Travellers in Magic Read online

  Travellers in Magic

  Stories

  Lisa Goldstein

  To Larry, brother par excellence.

  CONTENTS

  Alfred

  Cassandra’s Photographs

  Ever After

  Tourists

  Rites of Spring

  Midnight News

  Preliminary Notes on the Jang

  A Traveller at Passover

  Infinite Riches

  Death Is Different

  Breadcrumbs and Stones

  The Woman in the Painting

  Daily Voices

  A Game of Cards

  Split Light

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALFRED

  Alison walked slowly through the park near school. Usually she went to Laura’s house after school let out, but on Fridays Laura had a Girl Scout meeting. She passed a few older boys playing basketball, two women pushing baby strollers. Bells from the distant clock-tower rang out across the park: five o’clock, still too early to go home.

  A leaf fell noiselessly to the path in front of her. The sun broke through the dark edge of the clouds and illuminated a spider web on one of the trees, making it shine like a gate of jewels. A spotted dog, loping alone down the path, looked back and grinned at her as if urging her on. She followed after it.

  An old man sat on a bench ahead of her, his eyes closed and his face turned toward the sun.

  If Laura had been here they’d be whispering together about everyone, laughing over their made-up stories. The two women would have had their babies switched at the hospital, and they would pass each other without ever knowing how close they were to their true children. The old man was a spy, of course.

  As Alison walked by the man she saw that his face and hands were pale, almost transparent. At that moment he opened his eyes and said, “I wonder—could you please tell me the time?”

  He had a slight accent, like her parents. Her guess had been right after all—he was a spy. “Five o’clock,” she said.

  “Ah. And the year?”

  This was much too weird; the man had to be crazy. Alison glanced around, acting casual but at the same time looking for someone to run to if things got out of hand. You weren’t supposed to talk to strangers, she knew that. Her mother told her so all the time.

  But what could this man do to her here, in front of all these people? And she had to admit that his question intrigued her—most adults asked you if you liked school and didn’t seem to know where to go from there. “It’s 1967,” she said. Somehow his strange question made it all right to ask him one in return. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Oh, you know how it is. We old people, we can never remember anything.”

  She tried to study him without being obvious. She’d been right about his accent: it sounded German, like her parents’. He had a narrow face and high forehead, with thinning black hair brushed back from his face. He wore glasses with John Lennon wire frames—very cool, Alison thought.

  But other than the glasses, which he’d probably had forever, there wasn’t anything fashionable about him. He had on a thin black tie, and his coat was nearly worn through in places.

  He pushed back his sleeves. Nothing up my sleeves, Alison thought. Then she saw the numbers tattooed on his arm, and she looked away. Her parents had numbers like that.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  She shook her head; she wasn’t going to fall for that one. “My mother told me never to talk to strangers,” she said.

  “Your mother is a very smart woman. My mother never told me anything like that. My name is Alfred.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to offer me candy now?” Alison said.

  “Candy? Why?”

  “That’s the other thing my mother said. Strangers would try to give me candy.”

  He rummaged in his pockets as if searching for something. Alison saw with relief that his coat sleeves had fallen back over his arms, covering the tattoo. “I don’t have any candy. All I have here is a pocket-watch. What would your mother say to that?”

  He brought out a round gold watch. The letter “A” was engraved on it, the ends of the letter looping and curling around each other. Her initial, his initial. She reached for the watch but he moved it away from her and pressed the knob on top to open it. It had stopped hours ago.

  “Aren’t you going to wind it?” she asked.

  “It’s broken,” he said. “I can tell you an interesting story about this watch, if you want to hear it.”

  She hesitated. She didn’t want to hear about concentration camps; people—adults—got too strange when they talked about their experiences. It made her uncomfortable. Terrible things weren’t supposed to happen to your parents; your parents were supposed to protect you.

  On the other hand, she didn’t want to go home just yet. “Okay,” she said. She was almost certain now that he was harmless, but just to be safe she wouldn’t sit on the bench next to him. She could probably outrun him anyway.

  “My parents gave this watch to me a long time ago,” he said. “I used to carry it with me wherever I went, and bring it out and look at it.” He pried open the back and showed her a photograph of a dark-eyed boy and girl who looked a little like her and her brother Joey. But this back opened as well, revealing a small world of gears and springs and levers, all placed one over the other in careful layers, all unaccountably stopped.

  “I took the watch down to the river once. I had my own place there where no one could find me, where I would sit and think and dream. That day I was dreaming that someday I would learn how to make a watch like this. Someday I would find out its secrets.”

  He fell silent. The sun glinted over the watch in his hand. “And did you?” she asked, to bring him back from wherever he had gone.

  He didn’t seem to hear her. “And then the angel came,” he said. “Do you know, I had thought angels were courteous, kind. This one had a force of some sort, a terrifying energy I could feel even from where I sat. His eyes were fierce as stars. I thought he asked me a question, asked me if I desired anything, anything in the world, but in that confused instant I could not think of a thing I wanted. I was completely content. And so he left me.

