Travellers in Magic (2 page)

“That's me,” he said. Alison looked back at the photograph, trying to see this ancient man in the picture of the young boy. The shaking finger moved to another kid in the same picture. “And that's my brother Moishe.”

He looked down at her, uncertain. His face was flushed now, suffused with blood, a waxy yellow mixed with red. His eyes were vacant; something had gone out of them.

The clock sounded loud in the room. Finally he said, “Which one are you?”

“What?”

“Which one of these are you? You're one of the cousins, aren't you?”

“No, I'm—I'm Alison—”

“Alice? I don't know an Alice. That's me in that picture there, and that's my brother Moishe. Or did I already tell you that?”

Should she tell him? She was unused to dealing with old people; all her grandparents had died in the war. But just then he seemed to pull himself together, to concentrate; she could see the man he used to be before he got old.

“Moishe played the trombone—it was a way of getting out of the army in Russia. If you played an instrument you could be in the marching band. He played for anyone, Moishe did, any army in the world. He didn't care. The only army he ever quit was the White Russians. You know why?”

Alison shook her head.

“Because they made their band march in front of them in the war,” the old man said. He laughed loudly.

Alison laughed too. “What happened to him?”

The old man started to cough.

“Hi, Alison,” Laura said. Alison turned; she hadn't heard Laura come in. “Let's go to my room. I got a new record yesterday.”

As they walked up the stairs Laura said, “God, he's embarrassing. Sometimes he calls my mother by her maiden name—he thinks she's still a kid. My dad wants to put him in a nursing home but she won't let him. I hope he didn't bother you too much.”

“No,” Alison said. She felt something she couldn't name, a feeling like longing. “He's okay.”

She didn't get a chance to go back to the park for another week, until Friday. Laura had remained firm about not wanting to meet Alfred. But when she finally got there she couldn't see him anywhere. Her heart sank. Why had she listened to Laura? Why hadn't she insisted?

No, wait—there he was, sitting on the same bench, his head tilted back toward the sun. He looked thin, frail, even more transparent than the first time she'd seen him. She hurried toward him.

He opened his eyes and smiled. “Here she is—the child without a name,” he said. “I was afraid you would not come again. I thought your mother might have told you not to talk to me.”

“She doesn't know,” Alison said.

“Ah. You should not keep secrets from your mother, you know that. But if you do, you should make sure that they are good ones.”

Alison laughed. “Got any candy?”

“No, no candy.” He looked around him, seeming to realize only then where he was. “Do you want to take a walk?”

“Sure.”

He stood and they went down a shaded path. Alison shuffled through the fallen leaves; she wondered how Alfred managed to walk so quietly. Ahead of them, where the path came out into the sun, she saw a man with an ice cream cart, and she thought for a moment that Alfred might have intended to buy her a sweet after all. But they passed the cart without stopping, and she realized, ashamed, that he probably didn't have much money. “Do you want some ice cream?” she asked.

He laughed. “Thank you, no. I eat very little these days.”

The path fell back into shade again. At the end of the path stood the old broken carousel, with a chain-link fence around it so that children could not play on it. Alfred stood and looked at it for a long time. “I made something like this once,” he said.

“Really? Carousel animals?”

“No, not the animals. The—what do you call it? The mechanism that makes the thing go around.” He moved his hand in a slow circle to demonstrate.

“Could you fix this?”

“Could I?” He looked at the carousel for a long time, studying the tilting floor, the cracked and leaning animals, the proud horse on which someone had carved “Freddy & Janet.” Dirt and cobwebs had dulled the animals' paint. “How long has it been broken?”

“I don't know. It's been like this since I started coming to the park.”

“I think I can fix it, yeah,” he said. He pronounced it “Yah,” just like her parents. “Yah, probably I could. Mostly I made large figures that moved. A king and a queen who came out like this—” he moved his hands together “—and kissed. And a magician who opened a box, and there was nothing inside it, and then he closed it, and opened it again, and there was a dove that flew away. I made that one for the Kaiser. Do you know who the Kaiser was?”

She shook her head.

“He was the king. The king of Germany.”

“Did you have any kids?” she asked, thinking how great it would be to have a father like this man, and remembering the photograph of the two children in his watch. But almost immediately she wished she hadn't said anything. What if his children had died in the war, like so many of her parents' relatives?

“I did, yah,” he said. “A boy and a girl. I wanted them to take over the business when I retired. It was a funny thing, though—they didn't want to.”

“They were nuts,” Alison said. “I would have done it in a minute.”

“Ah, but you would have needed more than an interest in the figures. You would have had to understand electricity, and how the mechanisms work, and mathematics.… Both my children were terrible at mathematics.”

She was terrible at mathematics too. But she thought that if she had been given a chance at the kind of work Alfred did she would have studied until she understood everything there was to know.

She could almost see his workshop in front of her, the gears and chains and hinges, the tall wooden cabinets filled with hands and silver hair, tin stars, carved dogs and trumpets. The king and queen lay on their sides like fallen wooden angels, wearing robes of silk and gauze, and wooden crowns with gaudy paste jewels. The bird hung from the ceiling, waiting for its place inside the magician's box. All around Alfred apprentices were cutting into wood, or doing something incomprehensible with pieces of machinery. She thought that she could even smell the wood; it had the elusive scent of great trees, like a forest from a childhood fairy tale.

She turned back to Alfred. What had happened? The day had grown cold; she saw the sun set through the trees, dazzling her vision. “I've got to go home,” she said. “I'll be late for dinner.”

“Oh. I hope I have not bored you terribly. I don't get much of a chance to talk.”

“No,” she said. “Oh, no.”

She hurried down the path, shivering in the first real cold of the year. Once she looked back but Alfred had vanished among the shadows of the trees and the carousel.

