“It is simple, Mohammed Yar. Only a woman whom you love and whom I love, but who, being a gypsy, loves neither you nor me, but only gold and silver and jewels and sweets and laughter.”
“Aziza?” the Kurd had whispered, the blood mounting to his high cheek bones.
“Yes; Aziza.”
Aziza! The gypsy!
Up there on the second floor above his shop, glistening among the heaped green cushions of her couch like an exotic beetle in a nest of fresh leaves; with her tiny oval of a face that through the meshes of her bluish-black hair looked like the face of a golden statue with living eyes—and the expression in those eyes, hard, keen, narrow, like the curling shimmer of moon-rays on forged steel…
For he had married Aziza after the Kurd, con fronted by the inevitable, had given in. He had taken her to New York with him. For love of her he had outwitted his brother Armenians. He had out-generaled them, out-bargained them, and if the truth be told—out-cheated them…yes…because he loved her.
And now—?
* * * *
“Mohammed Yar!” he stammered. “Remember the oath you gave!”
“I do remember,” smiled the other, with a flash of even, white teeth, “and I shall keep it. Do not be afraid, Zado. And now—a cup of coffee, a few figs, a handful of dates. Give me welcome!”
Zado gave a relieved laugh. The color came back to his cheeks. He clapped his hands, summoning a clerk, and ordered coffee and figs and pipes to be brought, and for the next hour he sat facing his guest, chattering gaily.
Finally the Kurd rose.
“I shall call again if I may,” he said.
“Please do.” Krelekian accompanied him to the door. “Call again. I shall make you welcome. What are you doing in New York? Where are you staying? How long have you been here?”
“I came with an Arab doctor whom I met in Smyrna,” replied the Kurd. “We live—oh, a ways north, near the University. He is taking a special course in the medicine of the Americans, and he teaches me in payment for my services. Someday I shall be a doctor myself.” He took the other’s hand, shook it, then, just as he was about to release it, raised it close up to his eyes and studied it. “Zado!” he went on, giving his words the emphasis of a lowered voice. “What is the matter with you?”
“Why—nothing.”
Again the Kurd studied the other’s pudgy, flabby hand.
“Well”—he shrugged his shoulders—“perhaps I am mistaken. Never mind.”
And he walked away, while the Armenian looked after him, smiling, happy once more, and saying to his chief clerk that indeed America was a great and wonderful country.
“It teaches decency and kindliness and forgiving even to a Kurd,” he wound up, and he went upstairs to kiss the red lips of Aziza.
She yawned.
* * * *
Mohammed Yar had not lied when he had told Zado Krelekian about his relations with the Arab doctor. The latter, a graduate of the University of Paris, had come to New York to take a special course under Professor Clinton McGarra, the great skin specialist, and had picked up the Kurd in Smyrna. For Mohammed Yar had left his native village shortly after Krelekian and Aziza had departed for America, drifting on the trail of the Armenian with the instinct of a wild animal, serene in his belief that presently Fate would send him across the other’s path.
The Arab, being an Arab, thus an ironic observer of living things, had taken an interest in the savage tribesman, who took him completely into his confidence, telling him about Zado—and Aziza.
“Come with me to America,” El-Touati, the Arab, had said. “You say he has gone there. It will not be hard to find him. Armenians are a clannish folk, herding together like sheep.”
And thus Mohammed Yar became cook, bottle-washer, valet, and half a dozen other useful things to the smiling, bearded Arab, receiving in exchange a small wage and certain lessons in medicine certain lessons which, when first mentioned, had sent both the Arab and the Kurd into fits of high-pitched, throaty laughter.
El-Touati laughed now as Mohammed Yar came into the room, returned from his morning’s expedition to West Street.
“Did you find him?” he asked.
“Yes, Hakim.”
“Did you bridle your tongue and your temper?”
“Yes. I spoke honeyed words, sweet words, glib words.”
“And,” pursued the Arab, “did you speak forked words, twisted words, words filled with guile and worry?”
“Yes. I planted the seed of worry, Hakim.”
The Arab raised his thin, brown hands in a pious gesture.
