The Barter

by Siobhan Adcock

  The appointed hour arrived, and the lights dimmed in warning, and the good country people said their good-byes to each other and found their seats in a great clamor. The old hinges on the bottoms of the auditorium chairs sang and yawned like an orchestra tuning in the moments before the opening note.

  The magician appeared from behind the curtain and bowed deeply to their applause. He removed his hat, and they all held their breath. Nothing came out. Herr Robert Krause treated them all to a wry smile and put the hat back on his head.

  “I’d like to tell you some stories,” he announced, adding, “There’s no reason to be afraid.” He turned then, and the curtains parted on a cue. “As I tell my stories, you may, if you choose to look, see the truth of them revealed in the mirror behind me.” They could all now see emerging from the gloom the frame of a tall, wide, oval glass—just the sort of thing, Rebecca thought, delighted, that Snow White’s stepmother would consult for wicked ideas. The audience shifted, dimly seeing themselves in their rows.

  “You will see by my demonstrations that the mirror is an ordinary mirror.”

  He walked closer to it so that they could all see his reflection in the glass, and themselves behind him, nodding in the glimmering gray.

  “It is as solid as I am myself,” Herr Krause said. He put his hand out and touched it, then made a fist and knocked on it. They all heard the sound. He removed a cloth from his coat pocket and efficiently polished the evidence of his hand away from the glass.

  “It is, in short, a plain mirror. If one of you ladies would like it for your dressing room, I’ll sell it to your husband,” he added, again as if he were ejaculating a few last thoughts he hadn’t intended to vocalize, and again they all laughed in surprise.

  He turned back to them and pointed to an old woman seated at the end of the front row. “Beautiful Fräulein”—and there was some charmed laughter here—“will you come up to the stage by yonder stair and inspect my mirror? I will meet you and guide you to it,” he blurted, in what seemed to be an unpremeditated flash of gallantry, as she began to start up with some difficulty from her chair. He fairly dashed across the stage and down the five steps that descended to the first row, and the audience clapped. The two of them made a dear sight, the young blond man in his straight black clothes with his arm extended supporting the older woman, bonneted and yellow faced. She smiled handsomely and he smiled back at her and they ascended the steps and the cheering grew louder.

  “Who is that?”

  “Mrs. Brandt, the dear thing. Her daughter teaches at the school.”

  “Oh, yes, the pretty teacher—”

  He led Mrs. Brandt to the mirror and invited her to touch it, which bravely she did. Her hands, in the old-fashioned fingerless lace gloves women who’d lived through the war sometimes still wore, flattened against the glass as if it were a windowpane, then withdrew, leaving the impressions of her fingers.

  “Ach, let me clean that off for you,” she said, reaching instantly for her handkerchief, and the audience roared with laughter as she set to work on the glass with it. Herr Krause bowed again, and gently put his hand over hers.

  “Allow me, gnädige Frau. If you would touch the frame, there? Is it solid?”

  Mrs. Brandt laughed and ran her hand around the wooden frame of the mirror, nodding as she did so.

  “And if you would, please, walk behind it?”

  “Are you sure?” Mrs. Brandt said, surprised, and the audience laughed and clapped for her again. Herr Krause allowed a smile himself.

  “Oh, yes, please. If you would do me the kindness.”

  She was seen to disappear briefly behind the tall mirror, and while she was gone, if the room did draw itself up into a plate-just-dropped silence, then what of it? What did it mean but that the magician’s performance had already begun? Mrs. Brandt emerged on the other side and gazed at Herr Krause. “It is only a mirror,” she said distinctly.

  “Danke, verehrte Dame.” He bowed to her and with a wave of his arm invited the audience to applaud her intrepid explorations again. “Will you remain here with me while I tell the first of my stories?”

  “I will,” she said.

  “Good sirs, will you bring a chair for Mrs. Gerda Brandt?” Herr Krause called offstage. While the audience, no less than Mrs. Brandt herself, absorbed the information that he in fact knew her, knew her name, two of the young boys from the high school who had been trained in lifting and lowering the curtain and obeying the magician’s calls for remarkable articles bustled a high-backed dining room chair out onto the stage and left it in the position to which the magician directed them.

  He saw Mrs. Brandt settled into the chair and said to her, “Are you ready?”

  She looked at him as if to ask, What has it to do with me? “All right,” she said, and they all laughed again.

  Herr Krause nodded to her, then to the audience. “I shall turn toward the mirror, then, and begin. Whatever you should see, and whatever you should hear, you should not repeat outside this room.” Herr Krause smiled at his audience. “We are all friends here,” he added.

  “If I may ask also for your silence. These stories are very old, and it is difficult for them to hear. Now then.”

  Rebecca wondered briefly if he’d meant to say that the stories were difficult to hear, but then understood that the magician wanted them to believe that the stories were in fact listening to them, somewhere on the other side of the mirror, and waiting to be drawn into the world of the living through the medium of the magician. She shivered with some excitement and thought how much Frau would have loved to see this. How Aunt Adeline would have relished being the old woman on the stage! But then the young man turned his back on them, allowing the full force of his features to be reflected in the mirror that held all of their faces, too, and the lights behind him dropped to almost nothing, and he began to speak.

