The Red Magician Read online

  “Wait a minute,” said Kicsi suddenly. “Do you think he’s wrong? Maybe the Messiah’s come and no one has noticed yet. Do you think so? You’ve been to Palestine—maybe you’ve seen him there and didn’t know it.”

  Vörös laughed. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “When the Messiah comes, everything will be different. Elijah the Prophet will walk into Jerusalem and the Messiah, the son of David, will follow him. Then the air will be like myrrh and cinnamon, and the rivers will run with honey. The Temple will stand where it stood of old, built of gold and cedar wood and ivory. All promises will be fulfilled and all questions answered. We will come from the four corners of the earth, and the graves will give up their dead, and we will meet in the Promised Land and rejoice.” He sounded wistful, as though recalling a dream. “Didn’t the rabbi tell you that?”

  “No,” said Kicsi. “He just tells us what we can’t do.”

  “Oh, now,” said Vörös. “He can’t be that bad.”

  “You don’t know him,” said Kicsi. It was strange to think that she had stood in almost the same place a few days ago and the rabbi had leaned on his walking stick to talk to her. “I don’t like him at all.”

  A crystal candlestick holder fell off the mantel onto the wooden floor and broke into a thousand pieces. Vörös half-stood, then sat back in his chair.

  “Kicsi!” Sarah shouted from the kitchen. Kicsi heard hurrying footsteps and then Sarah came into the room. “What did you do?”

  “I—it just fell. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s right,” said Vörös. “It just fell to the floor.”

  Sarah saw Vörös for the first time. “Didn’t your father say you weren’t to talk to him?” she said to her daughter. “Now go. Get the broom and clean up this mess, and then come help me in the kitchen. And I don’t want to catch you talking to Vörös again. Do you hear me?”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Do as I say.” Sarah left the room.

  Slow tears formed in Kicsi’s eyes. She went to get the broom and began to sweep, slowly, methodically. The pieces of crystal blurred and ran together, sparkling. Suddenly she turned to Vörös, leaning forward on the broom.

  “When are you leaving?” she asked.

  “In—” He cleared his throat. “In a few days.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “What? I can’t. Why?”

  “I want to leave home. I’m almost an adult, you know. They treat me like a child because I’m the youngest. They don’t know. I want to see faraway places, I want to do things—I want to be like you.”

  “Faraway places? What do you know of faraway places?” Vörös moved forward in his chair. “All too soon you will leave this place, your village. You will go through pain and fire and hunger, and I cannot say what the end will be. It may be that you will finally come to Palestine, or to America. And there you will tell your children stories of your childhood, and they will think this town as exotic, as far away, as Shanghai. And all too soon they will want to leave you for faraway places. Things happen, you know. You cannot rush them.”

  She looked at him in amazement. America! What did he mean? “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Magda came into the room, turned slowly in a circle to look at both of them, and ended by looking at the broken glass. “Mother’s very upset about something,” she said. “She said you’re to clean that up and then go help her. I’m supposed to make sure that you do it. What did you do, knock it over?”

  Kicsi said nothing. She resumed sweeping, quietly. After a while Vörös cleared his throat, interrupting the rustling of the broom and the clinking of glass. He stood, walked to the door, and let himself out into the cool evening. Kicsi never looked around.

  She didn’t see him for nearly a week. She suspected some conspiracy between Vörös and Sarah, designed to keep them apart for the time he was staying. The next Friday at dinner time, however, he came in with Imre. She was helping to set the table. As she saw him, her heart leapt like a salmon from a stream.

  “I’m leaving after Shabbos,” he told the family, not looking at her. “I came for one final delightful meal.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Sarah. Kicsi, setting down a wine cup, pretended not to listen to his answer.

  “To England, I think,” he said. “And then to America.”

  “We have cousins in America,” said Tibor. “In New York. Will you be seeing them?”

  “Silly!” said Magda, laughing. “America’s a big place. Not like here.”

