Hesitantly, afraid, he said, “I always have heard that you are a strange type, but I never thought that just by telling you I would get trapped. Do you really mean it?”

I said, “Just sit down in the car, and on the way I will fill the whole car….”

He was looking at me and he said, “What are you doing? That much smoking will kill me!”

I said, “There is no way out now. Chain smoking means chain smoking. When you drop one cigarette, immediately take another; take the fire from the first cigarette to the second cigarette. And I will be watching.”

Just after three or four packets he said, “Can I go home, before…”

“No way! Either your dead body will go out, or you will have to drop this habit that you have been bragging about.”

He said, “I promise.”

I said, “I don’t want to interfere in anybody else’s life, but you offered yourself.”

He burned his lips, he burned his hands. It must have taken about six hours, and after six hours he was so tired…smoking and smoking. And a crowd of the neighbors gathered, and they started talking – “Is this man mad or something?” And all over, cigarettes and ashes. Finally he said, “Let me go!”

I said, “I will not let you go. Do you see my guard? He will put you back in your place, and if you don’t smoke he will force you to smoke. This time or never!”

He said, “It is better I drop this habit. But let me go home!”

I said, “Be a man of your word. If you are found smoking again you will have to commit suicide – hara-kiri. A man of his word has no other way. If he goes against his word, he has to commit hara-kiri.”

He said, “I promise. I will commit hara-kiri, but at least right now let me go home!”

I followed him for many days. He tried to escape, he wouldn’t look at me. But when I take something into my hands I do it.

I used to go every day to his home to ask his wife how things were going. She was of course on my side; she was my detective in his home. Even the small children of the poor professor were all working for me. They would say, “Uncle, you have done a miracle! He is so afraid. Even to mention the word cigarette and he starts perspiring. That experience you have given him…Since that experience – we don’t know what experience, he simply says, ‘Since that experience I am finished. Because that man is so dangerous, if I even touch a cigarette he will force me to commit hara-kiri. And I want to live, cigarettes or no cigarettes.’”