Her parents and Joey were already eating dinner when she got home. “Where do you go on Fridays?” her mother said as she sat down. “Doesn't Laura have her Girl Scout meeting today?”

“I don't go anywhere,” Alison said.

“You know you're not supposed to be late for dinner. And what about your homework?”

“Come on, Mom—it's Friday.”

“That's right, it's Friday. Remember how long it took you to do your math homework last week? If you start now you'll have it done on time.”

“We didn't get very much. I can do the whole thing on Sunday.”

“Can you? I want to see it after dinner.”

Her father looked at her mother. Sometimes Alison thought her father might be on her side in the frequent arguments she had with her mother, but that he didn't feel he had the right to interrupt. Now he laughed and said to her mother, “What would you know about math homework? You told me you didn't understand anything past addition and subtraction.”

“Well, then, you look at it,” her mother said. “I want to make sure she gets it done this time. And maybe you can ask her where she goes after school. I don't think she's telling me the truth.”

Alison looked down at her plate. What did her mother know? Sometimes she made shrewd guesses based on no evidence at all. She said nothing.

“Mrs. Smith says she saw you talking to an old man in the park,” her mother said.

Alison didn't look up. Didn't Mrs. Smith have anything better to do than spy on everyone in the neighborhood?

“When I was your age I knew enough not to talk to strangers,” her mother said. “The Gestapo came after my father—did I ever tell you that?”

Alison nodded miserably. She didn't want to hear the story again.

“They came to our house in Germany and asked for my father,” her mother said. “I was twelve or thirteen then, just about your age. This was before they started sending Jews to the camps without a reason, and someone had overheard my father say something treasonous about Hitler. My mother said my father wasn't home.

“But he was home—he was up in the attic, hiding. What do you think would have happened if I'd talked to the Gestapo the way you talk to this man in the park? If I'd said, ‘Oh, yes, Officer, he's up in the attic'? I was only twelve and I knew enough not to say anything. You kids are so stupid, so pampered, living here.”

It wasn't the same thing, Alison thought, realizing it for the first time. Germany and the United States weren't the same countries. And Alfred had been in the camps too; he and her mother were on the same side. But she felt the weight of her mother's experience and couldn't say anything. Her mother had seen so much more than she had, after all.

“We escaped to Holland, stayed with relatives,” her mother said. “And eight years later the Nazis invaded Holland and took us to concentration camps. My father worked for a while as an electrician, but finally he died of typhus. All of that, and he died anyway.”

Her mother's voice held the bitterness Alison had heard all her life. Now she sighed and shook her head. Alison wanted to do something for her, to make everything all right. But what could she do, after all? She was only twelve.

She took the bus back to the park the next day. Alfred sat on his usual bench, his eyes closed and turned toward the sun. She dropped down on the bench next to him.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

He opened his eyes slowly, as if uncertain where he was. Then he smiled. “You look sad,” he said. “Did something happen?”

“Yeah. My mother doesn't want me to talk to you anymore.”

“Why not?”

This was tricky. She couldn't say that her mother had compared him to the Gestapo. She couldn't talk about the camps at all with him; she never wanted to hear that note of bitterness and defeat come into his voice. Alfred was hers, her escape from the fears and sadness she had lived with all her life. He had nothing to do with what went on between Alison and her mother.

He was looking at her with curiosity and concern now, expecting her to say something. “It's not you. She doesn't trust most people,” Alison said.

“Do you know why?”

“Yeah.” His eyes were deep brown, she noticed, like hers, like her mother's. Why not tell him, after all? “She—she has a number on her arm. Like yours.”

He nodded.

“And she—well, she went through a bad time, I guess.” It felt strange to think of her mother as a kid. “She said last night the Gestapo came after her father when she was my age. She said he had to hide in the attic.”

To her surprise Alfred started to nod. “I bet it was crowded in that attic too. Boxes and boxes of junk—I bet they never threw anything away. Probably hot too. But then who knew that someday someone would have to hide in it?”

At first his words made no sense whatsoever. Then she said, slowly, “You're him, aren't you? You're her father. My—my grandfather.” The unfamiliar word felt strange on her tongue.

“What?” He seemed to rouse himself. “Your grandfather? I'm a crazy old man you met in the park.”

“She said he died. You died. You're a ghost.” She was whispering now. Chills kept coming up her spine, wave after wave of them. The sun looked cold and very far away.

He laughed. “A ghost? Is that what you think I am?”

She nodded reluctantly, not at all certain now.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You're right about your mother—she went through a bad time. And it's hard for her to understand you, to understand what you're going through. Sometimes she's jealous of you.”

“Jealous?”

“Sure, jealous. You never had to distrust people, or hide from them. You never went hungry, or saw anyone you loved killed. She thinks it's easy for you—she doesn't understand that you have problems too.”

“She called me stupid. She said I would have talked to the Gestapo, would have told them where my father was. But I never would have done that.”

“No. It was unfair of her to say that. She wants you to think of the world the way she does, as an unsafe place. But you have to make up your own mind about what the world is like.”

She was nodding even before he had finished. “Yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought, only I couldn't say it. Because she's been through so much more than I have, so everything she thinks seems so important. I couldn't tell her that what happens to me is important too.”

“No, and you might never be able to tell her. But you'll know it, and I'll know it too.”

“What was your father's name?” Alison asked her mother that night at dinner. Joey stopped eating and gave her a pleading look; he was old enough to know that she was taking the conversation in a dangerous direction.

“Alfred,” her mother said. “Why do you ask?”

There were probably a lot of old men named Alfred running around. Did she only think he was her grandfather because she wanted what Laura had, wanted someone to tell her family stories, to connect her with her past?