Considering the infrequent communication the island had with the rest of the world, it was a mystery how everyone was getting wind of such news of his improbable feats. Whether or not they knew any of them were true, they nevertheless spoke with the utmost certainty.

  Needless to say, the Writer wasn’t there. We knew his deep disgust with these kinds of things and that he had opted to retreat into a life of solitude. But the interesting thing was that the President had also failed to show up at this reception. It must have been to preserve his position of authority—envying, perhaps, all the interest the islanders were showing in the expert. And perhaps he was taking the imperious approach that a newcomer’s duty was to pay a visit to the President as his first act.

  The motorboat drew near, and, true to the description given by our neighbors peering through binoculars, the silhouette of a very tall man emerged into view. It was almost as though Don Quixote was approaching us, albeit not on his horse, but on a motorboat. Just as the boat was about to make contact with the pier, everyone broke into applause. The expert received this outpouring of love with a nod of greeting and a mild-mannered smile, then jumped nimbly up onto the pier and shook hands with the crowd. Our neighbors were virtually swooning with delight. They were overjoyed, as though the man’s height—which, I’m guessing, was at least six foot five and allowed him to look down on us—were advance evidence of the miracles he would work on the island. Behold! Our savior had come at last—and would put an end to our troubles!

  While everyone had wanted him to be a guest in their home, this honor was given to Number 9, probably because he had a small guest house in his yard.

  We eagerly anticipated an impressive speech from the expert, but alas, he preferred to remain silent. As soon as the hand-shaking ceremony had come to a close, he went off with the President’s men to pay the statesman a visit. His enigmatic silence caused the assumed legend to grow larger, bolstering opinions that he was truly a man of importance. Instead of talking about his own repute or influence, he offered only a vague smile. The effect of his presence made us feel as though he were granting us a privilege, bestowing a gift upon us.

  The expert remained silent throughout the week he stayed on the island, except for a couple of points of instruction he considered to be of special importance; as a result, the respect he received among the island population grew all the more.

  We couldn’t know just what it was he discussed with the President, but a torrent of instructions followed that afternoon. The President’s men seemed to have come under his orders. They told us they didn’t have much time for us. We were informed that we would have to work long and hard all that week erecting pillars at various sites across the island. It was a job with a critical deadline, and wasting time would not be tolerated.

  We hadn’t the faintest idea how these pillars were to be erected or what they were to be used for, but this didn’t stop anyone from working like mad the next morning. While we toiled, the highly paid world-renowned expert stood on the hilltop, pointing out the work to be done with his long fingers. He would occasionally mumble beneath his breath, saying nothing other than those few incomprehensible words.

  The islanders set about furiously cutting down trees from the forest, and transporting the logs. This time it was the President’s men who were their biggest helpers, displaying the same skill as when they’d first come to the island while they now went about working side by side with the islanders. I wondered whether anyone remembered the old arbor made up of intertwining branches that arched across the sky.

  The question in my mind still remained: What end was to be served by all this feverish work, all the trees that had been cut down, the small platforms placed on top of them, and all the poles being set up with Herculean effort? What was the purpose of it all? Having long forgotten about the notion of work owing to their years of indolence, the islanders began to have a number of questions of a rather disgruntled nature, as beads of sweat rolled down their noses amid this backbreaking work they’d suddenly thrown themselves into. The mood spread like wildfire, with everyone starting to ask, “What is it we’re working for? What’s the point of it all?” As the expert watched the work being carried out, the most fearless among us went to him to ask these questions.

  Pretending at first not to hear the questions—or ignoring them as if they weren’t worth answering—the expert saw the crowd around the questioners grow to include all of the islanders. Noticing they had left their work behind, he deigned to open his mouth and muttered, “The storks!” Then he turned around and walked off. No one had the courage to stop him—which, in my opinion, was because everyone was basically intimidated by the man’s height.

  “What’d he say?” everyone asked each other.

  “What’d he say?”

  “I think he said, ‘The storks.’ ”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The storks, the seagulls, the snakes, the foxes…what do you suppose they all have in common?”

  Our neighbors, now engrossed in this little game, were doing their best to solve the riddle.

  At long last, someone figured it out: “Storks hunt snakes!”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean, ‘so’? With storks on the island, there won’t be any more snakes.”

  “So is the expert going to bring storks to the island? How’s he going to do that?”

  “OK, so we get the storks, but then why have we been setting up all these poles?”

  Lara interrupted at this point and said, “For the storks! Don’t you get it? Don’t storks build nests on poles? He’s building nests for them.”

  “Hey, you’re right, we didn’t think of that! So how’s he going to bring the storks here? By sending them invitations?”

