The Magician’s Shadow

 

It is half past ten on Saturday night and I am alone in the living room of the run-down terrace house in Surry Hills that I live in. Belinda is spending the weekend at her boyfriend’s flat again and Natalia has gone out. The sickly orange light from the Chinese paper lampshade fills the room with a nervous, aimless energy. My over-stimulated retinas conjure slow-moving, oddly-shaped creatures in the shadows, like black-and-white photos developing in a darkroom. In the background Natalia’s red Philips cassette deck plays the Cowboy Junkies, but tonight the plaintive voice fails to stir my numbness.

On the roughly-painted coffee table there’s a two-day-old issue of the Sydney Morning Herald. I pick it up with little enthusiasm: Sydney’s selection as the host city of the 2000 Olympics is still dominating the headlines. I flip through a few pages, then toss it back. I walk to the portable black-and-white television, switch it on and turn the dial, going through all five channels in quick succession: there is nothing worth watching. The only readily-edible food in the fridge is Natalia’s tube of condensed milk; she sucks it straight out of the tube. I bring it to my lips and squeeze lightly, careful not to leave traces of my transgression. The sweetness overwhelms my taste buds for a few seconds, alleviating my boredom.

The sound of a key in the front door quickens my heartbeat. I pick up the Stendhal novel I was planning to read and place it on my lap, open at a random page. Natalia walks in. It is not yet eleven—a bit early to be returning home from a promising second date.

“Oh, hi,” she says, looking startled. “I didn’t realise you were sitting there.”

“So how was it?” I ask.

“It was all right,” she says, extending the last syllable.

“Did you have another near-sex experience?” I ask.

She looks into my eyes and laughs, her teeth dazzling against her red lips. “You’ve got such a way with words.” She slowly shakes her head.

Natalia is handsome rather than pretty, with strong eyebrows and lively dark eyes which can be somewhat unsettling, like those of a village woman in an old Italian film. Her body is already losing some of its firmness before it has borne a child, like an overripe fruit wasting slowly on the vine.

Once I asked how old she was, and she waved me off with mock coquettishness: “You never ask a lady her age.” Then one day, alone in the house, I couldn’t help myself. I saw she had left a filled-out form on her desk and sneaked into her bedroom to take a look. Hovering above the mess of books and notes I found her date of birth in the research grant application: she was thirty-five. Like me she was alone, thousands of miles away from her family and doing work she didn’t really like. I was only twenty-nine, though—still hoping to grow up.

“I’ve still got some wine left,” says Natalia. “That guy drank only beer.”

She pulls out a half-full bottle of Shiraz. We drink it together in non-matching coffee cups.

When the wine is gone Natalia says: “I might go to bed now. I’m going to play tennis tomorrow morning.”

I also go to my bedroom. Before sleeping, I pull a two-year-old issue of Penthouse from under the mattress. The airbrushed blonde model smiles at me like an old friend.

 

Natalia’s father was a Greek-Australian communist who was sent by the Party to study at the University of Cracow in the early 1950s. He was an idealist, a believer who kept his faith in the possibility of a socialist utopia even when it became evident that the communist governments of the Eastern Bloc were merely despotic bureaucracies ruthlessly clinging to power. In Cracow he married Natalia’s mother, a Polish fellow student, and they returned to Perth together.

Natalia was their only child. When she was in her mid-twenties she got engaged, and then the troubles started. Her fiancé’s Greek parents took it for granted that the wedding would take place at a Greek Orthodox church. As a staunch atheist, Natalia’s father had not had her baptised; seeing her baptised now and getting married in church would have been too much to bear. Not only did the conservative forces with their Orthodox priest allies defeat the Communists in the bitter civil war that had torn Greece apart after the Second World War, but now his only child was going to defect to their side. Natalia soon found herself torn by the conflicting ultimatums of her father and her fiancé’s family. Eventually the wedding was called off, and Natalia moved to Sydney.

I can still discern in her the lingering traces of her father’s beliefs: she would turn the television volume down whenever the commercials were on, her only bank account was with a credit union, and she would only buy her clothes at op shops, shunning consumer society. Despite her unconventional upbringing I can also see some residual influence of patriarchal Greek society. She once told me her fantasy about being raped: a dark-haired man with blurred facial features and the muscly body of a labourer has his way with her. The faint odour of his sweat permeates her nostrils. There is no brutality; the threat of violence is only implicit in his determined movements, in the weight of his body. I was puzzled at first, and then I understood: it offered her the possibility of sex without guilt.

