Thousand & One Nights: 107th Night

One hundred and seventh night.

Shahrazad was present along with her sister Dinarzad and the king Shahriar 

Hunchback was choked to death while on a feast, and carouse with the tailor and his wife. The couple put the body on the staircase of a Jewish physician. The physician and his wife put the dead man by the windshaft in the compound of a kitchen steward. He in turn, propped up the hunchback in the corner of an alley at entrance of the market. A Christian trader in his intoxication squatted by the side of hunchback to piss. Thinking that the hunchback was trying to snatch his turban, the trader fell upon him. The guard on watch who witnessed the attack and pummelling by the Christian on a Muslim, caught the offender and took him to the police and, the police in turn took him to the King. The king ordered him to hang. Attracted by the crowd at the gallow the steward came to the scene. He saw that the Christian stand under the gallow with rope around his neck and the hangman ready to charge. The steward interfered and said that the Christian trader did not kill the hunchback, but he himself killed him. He already had the burden of killing a Muslim, and if the trader were hanged he had to carry the burden of killing a Christian. So he wanted to stop the hanging of the Christian trader.

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When the chief of police heard the steward, he said to the hangman, "Release the Christian and hang this man on the strength of his confession." The hangman after releasing the Christian trader, made the steward stand under the gallows, put the rope around his neck, and was about to hang him, when the Jewish physician made his way through the crowd and cried out to the hangman, "Stop! this man did not kill the feklow; I am the one who killed him. Last night I was sitting at my house after the market closed, when a man and a woman knocked at the door. When the maid went down and opened the door, she found that they had a sick person with them. They gave the maid a quarter dinar, and she brought it upto me and told me about them, but no sooner had she come up than they rushed in, and placed the sick person at the top of the stairs. When I went down, I stumbled on him, and the two of us rolled to the bottom of the stairs, and he died instantly. No one was the cause of this death but I. My wife and I carried the dead hunchback to the roof and let him down through the windshaft, into the house of the steward, which adjoins ours, and left him standing in the corner. When the steward came home, he found a man standing there and, thinking that he was a thief, hit him with a club, knocking him down flat on his face, and concluded that he had killed him, whereas in truth none killed him but I. Is it not enough for me to have voluntarily and unwillingly killed one Muslim, without burdening my conscience with the death of another Muslim? Don't hang him, for no one killed the hunchback but I.

But it was dawn. The story was broken for the time being.