Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

The Projected Girl BY LAVIE TIDHAR

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the linked-story collection HebrewPunk, the steampunk novels The Bookman and Camera Obscura, the literary novel Osama, the SF novel Martian Sands, and, with Nir Yaniv, the short novel The Tel Aviv Dossier. He has lived on three continents and one island-nation, and was last seen in Southeast Asia.

NOTE: DAVID TIDHAR (1897–1970) WAS AN ISRAELI DETECTIVE, AUTHOR, AND HERO OF THE TWENTY-EIGHT DAVID TIDHAR BALASH (“DETECTIVE”) NOVELS.

On Danny’s tenth birthday Uncle Arik gave him a conjuring set. Uncle Arik had just come back from a spell in England. He’d stayed, he’d said, in a five-star hotel in a place called Brixton; apparently he’d stayed there for the whole year and three months of his absence. “A bed to lie on, a roof over your head, and three meals a day,” Uncle Arik told Danny, “—what is there to go out for?” When he’d finally left the hotel, however, and before boarding the El Al flight back home, Uncle Arik had stopped in a shop called Davenports, and there, remembering his favorite (and only) nephew’s rapidly approaching birthday, he purchased the conjuring set. “It’s a shop set underground,” he told Danny in confidence. “Below the great train station of Charing Cross. Unless you know it’s there, you will never find it. ’Course, it’s a magic shop.”

It was Danny’s conviction that his Uncle Arik was a Mossad agent. His mysterious job was seldom referred to, yet it took him to many exotic places, often for great lengths of time. He had once heard his father say, when he thought Danny couldn’t hear him, that Uncle Arik’s work involved “things falling off the back of trucks.” For a while, therefore, Danny thought Uncle Arik was a truck driver, or perhaps a mechanic: yet he had never seen him driving a truck, nor were there ever signs of grease on his immaculately ironed shirt or trousers. “A conjuring set?” Danny’s father said to his brother when he saw the present. “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

“It’s a great idea,” Uncle Arik said. “It’s what every kid wants.”

“And how would you know?” Danny’s father said.

“I was a kid once,” Uncle Arik said. “I always wished Mum had bought one of those for me.”

Mention of their mother merely brought a head shake from Danny’s father. But the present was given, and it stayed. “Go on, open it,” Uncle Arik said. “Remember, the magic you learn—you’ve got to keep it secret.” And he put his pointing finger over his lips, and Danny mimicked his gesture, and they both laughed. “I tell you,” Uncle Arik said, sitting down in the armchair favored by Danny’s father, wiping sweat from his bushy eyebrows, and opening the top button on his checkered short-sleeved shirt, “I’ve been to a lot of cities in my time, Ben. I’ve seen the sights of Paris and Rome, Tokyo and New York and London—”

“I guess you had a lot of time looking out of windows,” his brother said.

“But there’s nothing,” Uncle Arik said, ignoring him, “quite like coming home.”

Danny, who had never been out of Israel and seldom out of Haifa, shared Uncle Arik’s sentiment wholeheartedly. The city—his city—surely it was the greatest possible place anyone could wish to be born and live in. From the balcony above the street-veined slopes of Mount Carmel, Danny could always see the great blue expanse of the sea, spreading away from Haifa like a crayoned map until it fell off in a great rim of waterfalls beyond the horizon. From the balcony he could, if he was patient enough, lick the tip of one finger and then trace, at his leisure, a trajectory of the sun as it came over the green slopes of the mountain, hovered directly overhead, and fell at last into the water, “on time for sunset, every time!” as Uncle Arik liked to say. And, standing on the balcony and leaning slightly out over the railings, Danny could see the streets below, where partisans, rabbis, poets, and assassinated politicians wove between each other: There Hannah Senesh, who parachuted into Yugoslavia and death at the hands of the Nazis; there the Ba‘al Shem Tov, who could perform miracles; there the great Arlozorov Street, named after the man who was shot on the beach back in 1933. Looking left, the golden dome of the Baha’i temple shone in the sun, and there, farther down, was the great sprawling mass of Hadar, with its shawarma stands, its cheap clothing and sunglasses, its second-hand book stores, dingy travel agents and numerous coffee shops—Danny’s favorite place in the whole wide world.