  He said to the mirror:

  “Once there was a poor woman who loved children and wished for a child of her own. She and her husband prayed and prayed for a child to be born to them, but for many years their prayers went unanswered.

  “This woman who loved children was also well loved by the children in the town, and they followed her everywhere while she sang to them and told them stories and taught them games. The people in her town were poor and worked hard, and they often had little to feed their children, but this woman fed them with her love, and the children always went home happy and rosy-cheeked as if they’d eaten cake and milk all day long, and they went to bed with their heads so full of songs and games that they didn’t hear their bellies groan with hunger.”

  In the glass could be perceived another dim shift, as if everyone in the theater had just turned in their seats at once.

  “One day while the woman was in the fields with seven of the children from the town, a band of murderous thieves found them. Before the woman could call for help, catastrophe was upon them. One of the children was trampled to death under the men’s horses, one of the children ran in fright into the river and drowned there, and two other children, a brother and a sister, were snatched up by the robbers and never heard from again. The woman gathered up the three remaining children and hid them under a haystack and, seeing there was no more room for her there, crawled under a haystack nearby to hide. But the men saw the children moving in the hay and stabbed into the haystack with pitchforks until the children were all dead. The woman hid until she heard the robbers ride away, and then she crept out, weeping, and locked herself in her house. No one in the town knew what had happened, and even the woman’s kind husband could not convince her to tell him why she cried and cried and couldn’t stop. The parents of the dead children looked everywhere for them, but the children, even the ones under the haystack, were never found, and winter came suddenly that year and covered the town with snow and ice.”

  The surface of the mirror shifted as if smoke had blown across
it, and a pale face was seen to emerge: a woman’s face, smeary with tears, not beautiful but not ugly, either. Mrs. Brandt glanced at her and then stared fiercely at the floor, looking very much as if she would like to return to her seat in the front row next to her husband. A few people in the audience were heard to gasp, but as the sounds of alarm and amazement rose in the auditorium, the face in the mirror was seen to fade slightly.

  “Please,” the magician said, and for the first time he sounded out of breath and tired. “Please, I must ask for your silence.”

  They quieted. The face in the mirror began to shine with a terrible whiteness.

  “The children’s bodies slept under snow and ice, and during the winter that the woman wept and wept in her house, she and her husband found that, unknown to them both, just before her great sorrow descended, their dearest wish had been granted, and by spring they would have a child of their own. As the snow melted the woman’s womb grew, but to her husband’s dismay the woman’s soul was melting away with the snow. She could not stop thinking of the dear babies she had allowed to die.”

  In the mirror, as the magician spoke, the woman’s face could be seen to change. An expression of anguish came over her, and she seemed to turn partly away, then force herself to look back. She wasn’t pretty enough to be an actress, Rebecca thought.

  “Her husband couldn’t understand why she, with her dearest wish finally granted, would not be happy. She only melted further away. Even when the child was finally born, healthy and bloodred and snow-white, the woman was tormented with great unhappiness. Finally the husband took the child away to raise in the kitchen while the mother remained locked in her room, crying and crying, unable to stop, even with her happiness right outside the door.”

  A second face appeared in the mirror, and to no one’s great surprise, it appeared to be a child, infinitely beautiful and sad, neither boy nor girl. Mrs. Brandt shifted uneasily in her seat.

  “Time passed, and the child grew, and the woman stayed in her room and wept. Times were hard, and they were often hungry. The child was a good girl with a generous heart who saw how unhappy her parents were, and tried always to be obedient and helpful. With her mother locked in her room and her father working hard, she was constantly alone.

  “But not alone. Because the ghosts of the seven dead children came to the house of the woman they’d loved so well, who’d always fed them with her good heart. They were hungry and cold from their first winter under the snow and always would be. Even though the child gave them her blankets, her bread, and even her clothes, the ghosts were always cold and hungry, and always wanted more.”

  Murmurs of horror and alarm were heard throughout the theater. The faces of the woman and the child in the mirror had been joined by the spectral faces of sad, hungry ghost children: eyes huge and dark, mouths open and pleading. The face of the young magician, solid and handsome in the mirror with the ghosts, remained stern, and old Mrs. Brandt on the stage refused to acknowledge them by so much as a glance.

  “The day finally arrived when the little girl had nothing else to give to the hungry, scared ghosts. There was no bread left in the house, and no wood for a fire, and the little girl’s clothes were ragged and thin. The father worked hard, but times were bad, and many families were hungry and making do with little.

  “The ghosts said to the little girl, ‘Please, please feed us and let us come by the fire. We’re so cold and hungry and tired.’

  “The little girl said sadly, ‘I don’t have a fire, and we have nothing to eat.’

  “The ghosts said, ‘Then you must let us eat your insides hollow and warm ourselves inside your skin.’”

  In the mirror, the little faces became monstrous, prompting some cries of dismay.

