Magic for Unlucky Girls

by A. A. Balaskovits

  When I was a little girl I would beg my grandfather to tell me stories, and he would always tell the one about a girl who lived in a faraway desert, the youngest member of a tribe of tanned shepherds. They were peaceful folk, raising sheep on lofty mountains the color of camel skin, raising children on the banks of the sea of salt. When the great drought came the people were unprepared; they lived morning to night, and never had enough to save up for tomorrow. Many died that season. They prayed to their gods, sacrificed entire flocks, danced on their toes until all the water ran from their bodies, but the rain did not come.

  In another life, Grandfather said, I was the daughter of the chief, with the spirit of the desert sanded on my bones. My name was Hessa, the fated one. When my family went hungry, I starved, because I was good, and good meant not eating when others were hungry. My mother was a tall woman who had danced off all her toes, and my father had sent his entire flock into sacrifice, so our family had no more prayers to offer the clear, cruel sky. As Hessa, I slipped out into the night when my parents were asleep and crawled across the desert until sand ripped my skin raw. I travelled farther and farther until I saw an ibex with horns as high as I was tall, made of gold and amber. I followed him across the mountains, and then across the salt sea, where none can drown and none can slake. The ibex drank from the sea and expanded; I drank and my veins went dry. When I could go no farther, I fell to my knees and thought of nothing. The ibex tipped his lovely horns to my head and where they touched my skin I tore apart. Underneath my human leather was a soft ibex kid with silver horns and black eyes. I raised myself on steady legs, bleated my new voice, and went into the rising sun. The next morning, the rain came.

  Grandfather told me this story every time I asked, and sometimes when I did not. I grew tired of hearing it and would beg for something new, but each time it was always the drought and the sacrifice.

  I’m not Hessa. You made her up, I accused him, and he would always say, Yes, of course, it’s just a story.

  When I grew up, I tried to find where the story came from. Grandfather was intelligent, but not exactly creative, and I doubted his ability to make it up. When I asked my mother, she only shrugged, and said she had never heard such a bizarre tale. That only made me want to know more, because it was something special between us, a secret that I didn’t fully understand except that it was ours. I scoured the library, but it was not in any book of myths or fairy tales. I Googled, and while some results were cartoonish or funny, occasionally pornographic, there were no real leads.

  Why do you want to know? he’d ask.

  Because it’s our story, I would say.

  He wouldn’t tell me anything, except that the story was meant for me, and that was all there was to it.

  When he was seventy-eight, Grandfather suffered a heart attack from twenty years of his dead wife being unable to stop him from eating a dinner of potato chips and sausage four times a week. He survived, barely, and my family watched him with a dire curiosity, waiting for the inevitable, but he was stubborn. He made me put my ear to his chest to prove it beat on tempo, and I had to strain to hear.

  On the morning of his eighty-first birthday he tripped over a mound of dirt in his backyard. His hip fractured before he hit the ground, as if his bones were made of sandstone. The doctors told us he wouldn’t walk without assistance for the rest of his life, if he walked at all. Then they handed us assisted living brochures, the kind with bemused faces and wrinkled smiles playing endless games of bridge and pinochle on the glossy covers.

  I’ve heard that the older someone is when they go under the anesthesia, the more it screws with the head. When grandfather was coming out of surgery he called my name, sometimes he’d say Hessa, Hessa, like a plea, or ask if the whir of the machines around him was rain. I sat next to him for hours, gripping his hand.

  If I met her now I think I’d be happy, Grandfather said, his eyes unfocused.

  I’m right here, I said, and he gripped my hand and turned his head aside. Then I said, You’re not happy? but he was sleeping.

  When he was released I stayed away. He stubbornly refused to go into assisted living, so even though I knew he needed help, I went back to my apartment in the city so I wouldn’t have to watch him spend minutes on each and every step, or grip the rails in the bathroom. If he died, I wanted to remember him as something more than fragile. When we were younger, he used to let me win at chess, and in the summers he’d dab sunscreen on my nose and chase me around the park, whooping, his arms above his head. I excused myself from family gatherings by telling my mother I had to work. I said I was an important member of the bank. The best auditor they had. I made up business cards that said so.

