The Spirit Cabinet (13 page)

The two didn’t actually speak until after that evening’s Show.

When they returned to
das Haus
, Rudolfo said, “We need to talk.”

Jurgen merely grunted. He did not turn to face Rudolfo, or even slow down, continuing steadfastly down the hallway toward the Grotto. The boulder was still in place—
again
in place, Rudolfo corrected himself—and Jurgen removed the sleek black remote control from somewhere on his person and blasted it. The stone creaked and rumbled and began to move.

“You see,” explained Rudolfo, “I’m having an idea.”

Now Jurgen spun around, and his eyebrows raised and bumped into each other. “Yeah?” Before Rudolfo could respond, Jurgen turned and nearly bolted through the newly made opening, which seemed barely wide enough to accept him.

Rudolfo took a step or two after him. He caught the wall on either side of the doorway and leant forward, so that his head stuck into the Grotto.

The books were still in teetery stacks, but the stacks had been shoved about until they formed a large, lopsided circle, in the centre of which Jurgen had positioned the wooden automaton. Jurgen approached the automaton now and—although Rudolfo didn’t see him press a button or throw a switch—activated the mechanical man. The doll began to hum and vibrate,
turning slightly from side to side and raising, abruptly, its arm. A deck of cards was clutched between the shiny carved fingers. Jurgen plucked one of the cards, studied it briefly and then approached a stack of books. He counted down three, pulled out the volume quickly and returned with it to the little schoolboy’s desk, settling into the seat. Placing his elbows on the tabletop, Jurgen knuckled his hands and rammed them on either side of his head, pulling his crippled purpled eyelids up so that he might better read without interference.

“Yeah,” said Rudolfo, “I’m having a great idea.”

“Speak German,” snapped Jurgen, turning a page, eagerly following the words with a thick forefinger.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe the Show has been getting a little, um …”

“… dull,” Jurgen completed the sentence.

It was a damning word,
eintönig
. The one inheritance Rudolfo had from his mother was a delivery from dullness. What no one understood—not even Jurgen, Rudolfo reflected bitterly—was that Rudolfo was an artist, that he had been brought into this world to create. His Art was the Show. It could have been painting, or music …

Rudolfo suddenly remembered his inspiration. He smiled brightly and lifted a forefinger. “Bruckner’s Fourth.”

Rudolfo began to sing, by way of illustration, waving his hands before him to suggest motion and pageantry unfolding on an unseen stage. Jurgen glanced up briefly. “The Romantic,” he nodded, and then returned to the ancient tome.

Rudolfo’s hands stilled themselves in the air. How would Jurgen know that Bruckner’s Fourth was nicknamed “The Romantic?” His taste was decidedly more everyday, what Rudolfo characterized as “goatherding music.” Jurgen usually enjoyed listening to squat men strum guitars and squeeze accordians, plaintively bellowing about lost loves.

Rudolfo decided that he must have told Jurgen about it at some point; perhaps he had played the symphony one night as an overture to lovemaking. This would have been some time ago. “Yes, the Romantic,
but
,” said Rudolfo, loudly enough to make Jurgen’s square head pop up, “the Sturm and Drang version.”

Sturm and Drang was a duo, two dour, middle-aged heroin addicts. When they performed (which they did with merciful infrequency), they stood upon the stage dwarved by a towering monolith of speakers. They themselves hunched over racks of emulators and samplers, pressing down upon the tiered keyboards with the dispassionate propriety of pathologists. They had few fans, but were fortunate in that one of them was Rudolfo Thielmann.

“So here’s my idea. What we should do is—”

“—cancel the Show for a few days,” supplied Jurgen. “You go to Los Angeles and make the music. I’ll stay here and work.”

“Work?”

“I have a few ideas myself.” Jurgen glanced up and winked. Or, at least, that’s how it seemed, but it was impossible to say for certain. Jurgen was always appearing to wink, a spasm sending one or the other of his eyelids bouncing down and up.

“The only problem with that is, you don’t like to be alone.”

“I don’t?”

“No.”

“How do you know that?”

