The top of her head was smooth and blank. In the mirror I saw her faded eyes, her flat, painted eyebrows. Her nose was little and hard. With a sigh she stood up. Wearily she drew the black dress over her head, revealing a black half-slip and a black bra. “Olivia,” I said, “that’s enough now, enough, enough now,” and somewhere I heard a footstep creaking on a stair. “Olivia,” I said, but already she was removing her half-slip, already she was stepping out of her underpants, unhooking her black bra. Her breasts were smooth and flattish and without nipples. Wearily she slipped out of her cluster of pubic curls, leaving herself smooth and hard. “Tn,” she said, and stood stiffly there. “What,” I said, “what did you say.” Her limbs shimmered in the lamplight. One arm was held out as if to be offered to someone crossing the street. The masked wig stand looked at me.
“Olivia?” I said, reaching out a hand but not moving. I felt that if only I could return to the meandering hallways then perhaps I might begin all over again, but behind me I heard a clattering, the door began to shake, all at once it sprang open.
Huffing and puffing, taking deep exaggerated breaths, holding one hand over his chest, Orville entered. “So there”—pause for gasping—“you”—pause for gasping—“are!” His running shoes were covered with wood shavings. He strode over to Olivia, picked her up by the elbows, and laid her against the reading chair like an old lamp. And indeed she had begun to resemble an old standing lamp, with a dull brass base and three light sockets with burned-out bulbs. “That’s all, then,” he said. “We won’t be needing this anymore.” He went over to the table and removed the oval mirror, leaning it against a wall of books. He went to the casement window and slipped off one of the hinged frames. A brisk wind blew into the room, fluttering the hair of the wig stand, knocking over a glass vial. Orville laid the hinged frame against the mirror. He looked about, strode up to a wall, and began pushing against the shelves. The walls began to move back and forth, I could feel the tower trembling. “Stop that!” I said. In rage he turned to me and stamped his foot, which plunged through the floor. Splinters flew; puffs of dust rose up. “I hope you’re satisfied!” he cried. He looked at me with hatred as I turned to the door. It seemed to have grown smaller—I could barely squeeze my way through.
I hurried down the turning wooden stairs, which seemed to be swaying under my footsteps. Above me I heard sounds as of ripping and muffled thumping. I came to a landing, I flung myself down the steps to another landing—and as I descended, the landings seemed to rise faster and faster to meet me. I stepped into a pile of shavings, climbed over a threshold that came up to my knees, clattered down a flimsy flight of splintery steps, emerged in a hall. As I hurried along I could hear bits of plaster falling with the delicate sound of spilled sugar. Other hallways branched from the hall, and I must have made a wrong turn somehow, for I could not find the carpeted stairway going down. Ahead of me in the darkness I saw a line of light under a door. I felt a sudden need to say farewell to her room, and when I came up to it I pushed lightly against the door. It swung briskly inward and clattered against the wall. In a big bed an old woman with streaming white hair stared at me over the tops of her reading glasses. Her mouth was large and brightly lipsticked. Her hand gripped the top of her nightdress and her mouth was opening wider and wider as I shut the door and rushed on. The floor was trembling slightly, bits of plaster struck my arms, and I noticed that the corridor was lined with pieces of furniture: a small table, a wing chair, a grandfather clock. The furniture began to collect more thickly and jut into the hall, so that it was necessary for me to squeeze between sharp edges and climb over the arms of old stuffed chairs, as in certain dreams, terrible dreams, where you—Somewhere I heard a sound of shattering glass. I was wondering whether to turn back when the hall ended in a small door no higher than my knees. I knelt down and tried to peer through the tiny keyhole, then pushed the door open and scraped my way through.
I found myself in what appeared to be a low storage space. My hand pressed into something soft and rubbery that gave a wheezing squeak. I snatched my hand away and brushed against a shape that began to fall over, giving a soft “Waaa.” Something poked up before me and I felt the cold top of a ladder, rising through a trap door. I swung my leg through the opening and began to climb down. Cloth rose up on all sides of me, it was as though I were sinking helplessly into a morass of thick, yielding folds—and half drowning in that mass of musty perfumed dresses I made my way down to the floor of a closet. There I thrust my way through clutching sleeves and buckles to a door that opened onto a hall.
In the branching corridors I turned left and right while plaster fell from the trembling walls. Behind me a picture struck the floor sharply, like the blade of a guillotine. I came to a door, pulled it open, and entered the dark kitchen. In the black dishrack a pointed black party hat sat upside down in the silverware box. I hurried through a door and found myself in the lamplit room of couches and armchairs, deserted except for a tired-looking woman with gray hair pulled back tight who was picking up teacups and glasses. Without looking up at me, she handed me a small wooden bowl containing a few peanut halves lying among glistening brown skins. I carried the bowl into the next room. Everyone had left, the room was nearly dark. Black furniture loomed against the night-blue windows. On the dark-gleaming piano bench I placed the bowl beside an abandoned mask. I tore off my mask and knocked my leg against a sharp corner as I hurried through the room and out into the front hall. Heavy pieces of plaster were falling, I could feel a fine dust sifting down. Somewhere above I heard a loud snap or crack. Before me the coat tree began to fall slowly, dreamily, landing with a muffled thud among its coats. I stepped over it, fumbled at the front door, and ran out onto the porch. One of the thick corner-posts appeared to be buckling. I ran down the stone steps onto a flagstone path, where I leaped over something that might have been a cat, and as I escaped from the collapsing house into the ruined garden, which was already wavering and dissolving under a rushing sky, it seemed to me that if only I could remain calm remain calm remain calm then I might be able to imagine what would happen to me next.