  I claimed work until his next birthday, when I had to attend or risk my mother sending me multiple caps-locked e-mails. For his gift, I had a cane made for him from the horns of some virile ibex and shipped in across the ocean. It cost me a fortune and it was beautiful: bone white and trimmed with gold. Flawless. Usually Grandfather loved my gifts, even when I was five and gave him a haphazard mess of Popsicle sticks and clumpy Elmer’s glue and told him it was the Statue of Liberty. Mother had said he was walking better now, and only needed a sturdy cane. It seemed a good gift, but when I put it in his hands he held it away from his body.

  Like the girl, I tried to explain. In your story.

  He thanked me and put it aside. Later that night, I saw him holding it away from his body, his shoulders hunched up.

  After a month of watching him grasp the metal hospital-issued cane, I cashed in half a decade’s worth of vacation time and bought two round-trip tickets to Israel, the only place I knew contained a salt sea. Besides my mother, the only person to tell was my rotund and sappy boss. At first he wasn’t going to give me the time off, so I lied and said I was half-Jewish on my father’s side.

  Go, he said, waving his arms like a benediction. If you don’t find yourself now when you’re young, you’ll never get the chance.

  Grandfather kissed me on the forehead when I showed him the tickets.

  Real ibex, I said. Up close. Cool, right? Like we’re a part of the story. And we can see where Hessa ate and slept and played with her family by the shore.

  Grandfather laughed and called me his pretty ibex girl, always thinking of others. He said, I hope my tired legs can get me that far. He tapped his cane on his healed hip.

  You walk just fine, I said. You’re fine.

  He limped to his bedroom and packed the smallest bag he owned, which I attributed to him having never travelled outside of the States before. I filled up half my suitcases with extra clothes and things for him.

  My mother called and told me not to take him. I listened to her worries and said I was going anyway. I was going to prove he was fine. I hung up on her. Twenty minutes later I received an e-mail:

  U THINK TAKING A DYING MAN OVERSEAS WILL HELP HIM?! UR NUTS!

  LOVE, UR MOM

  P.S. DONT GET BLOWN UP!!

  Grandfather and I flew eleven excruciating hours into Tel Aviv and stood for an additional two in lines at the airport. I asked the stodgy woman at passport control if this was typical and she said yes, tourism booms between conflicts.

  I’d made arrangements with my travel guide for us to meet up with a tour agent in Jerusalem to take us wherever we wanted to go. Their prices were exorbitant, but for the supposed services they offered, and considering I knew little of the place beyond when the violence made headlines, I figured it would be worth the cost. They had a cab waiting for us outside the airport. Grandfather pointed out everything on the way, the palm trees, the skyscrapers piercing the neon Tel Aviv sky. He falsetto’d his excitement when we passed camels on the dusty roads, and I asked the driver to slow down so we could watch them walk in their funny, plodding manner.

  We arrived in Jerusalem, exhausted from reclining on the plane and sitting in the cab. We found a cheap restaurant that accepte
d American money and ate chewy falafel with hummus, the only thing we recognized on the menu. Our hotel was located in New Jerusalem, near one of the entrances to the old city. The air smelled like spice and tasted like the cheap metal of coin and sweat. We shared a room with a halfhearted but loud air conditioner. Grandfather fell asleep immediately, but I stayed awake as long as I could to watch him breathe.

  In the morning we met our guide, Amir, in the lobby. He was tall, slightly muscular, like a soccer player. He smiled and shook grandfather’s hand and asked him how he liked the weather. When he smiled at me I could see all his teeth. He didn’t look much older than me, and when I asked it turned out he wasn’t, but he swore guiding was his passion, and he had been doing it alongside his father since he could talk.

  At my urging, Grandfather told him the story of the ibex girl, but he left out the part where I had been Hessa.

