Travellers in Magic

by Lisa Goldstein

  A half an hour later he had to stop, aware that something was wrong. Mustafa had told him the Jang believed in an afterlife, but Clara had mentioned reincarnation. Mustafa had said the Jang didn’t eat beef, but Clara had given him a recipe with beef in it. Mustafa had told him about a long and beautiful wedding ceremony, but Clara had said two people were considered married if they’d simply shared a meal and a bed.

  Could there be two sets of customs, one for men and one for women? No, not with this much disparity between them. His agitation grew the more he compared Clara’s and Mustafa’s sessions. He knew he couldn’t wait until next week. Angry now and a little frightened, he got into his car and drove to Mustafa’s apartment.

  He could hear voices raised in argument as he climbed the stairs. A man and a woman were shouting in the Jang’s dark rolling language, exchanging insults like thunder. Simon hesitated a little before the door, but his anger overcame everything else and he knocked loudly.

  The argument stopped in mid-sentence. Mustafa opened the door, his face flushed, his eyebrows lowered. Clara stood behind him in the hallway.

  Simon had never seen Mustafa so angry. It terrified him, made him want to turn around and leave. Then he remembered his thesis, his future, and summoned up the courage to stay. “You lied to me,” he said to Mustafa.

  “Did we?” Mustafa said. His voice was dangerously low.

  “Your information is totally different from Clara’s,” Simon said. “It’s like two different cultures. One of you lied.”

  Abruptly Mustafa’s expression changed. “Well, come in,” he said. “Our guests do not stand out in the hall. Perhaps we can discuss this, yes?”

  Simon followed them into the room with the pillows. A fire was lit in the fireplace, and candles glowed in front of the dark portraits on the mantelpiece. Clara sat down and looked at her nails, almost bored. She would not look at him.

  “We would not like to mislead you,” Mustafa said. “This thing you write, it is very important to you, yes?”

  Simon nodded, still too angry to speak.

  “Well then, perhaps we can come to an agreement,” Mustafa said genially. “Is it worth, say, a thousand dollars? A thousand dollars for the correct information, for the truth about the Jang?”

  “What?” Simon said weakly. He felt as if he’d been hit. He looked at Clara for reassurance but she did not look up. At least, he thought, she has the decency to be embarrassed.

  “Come now, a thousand dollars,” Mustafa said. “That’s not so much. And then your future is secure, you have a teaching job, you are all set.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Simon said. “I don’t have a thousand dollars. And anyway I don’t have to do my thesis on the Jang. There are millions of topics, millions of cultures.”

  “Yes, but are you willing to spend another four years waiting for one of them?” Mustafa said. How did he know that? Simon thought. “Another four years at the university, waiting for a topic of interest? Come, we will be reasonable. Eight hundred dollars. In a few months it will be time for the Jang to travel again, maybe to cross the water. Think of your notes, your work, all wasted. We can finish our sessions before we leave, and then you can teach, you can settle down, you can marry Linda—”

  “Marry Linda?” Simon said, shocked. “Why?”

  For the first time Simon saw Mustafa look confused. “Why? You are in love with her,” Mustafa said. He sounded uncertain.

  Simon laughed. He felt as if he were pressing his advantage, but he had no idea what his advantage was. “What gives you that idea?”

  “Because of the dreams,” Clara said suddenly. Mustafa said something to her in the language of the Jang but she ignored him. “Because of the dreams we gave you.”

  “You gave me dreams?” Simon said. “Those dreams about Linda? And about Clara?”

  Clara looked at Simon for the first time. He found it impossible to translate her expression. Surprise? Gratitude?

  “You—You dreamed about Clara?” Mustafa said. It was easy to recognize Mustafa’s expression, not so easy to find an explanation for it. It was defeat.

  “Yes, I did,” Simon said. “Now will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  Mustafa was silent. “We are the Jang,” Clara said finally. “We worship Ahitot, son of the moon, brother of Ana, our brother. The trickster god, you would call him. He tells us to defy authority and to aid lovers. He teaches us to dream together, and we dream the stories of the tribe. Like the story of Ana, that you dreamed with us. And he tells us to aid lovers. We were to help you and Linda.”

  “Me and—and Linda?” Simon said. “But what gave you the idea we were lovers?”

  “Ahitot told us in our dreams,” Clara said. “But then you met me. My father wanted to meet you. He called you and you came to learn about us. My father wanted to make money.” She looked at her father accusingly, as if to say, You see where your scheming gets you?

  “Your father—called me?” Simon asked.

  “Yes,” Clara said. “That is another thing Ahitot has taught us to do. We can change reality by our dreams.”

  This was too much. This was worse than the conflicting information he had been given earlier. They were laughing at him, mocking him. “You can stop it now,” he said. “I give up, all right? I’m going home. I’m not going to listen to any more. This is crazy.”

  “You do not believe me?” Clara said. Once again she looked at him impassively, incapable of being contradicted. Her eyes shone in the firelight. “Who do you think it was who changed the address on your piece of paper so that you would come here and not to your advisor’s? It changed because we dreamed it.”