Many children are given, at one point or another, a set of magic tricks for their birthday. Danny’s conjuring set, having come from Davenports, was better than most (it included a thumb tip and silk handkerchief, a pack of Bicycle cards, a cut-and-restore rope, an egg bag, a Svengali deck, and the inevitable wand), but it was not guaranteed to turn a kid into a magician.

Most children play with the magic kit for the length of time required to learn that coins don’t really disappear (it’s in the other hand!), that everyone knows a card trick or two and would be happy to display it when presented with the slightest opportunity, and that performing magic requires practice. Like playing the clarinet, unless one enjoys the task, one soon abandons it. And it would surprise no one—and Danny’s father least of all—that Danny, too, abandoned the magic kit shortly after receiving it, and after some time of its remaining untouched in his room, it finally made its way into the family boydem, the storage area in the ceiling where all unused but not-unwanted things inevitably end up.

In fact, the magic kit—the “conjuring set,” to use Uncle Arik’s term—bears little relevance to our story but for its consequences.

At thirteen, a Jewish boy celebrates his bar mitzvah, an occasion of great pleasure for his family and often of acute embarrassment for the boy himself. Danny’s bar mitzvah took place in a rented hall near Crusaders Road, close to the Garden of Statues, and was attended by a great many people, some of whom he knew. Besides the cousins, second cousins, loose cousins (“This is Tali,” Danny’s father said. “Her grandmother was once married to your grandmother’s brother. Works in diamonds.”), uncles, aunts, and other assorted relatives, there were also friends of his father’s (“This is Barashi,” Uncle Arik told Danny in confidence, “friend of your father’s from army training days. Good man. Lives in Jerusalem. Buys and sells.” Danny said, “Buys and sells what?” and Uncle Arik smiled and tapped his nose conspiratorially), acquaintances, and school friends of Danny’s with an entourage of parents of their own. He was given presents: Barashi gave him a black plastic combination flashlight-scissors-measuring-tape device and tousled his hair; Aunt Miri gave him hand-knitted socks and a wet kiss on the cheek; Cousin Uri from the kibbutz gave him a rubber catapult and said, “I made it myself”—it was confiscated by Danny’s dad as soon as it was given—and there were also envelopes with his name written on each, which were given to his father on Danny’s behalf.

After the party was over they took a cab back to the flat, just Danny, his dad, and his uncle. “Mazal tov,” the taxi driver said.

In the flat, the two adults sat back on the sofa, and Danny sat in the armchair. Sitting together, his dad and Uncle Arik looked remarkably alike: It was in the lines around their eyes, in the way their hairlines receded in an almost identical fashion, but mostly it was in the way they smiled. “Well,” Uncle Arik said, “what are you waiting for? Pass the envelopes.”

“It will all have to go toward paying for the hall,” Danny’s father said. Uncle Arik saw Danny’s reaction and winked at him. “Let’s count the money first.”

They divided the envelopes into three. Danny’s dad and his uncle began to open some. Danny put his on the low round table by the armchair. Too late, he realized the morning’s mail was also on the table and, in trying to extract it from underneath the pile of envelopes, upset the whole thing. Envelopes fluttered to the ground like a flock of seagulls settling down to rest in the harbor. Danny hurriedly bent down to pick them up. Danny’s dad frowned but said nothing. They sorted notes in piles, by denomination. Danny collected strewn paper debris.

When he was finished, and as he sat back down and began sorting through the pile, a small dirty-blue envelope fell down and fluttered into his lap. He picked it up. Unlike the others, it bore no giver’s name. The paper felt brittle. When he took his hand away there was dust on his fingers. He tore it open. There was no money inside.

