A wealthy burgher and a poor man lived in the same building—the burgher in the upper floors, the pauper in the lower. Neither had children. One night, the burgher dreamed that strangers entered his home and began packing all his possessions into bundles. "What are you doing?" he asked. "We are bringing everything down to the pauper." He watched helplessly as they carried away his entire fortune—every piece of merchandise, every promissory note, every letter of credit—leaving nothing but bare walls.
He woke up. It was just a dream. His wealth was intact, his warehouses full, his accounts untouched. But his heart was pounding, and the dream would not leave his mind. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the strangers packing his belongings.
The pauper's wife had her own dream the same night. She dreamed the exact opposite—that all the burgher's wealth was being delivered to their home, that abundance was pouring through their door like water.
The burgher, deeply disturbed, became even more generous to the poor couple below. But every time they entered his home, his face changed—a flicker of terror crossed his features, a tightening around his eyes. He could not help it. The dream haunted him. One day the pauper's wife asked directly: "Why does your expression change every time we visit?" He told her the dream. She told him hers.
They decided: since both had dreamed the same thing from opposite directions, perhaps their destinies were linked. They made a pact. The burgher's wife would give birth to a boy, the pauper's wife to a girl, and the children would marry. They wrote it down and sealed it as a binding agreement.
Both wives gave birth as expected. Then the burgher died. The pauper, through a series of astonishing reversals, became wealthy—as wealthy as the burgher had been. Now rich and powerful, the former pauper forgot the agreement. He wanted a better match for his daughter than the orphaned son of a dead merchant.
Rabbi Nachman's tenth tale follows these two children—the burgher's son raised by strangers and sinking into obscurity, the pauper's daughter raised in her father's new wealth—as their fates intertwine across years of separation and reversal. The dream was not a warning to be heeded or avoided. It was a prophecy that could not be stopped. Everything the burgher feared losing was always destined for the pauper. The transfer of wealth between the two families was decreed in heaven before either man was born.
And the cruelest irony: the pauper, now wealthy, repeats the burgher's original mistake. He hoards what was never truly his. He clings to fortune the way the burgher clung to fortune. And the children, bound by a covenant their parents wrote and then tried to break, must find each other through every obstacle the adult world places between them. The contract written in poverty is more binding than any contract written in wealth—because it was written when the writers had nothing to lose and everything to hope for.