  “The little girl was afraid, but the ghosts were so pitiful that she was afraid to say no. What could she do? She said, ‘It might be better for my parents if I let you eat me, because then my mother would be happy and my father would have one less mouth to feed. You may eat me, but let me kiss my mother good-bye first.’

  “The ghosts said, ‘Please, please hurry. We are so hungry, and so cold.’

  “The little girl rose sadly from her chair and went to her mother’s bedroom door. The key hung on a peg, and she unlocked the door and went inside.

  “There she found her mother sitting in her chair by the window, crying and crying, unable to stop. Her mother’s hair had grown very long, and her face was pale as the moon for being washed so constantly with tears. The little girl thought her mother’s hair looked as if it might warm her, so she went toward her mother and nestled into her long thick hair.

  “The mother looked down at her and said, ‘Daughter, why are you here? Leave me alone.’

  “The little girl said, ‘I’m here to kiss you good-bye.’

  “The mother said, ‘Where are you going?’

  “The little girl said, ‘I don’t know. Somewhere far away, where the ghost children live.’ Then she cried, thinking that where she was going, she would be a ghost child, too, and always hungry and cold.

  “The mother said, ‘What do you mean?’

  “Then the little girl explained about the ghost children who lived in the house with them, who could never be made warm and whose bellies could never be filled. She told her mother that she was going to let herself be eaten by the ghost children because she couldn’t bear their hungry cries.

  “The mother was horrified and wrapped her little girl tightly up in her hair. ‘You won’t be eaten, not while I live.’

  “The little girl had left the bedroom door open, and the seven ghost children had crept into the room with them. They were hungry for the sight of the woman they had loved so well when they were alive, and hungry to eat her little girl, too.”

  The little ghost children in the mirror reached out their hands, opening their mouths like hungry birds, their eyes dark and shining. It was a terrible sight. Rebecca shivered and slipped her hand into John’s.

  And now the magician turned and looked at Mrs. Brandt, still in her chair, refusing to glance at him or the mirror. He said something to her in a low voice.

  The older woman shook her head sharply—no, not that—and responded, loud enough for the auditorium to hear, “They save each other.”

  The magician nodded, then briskly concluded:

  “When the ghost children saw the little girl wrapped up warm in her mother’s long hair, they began to melt. They melted away like snow and became the woman’s tears. Finally the woman’s tears dried on her cheeks, and as her tears dried, the little ghost children were no more.”

  The faces in the mirror disappeared, and the lights rose again. The audience shifted creakily in their chairs and then burst into heated applause. The magician stood for a moment, shoulders slumped as if projecting the figures in the mirror had exhausted him. Then he turned and thanked the audience with a brief, professional bow. He strode to Mrs. Brandt’s chair and helped her to her feet, then, inexplicably, invited the audience with a broad sweep of his arm to applaud her, as if she’d somehow had a hand in projecting the figures onto the glass or supplying the tale, and in fact Mrs. Brandt did look a bit strange and moonlike as she stood, stone-faced, accepting their applause.

  * * *

  Herr Krause told three more tales that evening, each time inviting an audience member to come up on the stage first to inspect the mirror and then to sit onstage in the chair, revealing each time that he knew exactly who they were. The stories were all made from the same pastiche of Grimm fairy tale and German Volk talk that he must have known would particularly appeal to them. One story was bawdy and funny and violent and involved a miller’s wife who fed her husband his rivals in a series of stews. The final story was about a princess who pulled her entire country underwater, as if pulling it under a blanket with her, house by house, rather than marry her father, the king. And each time, before concluding the
tale and the mirror’s ghastly show, the magician consulted the person sitting in the chair onstage, as if he didn’t know without asking how his story would end. There never seemed to be any apparent connection between the stories Herr Krause told and the people who sat onstage during the telling—these were people well-known to other people in the audience, and there were no dramatic revelations or trembling fingers pointed that night. But as the magician spoke, eerie images flashed and grew, waxed and waned on the mirror, and the people seated on the stage were not the only ones who were perceived to grow silent and unhappy.

  After the last story was told and the images had faded away, the magician caused the mirror to be rolled back behind the curtain and offered for his final act to predict the circumstances of a single volunteer’s death.

  “No one?”

  No one stood up or came forward. The audience laughed uneasily as the silence unspooled.

  Rebecca, feeling reckless, rose to her feet. John looked up at her, and she smiled down at him, as if nothing she did could really harm him, which sometimes she thought was in fact the case.

  “Oh, but you, my dear”—Robert Krause squinted at her from far away, through the haze of the stage lights—“you won’t ever die.”

  Rebecca laughed. “But surely—”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you, but I’ve reached the extent of my powers when a beautiful young woman asks me to imagine the end of her life.” Robert Krause smiled and bowed, sweeping off his hat, and the audience applauded expectantly, but then he strode off the stage in long-legged lopes and they were given to understand that he meant it, and that the show had truly concluded.

  * * *

  The night, therefore, ended on a strange, deflated note. John and Rebecca found themselves forcefully congratulated on the way out of the theater.