The Greatest Miracle in the World Page 3

  “Simon, forgive me, but does it ever occur to you that perhaps you should not interfere in the lives of people or that you have no right to do so? After all, they’re not out there looking for you. You must find them and then convince them that they can have a new life if they are willing to try. Aren’t you trying to play God?”

  The old man’s face softened in a look of sympathy and compassion for my apparent lack of perception and understanding. Yet his reply was brief … and forgiving.

  “Mister Og, I am not playing God. What you will learn, sooner or later, is that God very often plays man. God will do nothing without man and whenever He works a miracle it is always done through man.”

  He rose as if to bring our visit to an abrupt end, a technique I have used frequently at the office if it was in my best interest to terminate an interview.

  I shook his hand as I stepped into the hallway. “Thanks for the hospitality and the sherry.”

  “It was my pleasure, Mister Og. And please bring me a copy of your book when you have a chance.”

  During that long drive home, one question continued to intrude itself into my thoughts.

  If that wise old ragpicker specialized in rescuing human refuse why was he wasting his time on me, an affluent and successful company president in the fifty-percent tax bracket who had just written a national bestseller?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Several days later, as I was getting out of my car in the parking lot, I heard my name being called with a volume of sound only slightly lower in decibel count than the public address system at Wrigley Field. I looked around but couldn’t see him.

  “Mister Og, Mister Og … up here!”

  Simon was leaning out of his second-floor apartment window, over a plant-filled window box, waving a small blue watering can to attract my attention.

  I waved.

  “Mister Og, Mister Og … your book, your book. Don’t forget your promise.”

  I nodded.

  He pointed inside his apartment. “This evening … before you go home?”

  I nodded again.

  He smiled and shouted, “I’ll have your sherry ready.”

  I threw him a circled thumb and forefinger, locked the car, and headed for the problems of the day.

  “Simon Potter, who are you?

  “Simon Potter, what are you?

  “Simon Potter, why are you?”

  Like some simple almost forgotten roundelay from my youth, I found myself silently repeating these three questions in time with my steps as I hurried toward the office.

  I had been unable to get a handle on my feelings about the old man and it bothered me. He fascinated me … and, for some inexplicable reason, he frightened me. Both his appearance and his demeanor fit all my preconceived notions of how the Biblical prophets and mystics must have looked and acted, and I would think about him at the strangest times, in the middle of a budget meeting, while reading submitted articles, when writing a book review. His face, his voice, his charismatic manner would intrude themselves into whatever I was thinking and momentarily wipe out my concentration. Who was he? Where did he come from? What was this latter-day Isaiah doing in my life? Maybe I’d get some answers this evening. For my own peace of mind I hoped so.

  Toward closing time I asked Pat Smith, my secretary, to requisition a copy of my book, The Greatest Salesman In The World, from our inventory. She paused in the doorway after placing the book in my hands. “Anything else, Og?”

  “No thanks, Pat, see you in the morning. Good night.”

  “Good night … and don’t forget to turn off the coffee machine.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You said that the last time you worked late … and ruined two pots.”

  I heard her lock the outside door while I sat holding the book, my book, my creation that was now being acclaimed by Publishers Weekly as “the bestseller that nobody knows.” In four years it had never made the big city “bestseller lists” and yet, with a phenomenal sale of four hundred thousand hardcover copies, it had already outsold every hardcover edition of every book written by Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace, or Jacqueline Susann.

  Now there were rumors that several paperback houses were interested in acquiring the reprint rights, and they were talking big money … six digit money. Homerun! What if it all happened? Could I handle it? Could I cope with all that sudden wealth and the national publicity that would surely follow a promotional campaign conducted by any of the large paperback houses? What kind of a personal price would I end up paying for all this? Would I regret it later? I remembered what Simon had said about the lifetime prisons we build around ourselves. Would this kind of success be a key to release myself … or a key to lock myself in? What more did I want from life, anyway? Would I change my lifestyle if I had that kind of financial freedom? Who can really ever have an answer to these questions before the fact?

  I tried to put all the “what-if” thoughts out of my mind and opened the book to autograph it for Simon. What could I inscribe on the flyleaf that would be appropriate for this saintlike man? Somehow the proper words were important to me. And what would an expert on Gibran, Plutarch, Plato, Seneca, and Eiseley think of my little book after he had read it? That was important. To me.

  I began to write …

  For Simon Potter

  God’s Finest Ragpicker

  With love

  Og Mandino

  I remembered to turn off the coffee machine, turned on the burglar alarm, flicked off the lights, locked up, and walked across the shadowy parking lot to his apartment building. I found #21 scrawled in yellow crayon above one of the lobby mail boxes, hit the bell button twice, and climbed the stairs. Simon was waiting for me in the hall.

  “You remembered!”

  “You reminded me!”

  “Ah, yes. Like most old men I am both rude and presumptuous. Forgive me my trespasses, Mister Og. Come in, come in.”

