Yusuf took out a knife, carefully sliced the sack open lengthwise, glanced at the dead man’s face, and shrank back suddenly, freezing in place with his eyes bulging out, trying to say something with his disobeying tongue.
Ali the chaikhana keeper dashed to help Yusuf, but the same thing happened to him. He cried out and fell backwards, directing his fat belly at the sky.
“What happened?” the crowd hummed. “Let us through, show us!”
Weeping, Guljan kneeled before the breathless body, but then someone brought up a torch, and she jumped back in great fear and surprise.
Torches came from all directions, the shore was lit brightly, and a powerful communal cry shattered the darkness of the night:
“Jafar!”
“It is the moneylender Jafar!”
“It is not Hodja Nasreddin!”
There was daze, confusion, and then the people began to shout and climb over each others’ shoulders. A crowded jam ensued: everyone wanted to see for himself. Guljan was in such a state that the old Niyaz led her hurriedly from the pond, afraid for her sanity: she was laughing and crying, believing and not believing, and she kept trying to take another look.
“Jafar, Jafar!” came joyous cries, which drowned out the palace celebration completely. “It is the moneylender Jafar! It’s him! And his bag full of receipts!”
A lot of time passed before someone came to his senses and directed a question to everyone else:
“But then where is Hodja Nasreddin?” The whole crowd began to rumble from end to end:
“But then where is Hodja Nasreddin? Where did he go, our Hodja Nasreddin?”
“He is here!” said a calm, familiar voice, and everyone turned in amazement to see a living Hodja Nasreddin, unaccompanied by guards; he was yawning and stretching lazily, as he had fallen asleep by the cemetery without noticing it and came to the pond too late.
“I am here!” he repeated. “Whoever needs me, come closer! O noble people of Bukhara, why did you gather here by the pond, and what are you doing here at such a late hour?’
“What do you mean, why?” hundreds of voices replied. “We gathered here to bid you farewell, o Hodja Nasreddin, and to mourn and bury you properly.”
“Me?” he said. “Mourn? O noble people of Bukhara, you do not know Hodja Nasreddin if you think he ever intends to die! I merely lay down for a quick rest near the cemetery, and you have already decided that I died!”
He did not manage to say anything else, because the fat chaikhana keeper Ali came at him, shouting, and then Yusuf the blacksmith. Hodja Nasreddin nearly suffocated in their passionate embraces. Niyaz ran up, shuffling his feet, but the old man was quickly pushed aside. Hodja Nasreddin ended up at the center of a large crowd, everyone wanted to hug and greet him, while he, going from embrace to embrace, tried to head to where he could hear Guljan’s angry, impatient voice. She was trying in vain to get to him through the crowd. When they met at last, Guljan clasped her arms around his neck. Throwing back her veil, Hodja Nasreddin kissed her in front of everyone, and no one, even the most zealous keepers of law and custom, could find any impropriety in this.
Hodja Nasreddin raised his hand, calling for silence and attention.
“You came here to mourn me, o people of Noble Bukhara! But do you not know that I am immortal?
“I, Hodja Nasreddin, always free have I been, and I say – ‘tis no lie – that I never shall die.”
He stood there, lit up by the bright flames of hissing torches; the crowd picked up his song, and it sounded over nighttime Bukhara, humming, ringing, and rejoicing: “Poor, tattered, and bare, I have never a care. I will live, sing, and praise, at the sun I will gaze!”
How could the palace ever match such merriment and rejoicing?
“Tell us!” someone shouted. “Tell us how you managed to drown the moneylender Jafar in place of yourself!”
“Right!” Hodja Nasreddin remembered. “Yusuf! Do you recall my oath?”
“I do!” Yusuf replied. “You have kept it, Hodja Nasreddin!”
“Where is he?” Hodja Nasreddin asked. “Where is the moneylender? Did you take his bag?”
“No. We did not touch him.”
“Ai-ai-ai!” Hodja Nasreddin said reproachfully. “Do you not understand, o people of Bukhara, who are amply supplied with nobleness but a tad short of wits, that if the moneylender’s heirs get their hands on this bag, they will squeeze out all your debts to the last coin? Give me his bag!”
Crowding and yelling, dozens of people ran to perform Hodja Nasreddin’s command. They brought the wet bag and handed it to him.
He took out a receipt at random.
“Saddle-maker Mamed!” he shouted. “Where is saddle-maker Mamed?”
“Here!” a thin, jittery voice replied; a tiny old man with a wispy-thin beard stepped out from the crowd, wearing a flowery robe which was ragged in the extreme.
“Tomorrow, saddle-maker Mamed, you have to pay five hundred tanga according to this receipt. But I, Hodja Nasreddin, release you from your debt; use this money for your own needs and buy yourself a new robe, for yours is a lot like a ripe cotton field: there is cotton sticking out everywhere!”
With these words, he tore the receipt to shreds. He repeated this with all the other receipts. When the last one was torn, Hodja Nasreddin took a broad swing and tossed the bag into the pond.
“Let this bag lie at the bottom of this pond eternally and forever!” he exclaimed. “And let no one take it up! O noble people of Bukhara, there is no greater shame for a man than to carry such a bag. No matter what happens to each of you, even if one of you grows rich – which is not too likely, of course, as long as our sun-like emir and his tireless viziers are alive and well – but if one of you does become rich, he must never take up this bag, so as not to cover himself and his offspring to the fourteenth generation with eternal shame! And moreover, he must always remember that Hodja Nasreddin is out there, and Hodja Nasreddin does not mess around – you all saw the punishment he inflicted on the moneylender Jafar! And now I bid you farewell, o people of Noble Bukhara, for the time has come for me to take a long journey. Guljan, will you come with me?”
“I will – wherever you want!” she said.
The people of Bukhara gave Hodja Nasreddin a worthy send-off. The caravanserai keepers brought a cotton-white donkey for the bride; he did not have a single dark spot, and he shone proudly as he stood next to his gray cousin, Hodja Nasreddin’s ancient and faithful companion in his wanders. But the gray donkey was not at all embarrassed by such a radiant neighbor. He was calmly chewing juicy green clover and even pushing aside the snout of the white donkey, as if telling him that, despite a clear advantage in color, the white donkey did not yet have the same merits in Hodja Nasreddin’s eyes as did he, the gray donkey.
The blacksmiths brought a portable forge and had both donkeys shod right away. The saddle-makers gave two expensive saddles: one, decorated with velvet, for Hodja Nasreddin, and another, embellished with silver, for Guljan. The chaikhana keepers brought two teapots and two fine Chinese drinking bowls, the armorer – a sword made of famous gurda steel, so that Hodja Nasreddin could defend himself from bandits along the way; the carpet-makers brought horse-cloths, the rope weavers – a horsehair lasso which, when laid in a ring around a sleeping man, protects him from the bite of venomous snakes, for the snake cannot crawl past its sharp hairs.
The weavers, coppersmiths, and cobblers also brought gifts; all of Bukhara, with the exception of mullahs, officials, and the rich, helped prepare Hodja Nasreddin for his journey.
The potters stood to the side dejectedly; they had nothing to give. Why would a man need a clay pitcher on the road when he already has a copper one, given by the metalworkers?