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The Trick

Page 9

by Emanuel Bergmann


  Maybe the guy was only sleeping. Maybe he was enjoying a well-deserved rest after a long day.

  On the floor?

  Then he smelled gas.

  Max pounded against the door as hard as he could. “Hello!” he called. “Hello!”

  The man on the floor did not respond. Max turned around, clutching his backpack, and ran back to the lobby. The nurse was gone. Max timidly touched the bell standing on the counter, but the sound trailed off unheard.

  Nothing.

  He ran back to Bungalow 112. Now what? he wondered. Maybe he should break the door down after all. This was the sort of thing he had only seen in action movies, but never in real life. He rammed against the door with his left shoulder, and immediately felt a sharp shock of pain. He was too weak. Near the pool was a plastic lawn chair. Max grabbed it and smashed it against the door. This, too, produced no discernible result. He put the chair down and started kicking against the door.

  “What,” said a voice, “are you doing?”

  Max shot around. The manager was standing behind him, glowering at him.

  “Do you smell that?” Max asked.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “It smells like gas,” said Max. He leaned against the door, which suddenly gave in. For a brief moment, Max felt suspended in midair, like an astronaut. Then he crashed down to the ground.

  “You’re going to pay for that,” the manager informed him.

  “Look!” Max pointed at the motionless leg.

  “Moshe!” the man yelled at the leg and came charging into the room like a mad cow. “Wake up! Moshe!”

  At some point in his life, Moshe Goldenhirsch of Prague, son of Laibl and Rifka and possibly the Locksmith from upstairs, had realized that it was better to be a “Zabbatini” than a “Goldenhirsch.” It had taken considerable effort to become the former and run away from the latter. Not that it did him much good at the moment. Right now, the Great Zabbatini was lying on a wall-to-wall carpet, as good as dead. And it felt great. As if he was floating above it all, above Fairfax Avenue with its retirement homes, its thrift stores and kosher delis. He was looking down into the courtyard, feeling oddly at peace, watching Ronnie, the manager of the King David, dragging his lifeless self out into the courtyard. A boy was helping him. Little brat, Zabbatini thought. But so what? None of this concerned him any longer. He was free.

  And he turned around and started to float away into the evening sky. He didn’t get very far. He suddenly felt pulled down by the ankles, which strongly impeded his ability to float. He flapped his arms like he’d seen penguins do in nature documentaries, but that didn’t help. It didn’t help the penguins either. They were flightless birds. And he was a flightless man.

  Everything around him went black.

  The manager grabbed the old man by the legs and dragged him outside, with Max’s help. The bungalow consisted of two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. The old man must have been standing between the two rooms when it happened. Ronnie went back inside and closed the gas line with a wrench.

  The man moaned. He must have been well over eighty, and probably had been a good-looking guy in his youth. Now his face was sagging and sad, distorted by old age and years of disappointment. He had a nearly bald head, bushy eyebrows, a bulbous red nose, and thick black glasses that hung from his ears. He was wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt and a gold chain with a small Star of David around his neck. His left arm was distorted and withered like a gnarly tree branch, sticking out from his body at an odd angle.

  His arm! Max thought, and his heart skipped a beat. This must be the guy!

  The manager and Max managed to lift him up and put him in one of the lawn chairs that were standing around the sad, green swimming pool.

  “Moshe!” the manager called. “Wake up!”

  The old man moaned, but showed no sign of coming to.

  “We have to wake him,” said Max. “Maybe you should slap him.”

  “He’s your friend,” the manager said. “You slap him.”

  Ronnie didn’t particularly like the alte kaker. Moshe still owed back rent.

  “Me?” Max said. “I don’t even know him.”

  “What, you never hit a guy before?”

  Max had indeed once hit a guy, little Willie Bloomfield in the class below him. Willie had run to Mrs. Wolf and ratted on him, but he couldn’t really count that incident as proper violence. Willie was, after all, an idiot.

  Max shook his head.

