Travellers in Magic

by Lisa Goldstein

  Simon stood again in front of the door of 3460C, a briefcase in his hand and a tape recorder draped over his shoulder. His heart pounded loudly as he knocked. The same man—he looked to be about fifty, Simon thought, athletic for his age—opened the door. This time the hallway smelled strongly of garlic.

  “Yes?” the man said. “You find your doctor?”

  Simon was surprised the man remembered. “Look I’d like to ask you a favor. I’d like to—to ask you a few questions. You and your family.”

  The man was unperturbed. “You are a cop, yes?” he said.

  “No!” Simon said. “No, I’m—I’m a student. From UCLA. The university.” He brought out his wallet and showed the man his registration card.

  “Very nice,” the man said dryly. “And if you were a cop you would have one of these cards also, yes?”

  “No, listen,” Simon said. “I’m a student. I study different cultures, peoples. I’d like to know more about you. About the Jang.”

  The man hesitated, then seemed to come to a decision. “All right,” he said. “Come in. But we don’t talk about our criminal pasts, all right?” In the dim light of the hallway he seemed to wink.

  The room the man led him into had no furniture except four or five fat pillows arranged in a half circle. Rugs covered the old wood floor and hung from the walls, their colors mostly dark red, black or yellow. Portraits and yellow photographs of dark people Simon didn’t recognize stood over the fireplace, and candles in glass cups were placed in front of them. Simon could smell cooking coming from another part of the apartment.

  The man sat on one of the pillows and took out a pipe from his trousers. Simon sat next to him, sinking into the pillow with difficulty. He moved to turn his tape recorder on but the man stopped him with an upraised hand. “No,” he said. “Not that. We think it steals our souls.”

  “Okay,” Simon said. He took a pen and notebook out of his briefcase and wrote, “Recorder steals souls.” “To begin with, what is your name?”

  “What is yours?” the man said.

  Simon blinked. “What?” he said.

  “A custom among the Jang,” the man said. “The stranger among us gives us his name first.”

  “Oh,” Simon said. “Simon Montclair.”

  “I am called Mustafa,” the man said. He bowed a little, from the waist.

  “And your last name?” Simon said.

  Mustafa shrugged. “What is a good last name in your country?” he said. “Smith. I am called Mustafa Smith.”

  Simon looked up sharply but Mustafa had not smiled. “And the rest of your family—are they called Smith as well?”

  “If you like,” Mustafa said.

  “But you—What do you call yourselves?”

  “Oh, you know,” Mustafa said. “This and that. It depends on the country.”

  “Well, then what—” Simon began.

  Mustafa said, interrupting him, “I will introduce you to the rest of the family. Would you like?”

  “Of course,” Simon said. Mustafa clapped his hands. Immediately the room seemed full of people. “My second wife, Francesca. And her husband, Tibor. And these are my cousins, these her brothers.” Simon soon stopped trying to make sense of the names. “And my daughter, Clara.”

  Simon was looking at a young woman with long black hair and deep black eyes and skin that looked like silk. She wore an embroidered blouse and a flowing red skirt, and chains of coins fell from her earlobes. “Hello,” Simon said weakly.

  “Hello,” she said.

  There was an awkward silence. Then Simon recalled his purpose and took up his pen and notebook once more. “Your names,” he said. “They’re from different parts of the world, aren’t they? I mean how—”

  “We take the names of the country we are born in,” Mustafa said. He dismissed the family with a wave of his hand. Simon watched Clara as she left the room.

  “But where are you from?” Simon asked. “I mean originally.”

  Mustafa shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “We are from all over. The Jang are from every country on earth. There are Chinese Jang and New Guinea Jang. We are the travellers.”

  The session was a long one, and very satisfying for Simon. He made three charts of kinship before he got it right and saw Mustafa nodding in approval. These people seemed to marry whenever and wherever they liked: Once Mustafa surprised Simon by mentioning his wife in Spain. Simon learned that Mustafa had been a horse trader, a carpenter, a guitar player. He learned that the festival he had interrupted last week celebrated the birth of a saint and lasted three days, that Mustafa believed the king of Hungary could cure any illness, that white was the color of mourning and red the color of marriage.