  “I know that,” said Tibor, furious. “I could give him the address—”

  The telephone rang. It was the private line, recently installed, that ran from the house to the printing plant next door. Imre looked at his wife.

  The phone rang again. One was not allowed to use the telephone on the Shabbos, the day of rest, since the rabbis had ruled that using electricity constituted lighting a fire, which was considered work and so prohibited. But any rule could be sacrificed in an emergency.

  “Who can be at the plant at this hour?” asked Imre. “Everyone should have gone home hours ago.”

  The phone rang again. “Perhaps you’d better answer it,” said Sarah. “Someone may have gotten locked inside.”

  Imre went to the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello?” There was an unmistakable sound of relief in the voice at the other end of the phone. “Hello. This is Arpad.”

  “Arpad?” said Imre. Arpad was an employee at the printing plant, stolid and unimaginative and not very bright. His face was marked with smallpox scars. “What are you doing there?”

  “I—I followed a light,” said Arpad.

  “A light?” said Imre.

  “Yes, sir. When we were closing. I was about to leave, as all the lights had been turned off, when I saw this light, sir, and I thought that maybe one of them had been missed. So I went to look, and—and it moved. And I followed it, and it kept moving from room to room, past the presses, and into the offices, and then back to the presses—a sort of thin yellow light, sir. And then finally it went out, and I found the door, and then, well, I was locked in.”

  “A light?” Imre said again. “I don’t understand. Was it someone holding a torch? Do you think he’s still there?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” said Arpad. “It wasn’t anyone holding a torch. I would have seen that. It was just a light.” He paused. “I’d rather talk about this outside, sir. You see, it’s fairly dark in here. I can’t seem to get the lights back on, somehow.”

  “Very well,” said Imre. “I’ll be coming through the entrance connected to the house. Just wait there.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Just outside the dining room was a door that led to the plant. “Get me my keys, one of you,” said Imre, putting down the phone. “I think I left them upstairs.” Ilona ran to the stairs.

  “Sarah, tell him I’ll have to wait until I get the keys—”

  A slow rumbling started. They heard it in two places—over the telephone and from the plant next door.

  Magda cried out. Sarah said, “What’s that?”

  “The fool,” said Imre. “He’s somehow started the presses.”

  The sound became a muted roar. Occasionally the clanking rhythm of an individual press could be heard before it faded back into the general noise.

  “Let me out!” said Arpad. “Please. Help. Let me out!”

  Sarah picked up the telephone. “Imre will get you out as soon as he gets the keys,” she said. “How did you manage to start the presses?”

  “I didn’t start them,” said Arpad. “They’re just going by themselves. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “God help us,” said Sarah. “It’s the curse. The rabbi’s curse.” She sat down, the phone still in her hand, and looked blankly at the connecting door.

  Ilona returned with the keys. “Here they are,” she said, panting.

  Imre fitted the key to the lock. The door began to shake
. With his paralyzed left arm he could not hold the door steady.

  “The light!” said Arpad. “The light is coming back!”

  The door began to swing back and forth, although Imre had not turned the key in the lock. The Shabbos candles flickered. A glass of wine overturned, the stain spreading slowly through the white linen like a fist unclenching.

  “Help!” said Arpad. Everyone in the room could hear his thin voice through the telephone. “Help! He’s strangling me! I’m being strangled!”

  The dinner table began to tremble. Silverware and china rattled like chattering teeth. The candles went out.

  “In Heaven’s name!” said Vörös. “What does he think he’s doing?”

  The door closed. Imre fumbled with the lock.

  “Please! Somebody! I’m being strangled!”

  Vörös ran to the door, pushing Imre out of the way. As the door tore itself loose from the frame once more, Vörös pushed at it with his shoulder. The door flung open. The presses became louder.

  Vörös said one word into the din. The word sounded like breath, like wind, like the sea speaking to the sand. The presses stopped.

  Arpad came to the door. He looked at the family, gathered around him like the crowd that gathers around a man feared dead, and fainted. Imre and Vörös together dragged him to the table.