  “It’s easy. Look.” The manager proceeded to demonstrate. A powerful blow caused the old man’s body to jerk like a helpless puppet.

  “Like that,” he said.

  “Okay,” Max said. He touched the old man lightly on the cheek with his fingertips.

  “Not like that,” the manager said. “Harder.”

  “My shoulder hurts,” Max said by way of apology.

  “Put some juice into it,” said the manager. “I’ll get some water. Be right back.”

  Max watched as the man headed toward the lobby. There was something waddly about the way he walked. He seemed to be very content and at peace with himself. Max stood back and took a deep breath. He remembered watching old episodes of Kung Fu on TV. He remembered David Carradine who, when forced to use violence, would first gather his thoughts and then strike with great precision and accuracy. Max closed his eyes and inhaled. Then he let the air out, opened his mouth, and hit the old man as hard as he could. His glasses were flung off his face and fell into the pool, sinking down with a sad gurgle.

  “Ahhh!” the old man screamed indignantly.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at Max, his gaze deeply confused and filled with despair.

  Max stood in front of him, his hand still raised.

  This, he thought, is very awkward.

  Max cleared his throat, lowered his hand, and tugged helplessly at his T-shirt. His hand had left a red mark on the old man’s saggy cheek. The old man glanced around disoriented. Then he muttered, “I love you.”

  He put his face in his hand and began to sob.

  Max kneeled next to him and gently put his arm on the gnarled shoulder. “I . . .” he began. “I love you too.”

  The old man raised his head and looked at Max with great disbelief and contempt. “Not you!” he said.

  “I saved you . . .” Max added timidly.

  The old man gave a dismissive wave. “That’s a mitzvah? I want to be saved? Look at me. This is a life?”

  “But the gas . . .”

  “I wanted it should kill me,” the old man lamented. “That was the idea! Life is shit.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should have left me to die!”

  “It won’t happen again,” said Max. The man had the exact same accent as on the record.

  The old man leaned back in his lawn chair and stared at the cracked cement floor, brooding.

  Max got up silently. “Are you the Great Zabbatini?” he asked.

  “Shut up your mouth. Always with the talking,” said the old man.

  Max did as he was told. Both of them seemed lost in thought. And neither of them noticed the manager approaching with a bucket of water.

  Max heard a splashing noise, and when he looked up, the old man was completely drenched. He sat in his deck chair with a resigned look on his face. He looked down at his Hawaiian shirt. He wiped the few wet hairs from his forehead.

  The manager dropped the bucket with a loud clatter. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  The old man stared at him and Max reproachfully. “You beat me,” he said.

  The manager pointed at Max. “That was him!”

  “And now you try to drown me.” The old man’s voice got shrill.

  “You were unconscious,” the manager responded.

  The old man made a dismissive gesture. �
�It is no matter,” he said. He lifted himself laboriously from his deck chair and shuffled toward his room.

  “And why is broken my door?” he asked.

  “Well . . .” Max began. But the old man gave an exhausted wave. Water dripped from his arm. Max closed his mouth.

  “Nothing matters,” the old man said. “Nothing matters at all.”

  “There’s gas in your room,” Max said.

  “So what?” said the old man. He shuffled into his room. “Wake me when there’s pancakes,” he told the manager. Then he put his hand in his pocket and took out a pill for his heart. After all, who wants to have a heart attack?

  AN ARTIST

  Moshe found out that Princess Aryana’s real name was Julia Klein. She was not from Persia at all, but rather from a working-class neighborhood in Berlin-Spandau. She had met the Half-Moon Man at the Wintergarten-Varieté on Friedrichstraße, a well-known vaudeville cabaret.

