A Dove of the East Read Free

When you say ‘I am a Jew,’ they think you are weak. But of course we are as strong as anyone else, and because of that we often give them big surprises. Afterwards they hate us because they think we have tricked them. But usually it is they who have tricked themselves. Their eyes have done the tricking. As soon as little brother saw my clothing he lost all fear, because knowing that I was a Jew he did not think there was a man underneath.
    â€œHe has false sacks of dung, he yelled to his brother, and then began to lay out the meat and fruit against the wall of the path next to the donkey. I knew exactly what to do; it had come to me in a flash. I came close to him and said, Keep the meat and fruit, eat well, but in God’s mercy let me pass. He looked up and said, I am going to eat well, but I am also going to kill you, for if I don’t kill you I will have no appetite, and he laughed.
    â€œAt this I imagined as best I could that he was a branch on a long timber which awaited trimming before being sawed into logs. How many tens of thousands of times I had knocked off those thick branches with one stroke of my ax. But it was different with a man. I had never killed a man, and I found that I could not move. I was paralyzed. Then I realized that I could not fool myself into imagining that he was a branch to be severed, because he clearly was a man. So I thought, This is a man, not a tree, and I am going to kill him. I was afraid, and I knew that the minute I reached for my sword all hell would break out. I knew that if I hesitated they would kill me, and that if I did nothing they would kill me. This made me so angry that I pulled out my sword and with the most powerful stroke I had ever given (and the fastest), ten times as powerful as was necessary, I simply cut him in half.
    â€œI dropped my sword immediately and grabbed the lower half of his body, throwing it with all my might over into the gorge. Meanwhile his brother had begun firing his rifle and had hit my donkey, who went down on one knee. I could not stand the idea of having the body of the man I had just killed next to me, so at further risk of losing all the gold and my life I picked it up and sent it flying in a wide arc into the gorge. It seemed to hang motionless at the top of the arc, and since the other had stopped firing in his horror at this I had time to grab the faltering donkey and pull him back onto the path. Then the big brother began to fire many bullets, quite accurately I must admit, but they all went into the poor dead animal in front of me. He was smart though, because he began firing into the rocks, which broke into shrapnel and bloodied me all up. I took a silver bowl and some trays from the sack and put it over my head and them over my body, remaining there quite comfortably for another half hour eating lamb and pears and wincing at each shot and ricochet. Then he stopped, thinking either that I was dead, or that if I were not he wasn’t going to change the situation.
    â€œI looked at him through a little space between the donkey’s neck and the ground, and I cannot adequately describe what I saw. I was not afraid of him until that point, because I had planned to stay there until dark and then carry the treasure to the army station. Were he to move back to where I had begun he would have given me an hour’s head start, during which I could easily get to the army base. Were he to wait until dark, the darkness would shield me from his fire. I knew he could not go forward for fear that the troops ahead would kill him, so you see I had turned what they believed to be their great advantage, the safety of the gorge, into
my
great advantage. And I was unafraid, until I looked under the curve of the donkey’s neck and saw big brother.
    â€œWhat had been a simple ordinary bandit was suddenly something most different. I could not believe my eyes, and rubbed them.
His
eyes were red circular coals, but made of fur, and