by Michele Lang
And I cried too. Because every horrible word she had spoken prophesied our own doom. She and I hugged each other against the world she had spoken into life, the world that waited to swallow us up.
“You believe me,” Gisele kept saying. “I don’t want to believe it all myself, but you . . .”
I hugged her tighter against her tears, covered her hair with tiny kisses. “Yes, darling, hush, hush, say no more of it. I cannot take any more.”
She sighed, fell completely silent in my arms, and I tensed for another fit of prophecy to overtake her. And my mind raced, frantic, looking for some escape, some technicality to avert our terrible collective fate.
“We’ll run away,” I whispered into the curling glory of her hair. “We’ll run so far away that the Nazis can’t catch us. Paris, or Australia. Maybe even Zanzibar.”
I refused to consider the state of our finances and our ability to marshal our resources to flee. We were leagues ahead of the Jews in Germany—our government had not yet confiscated everything from us. But in our case, three orphan girls hanging by a thin thread over the pit of disaster, we had nothing much for anyone to take. Nothing, that is, except for our lives.
“I’m sorry,” Gisele whispered, her shoulders hunched in her misery. “I know you’ll think of something, you always do. But, oh! When I open up my mind’s eye, I . . .” and the poor thing started crying again.
She smelled of honey and dandelions, my poor little girl, my doomed little sister. I swiped at her tears with the soggy wreckage of the hankie in my purse. “I swear I’ll see you through. I swear it, you will not be murdered, no matter what happens to this world.”
Eva’s voice sounded far away and scared. “Um, what about . . . me?”
Eva was harder to fool. I turned my head and flashed my most expansive, confident smile. “You! Golden swan, you’ll outlast us all!”
Grief made Eva shy, but she joined us on the floor, and we drew her into our hug. She is as much of a sister to me as Gisele, really, though we’re no more related than I was to Eleanor Roosevelt. We had been friends since we had started in school together at the age of seven. Her quick, sometimes savage wit and her vitality had indelibly marked my childhood memories with incandescent light.
“You two witches better quit your fuss,” Eva warned, a strange, contained smile lighting up her eyes, seemingly against her will. “I’ll have none of it. I’ll pack my bags and light out for Tokaj, I will. My uncle Lazlo still lives there.”
“Girls, we can’t stay crumpled up on the floor like dishrags,” I said, pretending at a resolve I didn’t feel. “Disaster is around the corner. So what will we do about it?”
Gisele shuddered in my arms, and then she rose onto shaky feet. “Magduska, I will tell you one thing. We can’t run away.”
I refused to look at her as I slowly got up, my joints complaining like I was two hundred years old instead of twenty. “Yes, we can. We don’t need money. War is not yet. We can walk out of Hungary if we have to, and we already know how to get by on nothing.”
I watched Gisele pace, her hands pressed against her rounded sides. “We can’t just run. You know visions are a gift given. We can’t run out on a prophecy. We have to proclaim it, to act.”
My heart started pounding against my chest. “If by act you mean me putting my soul in danger, conjuring spirits, then no thank you.”
Gisele stopped pacing, and she swiped at the tear tracks on her chubby cheeks, as if wiping them away would lend strength to her side of the argument. “Magda, you know what you are! Mama was right—to throw your gift away is to act the fool.”
My heart turned to ice. “Don’t throw Mama at me. Don’t you dare.”
“I’ll dare anything, just to get you to wake up. Don’t you believe me like you said you did? It’s worse than any words I can find to describe it.”
Cold despair settled over my heart. Gisele had never spoken to me like this, the way my mother had spoken to me once, not long before her death. I stormed away from her to our grotty little kitchen and I banged around, starting water for tea. “You know I believe you. But that doesn’t mean I have the right to wreck my soul.”
Eva rescued me from the teapot before I burned my fingers lighting the stove. Of the three of us, only Eva remained dry-eyed. “Gisele’s fit was quite the horror, you have to admit that, Magduska darling. Can even a witch run away from something like that?”