“Is-subr miftah il-faraj!” (“Patience is the key of relief!”) he muttered. And then Kurd and Arab smiled at each other through half-closed eyes, and the latter turned to the former and asked him to come with him to the next room, his little private laboratory. “I shall give you another lesson, my savage friend. Hand me down that leather case with the crystal-tipped needles—and the little box filled with the tiny green vials. Listen…”
And the Kurd inclined his great head, listening to the other’s smooth, rapid words, occasionally asking a question when his primitive mind could not grasp the technical and scientific details, but sturdily bent on his task, until El-Touati declared himself satisfied.
“There is no danger?” asked Mohammed Yar. “You know, Hakim, I gave a most solemn oath.”
“There is no danger. None whatsoever. Except”—he smiled—“to Aziza. For she may change the gentle hand of Zado for—”
“I shall beat her,” said Mohammed Yar. “Then I shall kiss her red lips until they hurt. Then I shall beat her again. She will love me very much. She is a gypsy.…”
“And you—a Kurd!” laughed El-Touati, closing the little leather case, but not before the other had dipped a furtive hand into its contents.
* * * *
The next day, and again the next, and every day the following week, Mohammed Yar called on Zado Krelekian. Moslem, thus believing in the sacredness and proprieties of married relations, he never inquired after Aziza, never as much as mentioned her name to her husband, and it was not his fault that on his fourth visit the gypsy was looking from the narrow balcony where she was watering her starved, dusty geraniums. It was not his fault that suddenly her eyes opened wide—and that one of the flowers fell at his feet.
Gradually the Armenian looked forward with real pleasure to the Kurd’s coming. For not only was it a link with his little native Turkish village, but also the fact of his being on such good terms with a Kurd, a hereditary master, served to heighten his importance and social standing among his countrymen.
There was only one thing to which he took exception, namely the Kurd’s habit of inquiring after his health.
It was not the usual, flowery Oriental way, but a detailed inquiry: “How did you sleep? Did you perspire last night? Have you a headache? Does your body itch? Have you fever?” And always Mohammed Yar would study his hand intently, then release it with a flat, sympathetic sigh, until Krelekian one day lost his temper and made an ill-natured remark that the Kurd’s association with the Arab doctor seemed to have developed in him a positively ghoulish instinct.
“You are like some cursed, toothless Syrian mid wife,” he exclaimed, “forever smelling out sickness and death—sniffing about like some carrion-eating jackal of the desert!”
Mohammed Yar spread his hairy paws in a massive gesture.
“I am sorry, my friend,” he replied. “I meant only to— Never mind…”
Krelekian’s nerves trembled like piano wires under the hammer of the keys.
“Never mind—what?” he cried in a cracked voice; and the Kurd, like one making a sudden, disagreeable resolution, leaned across the table and spoke in a low voice.
“I—” he began, and was silent again.
“What? What?”
“I— Ah! Ullah Karim!”
Mohammed Yar was evidently embarrassed; just as evidently sorry for his host, terribly sorry. Then, as if obeying an over
whelming inner force, he picked up Krelekian’s flabby hand where it rested twitching and nervous among the brass-encased coffee-cups, held it high, and examined it intently, as on his first visit.
“Zado!” he murmured, in a low, choked voice. “Zado—dear, dear friend—”
He was silent. He dropped the trembling hand as if it were red-glowing charcoal. He rose very hurriedly and rushed through the shop, out to the side walk, Krelekian close on his heels and clutching his arm.
“No, no!” whispered Mohammed Yar, still in that same choked voice. “Do not ask me. Perhaps I am mistaken and if I am mistaken and should tell you, you would never forgive me! Perhaps I am mistaken. I must be mistaken…yes, yes…I know I am mistaken!” and he ran down the street, never heeding the Armenian’s protests to come back, to explain.
* * * *
Perhaps it was a coincidence that late that same evening the Kurd, helping the Arab doctor, received a special-delivery letter with the mark of a West Side downtown post-office; a letter perfumed with attar of geranium and saying in Arabic that “the sword of worry and despair has entered the buffalo’s soul.”