  “OK, I’ve figured it out,” the notary said, bringing the conversation to a halt. “Haven’t they been saying it’s got to get done just in time, that we have to erect all the poles this week? Well—there’s a reason for it. Don’t storks migrate south at this time of year, each year?”

  “Yeah, they do. And they fly over the island on their way.”

  “So there you go. It seems the expert is going to make it possible for them to land on our island by preparing nests for them.”

  We saw everyone’s eyes light up. The quandary was solved at last. The storks would come to our island, hunt the snakes, and save us from this misfortune. I was inclined to doubt the storks would look down from the sky and descend on a bunch of nests that had been prepared for them, but when I’d had an objection in the past, I always preferred to keep my mouth shut. Besides, the expert must have known what he was doing, being the great expert that he was.

  Now that they’d solved the mystery, the people of the island began to work with even greater enthusiasm than before and to get the nests ready for the storks. Made of vines, the nests were placed on the platforms on top of the tall pillars that had been erected, thus resulting in what may well have been the only stork hotel in the world. It sounded mad, but not necessarily if you stop and consider all the strange things there actually are in the world.

  That evening, while we were discussing whether this business was possible or not, out of the blue, we got a visit from the Writer! We greeted him, full of excitement at seeing him, not knowing to what we owed this honor. Lara had missed him terribly; they got along great and saw eye to eye on many topics. Yet lately it had seemed to us as though the Writer had turned his back on us, neither coming to visit nor calling to check up on us. We were never able to reach him whenever we tried calling him. Anyway, the past was the past, and what mattered was that he was now with us here in our yard. His visit overwhelmed us with delight.

  “Kids, I need your help.”

  “Sure,” we said, “what can we do for you?”

  “These idiots have now gone and put their hopes in that quack they call an expert. ‘Poles are going to be built and storks are going to come land on them,’ they say. And again, they’re only going to be disappointed.”

  “I think so, too,” said Lara. “That’s the most ridiculous plan I’ve ever heard of! But everyone’s believed in it so much that they’re not about to listen to any warnings.”

  “Even so,” said the Writer, “let’s go ahead and warn them. If they don’t listen, they don’t listen. Time will prove soon enough who was right.”

  “They’ve hardly learned any lessons from any of the warnings or from any of the misfortunes they’ve experienced so far, though,” I added. “Regardless, what can we do to help you?”

  He had prepared an announcement, which he asked us to copy by hand and distribute to all the houses.

  I doubted this plan would do much good, but, not wanting to hurt the Writer, I immediately took pen and paper in hand along with Lara, who began producing one beautifully handwritten flyer after another.

  “Dear neighbors,” the announcement began, going on in an attempt to remind its readers of old times on the island. Was there anyone among us who remembered those good old days, I wonder? Or had everyone thoroughly lost their memory? Of those days when people didn’t interfere in each other’s business, when we lived together in a spirit of friendship, and listened to our musician friends play their flutes and guitars so that the music was indistinguishable from the sounds of nature. When we would banter and consume many glasses of white wine with a meal of fish prepared for us by the grocer at the café where we would often meet in the evenings. That time of peace when we didn’t have a single problem with the seagulls. Was there anyone who remembered any of this? You would’ve had to be blind not to see that the state of balance in which the island had existed was undone with the arrival of the President.

  “I wouldn’t want to turn out to be right, but in the belief that you’ll carefully heed my following warnings, I want to emphasize once again that I am, in fact, right,” the text continued. “If you continue to be led on by this man’s crackpot ideas, we’ll only be bound to encounter a new set of disasters. And mark my words, all this business with the expert is also going to end in a fiasco. Then maybe you’ll see that I was right, realizing how important it is that we unite against that man called the President and send him packing from this island.”

  The announcement ended with this audacious pronouncement: “I see this initiative as an opportunity, and as a test for me personally. Should the President turn out to be right in the days ahead, I’m prepared to take back everything I’ve said and to get on my knees and apologize before the President. If I should turn out to be right, however, let’s please come to our senses and drive this man off the island for the sake of preventing any more of his madness and disaster.”

  After we’d finished handwriting copies of the announcement, the three of us each grabbed a stack of papers and distributed them to all the houses. But, of course, not to the President’s nor to his armed men. We were sure it would reach the President nonetheless. Number 1 was certain to see to that.

  One of the unforgettable events of that period was witnessing the heartbreaking tears of the grocer’s son. When the boy showed up at the chicken coop one morning, he was met with horror: the chickens had been slaughtered. The foxes had dug a hole beneath the cage wire, leaving nothing alive. The place was strewn with the bodies of chickens that had been choked to death and left behind by the foxes after making off with the others. The boy’s tears continued for days.

  A week later, the feverish work of erecting a large group of pillars on the northern shore of the island had come to an end. All we had to do now was wait for the storks.

