Fraternity-Testvériség, 1958 (36. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)
1958-02-01 / 2. szám
FRATERNITY 7 in order that centuries later no one should dare to make excuses by claiming that he could not understand it. The sages and the scribes went to work, querying and searching and delving more and more deeply into the history of these bloody years. They forged their way through the struggles of the civil war, back to the battles of the towns and villages; descended from the battles of the towns and villages down to the clash between neighboring hamlets and crept on through the narrow gap of that clash to the massacred caravan; thence to the murdered husband and slain driver, and at last to the common widow of the two unfortunate fellow's. Soldiers and eunuchs were immediately dispatched to the nameless little village to find the woman and drag her before the throne of the caliph. And the accursed village was given the name, “Mother of Carnage”. The woman prostrated herself before the caliph, touching the floor with her forehead, and at the caliph’s command sobbed her story with heart-rending lament and recriminations: how her jealous husband killed the driver wTho had lit a lamp to search by its light for the flea which had tortured him with hundreds of bites and thousands of stings. And the woman swore that it was not a familiar flea, not a domestic insect, but a wicked alien termite whom she herself had innocently carried home from under the balcony of Abu Majub, where it had pounced upon her, bit her neck and concealed itself in a fold of her garment, by the will of Allah. The sages and the scribes listened to the narrative with great wonderment and frequent shaking of their heads. In their souls there was fervent gratitude to Allah for leading them to the flea and Abu Majub’s beard, the source of all trouble, misery, bitterness and suffering. And the caliph did not know whether to weep or laugh, to punish or pardon. But in any case, he sent his soldiers to capture Abu Majub and ordered the woman flung to jail where she should meditate upon her sins in the unclean company of spiders and rats and other repulsive vermin, until black Saracens should come to seize her and sew' her up in a sack and throw her into the great fish-pond as a delicacy for the pikes of the Court. Such, then, was the fate of the woman who was a beauty among beauties and a good-for-nothing among good-for-nothings. And no one shed a tear for her because all the tears had long
