Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Danny sat on the couch and waited. The flat was sparsely but pleasantly decorated. Old photos, mostly in black and white, were framed on the walls. People in old-fashioned hats and coats. Bookshelves lined the walls. And there, amidst the unknown titles in Hungarian and Romanian and the scattering of Hebrew books—it couldn’t be, but—was that The Detective Library, featuring the exploits of none other than David Tidhar?

“So,” Zsuzsi said, sitting down opposite him and laying a tray bearing two cups, a finjan full of black coffee, and a plate heaped to the brim with dark chocolate waffles on the table, “what is it that you wanted to ask me, young man?”

Danny wordlessly handed over the magician’s journal. Zsuzsi took it from him. There was care in the way she handled it.

She leafed through the pages. Her fingers treated the old paper gently. She looked at the newspaper cuttings. She came to the last page. When she looked up, her face had changed once again. It was older now and sad, and yet she was smiling. “They never did get his name right, did they?” she said. “It’s because the name itself was a misprint, you see. It was Heisikovitz. It should have been Isikovitz but…” She shrugged. “I guess when the authorities came to their village to write down their surnames, the officer in charge spelled the name wrong. That would have been around the eighteenth century? Transylvanian, like our family.”

“You knew him?”

She shook her head. “No. They were from Marosvásárhely; we were from Brasov. And the time of this story…” She tapped on the journal with her finger, gently. “I was in Auschwitz, not Haifa. But Agi was here.”

He had heard the name before. Agi—Agneta—was his grandfather’s youngest sister. He followed Zsuzsi’s gaze to a photograph on the wall. “That’s your grandfather in the middle,” Zsuzsi said, “and me on the right. And the little girl holding his hand—that’s Agi. She was, what, seventeen, eighteen? when she followed your grandfather to Palestine. That would have been in forty-one, when it was still possible to go.”

She had said Auschwitz matter-of-factly, and that was how Danny accepted it. He said, “And she knew the magician?”

“Somehow,” Zsuzsi said, and that same smile, knowing and amused, was back on her face. “I suspect it isn’t the magician so much that you are interested in as it is his assistant, Daniel.”

She rose from her seat and made her way to a cabinet by the wall. When she returned she was holding a photo. She handed it to Danny.

The magician was short and stocky. He had dark wavy hair and a waxed mustache and eyes that seemed ready to twinkle. He was dressed in a black suit and wore a tall hat. Beside him was the girl.

He recognized her face. It was the girl from the painting.

“She’d always had that effect,” Zsuzsi said. “And she was beautiful.”

Danny wanted to ask questions, but he sensed silence was being called for. She would tell him what she knew, in her own time.

“Her name was Eva,” Zsuzsi said, and Danny thought about the letter in his book, signed with an aleph. Was it an aleph, for Eva? He had thought it stood for ima, “mother,” but without vowel markings, the nikud underneath the consonants, it could have been either. “She was from Austria, perhaps. The Nazis had her for a while. Somehow, she escaped. She made her way to Italy and onto one of the ships, and she came to Palestine. To Haifa. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. Like Agi. They became friends.” She sighed, and her eyes seemed to dim, like windows looking out not at the sea but a great distance still, across a land veiled now in darkness, where only a few stars still shone. “I don’t know how much you understand of that time, Daniel,” she said. “The Yishuv was fighting the British and their white book—their changing policy on Palestine—and at the same time working with the British against the Nazis. Ben-Gurion said, ‘We shall fight the Nazis as if there was no white book, and fight the white book as if there were no Nazis.’ It was not an easy strategy. And the girls were young, you know. Agi and Eva, saved from the Holocaust, so alive, and finding themselves in this city, filled with dashing soldiers who were just as young, just as handsome as themselves—they used to go to the old casino building to dance. It must have been exciting! And of course the excitement stemmed partly from the fact that it was not right for them to do it, to associate this way with the British, the colonizers. Agi worked as a secretary for a Dr. Katz. Eva had no papers, but one day she met Mordechai, and it was an easy enough decision for him to make.…”

Danny thought of cash-only payments and of stage names and stage clothes, and he said, surprised he hadn’t realize this before, “He hid her in plain view.”

“Like a magician. And so the days of the war went on.”

“So what happened?” Danny demanded.

“Have a waffle.”

“I—” he chose not to argue. For several minutes there was silence, not uncompanionable, as the two of them drank coffee and ate the kibud, the “refreshments.” Zsuzsi lit a cigarette. The smoke curled up and was blown toward the glittering sea.

“She fell in love,” Zsuzsi said simply. “With a British soldier. Deeply, madly, rashly in love. It was the sort of love that leaves no room for compromise, for anything other than itself. His name was Daniel. Like yours. You know what they did to her?”

“What did they do?” Danny said, and fear eased itself into him, edging beside the sudden jealousy that had flared there. He didn’t yet ask who they were.

“They cut off her hair.” The cigarette shook in Zsuzsi’s hand. “Her long, beautiful hair. It’s what the Yishuv did to girls who went with the enemy. They took her one night when she was coming home from the casino, singing to herself in the dark. They grabbed her and forced her down and they did this to her, like the Nazis did in the camps. Agi told me. It was meant as a warning to the other girls. After that she wore a wig, for the performances. And someone told on her. Then it was only a matter of time.”

“The police,” Danny said, thinking of that last newspaper cutting. “They would have sent her back.”

Young and old looked at each other across a table, sharing a horror which for the one was born of stories and for the other, of memories.

“What did they do?”

“She could have married him, but she had no papers, and he was only a boy himself, a common soldier with no influence. They loved each other very much. Agi told me they planned to run together, leave Palestine, the army, go to India or Hong Kong, a place where they could disappear. In the great story of the world they were unimportant, marginal.”

“Is that what happened?” Danny said, thinking of that night all those years ago when the Projected Girl had, for the last time, disappeared. “Did they run away?”

“I don’t know,” Zsuzsi said. The words hung heavy in the air, like thick smoke. “No one does. Some say the magician was a part of their plan. And some say that, frightened, hunted, she found refuge in the only place they couldn’t touch her—in that picture, in the field of sunflowers, where she could be always in the sun and never suffer darkness again.”

“It was magic?”

Zsuzsi smiled. “Sometimes you have to believe. Sometimes you want to believe.”

“And the magician? What happened to him?”

“He never performed again.”

“Is he still alive?”

The smile remained. It was a small private smile there in the corners of her mouth, and sad; like the last lingering note of a symphony.

“Yes,” she said simply. “And if you want him, you must go to the Mukhraka, to the Place of Burning—and there ask for Brother Mordechai.”

* * *

“How did it go?”

“Fine. I said I’ll come and see her again next week. Dad? What are you doing?”

His father turned and gave him a nervous smile. He was fiddling with the top button of his shirt, which looked new. “Do you think I look all right?”