  At the end of the session, after they had agreed to meet every week, Mustafa said, “You go home and tell the police now, yes?” This time Simon definitely saw him wink.

  “I’m going home and writing all this up,” Simon said.

  “Ah,” Mustafa said. “And then what will you do with it?”

  “I’m writing a—a dissertation,” Simon said. “When I’m finished I’ll be able to graduate. To leave school. Finally.”

  “And then?” Mustafa said. “What will you do?”

  “Get a job,” Simon said. He shrugged. “Probably teach somewhere.”

  “So this dissertation,” Mustafa said thoughtfully. “It is important to you, yes?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Simon said fervently. “Listen, you guys saved my life.”

  Mustafa drew on his pipe and leaned back on the pillows, looking satisfied.

  “Hi, Linda,” Simon said, coming into Dr. Glass’s office. “Where’s Glass?”

  Linda shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been waiting an hour.”

  Simon looked at papers on Dr. Glass’s desk, walked to the window and looked out. “I hear you’ve found a thesis topic,” Linda said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Simon said. He laughed. “Finally.” He turned to face her.

  “Sounds exciting,” Linda said. “Imagine stumbling on a tribe here in Los Angeles.” Linda was going to the Australian outback in summer. “What are they—gypsies?”

  “No,” Simon said. His caution about revealing his information fought with his need to tell someone and lost. “They call themselves the Jang. Means the People, of course. They know the gypsies, they’ve travelled with them, but they don’t consider the gypsies part of the people.”

  “That’s great,” Linda said. “I wonder why no one’s ever heard of them. You couldn’t find anything in the library?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “What does Dr. Glass say?” Linda said. “Hey, it’s too bad you missed his party Saturday. It was lots of fun.”

  “I know,” Simon said. “And it doesn’t look good for me to miss my advisor’s party. I got lost.”

  “Don’t worry,” Linda said. “There’ll be another one.”

  “I still don’t know where the man lives,” Simon said.

  “Well, next time I’ll show you,” Linda said. “We can go together.”

  “Okay,” Simon said. Linda smiled at him and he realized that somehow the idea of the two of them going to a party together had turned into a date in her eyes. What have I gotten myself into? he thought. She wasn’t bad looking, shoulder-length brown hair, face too thin, chin maybe a little too pointed. Unbidden, the face of Clara rose in his mind.

  “Listen, I’m tired of waiting,” Linda said. “Do you want to go to Westwood for a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure,” Simon said.

  Once at the coffee shop it seemed the most natural thing for Simon to offer to pay for the coffee and for Linda to accept. Mating rituals of North American peoples, Simon thought. But when he took out his wallet he found he had no money. He remembered getting twenty dollars from an automatic teller just that morning, and remembered too Mustafa’s face, eyes gleaming, white teeth showing in a smile.

  “You stole from me,” Simon said.

  “What?” Must
afa said. He lit his pipe and offered it to Simon.

  Simon refused, too angry to care about the significance of the ritual. “Listen, you people stole from me. When I got here last week I had twenty dollars. And when I left it was gone. I don’t like that. There has to be trust between us, Mustafa.”

  Surprisingly, Mustafa laughed, showing clean white teeth. “Of course,” he said. “And I will tell you what it is. We had to learn if you were from the cops, yes? And so Luis, my first wife’s cousin’s boy, looked in your wallet. It is hard work, stealing a man’s wallet and then replacing it so that he suspects nothing. And so Luis probably thought he deserved something for his trouble. That’s the way it is in your country, is it not, hard work is rewarded?”

  “Yes, and stealing money is rewarded by jail,” Simon said, still angry.

  Mustafa laughed again. “But now,” he said. “We know now that you are not from the cops, we know that we can trust you. Surely that was worth twenty dollars?”

  Despite himself Simon began to laugh too. What was twenty dollars, after all? Hundreds of ethnologists paid their informants. And now, as Mustafa said, these people knew they could trust him. He would just keep a closer watch on his wallet from now on.