  While we were still standing we conducted our exchange. I handed him my book and he gave me a glass of sherry. He frowned when he read the title.

  “The Greatest Salesman In The World? Very interesting. May I guess who that might be?”

  “You’ll never guess, Simon. It’s not who you think it is.”

  Then he opened the cover and read my inscription. His face seemed to soften and when he looked at me his big brown eyes were moist. “Thank you. I know I shall enjoy it. But why did you inscribe it in such a manner? Ragpicker, yes … but God’s Finest?”

  I pointed toward his stacks of books. “When I was here, before, you were telling me about your theory that some books were written and guided by the hand of God. I just figured that if you could recognize when a writer had been touched by God’s hand you must be a special friend of His.”

  He studied my face intently, staring at me for interminably uncomfortable minutes until I broke our eye contact.

  “And you would like me to read your book and decide whether or not I think it belongs in the same category as the others … assisted by the hand of God, as it were?”

  “I don’t know whether I want you to do that or not, Simon. Maybe subconsciously I do but I hadn’t thought about it. All I know, for sure, is that I get the strangest premonitions when I’m with you. You are in my mind a good deal and I don’t know why.”

  The old man leaned his head back on his overstuffed chair and closed his eyes. “A premonition is a forewarning, a foreboding of something about to happen. Is that how you feel when you are with me or when you think about me?”

  “I’m not quite sure that explains the sensation.”

  “Perhaps it is a feeling that we have met before or shared some experience in the past? What do the French call it? Ah yes … déjà vu.”

  “That’s closer to it. Have you ever had a dream and then when you awoke you tried and tried to remember it and all that remained in your memory were shadows and unrecognizable voices with no meaning and no relationship to your life?”

  The old man nodded, “Many times.”

  “Well, that’s how I feel when I’m with you or think about you. I guess the kids would call it ‘vibes,’ only I can’t characterize it because I’ve never experienced it before.”

  “The mind is a very strange mechanism, Mister Og.”

  “Simon, I couldn’t even begin to guess how many books and magazine articles I’ve read about the mind in the past ten years, for possible use in my magazine. Yet, the more I read the more I have come to realize how very little we know about that mystery within us … or even where it’s located.”

  The old man rubbed his hand across his cheek and said, “Dr. Karl Menninger wrote that the human mind is far more than the brain’s little bag of tricks. It is, instead, the entire personality made up of a human’s instincts, habits, memories, organs, muscles, and sensations, all going through a constantly changing process.”

  “I know Dr. Menninger.”

  “Personally? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of a man is he?”

  “He’s a giant of a man, almost your size, a beautiful man, like you … and he always has a twinkle in his eyes when he speaks.”

  “Is there, what do you call it, a ‘twinkle,’ in my eyes, Mister Og?”

  “Sometimes, Simon. Sometimes.”

  He smiled sadly. “I like, best, what Milton wrote about the mind. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.’ Mister Og, our mind is the greatest creation on earth and it can generate the most sublime happiness for its owner—or it can destroy him. Yet, although we have been given the secret of how to control it, for our happiness and benefit, we still function completely ignorant of its potential, like the most stupid of animals.”

  “The secret of how to control our mind for our benefit …?”

  Simon pointed toward the book stacks. “It’s all there. One has only to study the treasures that lay, exposed, all around us. For countless centuries man compared his mind to a garden. Seneca said that soil, no matter how rich, could not be productive without cultivation and neither could our minds. Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote that our mind was only barren soil, soon exhausted and unproductive unless it was continually fertilized with new ideas. And James Allen, in his monumental classic, As A Man Thinketh, wrote that a man’s mind was like a garden which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild, but whether cultivated or neglected, it would produce. If no useful seeds were planted, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds would fall into the land, and the results would be wrong, useless, harmful, and impure plants. In other words, whatever we allow to enter our minds will always bear fruit.”

  I lit a cigarette and hung on his every word.

  “Now, man is comparing his mind to a computer but his conclusions are the same as Seneca’s and the others. The computer people have a phrase, actually an acronym, ‘GIGO’ … ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ If one puts faulty information into a computer, out will come faulty answers. So it is with our minds … whether one is thinking in terms of a garden or an IBM Three-Sixty. Put negative material in … and that’s what you’ll reap. On the other hand, if you program in, or plant, beautiful, positive, correct thoughts and ideas, that’s what you’ll harvest. So it’s simple, you see. You can actually become whatever you are thinking. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Allen wrote, ‘Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace. By the right choice and true application of thought man ascends to the divine perfection.’ Mister Og, note those words, ‘by the right choice.’ They are the cornerstone of a happy life and perhaps, at some other time, you will let me elaborate.”

  “In other words, Simon, you’re saying that we can program our mind. But how?”