EISENHEIM THE ILLUSIONIST
In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished as never before. In obscure villages of Moravia and Galicia, from the Istrian peninsula to the mists of Bukovina, bearded and black-caped magicians in market squares astonished townspeople by drawing streams of dazzling silk handkerchiefs from empty paper cones, removing billiard balls from children’s ears, and throwing into the air decks of cards that assumed the shapes of fountains, snakes, and angels before returning to the hand. In cities and larger towns, from Zagreb to Lvov, from Budapest to Vienna, on the stages of opera houses, town halls, and magic theaters, traveling conjurers equipped with the latest apparatus enchanted sophisticated audiences with elaborate stage illusions. It was the age of levitations and decapitations, of ghostly apparitions and sudden vanishings, as if the tottering Empire were revealing through the medium of its magicians its secret desire for annihilation. Among the remarkable conjurers of that time, none achieved the heights of illusion attained by Eisenheim, whose enigmatic final performance was viewed by some as a triumph of the magician’s art, by others as a fateful sign.
Eisenheim, né Eduard Abramowitz, was born in Bratislava in 1859 or 1860. Little is known of his early years, or indeed of his entire life outside the realm of illusion. For the scant facts we are obliged to rely on the dubious memoirs of magicians, on comments in contemporary newspaper stories and trade periodicals, on promotional material and brochures for magic acts; here and there the diary entry of a countess or ambassador records attendance at a performance in Paris, Cracow, Vienna. Eisenheim’s father was a highly respected cabinetmaker, whose ornamental gilt cupboards and skilfully carved lowboys with lion-paw feet and brass handles shaped like snarling lions graced the halls of the gentry of Bratislava. The boy was the eldest of four childr
en; like many Bratislavan Jews, the family spoke German and called their city Pressburg, although they understood as much Slovak and Magyar as was necessary for the proper conduct of business. Eduard went to work early in his father’s shop. For the rest of his life he would retain a fondness for smooth pieces of wood joined seamlessly by mortise and tenon. By the age of seventeen he was himself a skilled cabinetmaker, a fact noted more than once by fellow magicians who admired Eisenheim’s skill in constructing trick cabinets of breathtaking ingenuity. The young craftsman was already a passionate amateur magician, who is said to have entertained family and friends with card sleights and a disappearing-ring trick that required a small beechwood box of his own construction. He would place a borrowed ring inside, fasten the box tightly with twine, and quietly remove the ring as he handed the box to a spectator. The beechwood box, with its secret panel, was able to withstand the most minute examination.
A chance encounter with a traveling magician is said to have been the cause of Eisenheim’s lifelong passion for magic. The story goes that one day, returning from school, the boy saw a man in black sitting under a plane tree. The man called him over and lazily, indifferently, removed from the boy’s ear first one coin and then another, and then a third, coin after coin, a whole handful of coins, which suddenly turned into a bunch of red roses. From the roses the man in black drew out a white billiard ball, which turned into a wooden flute that suddenly vanished. One version of the story adds that the man himself then vanished, along with the plane tree. Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams, but in this case it is reasonable to suppose that the future master had been profoundly affected by some early experience of conjuring. Eduard had once seen a magic shop, without much interest; he now returned with passion. On dark winter mornings on the way to school he would remove his gloves to practice manipulating balls and coins with chilled fingers in the pockets of his coat. He enchanted his three sisters with intricate shadowgraphs representing Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel, American buffalos and Indians, the golem of Prague. Later a local conjurer called Ignazc Molnar taught him juggling for the sake of coordinating movements of the eye and hand. Once, on a dare, the thirteen-year-old boy carried an egg on a soda straw all the way to Bratislava Castle and back. Much later, when all this was far behind him, the Master would be sitting gloomily in the corner of a Viennese apartment where a party was being held in his honor, and reaching up wearily he would startle his hostess by producing from the air five billiard balls that he proceeded to juggle flawlessly.
But who can unravel the mystery of the passion that infects an entire life, bending it away from its former course in one irrevocable swerve? Abramowitz seems to have accepted his fate slowly. It was as if he kept trying to evade the disturbing knowledge of his difference. At the age of twenty-four he was still an expert cabinetmaker who did occasional parlor tricks.
