The Beggar: The Complete Audiobook

The Egg He came toward me in the morning the way he always came, bent at the waist, moving slowly along the jungle trail, with his hands clasped behind his back.

His clothing was worn and dirty.

Age and hardship had folded his body forward, and every step looked as though it required a private negotiation with pain.

I had watched him make that walk before.

By then, I recognized his pace, the shape of him, and the smile that seemed out of place on a man who owned so little.

I was sitting outside the bamboo hooch where John was teaching the Karen medical students.

My position gave me a view of the trail and the people moving through the camp.

It also kept me near the doorway, close enough to respond if anything changed.

Inside, John was teaching medicine that would travel far beyond that room.

Outside, the village moved through another humid morning in a war that had lasted longer than many of its people had been alive.

The old man stopped in front of me.

He had something in his hands.

At first, I saw only a piece of cloth, stained by use and the ground and whatever life had required of it.

He brought his hands from behind his back and held the bundle toward me.

I accepted it because he was offering it, although I did not yet understand what was happening.

I opened the cloth.

Inside was one hard-boiled egg.

This is for you, he said.

There are gifts whose price can be calculated, and there are gifts whose cost can only be understood by looking at the life of the person who gives them.

In the United States, an egg would have been almost nothing.

I could have replaced it without thought.

In that village, in that man's hands, it was not almost nothing.

He lived by begging.

He had no reserve that I could see, no pack filled with supplies, no way to leave the country when the mission ended.

That egg may have been one of only a few things he would eat that day.