  The same week, a neighbor or two who had been watching the horizon in anticipation of the ferry had noticed some birds in the far distance that they believed may have been storks. On hearing this news, we all gathered on the north shore of the island. We began to debate whether the approaching birds were storks or not. The expert, bringing his bony index fingers to his lips, signaled for us to be quiet. We all fell into a deep silence.

  As the birds approached, we realized that they were indeed a flock of storks. The excitement on the island reached a palpable level as their expansive wings and slender torsos grew clearly distinguishable. The storks flew closer and closer, then alighted on the deserted island across from us. We could even sense the fatigue in the birds’ wings, the closer they got to the island.

  We looked at each other, baffled. Why hadn’t they flown down onto the nests that had been prepared for them? everyone wondered. Would they come over here after resting on the other island for a while? A flurry of whispers spread among us. Perhaps it was the sight of the crowd of humans that was keeping the storks at bay, we surmised. So the crowd quietly dispersed, and all of us headed to the patch of pine trees at the top of the hill to watch events from there. The storks were walking around on the island across the way, drinking water, some of them scratching beneath their wings with their beaks. Then we watched them take flight once again. They rose up into the sky, flying directly above our island as we watched their every move. They circled around our island a few times, our eyes following in circles with them. We were all holding our breath. We were just about to get whiplash when, unfortunately, we saw the storks take off toward the south again. They flew off in one fell swoop as we stood looking on, crestfallen. We watched them until they disappeared on the southern horizon. At which point we had lost all hope. The shame that overcame us was so great that it became impossible to so much as look each other in the eye.

  Someone asked where the expert was. At that point, everyone suddenly stirred to life, consumed with a burning desire to demand from the expert that he account for this course of events. But the expert was nowhere to be seen. We searched high and low, all the way to the pier.

  The ferry had pulled up anchor. In the midst of watching the storks, we’d forgotten all about it, along with everything else.

  It was the grocer who broke the bitter news: While we had been staring at the sky like fools, the expert had hopped aboard the motorboat and onto the ferry, which, as we could now see, had pulled up anchor and was quickly disappearing into the distance. When some of the islanders began to scold the poor grocer, the matter was instantly settled with his thoroughly reasonable reply: “How was I supposed to know that you wanted to stop the man?”

  The expert was probably on deck counting his money as he thought about the people at the next stop who were awaiting the miracles he would work. In short, we had let him get away. We were to go on living on our cursed island, together with the poisonous snakes.

  For most of us, our disappointment was so intense that we were in physical pain. Everyone was too distressed to speak in the days that followed, retreating into a corner and licking their wounds like animals. A few days later when people began to talk again, there was only one subject:

  “I knew that guy wouldn’t be able to achieve anything anyway!”

  “So why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know, the guy was just…so tall!”

  “If it’s size that matters, hell, camels are big, too!”

  “Yeah, that’s right! A camel is big and eats grass, but a falcon is small—and eats flesh!”

  “What gullible fools we turned out to be!”

  “Oh, come on, don’t say that…Even if we hadn’t believed him, what were we supposed to do?”

  “You’re right. Who else was there to believe?”

  “Yeah! We don’t have anyone to rescue us and show us the right way!”

  “What was the President supposed to do, poor fellow. He has to deal with all kinds of problems all by himself.”

  “The people who are making problems for him and who are forever looking for opportunities to criticize him aren’t giving it a rest, even in the midst of these days when unity is of utmost importance.”

  “No, no, the fact is, there’s no telling what the President is going to say or do. He’s unreliable.”

  “But he’s the only one who’s trying to find solutions, the only one trying to do something.”

  “You’re right. Whenever there’s a bad outcome, tongues start wagging.”

  Overhearing these exchanges was showing me that all my efforts to try to understand humankind were useless.

  AFTER ALL THIS TIME and all the horrific events that have happened in the meantime, it’s hard to believe that we’d talked only of literature on your last night on the island. But of course, there was no way for us to have known that it was your last night, my dear Writer. We believed that many such nights and days lay ahead of us.

  That evening, you’d passed on to me the key wisdom on the art of narration: “Leave psychology, characterizations, and descriptions of human relationships out of it and just stick to describing what happens—the action,” you’d said. “Don’t go looking for prettier or more violent words to describe people. Just describe the action and let the reader fill in the rest in his head. This was Aristotle’s advice, as well.”

  ‘ “Why don’t you give me an example,” I said. You responded with this timeless parable of folklore:

  ‘ “There was once, in ancient times, a young man who fell in love with the daughter of a physician. She also was a dentist. The young man would visit the physician just so he could see the girl, and, as the rest of the story went, ‘He had all thirty-two of his teeth pulled as he gazed upon the face of his beloved.’ Now what other descriptions of love could you possibly add to that? They would all pale in comparison.”