  Imre unbuttoned Arpad’s shirt and peeled back the collar. He sucked in his breath in dismay. Standing out against the pale skin were deep red marks, marks like fingers.

  “Somebody! Somebody get a doctor,” said Imre. “Sarah, wet a napkin and bring it to me. Stand back, all of you—he’s fainted. You can look at his neck another time. Get back!”

  Kicsi looked, horrified, at the red marks. Slowly she moved back with everyone else, as Sarah applied the wet napkin, as Arpad opened his eyes. She looked around for Vörös. She wanted to ask him if the word he had spoken was the holy and unutterable Name of God. But Vörös had gone.

  2

  Kicsi and her best friend, Erzsébet, sat in the attic. Several months had passed since Vörös had left, and summer had come and gone. Dust motes flowed like molten gold through a hole in the roof—a hole that no one had known was there and on which Kicsi and Erzsébet were speculating endlessly.

  It was midafternoon. In the huge old house that contained her mother and father, three other children, a visiting cousin from Budapest, and friends and workers from the press who were always stopping by, Kicsi thought she had about an hour before anyone would think of looking for her in the attic. She sat against the wall looking at the old furniture, trunks of clothes and photographs, mirrors gone blind from the dust. Erzsébet stood up and looked through the hole to the street below.

  “Maybe this is how Vörös left,” Erzsébet said. “Through the roof.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Kicsi. “We were all on the first floor. He would have left a hole in every ceiling he passed through.”

  “Oh,” said Erzsébet dully. The hot sun was making her sleepy.

  “And besides,” Kicsi said, “someone would have heard him.”

  “Oh,” said Erzsébet. She turned and sat down next to Kicsi. “There sure are a lot of people down on the street.”

  “There are? Who?”

  “Visitors for the rabbi’s daughter’s wedding, mostly. They’re all looking at your house.”

  Kicsi scowled.

  “Well,” said Erzsébet, pushing up her glasses, “they want to see the house where the magician stayed, where he fought with the rabbi and won.”

  “I wish they’d go away,” Kicsi said.

  “I wish he’d never come,” said Erzsébet.

  Kicsi looked at her sharply.

  “Well,” said Erzsébet, “I wish he’d never taken the curse off the school. I hated going back. I hate Hebrew. I wonder if anyone really speaks it or if they’re all just pretending.”

  “I’ll bet it was a tree,” said Kicsi.

  “The hole?”

  “Sure. A tree must’ve fallen on the roof.”

  “Where’s the tree now?”

  “Oh,” said Kicsi. “I don’t know.”

  “No, it couldn’t have been. Say—” Erzsébet broke off as another thought occurred to her. “Do you suppose the rabbi made the hole in the roof?”

  “The rabbi? As part of the curse, you mean?”

  “Sure. The rabbi, or one—you know—one of the demons.” She lowered her voice.

  “I think you’re right. The rabbi’s curse. I wonder why no one noticed the hole before. I’m going to have to tell my father about it before the rains start.”

  “What was it like?” Erzsébet said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You know—being under a curse. Were you frightened?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Did you see any demons?”

  “No, not at all. The only thing that happened was when the printing presses started. Oh, and a candlestick holder broke once.”

  “And the hole in the roof.”

  “And the hole in the roof.”

  “And that’s all? No noises, no strange voices?”

  “No.” Kicsi was openly scornful now. “Why did you think there would be?”

  “Well, my brother, he said—we have an uncle staying with us for the wedding, and my brother told him—well—that there were sparks when Vörös cast out the demon. Blue sparks, and red, and golden. And that the demon let out a shriek—you could hear it as far away as the forest—and flew up the chimney. And that Vörös spun around three times and flew away, over toward Palestine.”

  Kicsi laughed. “No, it didn’t happen like that.”

  Erzsébet began to laugh with her. “Wait, you haven’t heard the funniest part yet. The funniest part was that he said—my brother said—that he knows what he’s talking about, because his sister’s best friend lives in the house where Vörös stayed.”

