Travellers in Magic

by Lisa Goldstein

  “It sounds to me,” he said when she was done (and she realized guiltily that she had talked for nearly half an hour; he must have been bored out of his mind), “that you like going out with men who have adventures.”

  “You mean,” she said slowly, watching the thought surface as she said it, “that I don’t think women can have adventures too?”

  The next day she applied to journalism school.

  She didn’t see him until nearly a year later, at the house of the couple who had invited them both to dinner. This time only the two of them were invited. The set-up was a little too obvious to ignore, but she decided she didn’t mind. “What have you been doing?” he asked between courses.

  “Going to journalism school,” she said.

  He seemed delighted. “Have you been thinking of the conversation we had last year?” he asked. “I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  “What conversation?”

  “Don’t you remember?” he asked. “At the dinner last year. About women having adventures. You didn’t seem to think they could.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember.”

  He didn’t press it, but she became annoyed with him anyway. Imagine him thinking that a conversation with him was responsible for her going to journalism school. And now that she was looking at him she realized that he was going bald, that his bald spot had widened quite a bit since she’d seen him last. Still, when he asked for her phone number at the end of the evening she gave it to him. What the hell.

  It was months later that he confessed he had asked their mutual friends to invite them both to dinner. But only after they were married would she admit that he might have been right, that she might have enrolled in school because of him.

  For a while, since he didn’t seem to mind, since he neither praised nor blamed, she told him about her old lovers. The stories became a kind of exorcism for her. The men had all been poor (except, for a brief time, the drug smuggler, until his habit exceeded his supply), they had all been interesting, they had all been crazy or nearly so. Once he mixed up the revolutionary who had stolen her stereo with the would-be writer who had stolen her stereo, and they laughed about it for days. After that the chorus line of old lovers had faded, grown less insistent, and had finally disappeared altogether. And that was when she knew something she had not been certain of before. She had been right to marry Jeremy.

  The radio was playing what sounded like an old English folk song. She turned it off, read and re-read the short letter until she had memorized it, and went to sleep.

  The young man was on the sidewalk when she stepped out of the hotel the next morning. “What can I do for you today, mem?” he asked. “Anything.”

  She laughed, but she wondered what he wanted, why he had followed her. She felt uneasy. “I don’t—I don’t really need anything right now,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Anything,” he said. He was earnest but not pleading. “What would you desire most if you could have anything at all? Sincerely.”

  “Anything,” she said. You mean, besides wanting Jeremy here with me right now, she thought. Should she confide in him? It would get rid of him, anyway. “I want,” she said slowly, “to talk to the head of the Communist Party.”

  “It will be done,” he said. She almost laughed, but could not bear to damage his fragile dignity. “I will see you tomorrow with your appointment,” he said, and walked away.

  She watched him go, then opened her guide book and began to look through it. A travel magazine had commissioned her to do a piece on the largest city in Amaz, the ruins, the beaches, the market-place, the famous park designed by Antonio Gaudí. How was the country holding up under the attack by the guerrillas, under the loss of the income from tourists which was its major source of revenue? “Don’t go out of the city,” the magazine editor had said. “Be careful. I don’t want you to get killed doing this.” Five hours later, when she’d told him about the assignment, Jeremy had repeated the editor’s warning almost word for word.

  But she had other ideas. As long as the magazine was paying her travel expenses she might as well look around a bit. And if she could find out if the Russians were arming the guerrillas or not, well, that would be a major scoop, wouldn’t it? No one had seen the head of the Communist Party for months. There were rumors that he was dead, that he was with the guerrillas in the hills, that the party itself was about to be outlawed and that he had fled to Moscow. She laughed. Wouldn’t it be funny if the young man could get her an interview?

  She began to walk, stopping every so often to take notes or snap a picture. The morning was humid, a portent of the heat to come. Her blouse clung to her back. She passed fish stalls, beggars, a building of white marble big as a city block she supposed was a church, a used car lot, a section of the city gutted by fire. On the street, traffic had come to a standstill, and the smells of exhaust and asphalt mingled with that of fish and cinnamon. Cars honked furiously, as though that would get them moving again. The sidewalk had filled with people moving with a leisured grace. Silver bracelets and rings flashed in the sunlight. Once she came face to face with a man carrying a monkey on his shoulder, but he was gone before she could take his picture.

  She took a wrong turn somewhere and asked a few people in Lurqazi where the Gaudí Park was. No one, it seemed, had ever heard of it, but everyone wanted to talk to her, a long stream of Lurqazi she could not understand. She smiled and moved on, and looked at the map in the guide book. Most of the streets, she read, were unnamed, so the guide book had rather unimaginatively called them Street 1, Street 2 and so on. After a long time of walking she found the park and sat gratefully on a bench.

  The benches were wavy instead of straight, made of a mosaic of broken tile and topped with grotesque and fanciful figures. The park looked a little like Gaudí’s Guell Park in Barcelona, but with harsher colors, more adapted, she thought, to this country. She was trying to turn the thought into a caption for a photograph, and at the same time wondering about the structure on the other side of the park—was it a house? a sculpture of flame made of orange tile and brass?—when a small dirty boy sat on the bench next to her.