As if suddenly, Eisenheim appeared at a theater in Vienna and began his exhilarating and fatal career. The brilliant newcomer was twenty-eight years old. In fact, contemporary records show that the cabinetmaker from Bratislava had appeared in private performances for at least a year before moving to the Austrian capital. Although the years preceding the first private performances remain mysterious, it is clear that Abramowitz gradually shifted his attention more and more fully to magic, by way of the trick chests and cabinets that he had begun to supply to local magicians. Eisenheim’s nature was like that: he proceeded slowly and cautiously, step by step, and then, as if he had earned the right to be daring, he would take a sudden leap.
The first public performances were noted less for their daring than for their subtle mastery of the stage illusions of the day, although even then there were artful twists and variations. One of Eisenheim’s early successes was The Mysterious Orange Tree, a feat made famous by Robert-Houdin. A borrowed handkerchief was placed in a small box and handed to a member of the audience. An assistant strode onto the stage, bearing in his arms a small green orange tree in a box. He placed the box on the magician’s table and stepped away. At a word from Eisenheim, accompanied by a pass of his wand, blossoms began to appear on the tree. A moment later, oranges began to emerge; Eisenheim plucked several and handed them to members of the audience. Suddenly two butterflies rose from the leaves, carrying a handkerchief. The spectator, opening his box, discovered that his handkerchief had disappeared; somehow the butterflies had found it in the tree. The illusion depended on two separate deceptions: the mechanical tree itself, which produced real flowers, real fruit, and mechanical butterflies by means of concealed mechanisms; and the removal of the handkerchief from the trick box as it was handed to the spectator. Eisenheim quickly developed a variation that proved popular: the tree grew larger each time he covered it with a red silk cloth, the branches produced oranges, apples, pears, and plums, at the end a whole flock of colorful, real butterflies rose up and fluttered over the audience, where children screamed with delight as they reached up to snatch the delicate silken shapes, and at last, under a black velvet cloth that was suddenly lifted, the tree was transformed into a bird-cage containing the missing handkerchief.
At this period, Eisenheim wore the traditional silk hat, frock coat, and cape and performed with an ebony wand tipped with ivory. The one distinctive note was his pair of black gloves. He began each performance by stepping swiftly through the closed curtains onto the stage apron, removing the gloves, and tossing them into the air, where they turned into a pair of sleek ravens.
Early critics were quick to note the young magician’s interest in uncanny effects, as in his popular Phantom Portrait. On a darkened stage, a large blank canvas was illuminated by limelight. As Eisenheim made passes with his right hand, the white canvas gradually and mysteriously gave birth to a brighter and brighter painting. Now, it is well known among magicians and mediums that a canvas of unbleached muslin may be painted with chemical solutions that appear invisible when dry; if sulphate of iron is used for blue, nitrate of bismuth for yellow, and copper sulphate for brown, the picture will appear if sprayed with a weak solution of prussiate of potash. An atomizer, concealed in the conjurer’s sleeve, gradually brings out the invisible portrait. Eisenheim increased the mysterious effect by producing full-length portraits that began to exhibit lifelike movements of the eyes and lips. The fiendish portrait of an archduke, or a devil, or Eisenheim himself would then read the contents of sealed envelopes, before vanishing at a pass of the magician’s wand.
However skilful, a conjurer cannot earn and sustain a major reputation without producing original feats of his own devising. It was clear that the restless young magician would not be content with producing clever variations of familiar tricks, and by 1890 his performances regularly concluded with an illusion of striking originality. A large mirror in a carved frame stood on the stage, facing the audience. A spectator was invited onto the stage, where he was asked to walk around the mirror and examine it to his satisfaction. Eisenheim then asked the spectator to don a hooded red robe and positioned him some ten feet from the mirror, where the vivid red reflection was clearly visible to the audience; the theater was darkened, except for a brightening light that came from within the mirror itself. As the spectator waved his robed arms about, and bowed to his bowing reflection, and leaned from side to side, his reflection began to show signs of disobedience—it crossed its arms over its chest instead of waving them about, it refused to bow. Suddenly the reflection grimaced, removed a knife, and stabbed itself in the chest. The reflection collapsed onto the reflected floor. Now a ghostlike white form rose from the dead reflection and hovered in the mirror; all at once the ghost emerged from the glass, floated toward the startled and sometimes terrified spectator, and at the bidding of Eisenheim rose into the dark and vanished. This masterful illusion mystified even professional magicians, who agreed only that the mirror was a trick cabinet with black-lined doors at the rear and a hidden assistant. The lights were probably concealed in the frame between the glass and
the lightly silvered back; as the lights grew brighter the mirror became transparent and a red-robed assistant showed himself in the glass. The ghost was more difficult to explain, despite a long tradition of stage ghosts; it was said that concealed magic lanterns produced the phantom, but no other magician was able to imitate the effect. Even in these early years, before Eisenheim achieved disturbing effects unheard of in the history of stage magic, there was a touch of the uncanny about his illusions; and some said even then that Eisenheim was not a showman at all, but a wizard who had sold his soul to the devil in return for unholy powers.
The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series) Page 21