  The Wintergarten was located on the ground floor of the Central-Hotel, and for many nights, after her shift at the store was over, Julia would stand in front of its stone columns, where a uniformed doorman held open the doors of carriages and automobiles, so that the elegant ladies and gentlemen of Berlin society could make their proper entrances. The ladies wore mink coats and ornate hats with peacock feathers; the gentlemen were dressed in frock coats. Arm in arm, the couples would enter through the imposing and ornate double doors and vanish in the dark. Julia would stand and watch. She could feel the warmth and hear the laughter and music from inside, and she even smelled the faint cigarette smoke. She longed to go inside, to enter this sophisticated world, seeking a refuge not only from the cold and rain, but from her life. She would study the playbills posted in front, riveted by what she read. Transvestite shows! Jazz! Magic! One night, after borrowing an ill-fitting dress from her friend Dagmar, she ventured inside.

  The Wintergarten was smoke-filled and poorly lit. Hurried waiters in tuxedos rushed about. People jostled, and rudeness was de rigueur—this was Berlin, after all. Julia, who wasn’t used to wearing heels, stubbed her toe looking for a seat, and a pudgy waiter with a large tray and a white cloth grudgingly assigned her a place in the back, rolling his eyes. She could barely see the stage, since a round lamp illuminating her table almost completely blocked her view. In the orchestra pit, the musicians were playing a jazz hit of the day: “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” Julia was astonished to see that the musicians had dark skin. She was puzzled. Were they Africans? She’d seen Africans before at the Berlin Zoo. Or perhaps they came from America. Everything inexplicable came from America: the latest music, the latest automobiles, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Coca-Cola.

  After a few more songs, the red curtain opened and an announcer entered the stage and took the microphone. He was a small man with blond slicked-back hair and he wore a frock coat.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he purred into the microphone, “welcome to the Wintergarten. Allow me to introduce a man of magic and mystery. . . .”

  He continued in this vein for a while, and then introduced “Kröger the Great,” adding, “We guarantee that this gentleman will change your life.”

  This was no lie: he did indeed change Julia’s life. But what she saw that night wasn’t very promising. Kröger appeared in front of a rather small audience, and they seemed to be mocking him. Still, he kept his cool, smiling and bowing. She was oddly intrigued by his hapless performance, which must have triggered some maternal instinct in her, for she decided, right then and there, that this man needed her help, whether he wanted it or not.

  She came back, night after night, watching the Great Kröger and spending the money she earned as a shopgirl.

  One day, after another disastrous performance, she gathered her courage and went to his dressing room. In the narrow hallway backstage, she ran into some of the musicians, who were washing their faces. Only then did Julia realize that they had been wearing makeup, as the black dissolved to reveal white skin underneath. When she asked for Herr Kröger’s dressing room, one of the musicians pointed down the hallway with his thumb.

  “That way,” he said in a thick Berlin accent.

  Julia knocked on his door. And so it began.

  “Come in,” said Kröger the Great.

  Julia timidly entered and curtsied, just like she had learned in school.

  “What do you want?” asked Kröger. His first name, she would learn, was Rudi.

  He wasn’t looking at her; he was only looking at himself in the mirror, as he was removing his stage makeup. She didn’t know how to begin. What could she possibly say? That she hated her home and that she wanted to run away? That would sound foolish. But she knew that men usually found her attractive, and that all she needed to do was keep her mouth shut. The less she said, the easier it was for her to get her way.

  It worked. That night, he took her out for dinner. They had champagne and lobster—on credit, of course. Julia Klein was enchanted, and did her best to enchant Kröger, whom she saw as her way out.

  She was getting tipsy and she began telling him about her family. Her father had fought at Verdun; now he worked in a factory. He often came home drunk and berated the family, making Julia blush with shame. With an iron will, he enforced his ideas of discipline, even raising his hand against his own daughter on occasion. One time, she confided to Kröger, he had even smeared his feces all over the bedroom wall, throwing it everywhere. Everyone thought he was insane. He wasn’t. No one in her family realized that flinging around excrement was a perfectly reasonable response to the events of the twentieth century.

  Julia, like most people, was not very interested in politics—or feces, for that matter. She was, however, very interested in leaving behind her bleak world. She told Kröger that she wanted to run away from home, and that it had not escaped her attention that he, a magician, might be in need of an assistant. That night, they kissed under the stars that hung above the Brandenburg Gate.