“You told me,” said Rudolfo, treading very carefully because he didn’t know exactly where he was. “You’ve told me that many times.”

“I don’t see how I could have told
you
that,” said Jurgen, “because I don’t know that. I’ve never
been
alone.”

There was some truth in that. When they met in Münich, Jurgen was living in a tiny apartment with several brothers and cousins. They slept three in a bed, two on a fold-out couch; there
were always at least four of them up to various off-putting things in the single washroom, and for all these Schubert men, it was luxury. “Because,” they’d say, “it’s so
crowded
at home.” And since then, Rudolfo reflected, he and Jurgen had been together. “Well,” he spoke aloud, “it’s not that great. Being alone. It sounds like it might be wonderful, but in the end, it’s just lonely.”

Jurgen didn’t appear to have heard. “You go to Los Angeles,” he said softly. “I’ll stay here.”

Rudolfo didn’t see Jurgen reach out and press a pad on the remote control, but he must have done, because the boulder shook and began to move. Rudolfo moved his head out of the way and the rock rumbled into place.

After performing the Cingalese Eye Levitation, Jurgen had immediately given up Magic, throwing away the cheaply bound
Houdini on Magic
and reapplying himself to other, more wholesome, interests. Soccer, for example. Jurgen was a talented footballer, and he took to the fields with a vengeance, playing with a grace and savageness not seen in many twelve-year-olds. His only weakness was that, occasionally, as he neared the enemy goal, his eyelids (still brilliantly purple) would flutter and fail, causing him to stumble and kick the ball well away from the net. Jurgen also took up swimming, joining a local aquatics club. The Sharks,
die Haie
—that was the name given to the division of young boys—met at five o’clock on alternate mornings. They stripped naked and dove into the warm, milky water. Jurgen swam laps with industry, vaguely aware that some portion of his mind was far away in another place.

Despite her having entered a higher level of feeblemindedness, it was Jurgen Schubert’s grandmother who rekindled Jurgen’s interest in Magic. He noticed that whenever he came
home from school, Oma’s face would change. She was perpetually sitting on the sofa, her hands nested in her lap. She usually stared straight ahead, her mouth set in a light half-smile, as though expecting an old friend to arrive at any moment. An endless parade of Schuberts had no affect upon this expression. There could be a youngster with his head cracked open from a fall, there could be a near-naked young girl tiptoeing in to grab her nylons from above the kitchen sink, there could be a shiftless uncle drunkenly falling face-first onto the carpet, and Oma Schubert would remain placid and pleasant. But whenever she saw Jurgen, her eyebrows would fly up to mix with the wrinkles, her eyes would bug open and her mouth would shrivel into a tiny creased ring of wonder.
“Der Zauberer!”
she’d exclaim. “The Conjuror!”

Jurgen would walk by, nodding politely. “Hello, Oma.” But his grandmother would get agitated by this, raising her trembling fingers, long after he’d gone, in a desperate attempt to clutch at his shirt sleeve. Jurgen was too polite a boy to keep ignoring her, particularly when he began to suspect that she was weeping in an odd manner, would have actually
been
weeping except that she seemed to be dried up inside and could summon no tears.

He felt very bad about all this. In a sense, it was his fault, or rather, the fault of the Cingalese. But it was Jurgen who had unleashed the Cingalese into the Schubert living room. Oma had never been very far from gaga, not even as a young woman, but she had undeniably been pushed over the edge by the Baby Levitation. Now she sat, her brittle body all a’thrimble, calling out desperately to the haughty
Zauberer
.

But Jurgen knew no magic secrets. The things in Houdini’s book, he realized bitterly, were traps, set-ups for little boys to humiliate and destroy themselves. It was Houdini’s way of protecting his vaunted status as Master Magician, to dissuade if not to actually maim, disfigure, possibly
kill
any pretenders to that throne.