  They both laughed, Erzsébet louder than Kicsi. Erzsébet looked up at the roof. The light coming through the hole had almost disappeared.

  “Oh, Kicsi, I’d better go. I’m going to be late for dinner.” They stood up and brushed the dust off their clothes. Kicsi lifted the trapdoor, and first she, then Erzsébet, climbed down the ladder.

  Kicsi was almost glad to see Erzsébet go. She could not bear to talk of Vörös yet. For her the most important thing that had happened was that he had gone and might not be coming back. The rabbi had abandoned his feud with the school, and the friends of the family were coming back, sheepishly, to renew old ties, but Kicsi cared little for that. She felt that her heart had gone out of her, that never again would she feel so wholly and completely alive. She was thirteen years old.

  They passed the library, and Kicsi remembered how Vörös had once sat there and promised to show her card tricks. Her cousin and Imre were talking behind the closed door. The cousin had come to the village for the wedding of the rabbi’s daughter and was staying in the room Vörös had once used. He had been the rabbi’s student before he and his family had moved to Budapest. Kicsi hated him thoroughly for daring to take Vörös’s place and at the same time knew that he had done nothing to deserve her hatred.

  “Wait,” Kicsi said.

  “Wait for what?” said Erzsébet.

  “I thought I heard them say my name. Wait just a minute.”

  “Oh, Kicsi, I really have to go home now.”

  “All right, go. I have to hear what they’re saying.”

  “Good-bye, Kicsi,” said Erzsébet.

  “Good-bye,” Kicsi said absently.

  “The rabbi certainly knows how to stir up this old sleepy town,” the cousin was saying. “I’ve never seen so many people here at one time.”

  “We have people here from as far away as Russia,” said Imre. “The rabbi’s a very famous man. Though we’ve had our differences in the past—”

  “He’s a strange man,” the cousin said. “I remember when I was studying with him. One of the students disagreed with him on some poin
t of Talmudic law—I can’t even remember what it was now—and the rabbi threw him out of the classroom. Just like that. And he never let him back, either.”

  “He likes to think he is responsible for everyone in the village—for what they think and how they speak and what they do,” Imre said. “The village is terribly isolated. Old László wanted to start a newspaper once and asked me if I’d print it, but the rabbi was against it and László gave up the idea.”

  “Then how do you get news here?” said the cousin.

  “Well, the radio. On good days, when the signal makes it over the hills. The rabbi really doesn’t allow anything else. He’s had too much power, with no one to challenge him, for too long.”

  “Isn’t that what your guest tried to do—to challenge him? I wonder how many people are coming to the wedding just because they heard that story.”

  The cousin had wanted to hear the tale of the rabbi and Vörös ever since he had come to town, but Imre had forbidden everyone to talk about it. Because the cousin was staying with Kicsi’s family he had been asked many times by those in the village for his opinion of the two magicians and had had to pretend to knowledge with quiet nods and winks and a general air that he would tell more if he could.

  “My own daughters will be marrying soon,” said Imre, changing the subject.

  The cousin sighed. “How will you ever find husbands for all three of them?”

  “I don’t think that will be much of a problem,” said Imre. “Magda already has a suitor—a very respectable young man—and as for the rest of them, well, I suppose I can arrange something when the time comes.”

  Kicsi felt her heart pounding. I don’t want to be arranged for! she thought wildly. Will Vörös never come and take me away?

  “It’ll be hard arranging for a husband for Kicsi,” said the cousin, as though the force of her thoughts had driven them through the thick wooden door. “She seems to hate everything and everyone.”

  “Kicsi?” said Imre. “Why do you say that?”

  “She certainly has something on her mind,” said the cousin. “I can’t even get her to say hello to me.”

  “You have to treat her very carefully,” said Imre. “This is a difficult time for her now.” He paused. “You were talking before about the strange traveler who stayed with us for a time.”