  A mere five days later, Rudi Kröger and Julia Klein left their lives and names behind. They reinvented themselves—as Baron von Kröger, the legendary Half-Moon Man—and the Persian Princess Aryana. The name Half-Moon Man had been Julia’s idea. She knew that Rudi was a war veteran and that many veterans had disfigured faces. Why not play with that? In a shop selling carnival supplies, she found a Venetian brass mask in the shape of a half-moon. From now on, Kröger would pretend to be a nobleman with a tragic past whose face had been forever destroyed by the enemy’s weapons.

  Kröger envisioned himself in the tradition of the great European masters of magic, such as Bartholomeo Bosco, the Maskelynes, and Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. Julia was fascinated as Kröger led her through the history of magic and, later, to his bed. It was her first time, and happened a few weeks after their first meeting at the Wintergarten. In her dreams, this had been a moment of enormous importance, but it turned out be to oddly uneventful in real life, and slightly uncomfortable.

  Is this it? she thought. Are we really making love?

  Before she knew it, it was over. She got up and went to the bidet in the small bathroom of the hotel they were staying at and carefully rinsed herself.

  Kröger was hardly a magician between the sheets, but anything was better than living under the same roof with her increasingly demented father and tormented mother. Still, Kröger’s occasional outbursts of anger kept her on edge. One moment, he would be sweet as a lamb; the next, some trivial incident would send him into fits of fury. A real artist!

  Together, they worked out a nearly seamless magic act, tried and tested over hundreds of performances. Gradually, a structure emerged that seemed to be pleasing to the audience. In addition to playing the Wintergarten, they appeared in various other clubs and cabarets around Berlin, saving up enough money so that they could buy an old army tent, which Kröger and Julia painstakingly repaired and turned into something resembling a circus tent. And thus the Zauber-Zirkus was
born. Cobbling together a small group of musicians, acrobats, and animal trainers to flesh out Kröger’s show, they proceeded to go on tour. It was the best time of Julia’s life so far. They traveled through Galicia, Belorussia, Hungary, and finally Czechoslovakia.

  And that was where Moshe Goldenhirsch appeared, and kissed the sleeping princess awake.

  Now, young Moshe, at the tender age of fifteen, was sitting in Julia’s wagon, drinking a hot tea spiked with brandy. He felt incredibly lucky to be in her presence. Moshe didn’t realize it, but luck had nothing to do with it. Julia had noticed at once that Moshe had a crush on her. She was only eighteen herself, and desperate for the attention of boys, so that she could scorn them.

  But she did not scorn Moshe. No, Moshe was a gift from heaven. There was one thing in the Zauber-Zirkus that she hated, and that was shoveling horse manure. It seemed there was no end to it. Men and horses were incredibly prolific producers of shit. And since everyone else in the troupe was a “highly trained specialist,” whose skills and experience were far too valuable to be wasted on shoveling, the task had always fallen to her, the youngest and least experienced member. This was where Moshe came in. And so, she did everything in her power to make him feel warm and welcome in her wagon, which she had to share with Mrs. Arndt, the ticket-taker and cook of the troupe. Julia didn’t have to do much to persuade Moshe. The little Jew was clearly beguiled by her.

  “What a glamorous life you must lead,” Moshe said, awestruck.

  “Every day is an adventure,” Julia said, but wisely didn’t mention what kind of adventure.

  Her face had an almost classic beauty to it, with deep-set green eyes. Moshe feared that he would drown in those eyes. The boy lowered his cup and stared at the wooden planks beneath his feet. Julia knew what was coming.

  A warm, pleasant fire in a steel oven was warming up the tiny wagon, which was stuffed with pots and pans and the clutter of everyday life. Moshe glanced at the makeup table, the costume racks, the sacks of hay on which Julia and Mrs. Arndt had to sleep, the colorful playbills and programs pinned to the mirror, the masks and costumes. He was enthralled.

 

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