Jurgen found help in an unlikely place—at home. His brother Dieter, nine years older, a pudgy and pale young man with clownish circles of flushing on his cheeks, one day pointed a deck of cards at him. Dieter belched, and Jurgen was made faint by the previous night’s effluvia, spiced by cigarette smoke and marinated in slumber. Dieter was a great frequenter of beer cellars and taverns, and it was there that he learned the trick he was about to show his little brother. “Pick a card,” he muttered, making a very clumsy fan with the deck. “Any fucking card. I don’t give a shit.”

Jurgen pulled out a card, the king of clubs.

“Right. Okay. Now, put that card back on top. Yeah. Now. We’re going to cut the deck, right, so the card is in the middle. Here. Take some of the deck. Okay. Now I put my half down and you put your half on top. Now, your card is in the middle, right? So watch this.” Dieter lifted the cards into the air. “This is great,” he muttered. “Hocus-fucking-pocus.” Dieter allowed the cards to drop, carpeting the floor. One card—the king of clubs—lay overturned.

Jurgen wrapped his hands around his brother’s throat. He was almost as big, and certainly more powerful. He spoke calmly, although Dieter was clearly alarmed. “Show me how to do that.”

“Yeah, sure, Jurgen,” said Dieter, which gained his release. “It’s easy. Look. When you cut the deck, I take my half and go over top of yours to put it down. And then I say,
put your half on top
, okay. You see?”

“I put the cards back where they came from in the first place?”

“Yeah!”

“But I’m not
that
stupid,” he insisted.

“Nobody ever notices. It’s because I move my cards over yours. It seems like it was always the top part.”

“Nobody notices that?”

“You know what? People just aren’t as bright as you think they are.”

“Huh.”

“Then,”
continued Dieter, shoving the cards together, “you just shove the top card over a little, like this, so when you drop the deck it flips over.” Dieter demonstrated.

The next afternoon, Jurgen sat down beside Oma on the sofa.

The old woman allowed herself to keel over so that she butted up, shoulder to shoulder, with her grandson. She smelt as though she’d been kept in an old wooden chest for many years. “Show me magic!” she whispered.

Jurgen took the deck of cards from his shirt pocket and spread them into an awkward fan.

“Pick a card, any card.”

Oma nodded and reached forward with a trembling hand. “Tell me,” she asked, “will it be very painful?”

“No, Oma,” answered Jurgen truthfully.

Oma excitedly ripped a card out of the deck and studied its face. “Oooh,” she grinned. “A good one.”

“Remember what it is, Oma.”

“Yes.”

“Really remember what it is very well, Oma.”

“Yes.”

“Put it back on top.”

Oma lingered with the card, not impressing it upon her memory, merely studying the face as though she found it pleasing.

“Okay, Oma, cut the cards, okay?” He offered the cards, cradled upon his palm. Oma lifted off three cards, about as much weight as she could bear.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Jurgen encouragingly. “Now …” He was still unsure about this next part. It angered him, somehow,
that the art was based on people’s stupidity. Suppose people weren’t stupid? Suppose only Jurgen Schubert was stupid, and every time he assayed this trick he was discovered and ridiculed?

He passed his portion over those trembling in his grandmother’s hand and placed them on the coffee table in front of them.

“Oma,” he said very quietly, “put your cards on top of those.”

She did so without hesitation, and as gleefully as she could manage.

Having gotten away with it (though his grandmother wasn’t much of a test), Jurgen sighed and reached for the deck.

“No, no, no!” shouted Oma.

“Hmmm?”

“Magic,”
said Oma, with trenchant precision.

“Yeah, watch.” Jurgen reached for the deck again.

“No, no!
Magic
.” Suddenly her face was in curious motion, the wrinkles flowing, bumping up against each other. Her eyes widened, her mouth all but disappeared. Jurgen was about to call for his mother when his grandmother’s face suddenly blanched and recomposed itself. “Like that,” she explained.

“Oh!”

Even as a twelve-year-old, Jurgen Schubert could fashion a pretty intimidating face. He ran the two halves of his huge, squared brow into each other, producing creases as sharp as lightning bolts. He pursed his mouth, flared his nostrils and then, to deal with the dark, flickering lids, he forced his eyes open until the irises were like little blue stones in a pond of milk.