Prevod

Do not imagine that what I am about to relate happened in our own day or in our own lands, or that it is invention or fiction. If it holds any useful moral, it is that history has meaning and lessons to teach. Woe to humankind if history amounted to nothing more than the oppression of the weak by the strong, the triumph of violence!

Once upon a time there was a king of Persia whom many call Nemrod, though according to better-founded accounts his name must have been Doac, and he slew and succeeded that Yemsid whose sin was to believe himself perfect. This Doac was a magician, a sorcerer, and a man of learning; but instead of applying his knowledge as his predecessors had done—founding cities, teaching and spreading arts and crafts, vanquishing the divs, or spirits of evil, in single combat, establishing the first pearl fisheries, sinking the first turquoise mines, spreading knowledge of the alphabet and of those signs which, inscribed upon brick or stone, preserve the memory of great deeds through the ages—the wicked Doac used his magic only to concoct and distil potions and poisons and to devise ever more ingenious tortures, for he delighted in pain, and groans were sweet music to his ears. Until Doac’s reign, the Persians had not known how a bundle of rods tears the flesh, or how a rope tightens about the throat. When asked what Doac taught his subjects, the chronicle replies that he taught them to flog and to hang.

Heaven, doubtless weary of him, afflicted Doac with a cruel and shameful ailment. One morning, as he prepared to enjoy the pleasures of the bath, the king noticed that a large wart had sprouted on each shoulder, as big as an egg and shaped exactly like a serpent’s head—flat, greenish, hideous. At first these growths caused him no pain, but before long they ulcerated and tormented him so atrociously that Doac flew into fits of rage. Worst of all, since he would not show his loathsome affliction to physicians or to any living soul, he had to wash, tend, and dress himself alone, treating the sores with whatever poultices and ointments he could find in his magical repertoire. Despairing at last of so many remedies that had proved useless, and casting fresh spells, he awoke one day convinced that the only cure was a man’s brains, applied while still warm to the festering wounds.

Let no one be appalled at the ignorance this reveals in Doac’s time, for even in our own we have seen sheep’s caul, a pigeon split lengthwise, and a piece of beef prescribed for application to lupus sores. That this bloody medicine must have had some effect is shown by the gradual emptying of the prisons throughout the kingdom of Persia: two prisoners were executed daily so that their brains could be removed. But nothing in this world is inexhaustible, not even imprisoned criminals; and so, when the supply of fresh brains ran out, a tribute of two men a day was imposed, collected by henchmen and executioners sent here and there to seize them. From large families they would generally choose the sickly, the deformed, the crippled, the old, the useless. When Doac learned of this, he flew into a furious rage, swearing that if they went on giving him the refuse and the worst of his subjects’ brains, he would slit all their throats. The executioners then resolved to sacrifice the flower of Yspahan, to satisfy the king.

They did not, however, venture to seek victims among the powerful—the great lords or the officers of the royal household—but almost at once they remembered that a poor blacksmith named Cavé had two sons, straight and splendid as a pair of golden pines, exceedingly handsome and skilled in every bodily exercise. Thinking them good prey, they caught them unawares in the public square, cut their throats, split open their skulls, and carried their brains, still warm, to Doac.

Cavé was working at his forge when his neighbours, some out of compassion and others out of officiousness, came to bring him the dreadful news. At first it seemed as though the wretched father had not grasped the unheard-of calamity they were recounting: frozen, motionless, speechless, he listened to the tale of horror. Suddenly his grief burst forth with the fearful fury of a lion that snaps its chain and tears away the bars of its cage with a single swipe. What roused Cavé was the knowledge that his sons had been singled out for the blade precisely because they were strong, intelligent, and handsome. “Not to leave me even one for comfort! Ah! By the eternal light of the Sun, I swear I shall have my revenge.” And as he cried out, the blacksmith brandished his enormous hammer; and as he swung it, great mounds of bronze flesh, hardened by labour, swelled upon his bare arm, black with slag.

Unfastening the broad leather apron that protected him, Cavé tied it to the end of a pole, and with the apron for a standard and the hammer for a weapon, went out into the square, shouting curses against Doac. At the despairing father’s cry, a strange thing happened: the inhabitants of Yspahan, who had lain numb and frozen with fear, recovered their vigour and shook off their stupor. Seeing that there was a man who dared to raise a standard, they rushed to gather round him, wild with enthusiasm, and the rebellion broke out so suddenly that the tyrant had time only to flee in disgrace with his women and his treasures.

Once far from Yspahan, Doac gathered an army of more than a hundred thousand men and returned, determined to scatter the hordes led by a craftsman whose banner was a filthy, blackened leather apron. But things went badly for him, for Doac’s embroidered standard of silk and gold, studded with pearls and bearing the seven planets and the moon as its emblems, was forced to retreat before the scrap of leather that displayed only the marks of labour and the traces of human sweat. And Doac’s head, dripping blood, livid, its features twisted in the grimace of death, was impaled upon the pole that held the leather apron, while Cavé’s troops, having stripped the tyrant of his garments, roared with laughter at the two warts on his shoulders that resembled serpents’ heads...

When his army acclaimed him king, the blacksmith flatly refused to accept the crown. He himself chose Prince Feridún to reign, and Feridún later became a great monarch and a profound scholar, teaching the Persians astronomy, medicine, and botany. The only glory that fell to Cavé the blacksmith was embodied in his apron, which Feridún adopted as the royal standard. Whenever Feridún went into battle and, without false shame or concern for others’ opinions, set before him that scrap of leather representing the sanctity of labour and the protest against injustice and the abuse of power, it was as though he carried a talisman: victory was assured. Whenever he felt ashamed of the leather apron, he suffered defeat. Because the apron was lost amid the upheavals and vicissitudes of the Greek invasion—that apron which symbolized the warning that a monarch must not fill the cup of iniquity lest the cup of heavenly wrath overflow—because, I say, Cavé’s standard and its tradition of independence disappeared, the Persians, a people of the noblest origins and the highest intellectual gifts, sank into the backwardness, servility, and degradation in which they rot today.