Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Danny left a fifty-shekel note on the counter and left the shop, as the absorbed owner was unsuccessfully trying to make the note disappear.

* * *

As he walked home along Balfour Street he passed the old Technion building. Climbing up the hill, laden with books, he felt sleepy and slow. The sun was hot in the sky. He vaguely thought of investing some of his remaining money in a glass of orange juice from a stand by the side of the road but decided against it. To his left he noticed something that, he realized, he had seen countless times before but never paid it much attention. It was graffiti of a sort, one of those street paintings done on the walls that fenced off old buildings, which in far-off Tel Aviv was considered art, but here was considered merely a nuisance. He stopped (the place was shady) and looked at the painting.

It showed a field of sunflowers in vivid yellow, a deep blue sky, and a range of mountains in the distance that might have been the slopes of Mount Carmel. But those were merely background details; what drew his attention, with a sudden, sharp shock, was the girl in the painting.

She was standing in the field of sunflowers and seemed to be looking out; he had the uncomfortable feeling that she was looking out of the painting, into the street where he stood. She was young, and pretty. Her eyes were olive black, her hair, fair. She had a European look, like a new immigrant, and delicate features not yet made brown by the sun. She seemed strangely alive. Vibrant. It must be the colors, Danny, the great art connoisseur, thought.

The painting disturbed him. The girl didn’t look like she belonged in the field; there was something unearthly about her. He wondered what her name was.

When he finally came home, the flat was empty. His father had left him some schnitzels and mash in the fridge—the universal meal of the Israeli family. Danny was what they called a yeled mafte’ach, a “key child”; that is, he did not have a mother at home, had a key on a string around his neck, and was expected to fend for himself in the absence of parental supervision. It was thus, with great leisure, that Danny sat at the kitchen table, the heated food before him, the magician’s journal open by his side. The sun came streaming through the window. In the distance the sea was a perfect calm blue. He was facing the outside while remaining comfortably inside. He leafed through the journal.

His attention was drawn by a new trick that the magician was apparently using, from around the middle of the journal onward. It was called The Projected Girl. Details were scarce, yet it appeared to be a great success. Audience numbers were up. Newspaper clippings, from this point onward, became, if not exactly abundant, at least slightly more frequent in the pages of the journal. Danny shoveled some mash absentmindedly into his mouth (dropping a little back onto the plate) and began perusing the articles.

Ha’aretz, 3 June 1943.

HAIFA MAGICIAN BRINGS WONDER TO TROOPS

HAIFA—Last night there was a benefit gala for the British troops stationed in Haifa harbor. The event took place in the Casino building. Mr. Mordechai Isikovich—the Great Abra-Kadabra, as he prefers to be known—performed for the assembled guests, bringing shock and wonder to the audience. “It was truly remarkable,” Mr. Etzioni of the city council told Ha’aretz; “I just don’t know how he did the things he did.” The magician—who reputedly worked in a circus in Hungary before making aliyah in the early ’30s—performed such “miracles” as pulling a selected card, signed by a soldier in the audience, out of an orange, and made doves mysteriously disappear. The highlight of the show, however, was his latest creation, which the magician calls The Projected Girl. Using a screen and a light projector, the audience could clearly see the shadow of the magician’s assistant—a young woman—as it began to shrink and finally disappeared. The magician then removed the screen—to show the girl transformed into a picture on the wall! As the assembled guests burst into spontaneous applause, the magician reversed the process, and he and his assistant took their bows together before the crowd. “It was amazing,” British Private Eddie Gall told Ha’aretz. “I don’t know how he did that.” When asked, Mr. Isikovich smiled but did not comment.

Davar, 24 September 1943.

