The Red Magician

by Lisa Goldstein

  Vörös turned to her. “Kicsi!” he said. “Stay back. Please.” Ha, she thought, almost pleased. I have never surprised him with anything before.

  “No,” she said. “I—I have something to say. You are wrong, rabbi. You did not kill your daughter. And it does not matter now if you could have done something to save her or not. To talk about what might have happened is useless. You can think about what might have happened, turn it over and over in your mind until you can’t think of anything else. You can plan your revenge or—or suicide. But none of that can change the past. The dead—your daughter and my parents—they would want us to go on. To live.” She was crying now. She wiped away the tears angrily. “Do you understand?”

  “No,” the rabbi said. “I cannot understand. I am an old man, and a stubborn one. It does not seem right to me, as it does to you, that so many people should die and that we should say only, ‘Ah, well, but that is the past. There is nothing we can do about it now.’ It is a terrible thing, a thing beyond my understanding. All my life I have lived with things I can understand—my family, my village, my traditions. And now, at the end of my life, I am faced with something I cannot accept or understand. I don’t—I don’t know what to do. There is nothing that I can do.”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” Kicsi said, nervously. She had never spoken back to the rabbi before, and she was not sure of what she would say to him. “I don’t mean that we should forget or—or do nothing. I mean that—well—You knew my parents, rabbi.”

  The rabbi nodded.

  “And Aladár, Erzsi’s cousin?”

  “Yes, slightly.”

  “They are dead now. And I—I wanted to die too, because—I don’t know if I can explain this to you—because I knew that I wasn’t as good as they were. It didn’t seem fair that they should die and I should live.”

  “But that—that’s nonsense,” the rabbi said. “Of course you should live.”

  “I know. I know that now,” said Kicsi. “But don’t you see? You’re doing exactly what I did. You blame yourself for something that was not your doing.”

  The rabbi looked at Vörös. “She is very wise,” he said. “Have you been teaching her?”

  Vörös smiled. “No,” he said. “She has come to her wisdom by herself. I am very proud of her.”

  “It will be hard,” the rabbi said, not looking at Vörös or Kicsi, “to give up my vengeance. It has occupied my mind for so long. I will have to start thinking about the world again, and about my dead. I see now that I must give it up, this foolish idea I once had. But what will I do now? Where will I go?”

  “Why don’t you stay here?” Vörös said. “People will be coming back someday. There will be a community here again, though not as big as it was before. They will need a rabbi, someone to lead them, to help them get settled again.”

  “No,” said the rabbi. “I can never lead anyone again. I do not understand the world, and I can’t pretend to the villagers that I do. They will be asking me questions for which I do not have the answers.

  “I think,” the rabbi said slowly, “that I would like to find the answers. That I would like to travel the world, and to learn. To become a student again, as I was when I was younger. Why did my daughter have to die? I understand now that you are not to blame, traveler, and it may be true, as this young woman has said, that I am not to blame. But I would like to think that there was a—a reason for her death, and for the deaths of so many other people. It may be that there is no answer. It may be—it is likely—that I shall die before I find it. But I cannot accept that her death, so young, had no meaning. That is something I cannot understand.”

  Vörös nodded. There was pity in his eyes. “I wish you luck, rabbi,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said the rabbi. “Sholom aleichem. And good-bye, Kicsi. I will always remember your words.” He walked away, his feet making no sound on the gravel-paved road, and merged with the shadows. They were never to see him again.

  Kicsi felt suddenly tired. She yawned and leaned against the gatepost. Just before she closed her eyes she looked up and saw the juggling balls circling over her head, crowning her with precious jewels. Then she fell asleep, and did not wake even when Vörös lifted her in his arms and carried her away.

  10

  Invisible, she walked through the rooms and corridors of the house. Outside it was bright afternoon, and things were clearer than they had been last night. She saw that much of what she had seen the night before was real and not part of the rabbi’s illusion. Furniture had been moved around or exchanged to make room for all the soldiers staying in the house. She reached out to touch a vase and her fingers went through it. Vörös had told her that that would happen.

  That morning she had talked to Vörös, telling him that she wanted to see her house for the last time. “I can make you invisible,” he had said.

  “No, I meant—Maybe I could get through the back door again.”

  “I wouldn’t try it. Not during the day.”

  “You could … make me invisible?”

  “Of course,” Vörös had said, smiling. “Don’t make any noise, though. They’ll still be able to hear you. And you won’t be able to touch anything. If you wanted to, you could walk right through the walls.”

  Now she looked at the solid walls around her and decided she did not want to try it. If she walked through them she would feel even more like a ghost come back to haunt the scenes of its former life. She went down the back hall and into the kitchen.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it,” one of the soldiers was saying. “All kinds of bright lights and strange shapes, right outside the front window. I thought for a moment we were under attack again, but there wasn’t any sound. Strangest thing I ever saw.”

  The other soldiers laughed. “I swear to you, I didn’t see a thing,” one said. “I must have slept right through it.”