If ceding control is what women really want, I thought to myself, no wonder I am alone. Two years earlier my ex-girlfriend had dumped me for another guy. She was breathtakingly beautiful, and self-absorbed to the point of seeming mildly autistic. My life had reached a standstill at the time; I had decided against trying to forge an academic career, but did not know what I should do instead. Her beauty propped my sense of self-worth, and when she left me it collapsed like a house of cards. I felt like a sacrificial victim at the hands of Aztec priests wielding obsidian knives. I then spent two arid years trying to even the score by finding an even more attractive girlfriend. My shattered confidence precluded me from getting closer to those that I desired, and when a less attractive woman approached me I became a Groucho Marx, refusing to join a club that would accept me as a member. That childish obsession with perfect looks, I realised, exasperated with myself, was still inhibiting me, preventing me from moving forward from my constant flirting with Natalia and into a proper relationship.

 

When I awake the next morning it is almost eleven. I’m alone in the house. The milk bar down the back lane is closed on Sundays, so I can only have black coffee for breakfast. Luckily I am not very hungry.

When Natalia finally returns from her tennis match I ask if she wants to have an early lunch at Café Casablanca, a little Moroccan restaurant up the road owned by a French-speaking lesbian couple—one of them pretty and outgoing, the other plain and sour. I walk up the street half a step ahead of Natalia. When I lift my right arm slightly our foreshortened shadows on the footpath appear to be holding hands.

“Oh, hi!” says the pretty co-owner when she sees Natalia, kissing her on both cheeks. She smiles pleasantly to me as well, but something tells me I shouldn’t try to exchange kisses.

We order a couscous royal for two. The restaurant owner keeps flirting with Natalia, and in the warm glow of her attention, Natalia’s face, framed by her long dark hair, acquires a stirring beauty, epiphanous and yet oddly familiar. My heartbeat quickens. If she is so beautiful in her way, then what is preventing me from trying to start a relationship with her? Could it be her ticking biological clock and the fact that we are already living in the same house?

The couscous arrives. Maybe these are all just excuses. Maybe there’s something else. I hesitate. Then I suddenly find myself telling Natalia about my childhood in Israel and about how I first met the Magician.

 

Memory first brings back the texture and the light. The rasping coarse sand finish of the stucco walls of the block of flats I grew up in, and the harsh Mediterranean light mercilessly exposing its imperfections: hairline cracks, bruises caused by soccer balls and bicycle tyres and—only a few years after the building’s construction—dark grey stains caused by leaded petrol fumes. This relentless light retained its intensity day after day from April until October, when clouds bearing the first rain of autumn would finally soften it. Then the smells come alive: cooking gas slowly leaking from the tall cylinders brought to our backyard by AmIsraGas trucks, the pungent smell of street cat urine.

Our street was made up of ten or so similar three-storey blocks of flats, built in the late sixties and early seventies using concrete blocks and cheap Palestinian labour. There were the first touches of modest luxury unknown to our grandparents’ generation: the second toilet inside the flats, the single family car parked outside. At the end of the street was a single freestanding house, built in the forties when our suburb was still a little rural settlement with poor road access to Tel Aviv. In its backyard was one remaining greenhouse where gerberas were still grown as a bit of cottage industry, almost a hobby.

School would finish at one o’clock—twelve o’clock for Year One students—and in the early afternoon the neighbourhood children, dressed in striped T-shirts, denim shorts and leather sandals, would converge at our car park, which was almost empty at this time of day. Most of the time we played soccer or a crude form of baseball—using a tennis ball and stick. There was little else to do. The only television channel was the government station, broadcasting in black-and-white without commercials. After allowing for educational programs, news and documentaries with Arabic subtitles about new tomato-growing methods, there was very little time left for any children’s programs.

The two best players selected the teams for the soccer and the bat-and-ball games. Each selected one child at a time in an attempt to keep the teams evenly matched. I was a bookworm, a dreamer, spending my afternoons reading encyclopedia articles about the Inca empire and fiddling with my chemistry set. When I joined the neighbourhood children, I was invariably one of the last to be picked, ahead of only one or two seven- or eight-year-olds with dripping noses.

The best player by far was Nissim, a tall overweight boy almost a year older than me who already had the shadow of a moustache on his upper lip. “He looks like an Arab, but we love him,” his mother told my mother when he was still a toddler. His family were Turkish Jews, descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. At home they mostly spoke Ladino, a medieval Spanish dialect sprinkled with Hebrew words. His father affected the mannerisms of a Levantine effendi. His ample stomach preceding him, he always walked two or three steps ahead of his wife, sometimes holding amber prayer beads in his hand. The mother was obese, with a soft, downtrodden look. Nissim’s father had forbidden her to take driving lessons. Once my mother helped her fill out a medical insurance form, and she showed up at our flat the following day with a cake and a poem she had written in Turkish. My mother asked a Turkish-speaking acquaintance to translate it: the poem described my mother as an emerald.