MAGICIAN ENTERTAINS DETAINEES

CYPRUS—Celebrated Haifa magician Mr. Mordechai Isaakovitz has just returned from Cyprus on board H.M.S. Napier. Cyprus is currently “home” to detention camps where Jewish refugees from wartorn Europe are held by the British for illegally trying to enter Palestine by ship. “I am very grateful to the British authorities for letting me go,” Mr. Isaakovitz told Davar. “While I cannot free our people, I can at least try and lift their spirits. I hope they will be released soon and allowed to come to Eretz Yisrael.” The magician was accompanied by an assistant.

* * *

Danny stared at the open journal. He’d finished the schnitzels. A small globule of mash remained on the plate, looking strangely like the dome of the Baha’i temple. He knew about the refugees trying to enter Palestine by ship. The Jewish settlement in Palestine—the Yishuv—sent men to Italy and Greece, members of the Palyam, or sea brigades, who bought what decrepit old ships could be found and tried to smuggle refugees and guns into Mandate-ruled Palestine. If the British caught them, they were arrested and sent to Cyprus. Many ended up back in Europe, sometimes back under Nazi rule. But if they got through the British blockade, well, then there would be lights winking in the darkness from the shore, and the boats would be lowered stealthily into the water, and the refugees would travel that last distance to land, to the secret coves of Haifa, of which there were many. He had heard the stories from his grandfather Shaul. The British had a radar station up on Mount Carmel, by the Stella Maris Monastery, but the Yishuv’s fighters blew it up after the war. He leafed farther ahead. The journal stopped abruptly in February 1945. The magician’s entry for that day must have been written in advance of the performance, which was to take place outdoors on Balfour Street: it included only a list of tricks, the last of which was The Projected Girl. The rest of the journal was left blank.

* * *

For a few weeks Danny mulled over the mystery of the magician’s notebook in his spare time. Magic and mystery may have occupied his mind, but society dictated it should have been occupied in more beneficial pursuits, and uppermost amongst them was school. There were lessons to be endured: sines and cosines; isosceles triangles and parallelograms; the stories of Ruth and Esther, both stories where a foreigner and a Jew triumph over obstacles to consummate their love (“For your homework, write an essay in no less than one thousand words.…”); the anatomy of the Palestinian Painted Frog (extinct); meaning and symbolism in Dan Pagis’s Holocaust poem, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car”; and more, in chalk on blackboard and in mimeographed handouts blue-inked against white.

It was with a sense of some relief, therefore, that one bright morning the school break finally came, and to celebrate Uncle Arik (only recently returned from another mysterious assignment, having lost both weight and his tan in foreign climates) took Danny out for a slice of pizza and a cappuccino, which in Haifa comes in a tall glass, the upper half of which is generously filled with whipped cream. They sat in the paved Nordau Street and watched the passersby. “So tell me about the Palestinian Painted Frog,” Uncle Arik said.

Danny stared at him vaguely. He was still thinking about the magician, Isikovich or Isaakovitz. He took to picturing him in black evening dress, with a dashing top hat (a rabbit poking out under the brim), while his assistant, dressed in a sequined blue dress, handed him props and looked glamorous (not unlike Daryl Hannah, who had only recently appeared in Splash and was, subsequently, occupying much of Danny’s daydreams in class). “It’s a rare kind of frog,” he said, dragging his attention back to the present. “It used to live in the Huleh swamps, before they were drained in the fifties. They only ever found it twice, so no one knows much about it. It’s extinct.”

“But you,” Uncle Arik said seriously, “you do know. As long as you can remember something, it isn’t truly lost.” He had become more philosophical with the years, full of deceptive depths and shadowed valleys, occasionally surprising even his brother.

“I guess,” Danny said. He felt both sleepy and restless. It was getting hot, and the people going past were moving slowly, lethargically, like frog spawn trying to swim upstream. It was lunchtime.

“Oho! If it isn’t my young magician friend!” Danny looked up and saw the owner of the Book Basement smiling benevolently. Strangely, the man wore a top hat that looked ridiculous over his workingman’s checkered shirt, and in his hands he held a pack of cards he was busy shuffling. “Go on, pick a card. Any card.” He extended