10. The Long-Bearded Man

America is a vast ocean. Little of it is known; what remains unknown of its world is far greater than what appears in plain sight. So it is with this country: life in it contains more secrets than thought can number or encompass.

A person often marvels at the lives of certain people and asks himself: By God, how do this man and that man and the other live when they have done no work in their lives?

America is the country of matter, and material things come only through work—real work in a broad arena where creatures race at a run. If one grows tired, he falls on the road. The people trample him as they pass, and he vanishes as though he never were. Yet despite America’s being the land of earnest toil, it contains people who live like everyone else although their hands have performed no work, their brows have never sweated, and their feet have not taken a single step in that practical arena.

That such people live among creatures crowded together in the race and struggle for existence is a marvel indeed.

I joined others in wondering how Mikhāʾīl Filfil lived. Here was a young man in the finest clothes who ate in the loveliest hotels and restaurants and spent money as though backed by the Ottoman Bank—or as though he were a son of Rockefeller, Morgan, or Astor.[50] Where did his living come from? No one knew. How could he live in extravagance and waste when all his days he was a “sniffer of air and plucker of roses”? No one knew. Meanwhile many people worked night and day, laboring while awake and raving in dreams of success, yet wrested from life only bare subsistence.

Mikhāʾīl Filfil was a wonder, and many resembled him. No one knew how these people could live idly in a place where a bite of food came only through effort, dipped in the blood of the heart and sweat of the brow.

When Mikhāʾīl entered America, he possessed no fortune that would let him live luxuriously without work. He was like other immigrants who arrived with provisions for a single day. But he had a natural resource: the power to invent and create stratagems.

As soon as he settled in America, he understood that a young man like himself, without capital, could not open a business yielding great profits. If he wished to rise into the merchants’ ranks by wage labor, peddling, or similar work, years of weary thrift and perseverance lay ahead. He therefore avoided the occupations practiced by his Syrian brethren.

Every summer he attached himself to one fair or another and rented a tent. At its entrance stood a large sign:

EASTERN ASTROLOGER

HE TELLS YOUR PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Inside sat His Excellency, a turban on his head and a Bedouin cloak wrapped around his squatting body as he smoked a water pipe. Beside him stood a young American who knew not one word of Arabic and translated the astrologer “Ali Baba’s” words into English.

Ali Baba, or Mikhāʾīl Filfil, knew as much English as the American youth knew Arabic. Yet both were master translators of whatever pleased, delighted, and astonished the customer—and benefited their pockets with dollars that came effortlessly and unasked.

Once, while I walked along Broadway, a hand fell upon my shoulder. It stopped me and turned me around. I found myself before a man with an enormous beard, wrapped in sheepskin and wearing a tall silk hat. Our eyes met. He smiled at my look, but I was bewildered by the sight and worked my mind for about two minutes to identify him. At last memory brought me his name.

“Mike! When did you grow a beard?”

“By God, you recognized me. But you do not know my new name. Guess!”

“Your new name? You have a new name?”

“Have you not heard the name Ali Baba across the length and breadth of the country? I am he.”

“You are the famous astrologer?”

“I am.”

“Good God! You have revealed what I spent years trying to discover: how you live and what you do.”

My friend took me by streetcar to Coney Island. He brought me into his observatory, introduced me to his interpreter, sat me down, and said, “Sit here and see how your friend lives, what station he holds among the highest people, and how flocks of dollars come to him in submission.”[51]

I sat overcome by amazement, watching his every movement. Then the interpreter called from behind the curtain:

“Ali Baba! Ali Baba!”

Mike compressed his lips, signaling me to remain silent and still. He put the turban on his head, wrapped himself in the cloak, squatted, took up the pipe stem, and began to make the water-pipe smoke.

The pipe’s sound seemed to signal that the interpreter might admit the customer. Preparations were complete to receive her before the majestic expositor of human secrets, master of the reins governing nature’s mysteries.

A lady entered in the interpreter’s guidance. He told her to kneel before the supreme astrologer, and she did so, the interpreter beside her. When Ali Baba was ready, he stopped smoking for a moment. I watched eagerly, studying every motion of face, hands, and feet, waiting for his lips to reveal the secrets of the lady’s past. She yearned to know the future and what might befall her, certain of its truth once she heard the secrets of her past.