  “I will tell you what,” Mustafa said. “In exchange for the twenty dollars I will read your palm. All right? All right!”

  Bemused, carried away by Mustafa’s enthusiasm, Simon held out his palm. “Ah!” Mustafa said. “I see—I see a woman. Hair to her shoulders, blond hair or brown. A beautiful woman.” Linda? Simon thought. He would have never called Linda beautiful. “You know her, yes? She will be important to you, very important. I see you leaving school, you and her together. You are finished with school. And you are ready to start a new life.” Mustafa looked up. “That is all I can see today,” he said. “Is it helpful to you?”

  Simon shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Maybe it will be helpful later,” Mustafa said. “And maybe I can be helpful today. Today is a feast day. And you, since you are now worthy of trust and not a cop, are invited along. We celebrate.”

  “A feast day?” Simon said, beginning to get excited, not quite believing his luck. “For what?”

  “Our saint,” Mustafa said. “Ana, the mother of all the Jang. It is her birthday today.” He offered his pipe to Simon and this time Simon took it. “You will stay for dinner, of course.”

  Simon coughed. “I’d be honored,” he said, wiping his eyes. He followed Mustafa into the dining room.

  Simon tried to take notes during the meal, but his pen and notebook got in the way and he gave up. Everything was delicious. “What is this?” he asked, having noticed that the Jang talked with their mouths full.

  “Hedgehog,” someone said, one of the brothers or cousins or husbands.

  Simon nearly stopped eating. And yet it was good. Everything was good. He took a second helping and washed it down with wine.

  Everyone was talking loudly. Simon thought he heard bells again, and someone dancing, but when he looked around all he saw were the people at the table. The room was growing dim, the candleflames spiraling up to the ceiling. His notebook fell off his lap to the floor and he realized he had dozed off for a minute. Clara’s face shone across the table and he smiled at her.

  Then it seemed as if they had gone outside and into brightly-painted caravans smelling of hay. The horses (Horses? Simon thought. In Los Angeles? But he was too tired to look outside) brought them to a grassy field surrounded by tall trees standing like sentinels. A stream splashed somewhere in the distance. The men got out their guitars and began to play. Men and women danced, feet stamping. Bells jangled.

  The full moon was rising. In the empty space above the meadow the sky looked like a banner filled with stars. Simon looked from the moon to Clara’s face and to the moon again. I should be taking notes, he thought, and struggled to rise. “Hush,” Clara said. “Rest. Everything is all right.” He trusted her voice. The music wove through his dreams.

  He woke the next day in his room, though he did not remember coming home. He groaned and rolled over. The notebook lay open beside his bed. “Preliminary Notes on the Jang,” the notebook said in his handwriting.

  He sat up carefully. His head seemed heavy, about to fall off. There were pages and pages of notes, most of them illegible, citing almost every anthropologist he had studied or heard of. “Trickster god—see Amer. Indian myth,” one of the notes said. Then a scrawl, then “Mercea Eliade,” then a page and a half of scrawls, and then what looked like “cf. Jim Henson’s Muppets.” He squinted, hoping the words would say something else, but they stayed the same.

  Pieces of the night before were coming back to him. He remembered dreaming, remembered that they had all dreamed, that they had all had the same dream. It was the dream of the tribe’s origins, how Ana, mother of the Jang, had disobeyed her mother the moon and was sent out to wander the world forever.

  His headache was gone. He was trembling with excitement now. They had all had the same dream. What had he discovered? This was bigger than he had thought. He would be the next Carlos Casteneda, legend of the UCLA anthro department. Best-sellers, lecture tours, his paper on “The Collective Unconscious of the Jang” considered seminal in the field.… He dressed slowly, organizing his notes in his mind.

  He dreamed of the feast in the meadow nearly every night that week. Clara was there, bending over him in the moonlight, kissing him. Sometimes it was Linda instead of Clara, and then he would wake dissatisfied, feeling that something had been taken from him. He began to avoid Linda, stopping by Dr. Glass’s office only when he knew Linda would not be there. He visited Dr. Glass every day now, excited, hardly able to wait for the next session with Mustafa, but he said nothing about the feast night. He wanted to save that for later.