  “Cards?” he asked. “Buy a pack of cards?” He took a few torn and bent cards from his pocket and spread them out in the space between the two of them.

  “No thanks,” she said absently.

  “Very good buy,” he said, tapping one of the cards. It showed a man with a square, neatly trimmed beard framing a dark face. His eyes, large with beautiful lashes, seemed to stare at her from the card. He looked a little like Cumaq, the head of the Communist Party. No, she thought. You have Cumaq on the brain. “Very good,” the boy said insistently.

  “No,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “I can tell time by the sun,” the boy said suddenly. He bent his head way back, farther than necessary, she thought, to see the sun, and said gravely, “It is one o’clock.”

  She laughed and looked at her watch. It was 11:30. “Well, if it’s that late,” she said, “I have to go.” She got up and started over to the other side of the park.

  “I can get more cards!” the boy said, calling after her. “Newer. Better!”

  She got back to the hotel late in the evening. The overseas operator was busy, and she went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner. Back in her room she began to write. “Why Antonio Gaudí accepted the old silver baron’s commission in 1910 no one really knows, but the result—”

  The phone rang. It was Jeremy. “I love you,” they told each other, raising their voices above the wailing of a bad connection. “I miss you.”

  “Be careful,” Jeremy said. The phone howled.

  “I am,” she said.

  The young man was waiting for her outside the hotel the next morning. “I did it,” he said. “All arranged.” He pronounced “arranged” with three syllables.

  “You did what?” she asked.

  “The interview,” he said. “It is all arranged. For tomorrow.” />
  “Interview?”

  “The one you asked for,” he said gravely. “With Cumaq. The head of the Communist Party.”

  “You arranged it?” she said. “An interview?”

  “Yes,” he said. Was he starting to sound impatient? “You asked me to and I did it. Here.” He held out a piece of paper with something written on it. “For tomorrow. Ten o’clock.”

  She took the paper and read the ten or twelve lines of directions on it, what they had in this crazy place instead of addresses, she supposed. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to throw her arms around him and hug him. Could this slight young man really have gotten her an interview with the man everyone had been trying to find for the past six months? Or was it a hoax? Some kind of trap? She knew one thing: nothing was going to keep her from following the directions the next morning. “Thank you,” she said finally.

  He stood as if waiting for more. She opened her purse and gave him a five. He nodded and walked away.

  But that night, listening to the English news in her hotel room, she realized that there would be no interview, the next day or ever. “Government troops killed Communist Party head Cumaq and fifteen other people, alleged to be Communist Party members, in fighting in the Old Quarter yesterday,” the announcer said. “Acting on an anonymous tip the troops surrounded a building in the Old Quarter late last night. Everyone inside the building was killed, according to a government spokesman.”

  She threw her pen across the room in frustration. So that was it. No doubt the young man had heard about Cumaq’s death this morning on the Lurqazi broadcasts (But were there Lurqazi broadcasts? She had never heard one.) and had seen the opportunity to make some money off her. She thought of his earnest young face and began to get angry. So far he had sold her a sheet of poetry she couldn’t read and some completely useless information. If she saw him again tomorrow she would tell him to get lost.

  But he wasn’t in front of the hotel the next day. She went off to the Colonial House, built in layers of Spanish, English and Dutch architecture, one layer for each foreign occupation. The place had been given four stars by the guide book, but now it was nearly empty. As she walked through the cool, white stucco rooms, her feet clattering on the polished wooden floors, as she snapped pictures and took notes, she thought about the piece of paper, still in her purse, that he had given her. Should she follow the directions anyway and see where they led her? Probably they were as useless as everything else the young man had given her, they would lead her into a maze that would take her to the fish stalls or back to her hotel. But time was running out. Just ten more days, ten days until she had to go back, and she was no closer to the secret of the rebels. Maybe she should follow the directions after all.

  She got back to the hotel late in the afternoon, hot and tired and hungry. The young man was standing in the marble portico. She tried to brush past him but he stopped her. “Why were you not at the interview this morning?” he asked.

  She looked at him in disbelief. “The interview?” she said. “The man’s dead. How the hell could I have interviewed him? I mean, I know you don’t read the papers—hell, you probably don’t even have newspapers, just that poetry crap—but don’t you at least listen to the radio? They got him last night.”

  He drew himself up. He looked offended, mortally wounded, and at the same time faintly comic. She saw for the first time that he was trying to grow a mustache. “We,” he said, gesturing grandly, “are a nation of poets. That is why we read poetry instead of newspapers. For news we—”

  “You read poetry?” she said. All her anger was spilling out now; the slightest word from him could infuriate her. How dare he make a fool of her? “I’d like to see that. There’s ninety percent illiteracy in this country, did you know that?”

  “Those who can read read the poems to us,” he said. “And then we make up new poems. In our villages, late at night, after the planting has been done. We have no television. Television makes you lazy and stupid. I would have invited you to my village, to hear the poems. But no longer. You have not followed my directions.”