The interpreter prepared to catch the mysteries from the mouth of their revealer. Ali Baba opened his mouth and said in Arabic:

“Tell this whore that the powder on her cheeks has nearly melted beneath the sweat pouring from her brow.”

The words had scarcely left his mouth, and the interpreter was preparing to convey them in English—or no, God forgive me, his words could not be conveyed; the man was preparing to weave from his own skill phrases stuffed with trickery and confusion—when the lady sprang up on her toes, nearly shrieking, and poured curses upon the astrologer.

I felt a storm about to descend upon the tent and everyone in it. How astonished I was to see our astrologer perfectly composed, as though he had said nothing! He tried to place the blame upon the lady: the fault was hers.

I heard him address her in their shared Arabic:

“Do you not see that I knew you were Syrian? That is why I made you hear words you do not like, in answer to your contempt for those of us who make our living from Americans.”

The Syrian woman left the tent while my astrologer friend and his interpreter laughed. He told me this was the first such encounter he had had with a Syrian woman and that fate had brought me to witness the tragedy with my own eyes.

The interpreter went back outside the curtain to cast his nets across the market. With his horn he would catch passersby stirred by illusion and snare those whom faith in superstition delivered into the hunters’ hands. I had scarcely calmed myself enough to resume talking with my friend, the prophet Ali Baba, when I heard the interpreter’s voice trembling with reverence in the words that announced prey in the net:

“Ali Baba! Ali Baba!”

Ali Baba gave the water pipe a long gurgle. The intermediary entered with a middle-aged woman whose eyes were blue and face insipid. The interpreter made her kneel at the prophet’s feet. Ali Baba stopped smoking for a moment as the interpreter repeated:

“Ali Baba! Ali Baba!”

It seemed these were the only Arabic words the intermediary knew. He pronounced them in a strange accent—“Ally Baba! Ally Baba!”—and used them for every question he wished to put to the prophet. The latter mumbled an Arabic answer, from which the interpreter composed whatever English suited the occasion.

This time I heard Ali Baba, profiting from the earlier incident, say only, “O Lord, make it easy and not difficult! O Provider, O Knower of every condition!”

I listened with all my ears to the answer the intermediary would give the woman’s question about her past. Having received the prophet’s reply, he told her she was married to a young man she loved.

He had scarcely finished when the woman sprang upright in anger.

“Lies! Lies!”

Ali Baba immediately stood, knowing his interpreter had said something that displeased the customer. He emptied bowls of wrath over the man, threatening now to beat and kick him, now to spit upon him. The interpreter knelt trembling as though doused in cold water.

When their scene ended, the lady understood that the error came not from the infallible prophet but from his intermediary. Having patiently endured his master’s punishment, the man began pleading with the lady for mercy. He had made a mistake, he said, while carrying the words from the prophet’s mouth. She was not married at all, and his master had dismissed him for the crime.

The woman’s heart softened. She knelt again beside the interpreter before Ali Baba and begged him to pardon the poor man. Tears nearly poured from her eyes.

Throughout, our friend Ali Baba foamed and frothed and stared savagely at his interpreter as though he meant to devour him.

Seeing herself as the cause of all that had happened, the woman reached into her pocket, took three banknotes of ten dollars each from her purse, and offered them to the astrologer, imploring him to accept the money and pardon the poor man.

The interpreter turned to her, kissed the hems of her clothing in gratitude, and escorted her to the door beneath ever-growing loads of praise and thanks.

He returned inside. The instant his eyes met Ali Baba’s, both burst into laughter.

I stood to go, but my friend Ali Baba rose, took hold of me, and said, “Wait, my friend!”

“I am afraid a third incident will exhaust my patience. But I thank chance: it has shown me the source of your income, which I did not know and which made me marvel at your life.”

“Have you ever seen a business like ours? Profit upon profit without capital!”

“No. I have never seen a business like yours, whose entire capital is a long beard.”

NOTES

[50] The Imperial Ottoman Bank was a major international bank with headquarters in Constantinople; John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and the Astors epitomized American wealth. Mikhāʾīl has no actual connection to any of them.
[51] Coney Island was New York’s great popular amusement district, crowded with parks, sideshows, performers, and staged exoticism. Ali Baba’s costume and name sell an American fantasy of an undifferentiated ‘Orient.’