  “Very simple. We can do it for ourselves or others will do it for us. Merely by hearing or reading a thought or an affirmation, whether it be truthful or the vilest of lies, over and over, our mind will eventually imprint that thought and it will become a permanent part of our personality, so strong that we will even act on it without consideration or reflection in the future. Hitler, you may recall, did this to an entire country, and ‘brainwashing’ is a phrase with which we are all too familiar after many sad experiences by our captured troops in the Orient.”

  “We become what we think?”

  “Always!”

  This seemed like a good opportunity to do some probing and so I took it. “Simon, tell me about yourself. Do you mind?”

  He shook his head, placed the wine glass on the lamp table, folded his hands in his lap, and looked down at them as he spoke. “I do not mind. This opportunity has not come to me in many years, and I also realize that you are hoping I might touch upon some fact, some clue, that will clarify whatever seems to concern you about our relationship. First, I am seventy-eight years old and in good health. I have been in this country since nineteen-forty-six.”

  “You came here right after the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do before the war?”

  He smiled. “I realize it will require a good deal of blind faith on your part to believe me, but I headed the largest export-import firm in Germany that dealt exclusively with goods from the Middle East. My home was in Frankfort but the firm’s main office was in …”

  I interrupted … “Damascus?”

  He glanced at me strangely. “Yes, Mister Og, Damascus.”

  I rubbed my hand across my face and downed the rest of the sherry. How in the name of God did I know that? For some inexplicable reason I had the sudden urge to get up and run out of his apartment. Instead I just sat there, with two absolutely immobile legs, paralyzed by an unknown dilemma. I didn’t want to hear anymore and yet I wanted to hear it all. The reporter in me finally won and I began firing questions at him like some ambitious county prosecutor. He responded to each of my questions at his own pace.

  “Simon, did you have any branch offices?”

  “Ten, in cities such as Jerusalem, Baghdad, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo …”

  “Ten?”

  “Ten.”

  “What kind of merchandise did you export and import?”

  “Mostly goods with some degree of rarity and value. Finished wools and linens, fine glassware, precious stones, the finest rugs, some leather goods, coated papers …”

  “Your firm, you said, was large?”

  “We were the largest of its kind in the world. Our annual sales volume, even in the midst of the depression, in nineteen-thirty-six, exceeded more than two hundred million dollars in American currency.”

  “And you were company president?”

  Simon cocked his head, shyly. “It is not difficult to be company president when one is sole owner and founder and …” he held up my book, pointing to the title, “also the company’s top salesman.”

  My host rose and refilled my glass. I downed half of it as I studied him carefully. Was he putting me on? Finally I grasped his arm and turned him gently toward me so that I was staring directly into his eyes, “Simon, in truth, you have already read my book?”

  “Forgive me, Mister Og, but I have never seen a copy of your book until this evening. Why?”

  “The Greatest Salesman In The World is set in the time of Christ. It tells the story of a young camel boy, Hafid, who had ambitions to become a salesman in order to earn his share of the gold that he saw were the fruits of the efforts of the other salesmen in the caravan. Finally, after many rebuffs, Hafid is given one robe by the caravan master and dispatched to a nearby village, called Bethlehem, to prove that he can sell. Instead, the youth after failing to sell the robe for three humiliating days, presents it to warm a newborn baby sleeping in a manger in a cave. Then he returns to the caravan, believing he had failed as a salesman, never noticing the bright star that followed him. But the caravan master interprets the star as a sign that had been prophesied many years before and he gives our young man ten scrolls of success which the youth eventually applies to his life to become … The Greatest Salesman In The World.”

  “That is a very touching plot, Mister Og.”

  “There’s more, Simon. When the youth, Hafid, becomes wealthy and powerful, he establishes his main warehouse in a certain city. Would you care to guess the city?”

  “Damascus?”

  “Yes. And in time he opens other warehouses and branches throughout the Middle East. How many, Simon?”

  “Ten?”

  “Yes, again. And the goods he sold, as described in my book, were the same goods you sold!”

  The old man turned his head away from me and spoke very slowly. “Those … are … exceedingly … strange … coincidences … Mister Og.”

  I pressed on. “Tell me about your family, Simon.”

  He hesitated for several minutes before speaking again. “Well, as I have mentioned, my home was in Frankfort. Actually we lived in a suburb, Sachsenhausen, on a lovely estate in sight of the River Main. Yet, my time there was limited. It seemed as if I was always saying goodby to my family at the airport. More and more I came to hate the days and weeks when I was apart from my wife and young son. Finally, in nineteen thirty-five, I decided to do something about my life. I made very careful plans for the future. I decided to work very hard, until-nineteen-forty, and then I would take, from the business, sufficient assets for my family and me to live comfortably for the rest of our lives. Then I would transfer controlling interest in the company to those in my employ who had been so loyal to me through the years …”

  I interrupted him again … and this time my voice broke. “Simon, when you read my book you will learn that my great salesman, Hafid, finally gave his business and most of his wealth to those who had helped him build it.”