One late summer afternoon we were playing our bat-and-ball game. The worst part of the day’s heat was behind us, but the asphalt was still warm and little pearls of sweat formed on our foreheads. Nissim belted the ball down the entire length of the car park, across the street and over the neatly trimmed lantana hedge encircling the next building. As the other team frantically searched for the ball in the hedge, our team clocked home runs one after the other. Running around the car park, I was filled with joy at being part of the victory, although I knew it was achieved solely through Nissim’s ability. When one of the other team finally retrieved the ball and threw it listlessly towards the home base, we were already leading by an unassailable margin. Disheartened, they sat on the low concrete-and-stone wall flanking the entrance to the car park. We joined them. Nobody uttered a word. I was exhausted all of a sudden. Time stood still, in the way it sometimes does in childhood, when you think that life is a place rather than a road, before you realise that everything—including life itself—will eventually pass.

“Look, here’s the Magician!” cried Nissim suddenly. He was looking at a balding, overweight man who was heading down the street towards us.

“Is he a real magician?” I asked. He didn’t really look the part.

“Yes, I saw him at my friend’s birthday party. He was amazing! He had a child as his assistant and he pulled a rabbit out of that boy’s top hat!”

Nissim rose and ran towards the Magician. I followed more slowly, keeping a safe distance. I watched Nissim and the Magician talking to each other, but I could not hear the conversation. I noticed the Magician looking in my direction, then saying something to Nissim.

“Hey, come over!” shouted Nissim, beckoning. He dismissed my hesitation with an impatient look. I gingerly approached them.

Nissim turned to me. “The Magician wants to teach us magic so we can become his assistants and perform with him at birthday parties!”

I couldn’t believe my luck. I visualised standing on a stage and letting pigeons fly out of my outstretched palm, greeted by thundering applause and admiring, envious eyes. I looked at the Magician.

He had flimsy, light brown hair pasted on his sunspot-covered pate, his lips drawn together under his limp moustache. His watery blue eyes had a piercing, unsettling look, as if trying to examine me: was I magician material?

Suddenly he smiled, exposing small, even, white teeth. “I think both of you will do well,” he said. “How about you come to my place on Wednesday at four o’clock?”

 

At home my father was lying on the sofa in shorts and a singlet, listening to the radio, his face turned away from me. The announcer said something about Henry Kissinger and the Sinai Disengagement Agreement. I went to the kitchen to look for my mother. For some reason she didn’t seem to like the idea of me taking magic lessons.

“I think I’ve heard of that guy. He works as a chef for a catering company and also performs as a magician on weekends.” A light frown clouded her forehead. Her eyes narrowed. I could see two small images of me reflected in the tinted lenses of her glasses. “Do you know if he’s married?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. What difference does it make, I thought.

“I don’t know if you should go there. We don’t know him very well.”

“Oh, please, Mum! What’s the problem? Nissim would be there too!” I couldn’t believe the direction the conversation was taking.

“Well,” my mother finally said, “I guess if you and Nissim went together it would be fine.”

 

On Wednesday afternoon I met Nissim at the car park and we walked to the Magician’s flat, five minutes away. The landing in front of his door was narrow, and as Nissim stood pressing the buzzer, I waited beside him, invisible to the Magician who now opened the door.

“Oh, hello,” he said to Nissim. “But where’s your friend?” I thought I could detect disappointment in his voice.

“I’m here,” I said, stepping into view. The Magician’s face lit up. “I’m glad you could both make it.”

That day the Magician taught us a simple trick: you tear a piece of newspaper into strips, push them into your fist, and then pull out of your fist a folded piece of newspaper which you unfold to produce an intact sheet. I was deeply disappointed. This wasn’t real magic. Anyone could tell that we were using a different page.

The Magician noticed our disappointment. “Practise hard and I will teach you a more complicated trick next time,” he said. “But remember: everything we do here is secret. Magic tricks are worthless if people know how they are done.”

 

Nissim wasn’t in the car park the following Wednesday at five to four. I went to his flat and knocked but there was no answer. I couldn’t believe it. How could he not show up for our magic lesson?

When I arrived on my own the Magician looked pleased to see me.

“I don’t know where Nissim is,” I said nervously. “I went to his house but no one was there.”

“Never mind,” said the Magician. “To be honest, I don’t think Nissim is real magician material. He’s not like you,” he added, his blue eyes looking oddly teary, the corners of his eyes bloodshot, as if he were ill.