  “I looked down at the watch, which I still held in my hand, but it had stopped. And no one in the world has ever been able to make it start again.”

  He looked at her as if expecting a reply. But all she could think of was that her first thought had been correct; he was crazy after all. No one in her family believed in angels. Still, what if—what if his story were true?

  “But I think the angel granted my desire,” he said. He nodded slowly. “Do you know, I think he did.”

  The shadows of the trees had grown longer while he’d talked to her; it was later than she’d thought. “I’ve got to go now,” she said reluctantly. “My parents are expecting me.”

  “Come again,” he said. “I’m in the park nearly every day.”

  The bus was just pulling out when she got to the bus stop; she had to wait for the next one and got home just as her father and Joey were sitting down to dinner. Her mother carried plates filled with chicken and potatoes into the dining room. She frowned as Alison came in; it was a family rule that everyone had to be on time for dinner.

  Her mother sat and her parents began to eat. Joey looked from one parent to the other uncertainly. Finally he said, “What happens to planes when they crash?”

  Alison could see that he was trying to be casual, but he had obviously been worrying about the question all day. “What do you mean?” Alison’s father said.

  “Well, like when they fall. Where do they land?”

  Her mother sighed. Joey was six, and afra
id of everything. He refused to get on an elevator because he thought the cable would break. When they went walking he tried to stay with their parents at all times, and would grow anxious if he couldn’t see them. Sometimes at night Alison heard screams coming from his room, his nightmares waking him up.

  “I mean, could they land on the house?” he said. “Could they come through my bedroom?”

  “No, of course not,” Alison’s father said. “The pilots try to land where there aren’t any people.”

  “Well, but it could happen, couldn’t it? What if—if they just fall?”

  “Look,” Alison’s father said. “Let’s say that this piece of chicken is the plane. Okay? And your plate here is where the plane comes down.” Speaking carefully, his accent only noticeable as a slight gentleness on the “r” and “th” sounds, he took his son through a pretended plane crash. “Past where all the people live, see?” he said.

  Joey nodded, but Alison saw that the answer didn’t satisfy him. Their father was a psychologist, and Alison knew that it frustrated him not to be able to cure Joey’s nightmares. He had told her once that he had studied to become a rabbi before the war, but that after he had been through the camps he had lost his faith in God and turned to psychology. It had made her uncomfortable to hear that her father didn’t believe in God.

  “He had another nightmare last night,” her mother said softly.

  “I don’t know what it is,” her father said. “We try to make a safe place here for the kids. They’re in no danger here. I don’t understand why he’s so frightened all the time.”

  “Eat your dinner before it gets cold, Alison,” her mother said, noticing for the first time that Alison had not touched her food. “There was a time when I would have given anything to have just one bite of what you’re turning down now.”

  The next day, Saturday, Alison called Laura and told her about the old man in the park. She wanted to go back and talk to him again, but Laura said she was crazy. “He’s some kind of pervert or something, I bet,” Laura said. “Didn’t your parents tell you not to talk to strangers?”

  “He’s not—”

  “Why don’t you come over here instead?”

  Alison liked going to Laura’s house, liked her parents and the rest of the family. They were Jewish, the same as her family, but Laura’s grandfather had come to America before the war. To Alison that made them exotic, different. They seemed to laugh more, for one thing. “Okay,” she said.

  The minute Alison stepped into the house Laura’s mother called Laura to the phone, then disappeared on some errand of her own. No one had invited Alison farther in than the living room. She looked around her, hoping the call wouldn’t last long. In the next room Laura laughed and said something about the Girl Scout meeting.

  The furniture in the living room was massy and overstuffed: a couch, two easy chairs, a coffee table and several end tables. A grandfather clock ticked noisily in the corner of the room, and opposite it stood a clunky old-fashioned television that Alison knew to be black and white.

  For the first time she noticed the profusion of photographs, what looked like hundreds of them, spread out over the mantelpiece and several end tables. All of them had heavy, ornate frames, and doilies to protect the surfaces under them. Curious, she went over to the mantelpiece to get a closer look.

  Most were black and white, groups of children bunched around a stern-looking mother and father. Everyone stared straight ahead, unsmiling. The fathers wore fancy evening clothes Alison had never seen outside of movies, and sometimes a top hat and even a walking cane. The mothers wore dresses covering them from head to foot, yards and yards of flowing, shiny material. In one of the pictures the children were all dressed alike, the girls in dark dresses and bows and the boys in coats and shorts.

  A trembling hand came over her shoulder and pointed to a small boy in the front row. She turned quickly. Laura’s grandfather stood there, leaning on his cane, his eyes watery behind thick glasses.

  “That’s me,” he said. Alison looked back at the photograph, trying to see this ancient man in the picture of the young boy. The shaking finger moved to another kid in the same picture. “And that’s my brother Moishe.”

  He looked down at her, uncertain. His face was flushed now, suffused with blood, a waxy yellow mixed with red. His eyes were vacant; something had gone out of them.

  The clock sounded loud in the room. Finally he said, “Which one are you?”

