Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

“You look fine. Honestly. Where are you going to take her?”

“I’m not sure,” his father said worriedly. “I thought maybe a movie and then something to eat?”

Danny grinned. “Just don’t do what you did last time.”

His father, it had turned out, in his nervousness and desire not to disappoint, had driven his date from one empty eatery to another, refusing, so he said, to eat in an empty restaurant. They had ended, at last, at a kebab place in the old Check Point outside Haifa, once manned by the British and now a busy road of traffic and commerce. The kebab place was bursting with truckers, prostitutes, and several friends of Uncle Arik’s. It had not gone well.

“What do you think I should do? Where can I take her?”

“How about the harbor?”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” his father said, looking relieved. He was looking better; sunnier, Danny thought. Or at least his forehead did seem rather shiny.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, giving his dad a reassuring pat on the back. He watched him go down to the car, start it noisily, and drive away—and he smiled, and thought about love.

* * *

For every balash there comes a time when a final confrontation must take place; the case becomes clear; a truth is reached. Yet some things don’t need truth or clarity. A sense of closure, perhaps, or a sense of freedom from the dogged facts may be all that is needed. One day in early spring a family outing was planned and carried out. Present in the car were Danny, his father, Uncle Arik, Uncle Moyshe from the kibbutz (on Danny’s mother’s side), and Cousin Uri. They were not going far.

The car chugged along the Moria Road, past Herbert Samuel and Einstein; where Moria turns into Freud they took a left and went along Aba Hushi, encountering Einstein again along the way, passing Aharonson, Golda Meir, and the Ivory Coast. They gave the hard shoulder to Oskar Schindler and took a right this time, past Liberia, Sweden, and Costa Rica, past Haifa University with its array of satellite dishes and listening devices aimed at the skies (and nearby Lebanon), briefly admired the view from the top of Mount Carmel, and coasted down again, passing through forests of pine and the Druze villages of Usefiyeh and Daliat el-Carmel.

Winter had not yet given up its grasp on Mount Carmel, and the air had just the hint of chill about it as they climbed out of the car. The Dir el-Mukhraka, the Arabs called this place—the Monastery of the Place of Burning. It belonged to the Carmelite order. Here, Elijah fought the priests of Ba’al, and here a great fire came down from the skies, consuming the wood and the stones and the dust. The priests of Ba’al ran and were pursued until they reached the river Kishon, and there they were slain.

“Well, I’m hungry,” Uncle Arik announced. “Where are the egg sandwiches?”

They were going to picnic in the forest. But first they trooped into the monastery building, past the statue of Elijah holding his sword, and climbed up to the flat top of the monastery’s roof, from which one can see as far away as Nazareth and Mount Tavor.

On the way back Danny stopped. An old man, dressed in the habit of the monks, was working in the garden, and something about him …

He approached the monk and said, a little nervously, “Brother Mordechai?”

The man straightened his back. He leaned on his spade and examined Danny somewhat warily. “Yes?”

“The Great Abra-Kadabra?”

The man nodded slowly, as if confirming something to himself. “Once,” he said.

“I wanted to ask you … I mean…”

“About Eva?” The eyes seemed to twinkle.

For a brief moment Danny had an image of the monk before him with a waxed mustache and a top hat. He said, “I have your journal.”

“Oh?” The man looked momentarily surprised. Then he laid down his spade carefully and said, “Come, let’s sit down somewhere.”

Danny turned to shout to his family that he’d be right back, but in any event there was no need. A small group had appeared in the monastery’s yard, and he saw the security minister ambling along, trailed by his coterie and two bored-looking photographers, no doubt on an official visit of some sort. The minister, he saw to his surprise, was making for their small group, and as Danny watched, the minister came up to Uncle Arik and solemnly shook his hand, drawing him aside. Danny watched, puzzled, as his uncle and the minister spoke together in low voices. No one was paying Danny much attention.

He followed the old monk to a bench overlooking the wooded slopes of Mount Carmel.

“You want to know about the Projected Girl,” the monk—the Great Abra-Kadabra—said.

“Yes.”

“After all these years…” the monk said, and he shook his head, but then he smiled. “She did have that effect on people,” he said. “Eva … I was in love with her, you know. From the moment I saw her at Dr. Katz’s. It was a horrible evening. The kids were screaming, the rabbit wouldn’t come out of the hat … but then I saw her, and I forgot everything else. She was so beautiful.” He sighed. “Too beautiful. I never even had a chance.”

“What happened that night?” Danny said, and there was no question between them of what night that was. The monk shook his head. “We were performing The Projected Girl,” he said, “as normal. It was not, in truth, an overly complicated trick. I used a light projector, a lantern, really, with a cardboard cutout of Eva’s profile; it was quite easy to make it seem she disappeared. Back then, something like this was still novel, you know. But…”

His hands were browned by the sun, and liver spotted. For a moment he turned to face Danny, reached behind his ear, and pulled out a five-shekel coin. He moved his hand over it and it changed into a stone. He raised his fist to his mouth, blew softly, and when he opened his hand the stone had disappeared. He smiled apologetically at Danny. “I still do that sometimes,” he said. “I find it calming.”

“The picture,” Danny said. “It stayed on the wall.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I was there that night. She should have been in the…” He hesitated, then smiled and said, “I may have made one vow now, but it does not mean I should forsake the other.” He meant the monkhood in the first instance, Danny thought, and the Magician’s Oath in the second. Never reveal a secret.

The old magician hesitated. “She should have been there,” he said at last. “The picture was just that—a picture. Light projected on wall. But when I removed the screen for the second time, the picture was there, as if it had always been there, and Eva … Eva was gone.”

“It was magic?”

“Not the kind of magic I could do! I couldn’t understand it. I checked everywhere. I had a lot of time to think about it, later. The police came, and they thought I helped her escape, and it was a week before they let me go. I kept thinking, How could this have happened? Was it a trick? Did she set it up herself? It was possible … but if she did, I still don’t know how.”

Danny lifted his head. Somewhere in the forest a bird was calling and was being answered by its mate. A cool breeze rustled the pine needles. Otherwise it was quiet. “What was it, then?” he said, speaking in a low voice.

The elderly monk looked sideways at him and said, “A miracle.”

“No.”

“Have you seen her?” the monk demanded. “Have you seen her there, in her field of sunflowers, looking out into the city every day for the past forty years? It took me a long time to think it through. But I have no other explanation. I went to visit her; for months I’d go past that wall and look at her, and I could swear her expression changed, the way she stood, the way she…” He subsided. “She could see me,” he said. “And she wouldn’t come out. She was safe there in the margins of the city. And for that I’m glad!”

Danny sat back. “You became a monk,” he said.

Brother Mordechai smiled. “If it was a miracle,” he said, “that suggests the existence of God. I was a Jew before I became a magician, but I was a monk only after I stopped being a Jew. Maybe it was the way they treated her.… I felt something break inside me, like the clockwork inside one of my old tricks, when I saw.”

“And you are convinced?”

“I thought I saw her once,” the old magician said. “I was in Italy with the brothers. In Rome, walking down a busy street—I thought I saw her. Her hair was grown again, and she was not so young anymore, but still beautiful. There was a child with her, a little girl. And then a man came and put his arm around her and they were gone, lost