  Simon could not move. He felt he was being called upon to assimilate too much, to believe too many impossible things at once. Mustafa spoke into the silence. “My daughter would like to share a meal with you,” he said.

  Clara looked at her father, horrified. He had wanted to embarrass her, that much was clear, but Simon understood nothing else of what was happening. “A meal and a bed,” Mustafa said, clarifying.

  Had Clara told him the truth about the significance of sharing a meal and a bed? “You want—you want to marry me?” he asked, and as he asked it it did not seem so absurd.

  Clara looked into the fire. “That is what we were arguing about, my father and I, when you came,” she said. “It is rare—very rare—for a Jang to marry someone from outside the tribe.”

  Simon thought of the wild music, the dancing in the moonlight. He thought of his years as a graduate student, four years of sterility, with more to come. Clara was asking him to live with the Jang, to share their dreams, travel to far countries with them and become involved in the weave of the tribe in a way impossible for any anthropologist. He walked over to the fireplace and looked at Mustafa. “I’m sorry if it disturbs you, sir,” Simon said. The blaze consumed his notebook. “But I would like very much to accept your daughter’s offer.”

  AFTERWORD

  Jang” was written around the same time as “Tourists” and shares many characteristics with it—a puzzled young man, a strange and magical society, an abandonment of a former life. If there is a theme to the stories in this volume it is seen most clearly in these two, which are about the ways in which magic makes its presence felt in the mundane world, erupting through the rime of everyday life like a flower pushing its way through pavement.

  I have to admit to a heresy here: I’ve never agreed with Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic is something utterly different from technology; it has a very different feel to it. A magician is part scholar, part poet, part warrior, part priest or priestess. Any idiot can turn on a light switch.

  A TRAVELLER AT PASSOVER

  The phone rang the minute Emily got home from work. She hung up her coat and yelled for Heather—“You home, kid?”—and finally answered it on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?” the person at the other end said,
as if uncertain she had reached the right number. And for a moment Emily didn’t recognize the voice, it had been that long.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Emily.” She heard relief in her mother’s voice, but something more as well—trepidation, probably. “I was wondering—well, we’d like to know—that is, Passover starts next week.” She was silent, waiting for Emily’s reply. When it didn’t come she said, “Well, we’d like it if you came over for the first night.”

  “We?” Emily said. “Or you?”

  “Please. He misses you.”

  “Does he? He’s got a funny way of showing it. Why can’t he tell me so himself?”

  “It’s hard for him, you know that—”

  “Actually I don’t know it. I never noticed that it was hard getting him to talk. The problem was always shutting him up.”

  She heard her mother’s in-drawn breath, and then the sound of static on the line. She’d gone too far. Or maybe not—how far were you allowed to go if your father had more or less disowned you? It was an interesting question. Probably the etiquette books didn’t cover it.

  “I called to ask you to dinner,” her mother said. “Heather deserves to get to know her grandparents.”

  “And whose fault is it that she doesn’t?” Emily said. Anger and resentment flared up so strongly she shook as she said it.

  “I thought that for Heather’s sake—”

  Somehow her mother had hit on the only argument that would carry any weight at all. She had never been so good at getting her own way when Emily was growing up. Her father had been the one Emily had had to watch out for. What else had changed in six years?

  Emily forced her anger away. She owed it to Heather to try to lay aside old wounds, old scores. “All right,” she said reluctantly.

  “And please—don’t argue with him.”

  That was the way she remembered her mother. It had been so easy to disobey her as a child, almost a game. “Did you ask him not to argue with me?”

  “He never starts it—”

  “He does. He’s just cleverer about it than I am. Watch him if you don’t believe me.”

  “All right, I’ll ask him.”

  For a moment Emily felt sorry for her mother, for the way she and her father had used her as a game-piece in their skirmishes. “Okay, I’ll be there,” she said. “Should I bring something?”

  “Oh, no.” Her mother sounded hurt. If Emily brought anything it would mean that her mother had been lacking in some way, that all bounty did not flow from her mother’s kitchen. She was remembering all the ways her family interacted now, and she sighed. What had she gotten herself into? Would Heather be able to hold her own? “We’re looking forward to seeing you,” her mother said.

  Emily sat by the phone for a while after she had hung up, thinking about her family. She was fourteen, and had brought home a boy from school. She had thought about this boy every day for the past month and having him so close to her now made her breath hurt. Everything seemed sharper, more filled with meaning, around him, so that she felt that she had never really noticed anything until this moment. And her father had laughed and joked with him, and told him a story about being captured by gypsies as a child.

  “Your father is so great,” the boy had said. “I wish mine was like that.”

  She couldn’t describe what she felt until much later. It was jealousy, pure and simple. Jealousy, and anger that someone she loved had spent two hours talking to her father when he should have been paying attention to her. “You know that nothing he said was true,” she said.

  “So what?” the boy said.

  She was eighteen, and the family car she had been driving had been hit by a van which had then driven off before she could get the license number. She arrived home shaking, terror at what had nearly happened to her mingling with anger at whoever had hit her. And her father, instead of comforting her, instead of saying that she was fine and that was the important thing, had told her a story about being a truck driver, and the strange people he had met on the road.