  “And Pavel had some kind of fit last night,” the first soldier said. “I don’t really know about this place. I’ve been talking to one of the villagers, and he says there used to be a rabbi here who could—well, they called him some sort of magician. And the woods are supposed to be haunted. All right, laugh! Still, I’ll be glad when we’re posted somewhere else.”

  Kicsi smiled at that. The fat gray cat came into the kitchen, and one of the soldiers fed it scraps from the sink. It jumped into his lap and began to purr loudly. So the cat had survived too, Kicsi thought. She felt a kind of sadness that it had found another life apart from her family.

  She went on into the dining room. The huge dining table was set out as though for company. She remembered the last night that they were all together, the Passover night more than a year ago, and she began to cry, softly, so the soldiers would not hear. It was the first time she had cried properly for her dead.

  She did not want to see any more. Vörös had told her that the spell would end when she stepped out the front door. She stumbled through the living room, walked through the door, and left the house for the last time.

  Vörös waited for her in the woods. She said nothing to him, but nodded and walked past him toward the forest’s center. He smiled at her as she went.

  Toward evening she came back. Vörös had built a small fire. “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

  “Go?” she said. “I don’t know where I could go to.”

  “Your brother and sister are waiting for you,” Vörös said. “At the Displaced Persons camp in Italy.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “I know I have to leave. There’s nothing for me here. I know that now. But I don’t know if I can face them, so soon …” She did not finish her thought.

  “That’s no problem,” Vörös said. “We’ll leave tomorrow, if you like, and we’ll take our time getting to the camp. The journey will be good for you.”

  Kicsi nodded. The doubt was gone from her face. “All right,” she said.

  “How do you feel?” Vörös asked.

  “Better,” Kicsi said. She laughed. “I feel
as if I could start on a long trip tomorrow. I certainly didn’t feel like that yesterday.”

  “Yes,” said Vörös. “You’ve changed quite a bit.”

  Kicsi laughed again. “Did I surprise you?”

  Vörös did not answer, but sat and looked into the fire for a time. Then: “Yes, you did,” he said.

  She caught the deeper meaning of his words and shivered. “You mean—you did not think that I would survive the night.” It was not a question.

  “No,” he said. “I did not. And if you had died, it would have meant more to me, almost, than the deaths of all those people I could not save during the war. I love you very much, Kicsi.”

  They sat together for a while, not speaking, watching the fire hiss and spark. “Why did you throw me my leather bag, Kicsi?” Vörös said at last.

  “Why?” Kicsi said. “Because I wanted to save you, of course. Because I didn’t want to see you die.”

  “I don’t think that’s what I meant,” Vörös said. “I don’t know if I can explain it. How did you know that of all the things in my sack I would be needing the leather bag?”

  Kicsi blinked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just knew you would. Why? Is it important?”

  “I don’t know,” Vörös said. “It means that you have been touched by magic—that magic has left a mark on you as permanent as that scar on your palm. All your life you will know things without knowing how you knew them. I don’t think that’s such a terrible thing. After all,” he said laughing, “it saved my life.”

  “I’m glad,” Kicsi said. “I’m glad that I could do it. I don’t care so much about the magic. It doesn’t seem as important to me now as it did once.”

  “Well,” Vörös said. “Tomorrow will be a long day for us. Why don’t we have something to eat and then go to sleep early?”

  Light was just striking the road as they stepped out of the forest the next morning. Vörös carried his pack over his shoulder. As they came into the town, Kicsi saw a chimney sweep. She flinched. Then, with a great effort, she pointed him out to Vörös.

  Vörös had been watching her carefully. He relaxed when he saw her point at the chimney sweep. “Do you want to make a wish?” he said lightly.

  “I’ve had enough of wishes,” she said. “And I’ll be seeing more of faraway places than I ever wanted to. I wonder—what will America be like? Is it like here?”

  “Parts of it are,” Vörös said. “Of course, parts of it are very different.” He led her a roundabout route, so that they did not pass her house, or the graveyard, or the synagogue, and he talked all the while, telling her stories of faraway places. She understood what he was doing, and she was grateful for it. She did not want to talk until they had left the village. They came to the railroad station and boarded the train without looking back.

  The trip going away from the village, she thought, should have been the same as the trip coming in, but it was not. Of the trip coming in she remembered only darkness—the night they had spent in the forest, the black cracks in the railroad car. As they journeyed out she was surprised to see that it was summer. The sun shone hot on the rails of the train, and they seemed to stretch out forever, like a summons, or a promise. The train windows showed wheat fields under the heat or trees heavy with summer leaves. Kicsi watched it all, fascinated.

  Sometimes she would turn to Vörös and ask him for stories. He told her a little of what he had done during the war, and she told him about the time she thought she had seen him in the camp. He told her of his wanderings after the war, and how he had come finally to the camp to find her lying by the roadside. She asked him to tell her that story again and again, and as he told it she would not look at him but at the scar on her palm. Now that she wanted to live again she was amazed that her life had hung on such a small thing as that scar. “Touched by magic,” she said, and Vörös agreed.