“This little witch just wants to live,” Gisele murmured, casting a baleful glare in my general direction. “Unlike the Bride of Death over there, content to die and return from the dead as she pleases.”
Eva colored a bit but said nothing in reply. She knew as well as we did that the Lazarus girls were born witches, who could curse and bless, and visit with the citizens of the next world. But she was too polite to insist we manifest our powers in public. Like our religion, our witchery was something for private, and it was only for emergencies.
I wrestled the grubby teapot back from Eva, and poured myself a cup of weak tea though the water was barely warm. “Don’t talk about me like I can’t hear you, Gisele,” I muttered in reply. “I’m not about to go to Gehenna for a lost cause. It’s one thing to see visions that come to you, even such a one as this. But it’s another thing to force the dead to appear in your front parlor—force those souls to come to us here, in the living world, where we flaunt our youth and breath in their faces—like warm bread under the nose of a starving man.”
Eva blinked hard, played with her left earring as she tilted her head. “So, what are you fighting about, exactly? Gehenna, starving. Sounds pretty bad to me.”
“Gisele won’t come out and say it—she knows I’m not allowed to summon our ancestors. Gisele wants to do something about the end of the world. But I think the future is foreordained. Anything we do to try to change it will only make everything worse.”
Eva’s lips moved, but she made no sound. Her wide blue eyes made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. “The end of the world,” she finally said. “That sounds pretty bad, Magdalena. Maybe you can’t change the future, but you could save my neck, maybe. And I for one would be most appreciative.”
She wrinkled her nose, and I had to laugh. She made life-and-death matters sound like a light comic farce and not the darkening storm that they were. Gisele graced her with a grateful, watery smile, and I felt suddenly empty inside. Gisele had been having the waking horrors for some time now. And she had confided them to Eva first.
My fear for them came out in grumpiness. “Fine, try to force my hand.” My darling, maddening girls—they didn’t understand the dangers.
“Call Mama,” Gisele said, almost reluctantly. She folded her tiny white hands together over her heart, as if in supplication. “She will help us. She has to! Or it will be too late, the hammer will fall, and we will die. Not the first to go, but it will be hard. So terribly hard.” Another tear escaped over her pale, round cheek, and I suppressed a groan.
I took a slug of the tea like it was whiskey. “Mama could come back any time she wants to.” Grief roughened my voice still more, made me sound angry. “But she doesn’t want to. For whatever reason, she stays on in the next world with Papa.”
“He must need her help in the next world more than you need her help here in Budapest.” Eva’s eyes were dreamy, far away. “He has no magic, nothing. Just her. And there is the matter of love, you know.”
Eva didn’t have to say it for me to know. My parents were crazy about each other, like newlyweds until the day my father died. He succumbed to pleurisy when I was only nine, and the best part of my mother died with him. She carried on, a melancholy specter with one foot in the next world. When the last of our money finally ran out, seven years later, she faded all away. Love like that can be cruel.
Gisele sank back into her beloved rocking chair, as if the splintery wood held my mother’s soul within it. Her voice was soft, but it withheld all mercy. “If Mama would only come back, she could help us. And you coul
d make her, Magda.”
Eva and I looked at each other as Gisele closed her eyes against her misery. I adored my girl, could eat her like marzipan; but I couldn’t do what she asked of me. I could summon spirits from the dead, true. But my creed and the most basic tenets of my education dictated that I not compel souls against their will. Forcing my mother to appear would be a desecration of her memory and a misuse of our training.
When Gisele opened her eyes, she was crying again. “Do it, Magda. Call up the dead, summon who you will. We need help! If you don’t . . .”
I put my empty teacup on the rickety kitchen table. Eva and I waited in the silence. “You’ll what?” I finally said.
Gisele’s features grew calm, and I recognized the serene despair the Eastern revolutionary had displayed before at the Istanbul. “I’ll go to Count Bathory. Throw myself on his tender mercies. I may be a witch, but I’m still a young girl, and for my blood he’ll do what he can to save me. And you and Eva too.”
