Alien Souls/The Jester
THE JESTER
Fate wrote the first chapter of this tale before either Zado Krelekian or Mohammed Yar came to New York; long before the transatlantic steamship lines, seeing their European immigration business dwindle, thanks to improved wage conditions, began to invade Asiatic Turkey with agents who spoke the many languages of that motley and illy patched empire, who gave untold promises and were guilty of untold lies, who plastered ancient walls, tumbledown mosques, and battered, crumbling bazaars with garish six-sheet posters that pictured the New World as an immense block of real estate, entirely paved with minted gold and especially protected by the blessed hand of Ali.
Fate wrote the tragedy of this tale when, shortly after Creation itself, it made a compromise with Al-Shaitan the Stoned, the Father of Lies, by planting the seed of hatred in two races, Armenian and Kurd, the first Christian, the second Moslem; a curse which in the swing of the centuries stretched beyond the western vilayets of the Ottoman Empire, across the ragged, frayed basalt frontiers into the Caucasus and Southern Russia, the plains of soft, lisping Persia, west into the yellow, purple-blotched glare of Egypt, and west again … even beyond the sea, following the churned lane of Cunarder and White Star boat, into New York, there to abut in the maze and reek and riot of half a dozen tired, melancholy old streets that, a few blocks away from the greasy drab of the river, cluster toward the Rector Street Elevated station, toward the pride of the Wall Street mart, as far even as busy, bartering, negligent Broadway.
Smelly, wheezy, threadbare old streets.
Gray, flat, dull. Powdered here and there with the mottled brick-red of a once patrician house, a stable or a garage that generations earlier had been a stately residence. Streets branching west, north, and south, in an irregular pattern of rays; rays of wretched, lumpy cobblestone and wretcheder gutters; rays paralleled by rickety frame dwellings that bring you straight back to the days when square-rigged clippers rode the waters and when men imported their liquor from Holland and called it genever.
Tragic streets, fit background for a tragic tale.
Not that this tale is entirely tragic.
For both tragedy and comedy are a matter of viewpoint, perhaps of race and faith and prejudice (a wise Arab once said that prejudice is but another name for race and faith); and if your sense of humor be slightly crooked, slightly acrid, in other words Oriental, you will laugh at the thought of Zado Krelekian cooped up in the back room of his house, with windows nailed down and curtains and shutters tightly closed both summer and winter, the doors hermetically sealed, with fear forever stewing in his brain, in his very ears and eyes, as he imagines he can see or hear the approach of those whom he dreads, praying at times so as to be on the safe side of ultimate salvation, praying quite fervently to the God and the many saints of his ancient Armenian church, in whom he does not really believe.
You will also laugh at the picture of Aziza watering the starved geraniums in her window-box and looking from her balcony across Washington Street for the return of her lover; with her braided bluish-black hair that looks as if cigarette smoke had been blown through it, her immense, opaque eyes, her narrow, pleasurable hands, her tiny feet, the soles stained crimson with henna, the big toes and the ankles ablaze with gold and precious stones.
And finally you may smile tolerantly at the thought of Mohammed Yar, once a ragged, thin-mouthed, hook-nosed Kurd tribesman, but dressed to-day in swagger tweeds that bear the Fifth Avenue label, his brown, predatory fingers encircled by rings of great value, his shirt of silk and embroidered over the heart with an extravagant monogram in lavender and pale green, his shoes handstitched and bench-made; lording it gloriously and arrogantly over Krelekian's Armenian clerks, spending Krelekian's money, and at times kissing Aziza, Krelekian's wife.
"There is no power nor strength save in Allah, the One!" he says with typical Moslem hypocrisy every time he kisses her pouting lips. Always he smiles when he kisses her. Always he snaps his fingers derisively in the direction of the closed shutters behind which Zado Krelekian shivers and prays.
Thus he had laughed and snapped his fingers that day, half a year earlier, when he had walked down the length of Washington Street, supple shoulders thrown back, great, hairy hands swinging up and down like flails, elbowing out of his path Armenian and Syrian as if he were back in his native Turkish village of Khinis, up in the hills, between Erzerum and Biltis.
There was angry murmuring at his back; curses; occasionally a fist furtively clenched. But none challenged his insolent progress. For the man was lean and thin-mouthed and hook-nosed: a Kurd of Kurds; and a dozen years of American freedom cannot wipe out the livid fear of the centuries.
"Out of my way, sons of burnt fathers!" snarled Mohammed Yar, studying the sign-boards above the stores, Armenian all, Kabulian and Jamjotchian and Nasakian, and what-not, advertising all the world's shopworn goods at a shopworn discount; and then, taking a sallow, raven-haired youth by the neck and twirling him like a top: "Where does Krelekian live—Zado Krelekian?"