Perhaps it was coincidence that during the next four weeks, while spring burst into the full flower of summer, while Washington and West and Rector Streets began to shimmer with a great, brittle heat that danced about the heaped wares of the Armenian shops with cutting rays, that touched the ramshackle, drab houses and the dust-choked gutters with points of glittering gold, that steeped the open doors of the stores with black splotches like bottomless hollows and wove over everything a crooked, checkered pattern of intolerable orange and crimson—that during four long weeks Mohammed Yar attended strictly to his duties as Doc tor El-Touati’s factotum and never once found time to call on Zado Krelekian.
Perhaps it was an accident that, when finally he did go to the other’s house, he kept himself at a little, well-marked distance and, with clumsy intent, did not see Zado’s outstretched hand.
Lastly, it was perhaps by accident that when, after a sharp pause and struggle, he did shake the other’s hand, that same hand was suddenly withdrawn with a little cry of pain.
“Something scratched my palm,” said Zado Krelekian.
Apologetically the Kurd pointed at the sharp edge of his cuff.
“I am sorry,” he smiled, at the same time rapidly dropping into his side pocket a little crystal-tipped needle.
That day it was not the Kurd who inquired after the Armenian’s health, but the latter who spoke of it voluntarily, hectically, the words tumbling out of his mouth as if he had to speak them or choke, as if trying to roll an immense burden of grief and worry from his stout chest.
“I am not well,” he said. “I perspire at night. My body itches. I have fever. I am not well—not well at all!”
“Summer,” gently suggested Mohammed Yar. “The fever of summer.”
“No, no! It is not that. I tell you I am sick—and at times I am afraid. Tell me, Mohammed Yar, you who study with a great Arab doctor—what do you think?”
The other shook his head.
“I do not know,” he replied. “The last time I saw you I was afraid that you—” He looked up with sudden resolution. “Here is my address,” he continued, giving Zado a slip of paper. “If—I say, if—a tiny white rash should break out on your hand tonight, perhaps tomorrow morning, let me know at once. But tell nobody else—under no considerations whatsoever!” he emphasized in a whisper. “Why not?”
“Because— Never mind. You will know in time—if the rash should appear—though Allah grant in his mercy and understanding that it may not appear! Allah grant it!” he repeated with pious unction as he left the shop.
But late that night there was less unction and more sincerity in his exclamation of “Allah is great indeed! He is the One, All-Knowing!” when he opened the telegram he had just received and read its contents to El-Touati.
“It is done,” he said, “and I am off.”
At the door he turned.
“Tell me, Hakim,” he asked, “are you sure there is no danger? Remember I have sworn a most solemn oath never to take toll with steel or blood or pain for what happened that day, back home in Khinis, between him and me!”
“Rest assured,” laughed the Arab. “Your oath is inviolate. There will be neither blood nor pain—except perhaps a pain of the mind, which”—he shrugged his shoulders—“is beyond the probing of human ken, being entirely a matter of Fate, thus sealed to us.”
“There will also be pain on Aziza’s crimson lips when I crush them with the strength and the desire of mine own lips!” replied the Kurd from the threshold.
* * * *
It was hours later, in the little back room of Zado Krelekian’s shop, that Mohammed Yar put his hand gently on the Armenian’s shoulder.
“Heart of my heart,” he said, and his voice was as soft as the spring breeze, “it is the decree of Fate—Fate, which comes out of the dark like a blind camel, with no warning, no jingling of bells; Fate, which is about the necks of all of us, be we Armenians or Kurds, Christians or Moslems, like a strangling lash. Long life may yet be yours. But—” He made a sweeping gesture.
“Is it—hopeless?”
“Yes. As hopeless as when Khizr hides his shiny face.”
“But—what can I do? What—?”