My pulse pounded in my temples, and I felt sick. “You can’t, little star. You wouldn’t.” I respected the count, my employer. Though he was a vampire, his word was his bond. But even he could not resist a willing supplicant, one willing to sacrifice her innocence for his patronage and connections.
I dared to look my mild little sister in the eye. She had turned into a creature of iron. “Watch me do it, Magda! Either you protect me, as you swore to Mama you would do, or I must protect myself, the task must fall to me. You know my vision is true. I can’t stand by and do nothing, as the world goes up in flames all around us.”
I swallowed hard, the sensation painful in the back of my throat. The silence crushed me like an implacable weight; Gisele was right.
“I’ll do it.” The words scratched at my throat like thorns.
Gisele smiled and Eva applauded me with a little bow, but I stuck the pin into the rising balloon of their spirits with a single glare. “But I’m not calling Mama back. Oh no. When she died, I swore to protect you myself, and I swore I’d never look to her again. Mama can stay buried. If the matter is as grave as you say, my little Gisele, I am summoning no one less illustrious than the Witch of Ein Dor, our ancient great-great-grandmama herself.”
Gisele’s smile fell from her face as if I’d slapped it away. She understood the insanity of what I’d just said, but Eva looked from me to her, unknowing.
I answered Eva’s unspoken question, my voice low. “The Witch of Ein Dor is our ancestor, the original eldest daughter. She summoned the shade of the prophet Samuel at the command of King Saul.”
“Oh, that Witch of Ein Dor.” Eva’s laugh was a little too merry. “Of course.”
I sat myself down at the kitchen table, took off my shoes, and I unhooked my garters, slipping off my stockings one at a time with a sigh of relief. “The witch foretold the doom of Saul, summoned demons and prophets at her will. She taught King Solomon how to chain demons with magic, got them to build the First Temple at his command. They say the angels themselves knew her as a friend. She warned Solomon to humility but Solomon fell. Like all the kings did. And the Temple crumbled too, in the end.”
“And you think this shy, gentle creature will meekly appear at your command.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, and played with the cracked and glued cover of the Herend sugar bowl, a gilded remnant of our vanished opulence. “Oh, yes. The witch has no choice, once I summon her. But she knows as well as I do what a serious transgression I commit.”
“Well, in that case, can’t you call somebody who does not have an inkling? Some jolly king or something, who would maybe let us off the hook? After all, isn’t this just some glorified séance?”
She had a point—in the Budapest of my youth, families still mourning their dead in the Great War conducted séances every week, in an attempt to resurrect the loved ones they had lost.
But no. “We aren’t speaking of a séance at all, Eva. A séance is a connecting, an invitation. This is a summons, a declaration of war. Trust me, the spirit summoned does not welcome the disruption. It is a disturbance of the natural order.”
As I spoke, my own words reverberated inside my ears. I had the unsettling sensation of watching a drama of the past, a golden fleck of history destined to be forgotten even by the participants. Upon such random, throwaway moments does history sometimes turn.
Gisele hugged me, knowing I had chosen her path rather than my own salvation. She well knew the magnitude of the wrong I was about to commit in the name of love. “I knew you would do it, Magduska. I knew it. You would never just stand apart.”
3
At midmorning, Eva left for her job at the florist’s, and Gisele, exhausted, slept. I dragged myself to the narrow cot I shared with Eva in the back room. I collapsed onto the bed, then rolled over and stared at the ceiling while I rested, fully dressed, on top of the blanket, on my back with my arms folded over my chest like a corpse.
Random words from Gisele’s vision assaulted my mind: tattoo, firing squad, children, crematorium. Images born of the words marched in the muted morning shadows playing over our fine arched ceiling, the only evidence that once our hovel had been an elegant residence in a thriving city.
I blinked hard, willed the tears to come; but I could not weep, I could not scream. Gisele spoke the truth in all. A prophecy given, of such a magnitude, demanded a more courageous response than to simply save your own skin.
