by Cary Fagan
I watched from the wings. The actor’s gestures and strut looked just like the newsreels. He ranted about his scheme to conquer the world. The dialogue had been written by someone named Freddy Katz, a Broadway rewrite man who owed Mr. Ludwig a favour. It didn’t matter how stiff and melodramatic the lines were, that actor was genuinely scary to watch.
The Jews, Hitler said, would come first. They would be easy to defeat, for they were a corrupt and unmanly race. A general stepped forward. Yes, Mein Herr, he said. Easy except for one thing. A Hebrew boy who lived among the poor. A deaf-mute. What possible trouble could such a boy cause? Hitler asked. This boy, said the general, was said to be a wonder-worker, a maker of miracles.
Nonsense! Hitler became furious. He cracked his riding crop over the general’s back. I knew that the actor’s coat was padded, but still I flinched. This boy, Hitler said, must be captured at once. We shall go to the ghetto of the Jews.
The curtain came down. The tent was pulled up into the flies and the stagehands hurried to set up the ghetto. I adjusted my cap and checked my pockets again. An actor in rags got behind a plywood cart as the curtain went up. From the pit came the plaintive strains of a violin. Four peasant Jews rushed onto the stage screaming for help. My heart started to race. In the arms of one, a young girl hung limp. She was the Shirley Temple look-alike, but without her curly wig, legs bare and face dirty; somehow she had become this other child. The mother cried that her daughter had fallen into the well. She had lain under the water for many minutes. They laid her carefully on the ground. Another listened to her breast. No heartbeat, she said. No breath, said someone else. The mother began a terrible wailing.
“The boy! Call the boy who works wonders!”
Two peasants ran back into the wings and grabbed me by the arms. “Keep your focus,” one hissed. And then they were taking me downstage.
I didn’t want to think about the people in the audience, so I looked down at the girl. At rehearsals she’d always squirmed and complained, but now she lay absolutely still. I was almost afraid that she really had stopped breathing. I knelt down, put my hand delicately to her mouth, and slowly drew from between her lips a blue ribbon, as if it were the water in her lungs. I drew out more and more, many feet of ribbon, until the end appeared. A peasant knelt down to listen. Still she doesn’t breathe. I motioned for her to be laid atop the cart. Then I took the mother’s shawl, stretching it out in front of the girl. I let it fall upon her shape as if it were a shroud. The mother began to sob quietly. I held out my hand to stay her. I concentrated on the shrouded form and reached out my hands towards it.
The girl’s shawl-covered body began to rise. It rose until it hovered just above our heads. The peasants onstage gasped, cried, reached out to touch the frills of the shawl. I motioned for them to step back. I reached up, grasped a corner of the shawl, and pulled it sharply away. Nothing. The girl had vanished.
Where had the child gone? I looked at an old man and gestured to him. The old man said, “We must put our trust in the God who made us His chosen people.” I waved the shawl in the air and let it settle onto the ground. I pinched it at the centre and slowly pulled it up. As it rose, the shawl took on the shape of a figure, making the audience gasp. I pulled it away to reveal the young girl, her eyes closed. She wavered as if about to fall, but a peasant caught her. The girl opened her eyes. She looked about as if waking from a dream.
“Mamma?”
The mother rushed to take the girl in her arms. Everyone laughed, cried, spoke to one another, danced about. Only I remained still. And then the musicians struck up a military march. Two Nazis goose-stepped onto the stage, followed by Hitler himself. And behind him, four more soldiers pulled an iron cage on wheels. Inside the cage, the lion paced and turned and even roared. The audience’s excited reaction rose above the music. Hitler came right up to me, and when he spoke, his spittle hit my face. “Hold this boy!”
Two solders grabbed me and I pretended to struggle. Meanwhile, two others dropped a big sheet over the top of the cage, covering the side facing the audience. The sheet had a large red swastika on it. The soldiers dragged me up to the cage. One reached for the latch on the door, but I could still see the lion, its eyes fearful even as it roared again. An actor behind hit the lever, secretly tipping the floor and causing the startled lion to slide into the hidden compartment. Up came my costume from below, along with a dummy of me.
The soldiers made a big show of throwing me into the cage and shutting the door.
Did I hear my mother cry out, or was that somebody else? Quickly I pulled on the lion costume, legs first, then arms and head, pulling up the inside zipper. It was heavily padded and reinforced to make me look much larger. The realism was good enough to briefly fool an audience that had already seen a real lion and believed it still to be there. I kept hunched over the bloody dummy of myself while the stage lights, already dim, flashed blue and red.
I heard Hitler shout the cue for the sheet to be pulled away from the cage. As it came up, I made as if I were disembowelling the dummy, moving as viciously as I could. I threw myself onto the cage door, bringing it crashing down. The impact on my hands and knees made me yelp with pain. The audience screamed while Hitler too cried out in terror and fled the stage, even as I yanked off the lion’s head and revealed the boy underneath.
My mother, Bella Kleeman, threw open the door of the theatre and walked furiously up Yonge Street. A light rain fell. What she would do with her son when he came home! When had all this happened? What sort of people was he associating with? Really, she was the one who ought to be smacked, lost in her own suffering and pleasure. How had she missed the end of his childhood?