The evening before, the youth had learned in the Washington Street Night School about all men's being born free and equal, and so he mumbled some thing hectic and nervous as to this being a free country, and what did the other mean by—
"Answer me, dog!" came the Kurd's even, passionless voice. "Where is the house of Zado Krelekian?" He tightened his grip.
The Armenian looked up and down the street, but no policeman was in sight. He decided to fence for time, since he did not trust the stranger's intention.
"What do you want with Zado Krelekian?" he asked.
Mohammed Yar slowly closed one eye.
"I want words with him. Honeyed words, brother of inquisitiveness. Words smooth as silk, straight as a lance, soft as a virgin's kiss. Krelekian is a friend of mine, much beloved."
"A friend of yours? Ahi!" sighed the Armenian, in memory of past happenings in his native vilayet. "Was there ever friendship between your race and mine?"
"Indeed, there was not, goat of a smell most goatish!" came the pleasant rejoinder. "But this is America. A free land, say you! A land of brothers, say I! Therefore, tell me, or"—with a significant back sweep of his right hand—"I may think too much of this being a land of brothers, and, being older than you, may feel morally forced to chasten your reck less spirit with many and painful beatings, as be comes an elder and loving brother solicitous of his younger brother's welfare. Do you get me?" he wound up disconcertingly in plain American English.
"Yes, yes, yes! … Zado Krelekian lives at 84 West Street."
"Is he rich?"
"Yes, yes!"
"Is he happy and honored and contented?"
"Yes. None more so."
"Good! Good! And—is his wife still with him?"
"Yes." The young Armenian essayed a lopsided smile. "She is with him, and she is beautiful and—"
"Silence, dog! Do not besmirch a woman with foul praise, or—"
But the Armenian twisted quickly away from his grip and ran down the street, rubbing his shoulder, while Mohammed Yar turned into West Street, looking at the numbers of the houses until he reached Eighty-Four.
Eighty-Four was a shop, swollen and bulbous with merchandise that tumbled across the counter and through the open door, spilling into the street itself in a motley, crazy avalanche. There were bolts of silk and linen and wool; wooden boxes filled with Syrian and Greek sweets; figs and dates, raisins from the isles of Greece, and brittle, yellow Persian tobacco tied up in bundles; pyramids of strange, high-colored vegetables; slippers of flimsy red and orange leather. Dried fish there was, and incense in crystals; oil of rose and jessamine and geranium in slim bottles picked out with leaf gold; carved walking-sticks from Smyrna; inlaid metal work from Damascus; black and white veils heavy with twisted silver and gold, rugs from many lands, coffee and tea and what-not.
The whole seemed prosperous, and prosperous, too, seemed the youngish, stout Armenian merchant—about a year Mohammed Yar's junior—who stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, contentedly puffing at a fat, crimson-and-gold-banded cigar.
Peaceful he looked, and rosy, and well fed; pleased with himself, his neighbors, and the world in general. And then, quite suddenly, his knees began to tremble. An ashen pallor overspread his features. He dropped his cigar. Up went his right eyebrow and his upper lip in a curling, nervous twitch, and with a rapidity that belied his solid bulk he tried to rush into his shop.
But he was not quick enough.
For Mohammed Yar's hairy hand fell on his shoulder, and he heard the Kurd's raucous voice:
"Good morning, friend!"
"Go-goo—go-ood morning," stammered Krelekian, feebly trying to twist away; and the Kurd broke into low laughter.
"Allah!" he said. "Is this the way in which you welcome the man who has traveled many miles for the pleasure of shaking your honest hand, of feasting his eyes on your honest face? Shame on you, Zado of my heart!"—and he slipped his arm through that of the other and begged him to lead the way where they could sip their coffee and smoke their pipes in peace … "and speak of our home in Turkey, of the olden days when you and I were even as twin brothers rocked in the same cradle!"
Krelekian sighed. He looked to right and left, at his clerks who were behind the counter attending to the wants of the half-dozen customers. But not a word did he utter in protest. He walked along by the side of the Kurd; for beneath the man's ragged, shabby, hand-me-down coat he could feel the sharp angle of the crooked dagger-handle pressing into his side—like a message.
"Ah!" gently breathed Mohammed Yar as he sat down on a carved, inlaid Syrian chair in the back room of the shop, facing his host, who was still as livid as a dead man's bones, still furtive-eyed, shaking in every limb. "This is good! Good, by mine own honor! It is as if we were back in our home village, in Khinis of the hills, friend of me!"
He made a great gesture with his hairy, high-veined hand, that cut through the clustered shadows of the little room like a dramatic incident, that brushed through the sudden, clogged stillness like a conjurer's wand, sweeping away the drab grime and riot of West Street, and conjuring up the glare, the acrid sweetness, the booming, dropping snow chill of the little hill village where both had lived—and loved.