  “I didn’t follow your directions because the man was dead,” she said. “Can’t you understand that? Can’t you get that through your head? Dead. There wouldn’t have been much of an interview.”

  He was looking offended again. “Death is different in this country,” he said.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “You don’t have television and you don’t have death. That’s very clever. Someday you should tell me just how you—”

  “He will be there again tomorrow,” the young man said, and walked away.

  She felt faintly ridiculous, but she followed the directions he had given her the next day. She turned left at the statue, right at the building gutted by fire, left again at the large intersection. Maybe what the young man had been trying to tell her was that Cumaq was still alive, that he had somehow survived the shooting in the Old Quarter. But every major radio station, including those with Communist leanings, had reported Cumaq’s death. Well, maybe the Communists wanted everyone to think he was dead. But then why were they giving her this interview?

  The directions brought her to an old, sagging three-story building. The map in the guide book had lost her three turns back: according to the guide book the street she was standing on didn’t exist. But as near as she could tell she was nowhere near the Old Quarter. She shrugged and started up the wooden steps to the building. A board creaked ominously beneath her.

  She knocked on the door, knocked again when no one came. The door opened. She was not at all surprised to see the young man from the airport. Here’s where he beats me up and takes my traveller’s checks, she thought, but he motioned her in with broad gestures, grinning widely.

  “Ah, come in, come in,” he said. “It is important to be in the right place, no? Not in the wrong place.”

  She couldn’t think of any answer to this and shrugged instead. “Where is he?” she asked, stepping inside and trying to adjust her eyes to the dim light.

  “He is here,” he said. “Right in front of you.”

  Now she could see another man in a chair, and two men standing close behind him. She took a few steps forward. The man in the chair looked like all the pictures of Cumaq she had ever seen, the neat beard, the long eyelashes. Her heart started to beat faster and she ignored the peeling paint and spiderwebs on the walls, the boarded over windows, the plaster missing from the ceiling. She would get her scoop after all, and it was better than she ever thought it would be.

  The young man introduced her to Cumaq in Lurqazi. “How did you survive the shooting in the Old Quarter?” she asked the man in the chair.

  Cumaq turned his head toward her. He was wearing the same earring as the young man and the taxi driver at the airport, a gold five-pointed star. “He does not speak English,” the young man said. “I will translate.” He said something to Cumaq and Cumaq answered him.

  “He says,” the young man said, “that he did not survive. That he came back from the dead to be with us.”

  “But how?” she asked. Her frustration returned. The young man could be making up anything, anything at all. The man in the chair had no wounds that she could see. Could he be an imposter, not Cumaq after all? “What do you mean by coming back from the dead? I thought you people were Marxists. I thought you didn’t believe in life after death, things like that.”

  “We are mystical Marxists,” the young man translated.

  This was ridiculous. Suddenly she remembered her first travel assignment, covering the centenary of Karl Marx’s death. She had gone to Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetary in London and taken pictures of the solemn group of Chinese standing around the grave. A week later she had gone back, and the Chinese group—the same people? different people? the same uniforms, anyway—was still there. Now she imagined the group standing back, horrified, as a sound came from the tomb, the sound of Marx turning in his grave. “What on earth is a mystical Marxist?”

  Th
e man in the chair said two words. “Magicians,” the young man said. “Wizards.”

  She was not getting anywhere following this line of questioning. “Are the Russians giving you arms?” she asked. “Can you at least tell me that?”

  “What is necessary comes to us,” the young man said after Cumaq had finished.

  That sounded so much like something the young man would have said on his own that she couldn’t believe he was translating Cumaq faithfully. “But what is necessary comes—from the Russians?” she asked. She waited for the young man to translate.

  Cumaq shrugged.

  She sighed. “Can I take a picture?” she asked. “Show the world you’re still alive?”

  “No,” the young man said. “No pictures.”

  An hour later she was still not sure if she had a story. Cumaq—if it really was Cumaq—spoke for most of that time, mixing Marxist rhetoric about the poor downtrodden masses with a vague, almost fatalistic belief that the world was working on his side. “You see,” he said, “it is as Marx said. Our victory is inevitable. And our astrologers say the same thing.” She wondered what they made of him in Moscow, if he had ever been to Moscow.

  “You must go now,” the young man said. “He has been on a long journey. He must rest now.”

  “How about some proof?” she asked. “Some proof that he isn’t dead?”

  “He spoke to you,” the young man said. “That is proof enough, surely.”

  “No one will believe me,” she said. “I can’t sell this story anywhere without proof. A picture, or—”

  “No,” the young man said. “You must leave now.”

  She sighed and left.

  The next day she rented a car and drove to the beaches, took pictures of the white sand, the tropical blue water, the palm trees. The huge air-conditioned hotels facing the water were nearly empty, standing like monuments to a forgotten dynasty. In one the elevators didn’t run. In another the large plate glass window in the lobby had been broken and never replaced.