That afternoon the Magician finally taught me a real magic trick: you hold in your hand a piece of thin red gauze fabric, wave it around, and then you make it disappear into thin air—only to reappear out of your clenched fist a moment later. I practised a few times and was overjoyed to see that I could already perform the trick passably well—even if not as well as the Magician.

After a few more practice runs the Magician said: “And now we’ll move on to something a bit different. In my shows I also do short comedy skits. If you’re going to become my assistant and perform with me, you will need to practise for that as well.”

Comedy skits? Nissim had never mentioned anything about them. But I guessed I had to follow the Magician’s instructions.

“Could you please lie down on the carpet?” The Magician pointed to the red Persian-style synthetic runner covering the white terrazzo tiles in front of the wood-cased television set.

I lay down on the carpet, confused.

“Now don’t worry, this is all part of the exercise for the skits,” said the Magician. He crouched above me, his two feet placed astride my thighs, and then lowered his palms and placed them on the carpet near my shoulders, so that his body was hovering above mine. I lay there, motionless, the musty smell of the carpet invading my nostrils. I could see the large dark pores on his nose, the thread of saliva between his teeth.

He then placed his hands on my shoulders, using some of his body weight to hold me down, and said: “Let’s pretend that I’ve kidnapped you, and that you now have to beg me to let you go home to your parents.”

 

Natalia gasps, bringing her palms together and raising them to her breasts, her head tilted slightly back. “Wow,” she exhales. “Did he really say that?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And then what happened?”

“I can’t remember exactly. I think I said something like, ‘Please, let me go’.”

“And then?”

“He just stared at me, motionless. After a few seconds I said, ‘Please let me go home’. And then he let me go. That was it.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“No, I never told anyone. And oddly enough, I still returned to the Magician’s place the following Wednesday.”

“And did he try to do it again?”

“No. I remember him standing at the partly open door and blocking the entrance with his body. He refused to let me in and told me not to come again. He said that he’d heard I was showing my friends how to perform the magic tricks, and that I couldn’t be trusted to be his assistant. The most traumatic part of the experience was my humiliation and disappointment at being rejected, and my indignation at being falsely accused of betraying his secrets. I also remember feeling jealous a few months later when I heard that Oren, the brother of my classmate Shira, was performing with the Magician at birthday parties. He was two years younger than me, an angelic-looking boy with soft blond hair and blue eyes.”

 

This is what I tell Natalia, but what if it’s not all? What else happened that day?

I’ve read somewhere that a familiar smell can bring back a suppressed memory. I take a deep breath. The bare concrete floor of the Café Casablanca does not emit the odour of musty synthetic carpet. The air carries just the aroma of freshly-ground coffee beans and a gust of exhaust fumes from Darlinghurst Road. Suddenly my heart starts racing, to the point that I can actually hear its thudding beats with my ears. I struggle for air, like a swimmer resurfacing after staying underwater too long.

Natalia is looking at me silently, but I’m not looking back at her.

I’m seeing the Magician’s expressionless eyes looking at me, almost looking through me, opaque and reptilian, as I lie beneath him on that red polyester carpet, my elbows stinging from carpet burn.

“Please let me go,” I am saying in an uncertain voice, following his instructions, not understanding what he wants. What does this strange uncomfortable exercise have to do with magic, or even with comedy skits, for that matter?

I blink up at him. I can think of nothing more to say. In my total incomprehension, I don’t show any fear, just puzzlement. He looks at me intently for a few seconds and I see the alertness in his face dissipating, fading into resignation. Although I don’t understand what he wants I do understand that he didn’t get it, that I have let him down.

 

When I call my mother in Israel the following evening, I say: “Remember Oren, Shira’s younger brother? The one you used to say looked like an angel …”

“What makes you think of him all of a sudden?”

“I was just wondering what he’s up to these days.”

My mother is a bit of an aficionado of the old Jewish pastime of keeping tabs on acquaintances and their achievements in the three spheres of activity that count: marital, financial and academic. If you didn’t, how would you know if you were ahead of the game?

“He does some freelance work somewhere. He has a girlfriend—I think someone has told me that she is twelve years older than him. His hairline is receding, and he’s put on a lot of weight.”

 

A week later Natalia and I are at the local Hare Krishna cinema, where for less than ten dollars you can have a vegetarian all-you-can-eat buffet and watch a one-year-old Hollywood movie. We are stretched out on large soft cushions, almost lying down, surrounded in the small, warm, dark room by a dozen smooching couples. The air is thick with pheromones. The movie hasn’t started yet and the dimness makes the walls recede, as if the confined space we’re in has no boundaries. I reach for Natalia, and find her elbow, its crease under my fingertips, the smooth skin of her arm as I move to her wrist, feeling her softening flesh. I start forming slow figure of eights with my index finger on the back of her hand.