With a groan, I roused myself from the unquiet grave of my bed. Ten o’clock. Daily life went on outside our window, leaving us both behind.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and forced myself to get up, to move. Pace, pace, ten paces one way, ten paces back. Ten paces again, and I paused at the only window in the tiny room I shared with Eva, looked down three stories to the courtyard of our building. A pack of little children on school holiday swooped through the courtyard like starlings, their laughter and cries of joy rising like a reproach to my gloomy little mausoleum on the third floor.
But Almighty in Heaven, I still lived! And I wanted to stay in this world, lusted for life fiercely, with the energy and selfishness of youth.
The rational part of my brain sought to tidy these unpleasant revelations all away. Surely Miss Fragile Flower was exaggerating, surely things could not get as dire as all of that. Those screaming, bratty children knocking over the wrought-iron chairs in the courtyard downstairs, nobody would waste the time to do them any harm. Mass murder, so boring and illogical . . .
But my heart knew the truth.
I would have to conduct that “séance” as Eva so quaintly called it, despite the obvious dangers. The calamity hurtling toward us took up the entire sky, a storm the likes of which I could never have concocted or imagined.
I rested my forehead against the cool panes of glass above the open window, and I knew that at midnight that very night I would gamble with our lives and summon the fell Witch of Ein Dor. Only she, a demon-hunting witch and unquiet spirit, could surrender a spell strong enough to avert the harsh decree.
I had at least one faint consolation: if I failed to keep the witch in check, the three of us would be spared the grief of seeing Gisele’s vision coming true.
The rest of that wretched day passed in a long, slow, disjointed haze. Gisele and I stumbled through our ordinary chores, and she lunged for her piecework like a drowning man clings to driftwood.
All day, the secret knowledge of our destruction ate away at me, until I itched all over and could no longer sit still and wait like a lamb for my fate. Instead, I washed my hair, curled it, and put on my finest clothes and sorted the few others I had left as I counted the hours until night fell.
As it turned out, the “séance” went far too well. As we started, I chewed on my lower lip and risked a peek at my companions around the little lace-covered round table in the sitting room. Gisele, pale but resolute, sat to my right, holding on to the edge of the table in an obvious effort not to run. On my left, Eva had her arms crossed in front of her,
as if she could protect herself with her lack of magic.
My heart skittered in my chest like a crab in a trap. The girls didn’t understand how essential they were to the success of this dangerous operation. I took a deep breath, and as I considered my little sister’s round, tense face, my eyes finally filled with stinging tears.
“I need you to help me, girls. Courage!”
“You know it’s as bad as can be, an emergency!” Gisele shot back, her voice quavering. “I don’t have visions of destruction every day.”
Doomed. The three of us, walking dead. I forced myself to smile, to lie. “Nonsense, or else why would I bother with the summoning?” I directed my bravado at Gisele, and she put her despair away, at least for the moment.
Once I saw I had her with me, I could reveal a bit of uncertainty. “But I don’t quite know what I’m doing. Mama never taught me what to do in the event of the Apocalypse.” I allowed myself a little sigh.
I glanced over at Eva, and saw she had her chin down, with her famous stubborn look on her face. “Stop browbeating her, Magduska! What do you want from her?” Eva said. She was always defending Gisele’s melodramatic vapors. “It’s not her fault the world is about to end.”
I fought to keep my voice level. “She’s the one who demanded I do something.” Ah, the famous Lazarus fury . . . Gisele seemed to have escaped inheriting it, but I was cursed with a double dose.
I calmed myself by contemplating the hideous flowered curtains that adorned the alcove overlooking the courtyard. I hummed a gypsy love song my father used to play on the violin, until I could trust myself to speak civilly.
“I need your help to call up the spirits. This bickering is making it impossible to maintain a connection.”
Gisele’s delicate rosebud lips started trembling. She brushed away her tears with the tips of her shaking fingers. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t get the pictures out of my mind. It makes me want to put my head in the oven.”