  Over the years she had learned that very few of his stories were true. The process had been slow and painful, like coming to terms with a chronic but non-fatal illness. He might have been a construction worker and a truck driver, and maybe he had even ridden the rails as a young man, but everything else had been elaborations, fantasies. In place of the conversations most kids had had with their fathers she had gotten stories. Endless stories.

  But the stories had ended when she’d married Andy, who wasn’t Jewish. Tales of carnivals and princesses and magicians and pirates had suddenly given place to silence. And she wasn’t at all sure that the silence hadn’t been welcome, a space in which she could sort out who she really was, what was true and what was lies.

  She and Andy had gotten divorced six months ago. It had been a friendly divorce; they still talked on the phone, and she had met him for lunch once when his business took him close by. How typical of her parents that they called after the divorce, that now she was their daughter again. But her anger had gone for good; she wondered only how she would survive an evening with her family.

  At first, as she stepped into the entryway with Heather, she thought that nothing had changed. The house still smelled of tea and chicken. The bulky furniture of her childhood, the hi-fi cabinet and end tables and coffee tables, stood in their old places. The same worn trail on the rug led from the living room to the kitchen.

  Her mother, coming forward shyly to kiss her, as if entertaining royalty, seemed the same too: small and worried and smelling of cosmetic creams and dish detergent. But when she moved back Emily saw the lines in her mother’s face and the thickness of her new glasses. She’d changed the color of her hair, too; it was redder now. “Hello, Emily,” she said. “I’m so glad you came. Your father’s out in back.”

  Of course, Emily thought. I’ve got to go to him. I wonder if he set it up that way.

  “Heather!” her mother said. “I didn’t see you at first. Look at how you’ve grown.”

  Heather had never been shy. “Yes, I have,” she said gravely.

  “You were only two years old the last time I saw you. I bet you don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Emily wondered if that was true. She still remembered the time her mother had stopped by the house, furtively, as if scouting out enemy terrain. There had been an argument about, of all things, whether she could have Sinclair the dog. “He’s my dog!” Emily had screamed as her mother hurried toward her car. “I raised him. He’s not yours. Or Dad’s either!” The entire block must have heard her. Since then they had communicated through Emily’s brother David.

  “Just leave Heather with me,” her mother said. “We have a lot to catch up on. Your father’s looking forward to seeing you.”

  Was that true? Emily made her way down the hall and past her parents’ bedroom. Her old room was at the back of the house but she didn’t look inside. From the kitchen she heard laughter: David and his wife and their two children.

  The light was going from the sky as she stepped out onto the back porch. Her father looked up from his weeding. He had always been a stocky, vital man, with powerful shoulders and black eyes and curly black hair. It came as a shock to see that his hair had turned almost pure white. But when she got closer she noticed that aside from his hair he had not changed at all. Just for a moment she had hoped he had become smaller, shrunken. But she couldn’t wish that of anyone, even him. And he would stay the same until he died; he was too stubborn for anything else.

  Why hadn’t she stayed in the house? She couldn’t think of anything to say to him. Or maybe she had too much to say, and no way to manage it. Why didn’t you visit for six years? Are your stupid principles more important than your daughter, your grandchild?

  Just as he filled any space he entered he filled her silence with words. Anyone watching wouldn’t have guessed that six years had passed since they’d last seen each other. “Emily! I hope y
ou’ve brought Heather. She’ll have to say the Four Questions, your brother’s boys are older than she is. We’ve got eight people tonight—that’s the largest Passover we’ve had since Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Moe moved away. Your mother’s been cooking all week.”

  “Sure, Heather’s a great reader,” Emily said. You’ll like her, she wanted to add, but she didn’t know if that was true. He hadn’t even visited when she was born, she thought, and, suddenly angry, she nearly said something she would regret. I won’t argue if he doesn’t, she thought, remembering the promise she had given her mother. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine, just fine. Your mother wants to go to Canada to see Phyl and Moe, and we’re going to visit Quebec while we’re there. I’ve always wanted to go someplace they speak French. I took a class at the local college. Comment allez-vous?”

  She didn’t understand him. “Listen, I think I hear Ma. I’d better go see if she needs any help.”

  He waved at her and returned to his weeds. Going inside felt like surrender, but she didn’t think she could stay outside another minute. What did I expect? she thought. An apology?

  In the house she helped set the table with David’s wife Janet. “This is so great,” Janet said. “My family never celebrated Passover when I was growing up.”

  “Wait till it’s over before you say anything,” Emily said.

  Janet looked at her oddly. She wondered what her brother David had been saying about her. Did they think of her as the black sheep of the family, the one who had never fit in?

  She went back into the kitchen to see what else needed to be done. David and his two sons had gone out to the backyard, and the family was now divided the way she remembered it from her childhood: the men standing and talking, the women working in the kitchen. Heather watched while her grandmother lifted a platter from the oven. Wonderful, Emily thought. What terrific role models we’re showing her. The kitchen windows had steamed over from all the cooking.