The Strange War Page 15

write letters to the newspapers and Mrs. Kumar's eldest son even created a computer animation showing how the jam spreads over the whole city and they sent emails to all their friends and acquaintances and soon they found that many people had had similar thoughts about the war on the roads, but all at different times and different places and all had given up again. And people started recognizing each other on the road by their bumper stickers and when they saw many cars carrying the stickers they were not afraid they would get shouted at at the interesection when they stopped to let others pass, and then in one part of the city people found that – whoops, they really got home faster now although everybody was driving slower, and when the news spread, soon the general mood in the city changed and now people would honk their horns and shake their fists at people who blocked the intersection. But the more sensible ones would go and hand them a folder.

  “Well”, said Mrs. Kumar, “Peace begins at your own doorstep, but it also needs some coordination!”

  Meanwhile in the neighbouring town elections for the city council were being held. One of the candidates promised to solve the traffic problem and he got elected. The new mayor doubled the taxes, employed a lot of policemen and had cameras installed at every intersection. And everybody who blocked an intersection had to pay a fine amounting to one month's salary and if they could not pay they had to go to prison. This too solved the traffic problem. And fast too!

  The Two Prisoners

  Once several of Mr. Balaban’s friends were sitting around together and one of them said, “We’re all sorry losers. We ought to start a club so that we can help each other.”

  “Leave me alone with your clubs,” said one of them. “If everybody looks after himself then everybody will be looked after.”

  For a while the friends argued about whether that was true. Then they asked Mr. Balaban for his opinion.

  “Sometimes it’s true, I think. If two equally strong men go to a grove of nut trees and gather nuts, then it’s probably better for each man to gather them by himself. Because if each one gathered nuts for the other one, then they might be thinking, ‘Ah, why should I work so hard. If I knock myself out, I’ll only be getting the nuts that my partner gathers.’ And so maybe each one will put less effort into it than if he were gathering them for himself, and then both will have fewer nuts. But often the destinies of people are so interconnected that if they are only concerned with their own self-interest they make things tougher on themselves and everyone else.”

  “How is that possible?” his friends asked.

  And Mr. Balaban gave them this riddle:

  “In Samarkand, the authorities once caught two thieves who had stolen a goose. Timur Lenk locked them up in two different jail cells, so that they could not make contact with each other. Then he went to the first one and said, ‘Listen, you two stole a goose. For that you’ll get twenty blows with a cane. It is not pleasant, but you will survive it. But I know for sure that you didn’t just steal this goose but also two golden goblets from my palace. For that I could have you executed. That would have only one drawback for me: I wouldn’t get my golden goblets back that way. I could torture you to get the confession, but I’ve thought of something else. Pay close attention: if you confess to the theft of the goblets and tell me where you hid them, then I’ll only have your accomplice executed, but I’ll let you go. It’s true that I’ll give him the same possibility. If he confesses and you don’t, then I’ll let him go, and you’ll be executed. Of course, it’s possible you’ll both confess. In that case, I couldn’t let either one of you go free, of course. But I would show mercy and only have your right hands cut off.’

  ‘And if neither one of us confesses?’ asked the prisoner, who, by the way, really had stolen the goblets with his companion.

  ‘Well,’ said Timur, ‘then you would just get the twenty blows with a cane for the stolen goose.’

  “What,” Mr. Balaban asked his friends, “should the prisoner do, in your opinion?”

  “And they couldn’t communicate with each other?”

  “No,” said Mr. Balaban, “Timur made sure that they couldn’t communicate with each other in any way.”

  “He should keep his mouth shut and rely on his partner to say nothing either,” said one of them.

  “How can he rely on that?” said another one. “He must know that his partner will surely confess.”

  “How is that?”

  “Because it is much better for the partner if he confesses. Listen. Let’s call them Ahmed and Bulent. Now, if Ahmed confesses, it’s better for Bulent to confess too, because otherwise he’ll be executed. If Ahmed doesn’t confess, it’s also better for Bulent to confess because then he’ll be set free. So Ahmed knows that Bulent will confess. So Ahmed will confess too, or he’ll be executed. But if Bulent for some reason decides not to confess, all the better for Ahmed because then he’ll be set free.”

  “Yes, but the result is that they both get their hands cut off when they could have both gotten off with twenty blows with a cane.”

  So they kept debating this riddle for hours, but they couldn’t reach any other conclusion.

  “And this is what I waned to show you,” said Mr. Balaban. “By looking after their own self-interests, they made it tougher on both of them.”

  “But what should they have done, in your opinion?”

  “They should have talked to each other and promised each other to be silent,” said Mr. Balaban.

  “But you said they couldn’t talk to each other!”

  “They should have bribed a guard to carry letters or messages back and forth. They should have tied a note to a mouse’s tail, for all I know, or let a trained parrot fly from cell to cell. They should have tried everything they could think of in order to communicate with each other, because if humans can’t manage to communicate, then people will never be able to further their own interests without making life harder for everyone - including themselves

  Justice

  Now my friends I must tell you something and I hope you will believe me. And if you don't believe me, well, so much the worse for you. What I want to tell you is this: Once upon a time, on a small continent right on this planet earth (a continent which is now completely covered with water, so you won't be able to find it on any map - and when this continent existed, map making had not been invented yet, so you will not find it on the old maps either), anyway, on this small continent (which would have been the seventh continent if anybody had counted continents then, which nobody did because not a single continent had been discovered at that time, so all the people on all the continents thought that theirs was the only continent and why should they bother to count something of which there is only one anyway) well, what I was going to say was, this small continent, which wasn't the seventh continent nor the first continent, but just the continent, was inhabited by a very strange people. These people, I am sorry to say, were crazy. They were crazy in a very special way. They were not stupid, oh no. For instance they had invented the wheel before it had been invented on any of the other continents, and right after the wheel they invented fire and pyramids and mobile telephones and television. No, as I said, they were crazy in a very special way. How can I explain it? Well, for instance, let's say, they had an aunt visiting. This aunt would call on her mobile phone, and would say: “Hey, I will come and visit you over the holidays, just a couple of days, aren't you thrilled to see your old auntie again?” And the family who had planned to go to the seaside for the holidays would unpack their things and take the wheels back to the garage and wait for auntie. Now let's say the holidays were over and it was already six weeks that auntie was staying at the house and no chance of her going back home, and the whole family had to have tea for breakfast, because auntie had convinced them that coffee was bad for their health, and daddy had had to give up smoking because auntie couldn't stand the smell of cigarettes, and the children had to keep quiet from one to four in the afternoon when auntie was taking her nap. Well, these people wouldn't
throw her out nor even take a lipstick and paint red dots on their youngest daughters face and pretend that she had scarlet fever to make auntie run away. No, these people would just quietly pack their things again, would take the wheel out of the garage, give auntie the keys of the house and go and live in a tent near the seaside from now on where they could drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and play noisy games between one and four as much as they liked.

  Or let us say at a school a new headmistress was appointed and one of the teachers would keep nagging and saying: “Why didn't they make me the headmistress, I am much better than her!” They wouldn't tell her: “Well, she is much more experienced than you are and during the holidays she has always been taking courses, whereas you have only painted your toenails!” No. Instead, they would write a letter to the city council saying: “This woman is giving us a headache with her constant nagging, please make her the headmistress so she won't get on our nerves any more!” and most of the times even the newly appointed headmistress would sign the letter.

  Or if a boy wouldn't learn his lessons and get only very bad marks, his teachers wouldn't make him repeat the class. Instead they would say: “Ah, but he has such a pretty smile and his friends would be sad to loose him, so