Sigismond Eisler saw her leave. He wanted to catch up but thought better of it and stooped to tie his shoe. He wondered if he and Bella were over. Outside, he pulled his hat low to keep the rain out of his eyes. It had been nine weeks since he had heard from his wife and child. His eyes filled. Maybe they were in hiding somewhere in the countryside. Maybe they were still safe.
This is what my father thought: My son has turned out to be clever. He didn’t get up from his seat but remained as the band played and a dancing couple came on. So he had passed something on to the boy.
A passing automobile threw up a sluice of dirty water that soaked the hem of Miss Pensler’s dress. She felt a glow of pride for the boy who had come to her wanting a book. Getting into a cab, she opened her purse and fished out a pack of Buckinghams. For a reason she couldn’t fathom, she thought of her father, who had been hit by a delivery truck in front of the Telegram building when she was five years old. The match flared and she drew on the cigarette. She could remember only one image of him, standing in his undershirt in the kitchen, peeling an apple.
Corinne’s father held her arm tightly. He walked her to the front of the theatre, but she stopped and asked if he would wait a minute for her. He looked hard at her and then he said all right. Corinne hurried back inside. She went up to the ticket booth, politely asked for a sheet of paper and a pen, and then wrote a single line. She folded the paper and wrote To Benjamin Kleeman on it before giving it to the ticket seller. Then she went back to her father and the two of them walked quickly down to the station. Her father had just enough time to change into his uniform before they boarded.
The lion had died while confined in the hidden space under the cage floor. It couldn’t have suffocated as the compartment was properly ventilated. Nor were there any signs of injury. Likely it had died of a heart attack.
“Without a lion, we don’t have an act,” said Moses Ludwig in his office. “I don’t know where to get another one. Besides, he was eating me out of house and home. I’ve already put a lot of dough into this. And if there’s a war? Actually, I should say when there’s a war.”
“But the act worked,” I said. “The audience — did you hear them?”
“I hate to tell you this. There’s a magician I
know, working the circuit already. He’s willing to buy the act from me — cage, set, costume, script, the works. I’ll break even. Next month we’re going to start showing pictures. Sorry, Benjamin, it’s just the way things are.”
I didn’t say anything. In my hand was Corinne’s note. I had already read it, but I hadn’t taken it in, not really. I put on my jacket and knapsack and closed the door behind me. I went down the back stairs and out into the lane behind the theatre. The ground was slick and caught the reflection of the light over the door. The actor who played Hitler hurried past me. I couldn’t go back to my parents’ house, not with Corinne gone and not without performing to look forward to. In my knapsack I had a marked deck, my chop cups, a few essentials.
I hunched my shoulders in the damp air. Magic could make people forget whatever they needed to forget for a little while, and that was it. I knew there were bigger things going on out there, catastrophes awaiting, but none of it meant anything to me right now. I planned to write my parents a letter when I got a chance, just so they’d know I wasn’t dead.
When my father got home, he did not look for my mother but instead went straight to my room. He turned on the light, but even as the bulb flickered on, it made a popping sound and went out. In the gloom, he moved over to the dresser where he could see the shapes of the mechanical toys he had made so long ago — monkey, fish, crocodile, lion, bird. He picked up the key, put it between his teeth, and lifted the large bird with both hands. He carried it to the open window.
He had to put the bird down on the bed to haul up the window. The rain had stopped. Carefully, he wound up the spring mechanism, keeping one hand over its back so that the wings couldn’t move. They pushed against his fingers, not with the frantic energy of a real bird, but with the steady and insistent pressure of a machine. He had never wanted to risk trying it out so that he might continue to hold on to the possibility of it actually working. But now he held it out as a pigeon fancier might hold one of his racers and awkwardly shoved his arms through the open window as he let go.
The bird flapped hard. Laboriously. The body dipped downwards, but the wingbeat levelled it and the second caused it to thrust forward as if it were paddling through water. The mechanical whirr was as loud as a dozen cicadas. The wing flaps steadied as it rose and, wheeling, just missed the chimney of the house across the street.
It flew on. Over streets, over the buildings of the university with the zigzag pattern on their roofs, over the playing fields towards the downtown. Anyone seeing it from below would have thought it some large bird of prey, sick or wounded, struggling up through the air. It rose higher still, over businesses and shops, over Brant’s Vaudeville, over church spires. It gazed down with its glass eye, and then its beak opened and it gave out a single rasping call.
Many thanks to everyone at Anansi, especially Melanie Little for presenting the manuscript in the best light, Jared Bland and Sarah MacLachlan for their enthusiasm and editing skills, and Janice Zawerbny for seeing it through to the end. Once again Rebecca Comay and Bernard Kelly gave first readings and offered valuable suggestions. Patrick Crean has been very supportive of my recent work, and gracious as well. And a final but most necessary acknowledgement and thanks to Marc Côté.
Grants from the Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council gave me the necessary time.
Cary Fagan is an award-winning author who is known for timeless stories that reveal complex and universal themes. He has written several novels, including Valentine’s Fall, which was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award, The Mermaid of Paris, Felix Roth, as well as several books for children. He has been an editor and contributor to several magazines and newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette. His books have been published in the U.S., Canada, and Germany. He was the winner of the Jewish Book Committee Prize for Fiction, and most recently, his collection of short stories, My Life Among the Apes, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”