Clear across Zado Krelekian's livid realization of the present slashed the picture of the little town, Khinis, on the way to Erzerum, and what had happened there between him, not then a well-fed, rosy, prosperous New York shop-keeper, Mohammed Yar, not then dressed in the slops of the New York water front, and Aziza, the blue-haired girl with the henna-stained feet and the anklets that tinkled, tinkled mockingly.
Three years ago. And one day. And he had tried to forget that day!
Three years rolled back like a curtain. And the happenings of that one day, popping back again into the cells of his remembrance, sitting in a solemn, graven row, and jeering at him because of the pitiful futility of it!
A cold, raw hill day it had been, with cottony snow-flakes thudding softly and with the old mosque of Hajji Ali the Sweetmeat-Seller raised on its broad marble steps as on a base, lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe gate forty feet up in the air, and the gateway—how well he remembered it all, here in the flat, melancholy drab of West Street!—covered with arabesques of mosaic faïence in green and peacock blue and deep rose and bearing its holy message in conventionalized mushakil Arabic characters.
"In the name of Allah, the One, the All-Merciful, the All-Knowing, the King of the Day of Judgment!" read the inscription, and always he had feared it, he and the others of his race, like something terribly pious and terribly ironic, since it expressed the arrogant, harsh faith of the Kurd masters who ruled them, and beat them, and robbed them, and at times killed them because of the sport of it.
Well he remembered how he had trembled—even as he was trembling now—when Mohammed Yar, dressed in sweeping woolen cloak, leather sandals, and tall, rakish fur cap, had come out of the mosque of Hajji the Sweetmeat-Seller, had whispered a rapid word to him, and had walked on by his side, towards the coffee-house of Malakian, where they had sat down.
He remembered his own brazen words.
Yes. Brazen.
For, careful man, he had taken with him that day Musa Lahada, the lean, sardonic Turkish Jew who was attached as dragoman to the British Consulate and thus protected by the Union Jack.
"I saw and heard the whole thing, Mohammed Yar," he had said. "I was passing through Nahassim Street, and I heard the quarrel, the insults. I saw the blow—"
"He insulted me first!" the Kurd had cried. "That cursed Frankish infidel! He struck the first blow!"
"True; but you drew steel and killed. I saw it. I know where you hid the corpse—back of the camel stables in Farid Khan's Gully. And I have witnesses."
"Armenian witnesses! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs! Liars—"
"Armenians? Yes! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs? Perhaps! But not liars, Mohammed Yar. They saw the thing which is true, and they will swear to it. And Armenians or not, pigs or not, they will be believed by the British consul. For the man whom you killed was an Englishman, and—"
"And?" Mohammed Yar had asked with a sidelong glance.
"Death is bitter bitter as the fruit which grows near the Bahretlut!"
"But—must there be death?"
"No, Mohammed Yar. I am willing to stuff my mouth with silence for a consideration, supplemented by an oath."
"Name the oath first," the Kurd had laughed. "It is cheaper than the consideration—when dealing with an Armenian, O Father of Compound Interest!"
"Possibly cheaper." Krelekian had inclined his head. "Here it is, for you to take or leave, according to how you prefer life or death. You must swear on the Koran, by your own salvation and that of your parents, by the honor of your mother and your sisters, by the blood of the Prophet and the horns of the Archangel Gabriel—you must swear a most sacred oath that, as long as you live, there shall be no killing nor beating in revenge of what I shall ask of you, that never for what is happening to-day between you and me will you take toll with steel or bullet or whip or fist—with blood—nor with pain—neither you nor your tribesmen nor your friends! My life must be sacred to you, and inviolate."
"Good! I swear it. Yes, yes, yes"—as the Armenian had insisted on the exact phraseology. "Never shall I take toll, neither I nor my friends nor my tribesmen, neither with steel nor bullet nor whip nor fist. I swear it on the Koran, by my own and my parents salvation, by the honor of my mother and my sisters, by the blood of the Prophet and the horns of the Archangel Gabriel! May my right hand dry on my body—may I eat dirt—may God strike me dumb and deaf and blind—if I break this solemn oath! And now—what is the consideration for your silence in that little killing matter?"
"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, confronted 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 outgeneraled them, outbargained them, and—if the truth be told—outcheated 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 gayly.
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. Some day 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 un4er 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, Haakim."
"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, Haakim."
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, Haakim, 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 midwife," 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 overwhelming 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 Doctor 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 to-night, perhaps to-morrow 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, Haakim," 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 Haakim, 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 Haakim."
"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 to-day 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 fingers derisively in the direction 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!"