  I haven’t heard that story, Amir said. But there are many small tribal groups in this country, and they each have their own secrets. If you’re looking for the ibex, I can show you.

  He took us to a zoo on the edge of Jerusalem. We could have stayed home.

  There, he said, pointing to an ibex herd grazing behind bars. Want me to read the sign? he offered, since it was in Hebrew.

  I asked Grandfather what he thought, and he said they were very nice, larger than he expected, but he pointed to the zoo map and said could we go see the penguins? Amir explained penguins were not native to this part of the world while Grandfather mimicked their squacks. When we got to the little white myna birds, Amir unhelpfully supplied Grandfather with dirty phrases in Arabic, which they both tried to get the birds to mimic. By the end of the day they were slapping each other’s backs and laughing like morons.

  For dinner we returned to the hotel, and Grandfather filled a plate from the cafeteria and limped his way back to the room, claiming lethargy and jet lag, something only an excessive amount of sleep could remedy. Amir was on the clock for a few more hours, and because Grandfather kept saying I would only disturb him if I was in the room, Amir and I took to the streets and found a place that served cold Pakistani beer and hot shawarma.

  We call this gyro, I told him, holding up the pita.

  In the United Kingdom, he said, they call it a doner kebab.

  Have you been?

  He’d studied history at The University of Kent, about an hour southeast of London.

  Ah, I said. Your English is really good.

  I drained my beer to wash that sentence back down my throat. Thankfully he smirked, but I knew I couldn’t have been more insulting if I was trying, so I asked where we could go to see a real herd of ibex. Preferably wild ones who walked near the Dead Sea. Amir said they were all over the Qumran area, but that I should see the traditional tourist haunts before we left Jerusalem.

  He said, What are you going to do after you see the ibex? You take a picture, take an hour to float in the sea. See the Dead Sea Scroll caves. Go to Masada and walk the ruins. Takes an afternoon to see all of it. Not much else down there, unless you like the desert.

  We had to see, at Amir’s insistence, the traditional places for each major religion: The Wailing Wall, The Temple Mount, The Holy Sepulcher. And the bazaars, to appease the god all religions could agree on, and to whom all Americans specifically wondered at and loved.

  We’re here for the ibex, I said. And the girl, Hessa.

  Amir said, I thought she was made up.

  He walked me back to my hotel, even though he was off the clock. In the lobby he hesitated, shifting his weight from leg to leg. I thought he was going to proposition me, and I was thinking of the most politely vicious way to say no.

  Instead, he said, Your grandfather is very old. Then he waited.

  Okay, I said.

  He shook his head. It will be easier for you out in the desert. But your grandfather? He will find it very difficult.

  You don’t know my grandfather very well, I said.

  I wanted to drive out to Qumran the next day, but Amir arrived early for breakfast and cornered Grandfather with sweet coffee and peach yogurt and stories about the Sepulcher. Grandfather said he wanted to see it.

  But we came to see the ibex, I said. And you’re not Christian.

  It’s historical, he said. We can see the ibex tomorrow.

  We went into the old city. Two armed guards looked bored as we walked by. They made me feel uncomfortable, or the guns strapped to their sides did, so I lowered my head and avoided eye contact. Amir waved to them, and then Grandfather did, too.

  The roads were uneven and streets crowded with laughing children and quick-eyed shopkeepers. And Americans with American cameras. I almost lost Grandfather to several shopkeepers as every time they said they had a deal or a bargain, or called him friend, he would stop and listen, inspect the goods as if we needed a menorah or a replicate crown of thorns. Amir haggled for a gray pashmina and draped it around my bare shoulders.

  You need to cover up in the holy places, he said as I protested. He added, It matches your eyes.

  I spent the entire time walking through the church thinking about the pashmina and listening to Amir whisper the history of each nook and work of art.

  Did you know, he said as we watched an Armenian woman prostrate herself before an image of the Virgin behind glass, the Sepulcher is a separated whole. He gestured to the far ends of the church. He said, Everyone owns a part of it. Catholics, Armenians, Eastern Orthodox. It’s been claimed and lost and reclaimed many times.