  At dusk they passed the inn where they had been asked to leave and the forest in which they had spent the night. They pointed out the town to each other, and then both quickly changed the subject.

  They slept that night on the train. Sometime during the night Kicsi jerked awake, and Vörös woke after her. She fell back asleep, and when she woke the next morning she said nothing about her night, but sat and stared out the train window. They had come out of the small town. Forests sloped away from them on either side.

  That afternoon she asked suddenly, “Can you do anything about dreams?”

  “What do you mean?” Vörös said.

  “I mean if a person’s having a dream he doesn’t want to have, and he has the same dream over and over, can you do anything about it? Can you stop it?”

  “What dreams are you having, Kicsi?” Vörös said.

  Kicsi said nothing for a moment. Then she said softly, “I dream my family’s still alive. My family and Aladár. I dream that they got away somehow, and that we all meet together somewhere. In America, I guess. And we’re all very happy, and then someone says to them, ‘But you can’t be here. You died in the war.’ And they disappear, and I wake up.”

  “What’s wrong with the dream, Kicsi? It shows you loved your family very much.”

  “Yes, I did. You’re right. But I’m so happy in the dream, and then I wake up, and I remember … Every night. I think it’s real, every night.”

  “You’ll always have the pain, Kicsi. It will get less as the years pass, and the dreams will stop eventually. And you have people you can share your grief with—Tibor and Ilona. That will be important. But I can’t do anything about the pain. You don’t know how often I’ve wished I could.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Kicsi said. “But I had to ask.”

  One day she noticed that the trees outside her window were different. The days were warmer. They were journeying south, to a part of Europe she had never seen. Until then she had traveled almost complacently, not really worrying about the future. Now panic overwhelmed her. Once again she would be facing something outside her experience.

  “Why can’t you come with me to America?” she asked Vörös.

  “I can’t. There are people who need me here.”

  “Vörös.” She looked at him, seeing something she had never seen in him before. “How long have you been traveling like this, helping people? How old are you?”

  “Older than I look,” he said, smiling. He saw that that was not enough for her and went on. “Older than you or your father or the rabbi. A long time ago I studied magic, traveling for many years with one of the greatest magicians in Europe. It was he who taught me the power of names and who gave me the healing spell that kept me young past the time allowed to me. I lived among many peoples and learned from them the details of their lives—how to ride a horse, how to shoot with a bow and arrow, how to build a shelter from the wind and rain. I learned to speak their languages. And when I returned home, long after my parents’ death, I found the people there strange—unsubtle men who knew nothing of the world outside their small village. When my teacher died I left the town for the last time. And so I have wandered ever since, going where I am needed.”

  Kicsi sat silent, listening to him. “There are—there are people who need you in America, too,” she said finally, not looking at him.

  “I know,” Vörös said. “But I will not be in America for a long time. I’m sorry, Kicsi.”

  “You mean—I’ll never see you again.”

  “Yes,” said Vörös. “But you’re strong enough now that you won’t need me anymore.”

  “I know,” Kicsi said. “But—Vörös—I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you too,” Vörös said. “If you like, I can give you something to remember me by.”

  She almost agreed. Then she remembered and said, “No. Something will happen to it, and I’ll lose it, like I lost the last one.” She was very close to tears, but instead of crying she laughed, a quick, high-pitched sound. “And anyway,” she said, “I’ll never need anything to remember you by.”

  A few
days later they got off in a crowded, busy city. She could not remember ever seeing so many people in one place, and she held on to Vörös’s hand for comfort. Cars honked at them as they ran across the street. Buildings were taller and closer together than she was used to. People rushed past them without looking around. They took a bus to the outskirts of the city.

  They got off in front of what used to be an army barracks. Vörös walked into the first building he saw and Kicsi followed him. Inside was a desk piled high with papers, but no one was in the office. They turned to leave. At that moment the telephone began to ring.

  After it had rung three times a young man ran into the office, nodded to Vörös and Kicsi, and picked up the phone. “Hello,” he said in English. It was then that Kicsi realized with amazement that she was seeing her first American.

  She could not follow his conversation, though she remembered enough from school to know that it was about a ship due to leave the next week. “Ten people!” he said at one point. “I’ll have to have more than that. Ten people won’t even make a dent in the crowd we’ve got here.” Finally he said, “All right. See if you can get me some more spaces. I know … I know. Thank you. Bye.”

  He hung up and looked at Vörös. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do here. They say they can let me send ten of these people to America. Ten! Out of the whole camp. I don’t know.… Well, anyway. What can I do for you?”

  “We want to see some people,” Vörös said.

  “Fine,” said the man. “Go right in.”

  “But don’t you—don’t you have records?”

  “Records?” The man laughed. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? There’s too many of them. We’ve tried keeping records of the people that died once, but we didn’t know most of their names. Some of these people don’t even remember their names themselves. No, if you’re looking for people, the best way to do it is to go out and look for yourself.”

  “All right,” Vörös said. “Come on, Kicsi.”

  They went out into the barracks. “What did he say?” Kicsi said.