Travellers in Magic
Read Travellers in Magic Online
Authors: Lisa Goldstein
Travellers in Magic
Stories
Lisa Goldstein
To Larry, brother
par excellence.
C
ONTENTS
A
LFRED
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 wonderâcould you please tell me the time?”
He had a slight accent, like her parents. Her guess had been right after allâhe
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 herâmost 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 framesâvery 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; peopleâadultsâgot 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 ifâwhat 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 afraid 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 ifâif 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 notâ”
“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.