  The woman began murmuring in her language, and held a damp handkerchief to her eyes. Amir continued, The main entrance to the church is locked by these two huge wooden doors. Would you like to guess who holds the key?

  Grandfather guessed the Catholics. I watched the women shake her head back and forth. She breathed in trembling gulps. A man in all black put his finger to his lips and made a wet shushing noise at her.

  Two Muslim families, Amir said. Since the time of Saladin. One family locks up at night, and another opens it in the morning.

  The woman didn’t quiet herself. She put her head down onto her lace-covered chest and grasped at her heart, the icons on her rings and around her wrist catching the light. The men left me to go watch the Orthodox and Franciscan prayer services, but I stayed and watched her put her hands close to the glass, never touching, but so obviously longing to do so. I thought she was the most holy thing in the place, and I wondered what it would be like to be her, even if she was sad and I couldn’t understand why. What I wouldn’t do for that intangible sense of belonging, even if belonging was painful.

  After, we went to the Western Wall. I had no real interest—a wall is a wall—but Grandfather went up and slipped a hastily written prayer between the cracks. I asked him what he wrote, but he said it wouldn’t come true if he told me. I said I didn’t think God worked like fountains or birthday candles, but he said there was a lot I didn’t know.

  The next day I tried to get grandfather and Amir to go to Qumran, but Amir waved a paper fan in front of grandfather and himself and claimed it was too hot. Grandfather held out his arms and shook them. Look, I’m sweating sitting down, he said.

  The car is air conditioned, I said, but they were both staring at me, and I knew we weren’t going to Qumran that day.

  We did go to the Mount of Olives to see the panoramic view of the city. I took pictures of Grandfather doing funny balancing acts with his cane, and he took a picture of me sitting on the ledge with the Dome of the Rock behind me. He told Amir to come sit in the picture with me, and Amir draped his arm around my shoulder and made the peace sign.

  We ate a light lunch of vegetable salads and decided to go shopping between seeing some of the smaller sights; parts of the old wall and the convenient stations of the Cross. I easily acquiesced since I had to get my mother something to make up for not answering her e-mails of increasing fon
t size. I was looking at a gold statue of a bird when a street peddler approached me. He had hundreds of cheap plastic necklaces draped around his neck and both his arms. He shoved a choker of fake amethysts into my hand. I told him, no thank you, and tried to give it back.

  You are beautiful, he said out of nowhere. No charge. No charge. It is for you. You smile, now?

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I awkwardly smiled and thanked him.

  He stood closer to me. Do you have a man?

  I was stunned into truth, and so I said I didn’t.

  I will marry you, he said and thrust his arms out, the beads jangling, like a bird of paradise with its plumage on display for a mate.

  Oh, I said. Thank you?

  I will make a very good husband, he continued. I will take care of you.

  Just when I was afraid I had accidentally entered into a vow of matrimony, Amir put his hand on my shoulder and said something in Arabic to the peddler. The man gave me a sad smile and reached his hand out. I thought he wanted the necklace back, but instead he took my hand and shook it. He said I should smile more. He nodded to Amir one more time, then went over to a group of Japanese tourists and waved his necklaces in front of them.

  What did you say to him? I asked.

  Amir grinned. I told him you couldn’t marry him because you were going to marry me.

  He walked ahead of me to where Grandfather was waiting, leaning on his cane, grinning at us.

  I did my best to ignore Amir for the rest of the day, and gave one-word answers whenever I had to speak. Amir asked if I wanted to out with him that night, experience some of the Israeli nightlife. I considered it, but I thought what if Grandfather stopped breathing in the middle of the night, or needed a glass of water with an aspirin? I said no. Grandfather looked more disappointed than Amir.

  He’s a nice boy, Grandfather said when we in our hotel room, getting ready for bed.

  You can’t be serious, Grandpa.

  He shrugged. Maybe. You should have fun. You’re young. When’s the last time you went out with a man?