  “What?”

  “Which one of these are you? You’re one of the cousins, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m—I’m Alison—”

  “Alice? I don’t know an Alice. That’s me in that picture there, and that’s my brother Moishe. Or did I already tell you that?”

  Should she tell him? She was unused to dealing with old people; all her grandparents had died in the war. But just then he seemed to pull himself together, to concentrate; she could see the man he used to be before he got old.

  “Moishe played the trombone—it was a way of getting out of the army in Russia. If you played an instrument you could be in the marching band. He played for anyone, Moishe did, any army in the world. He didn’t care. The only army he ever quit was the White Russians. You know why?”

  Alison shook her head.

  “Because they made their band march in front of them in the war,” the old man said. He laughed loudly.

  Alison laughed too. “What happened to him?”

  The old man started to cough.

  “Hi, Alison,” Laura said. Alison turned; she hadn’t heard Laura come in. “Let’s go to my room. I got a new record yesterday.”

  As they walked up the stairs Laura said, “God, he’s embarrassing. Sometimes he calls my mother by her maiden name—he thinks she’s still a kid. My dad wants to put him in a nursing home but she won’t let him. I hope he didn’t bother you too much.”

  “No,” Alison said. She felt something she couldn’t name, a feeling like longing. “He’s okay.”

  She didn’t get a chance to go back to the park for another week, until Friday. Laura had remained firm about not wanting to meet Alfred. But when she finally got there she couldn’t see him anywhere. Her heart sank. Why had she listened to Laura? Why hadn’t she insisted?

  No, wait—there he was, sitting on the same bench, his head tilted back toward the sun. He looked thin, frail, even more transparent than the first time she’d seen him. She hurried toward him.

  He opened his eyes and smiled. “Here she is—the child without a name,” he said. “I was afraid you would not come again. I thought your mother might have told you not to talk to me.”

  “She doesn’t know,” Alison said.

  “Ah. You should not keep secrets from your mother, you know that. But if you do, you should make sure that they are good ones.”

  Alison laughed. “Got any candy?”

  “No, no candy.” He looked around him, seeming to realize only then where he was. “Do you want to take a walk?”

  “Sure.”

  He stood and they went down a shaded path. Alison shuffled through the fallen leaves; she wondered how Alfred managed to walk so quietly. Ahead of them, where the path came out into the sun, she saw a man with an ice cream cart, and she thought for a moment that Alfred might have intended to buy her a sweet after all. But they passed the cart without stopping, and she realized, ashamed, that he probably didn’t have much money. “Do you want some ice cream?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Thank you, no. I eat very little these days.”

  The path fell back into shade again. At the end of the path stood the old broken carousel, with a chain-link fence around it so that children could not play on it. Alfred stood and looked at it for a long time. “I made something like this once,” he said.

  “Really? Carousel animals?”

  “No, not the animals. The—what do you call it? The mechanism that makes the thing go around.” He moved his hand in a slow circle to demonstrate.

 
“Could you fix this?”

  “Could I?” He looked at the carousel for a long time, studying the tilting floor, the cracked and leaning animals, the proud horse on which someone had carved “Freddy & Janet.” Dirt and cobwebs had dulled the animals’ paint. “How long has it been broken?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been like this since I started coming to the park.”

  “I think I can fix it, yeah,” he said. He pronounced it “Yah,” just like her parents. “Yah, probably I could. Mostly I made large figures that moved. A king and a queen who came out like this—” he moved his hands together “—and kissed. And a magician who opened a box, and there was nothing inside it, and then he closed it, and opened it again, and there was a dove that flew away. I made that one for the Kaiser. Do you know who the Kaiser was?”

  She shook her head.

  “He was the king. The king of Germany.”

  “Did you have any kids?” she asked, thinking how great it would be to have a father like this man, and remembering the photograph of the two children in his watch. But almost immediately she wished she hadn’t said anything. What if his children had died in the war, like so many of her parents’ relatives?

  “I did, yah,” he said. “A boy and a girl. I wanted them to take over the business when I retired. It was a funny thing, though—they didn’t want to.”

  “They were nuts,” Alison said. “I would have done it in a minute.”

  “Ah, but you would have needed more than an interest in the figures. You would have had to understand electricity, and how the mechanisms work, and mathematics.… Both my children were terrible at mathematics.”

  She was terrible at mathematics too. But she thought that if she had been given a chance at the kind of work Alfred did she would have studied until she understood everything there was to know.

  She could almost see his workshop in front of her, the gears and chains and hinges, the tall wooden cabinets filled with hands and silver hair, tin stars, carved dogs and trumpets. The king and queen lay on their sides like fallen wooden angels, wearing robes of silk and gauze, and wooden crowns with gaudy paste jewels. The bird hung from the ceiling, waiting for its place inside the magician’s box. All around Alfred apprentices were cutting into wood, or doing something incomprehensible with pieces of machinery. She thought that she could even smell the wood; it had the elusive scent of great trees, like a forest from a childhood fairy tale.