“Nothing! I spoke to my Hakim, El-Touati. He does not know you personally. But I told him about you, of the fact that you and I, Armenian and Kurd, Christian and Moslem, enemies once, became friends in this strange land of America. And he says even as I say: you must shut yourself up where none may see you except I, your very good friend. For these Americans fear—it!” Again his hand pressed gently the other’s heaving, trembling shoulder. “If you go to an American doctor, if you tell anybody, they will make a report to their health police and send you away to a desolate spot, far away from the land of the living, from everybody, from all your friends—even from me, heart of my heart! It is the law of this land. It is so written in their books. But, doing what I tell you, you will also be shut up, but you will be near your shop—you can take the little house next door, which you own—near Aziza, near—me! And I will take care of you. I I am your friend, and, being your friend, I am not afraid of it! I, I myself, will bring you food and drink and tobacco and books and papers. But nobody must know, lest the health police find out and send you to the desolate spot!”
“How can we do it?”
“I shall spread a lie, skillfully, hoping that Allah may forgive me the lie because of the friendship which causes it. I will tell your countrymen that a great sorrow, a crushing melancholia, has overtaken you. I shall bring a paper to that effect from the Arab Hakim.”
“But,” cried Zado Krelekian hysterically, “my shop—my business—my wife?”
“Zado”—there was gentle reproof in the Kurd’s accents—“do you not trust me? Have I not been a friend to you? Has ever thought of revenge entered my heart? Zado—heart of my heart—I shall take care of everything for you, because of the respect, the friendship, the love, I bear you!”
And he walked softly out of the shop while Zado Krelekian looked at his hand, at the little white rash that had broken out where the crystal-tipped needle had pricked the skin.
“Leper!” he whispered under his breath. “Leper! Oh, my God!”
And it is thus that Zado Krelekian is cooped up in the back room of his house, with windows nailed down and curtains tightly closed both summer and winter, with fear stewing forever in his brain.
It is thus that Mohammed Yar, once a ragged, thin-mouthed, hook-nosed Kurd tribesman, dresses today in the height of fashion and lords it gloriously over Krelekian’s Armenian clerks, spending Krelekian’s money.
It is thus that, when the mood or the passion takes him, he crushes Aziza in his great, muscular arms and kisses her on the pouting, crimson lips.
Always he smiles when he kisses her. And always he gives thanks to Allah. Always he snaps his ringers derisively in the direct
ion of the closed shutters behind which Zado Krelekian shivers.
Always when, as a good Moslem, he says his morning and evening prayers, he adds:
“I am glad, O Allah, O All-Knowing One, that I kept my oath—that I did not take toll of Zado Krelekian, neither with steel nor bullet, neither with whip nor fist!”
THE STRENGTH OF THE LITTLE THIN THREAD
Ibrahim Fadlallah shrugged his shoulders:
“You do not understand, my friend. You cannot get it through your head that it is impossible to destroy caste and to create fraternity by Act of Parliament. Allah—you can’t even do it in your own country.”
“But modern progress—the telegraph—the democracy of the railway carriage—” interrupted the American.
“You can compel a Brahmin to sit in the same office and to ride in the same railway compartment with a man of low caste, but you can never force him to eat with him or to give him his daughter in marriage. You spoke of those who are educated abroad and even they, my friend, when they return to Hind, drift back into caste and the ways of caste. For there is a little thread oh, such a tiny, thin little thread which binds them to their own land, their own kin, their own caste. And it seems that they have not the strength to break it—this little thread.
“Ah, yes! Let me tell you something which occurred last year a true tale and please do not forget the thread, the little thread—
“Now the whole thing was like a play in one of your theaters—it was staged, dear one, and well staged. [The scene was the great hall in which meets the caste tribunal of a certain Brahmin clan. Imagine, if you please, a huge quadrangle, impressively bare but for a low dais at one end, covered with a few Bengali shawls and an antelope skin or two—ah!—and then the dramatic atmosphere. Not the atmosphere of death—oh, no!—much worse than death, much worse. For what is death compared to the loss of caste? And that afternoon they were going to try a man who had polluted his blood, who had sinned a great sin, a great sin more heinous than the killing of cows—not a sin according to your code of laws—but then they were men of a different race, and their sins are not your sins—eh?—and mayhap their virtues may not be your virtues.
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 16