  Clara, not Mustafa, answered his knock at the next session. “Where—Where’s your father?” Simon said.

  “I don’t know,” Clara said.

  “I was supposed to meet him today,” Simon said, a little impatient. “At—” He looked at his watch. “At three o’clock.”

  Clara laughed. “And you expected him to be here?” she said. “You don’t know much about the way we figure time.”

  “Well,” Simon said. “Can I wait for him? Or could you—Would you answer some questions?” He wouldn’t mind getting to know Clara better. And her answers would give him insight into the customs of the women of the tribe.

  Clara shrugged. “All right,” she said.

  “Great,” Simon said. She led him into the room with pillows and sat down.

  Simon sat and took out his notebook. “To begin with—” he said.

  “Why don’t you use a tape recorder?” Clara asked.

  “I—” Simon stopped, confused. “Your father told me you think it steals your souls.”

  “He told you that?” Clara said.

  “Here,” Simon said, showing her the page in the notebook as if that would prove something. Was she laughing at him? “My first entry. ‘Recorder steals souls.’ You mean he wasn’t telling me the truth?”

  Clara leaned back in the pillows. “Everything we say is a lie,” she said. Simon sat upright and started to say something, but she wasn’t finished. “Our native tongue is quite different from yours. Everything we say must be translated, put in sounds foreign to us. What would be pure truth in my language comes out muddy and unclear in yours. We cannot help but lie, you see. We are exiles, and all exiles lie.”

  What was she telling him? How many of his notes were wrong? He chose a question at random. “Why did your father tell me the recorder would steal his soul?”

  “I don’t know,” Clara said. “You’d have to take that up with him.”

  Simon paged nervously through his notes. “Trickster god—see Amer. Indian myth,” he read. He wondered what he had gotten himself into. “Where—Where did you learn to speak English?” he asked, to gain time. “You speak very well.”

  “I was at the university
,” Clara said. She tucked her legs inside her long skirt. “Same as you.”

  “The university?” Simon asked. Clara looked at him impassively. “I—Well, I’m surprised. It doesn’t seem like the Jang would send their children to the university. Especially the daughters.”

  “Why not?” Clara said. Simon winced a little under her even gaze. “It’s the daughters, the women, who have to make a living, after all.”

  “You—You do?”

  “Well, of course,” Clara said. “The men’s status depends on how well their women support them. The more money his wives make the more prestige the man has. Men aren’t expected to work.”

  “They aren’t?” Simon asked. He was aware he sounded stupid, unprofessional. “But Mustafa told me—” He looked through his notes. “Mustafa was a horse trader, a carpenter, a guitar player.”

  Clara laughed. “He plays the guitar, certainly,” she said. Then, aware that something more was being asked of her, she said, “I don’t know why he told you that. You’d have to ask him.”

  The session went a little better after that. Clara told him about burial customs, superstitions, the organization of the tribe. Toward the end Simon put away his notebook, and they talked a little about UCLA. Clara had even had a beginning anthropology class with Dr. Glass and she did an excellent imitation of him raising one eyebrow and looking out at his students. Simon was so charmed by her he forgot to ask about the dreams, about what really happened in the meadow the night of the feast of Ana. He wondered how he could ask about courtship rituals without offending her.

  Finally he looked at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Listen, when I come back next week could we pick up where we left off? I’ve still got a few questions to ask you.”

  “Sure,” Clara said. “I don’t see why not.” She walked him to the door. “Good night,” she said, and added a phrase in her language. She had told him it meant “Luck travel with you.”

  Simon stopped at a fast food place on the way home and got a burger. Then he went straight to his room to look through his notes. He felt as if he were glowing, as if people on the street could see him radiate light. His thesis was turning out far better than he’d expected, and he’d met a dark exotic woman who seemed to like him. Maybe that’s why I got interested in anthropology, he thought, remembering whole afternoons spent looking through his parents’ copies of National Geographic. I wanted to meet dark exotic women.