At first he thought it was empty. Then, when he tipped it, pressing the envelope open as if squeezing a lemon, a small single sheet of paper slid out. He picked it up and looked at it. There was a line of writing in black ink, the letters carefully drawn, as if the writer was not quite comfortable with the Hebrew alphabet. The handwriting seemed feminine. The note said, “Daniel, whatever is happen I love you.” It was signed with a single letter—aleph.

“What’s that,” his father said, briefly looking up from his work, “a check?”

Danny didn’t reply. He looked at the note again, mutely. Aleph could stand for ima—“Mum.” But his mother had died when he was four, of cancer. He had only a vague recollection of her: the smell of cooking stuffed cabbage, and cigarettes, and perfume like at the Mashbir department store on Herzl Street. “Danny? What is it?”

But the language was wrong. And no one ever called him Daniel. He said, “Nothing, Dad,” and put the note back in the envelope. “I’m just going to the bathroom,” he said. He got up and, still holding the envelope, went instead to his room. He looked at the envelope again. As he stared at its back, it seemed to him that he could see some faint etchings in the paper, as if an address had been written there before, and there was also a depression in the top right corner, as if a stamp was once affixed there. It’s just an old letter, he thought; maybe it finally surfaced from wherever it was and got mixed up with the normal mail. He’d read stories where things like this happened. He looked around his bookshelves. On the bottom shelf lay Ze’ev Vilnai’s seven-volume Guide to Eretz Yisrael, and alongside it all seventeen volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. On the shelf above it was a near-complete run of Am Oved’s science fiction paperbacks in the distinct white bindings. Above these, the western, secret agent, mystery, and karate paperbacks that could be found, at ten shekels a pop, in every secondhand store in the city—and on the last shelf, tended carefully like a row of elderly geraniums, the rare books left him by his mother: The Detective Library Series, the worn paperbound books that featured the adventures of the first hebrew detective, David Tidhar, and which were, at thirteen, Danny’s abiding passion.

He looked through them. Revenge of the Maharajah—no. The Blue Crosses, Tales of the Hashish Smugglers—no. But there—Disappearance on Mount Carmel: A Mystery in the Margins of the City? He wanted to look through it, but his father was calling him from the living room. Danny put the letter into the slim volume, where it nestled next to the title page. He felt strange, as if he had momentarily stepped into something beyond the ordinary and for which he had no words. “I’m coming,” he called, and returned the book to the shelf.

His father and uncle were still counting money when he returned, and he joined them, though less enthusiastically now.

At last the task was done. “I’ll get us a drink,” Uncle Arik said. “Ben?”

“Just some water,” Danny’s dad said. Uncle Arik departed to the small kitchen and returned with water for his brother, a coke for Danny, and a whisky with ice for himself. “Le’chaim,” he said, raising his glass. “And mazal tov, Danny.”

When the events hall and other expenses were all paid for, some money yet remained, and so a decision had to be made: What should Danny spend his money on?

Danny was initially in favor of a computer. Computers were the latest thing. You could buy one to have in your house. You could play games on it—an argument he didn’t quite put forward to his father. They would need to add extra money for the purchase price—quite a lot of extra money, when it came to that—but …

Uncle Arik, in an uncharacteristically somber display, suggested putting the money in a savings account at the bank, to accumulate interest until Danny was twenty-one. Danny was not wholeheartedly supportive of the idea.

At last Danny’s father said, “Why don’t you buy some books with it? Take it down to Ha’chalutz Street, to that shop you always go to.”

Danny said, “Really?” and then, as caution took hold of him, said, “Anything I want?”

His dad laughed. “Any books you want, Danny. It’s your money.”

And so it was decided.

The bookshops of Haifa are clustered like a gaggle of elderly, generally good-natured but occasionally difficult uncles, in Lower Hadar, around Ha’chalutz Street and below in Sirkin. Danny’s favorite was called Mischar Ha’sefer—“the Book Trade”—at number 31 Ha’chalutz, where it had resided for many years, and where it continues to reside. Seeing as the book dealers of Haifa, as a body, follow the ancient tradition of that city and take a lengthy afternoon spell between one and four in the afternoon, Danny went there early in the morning.

The entrance to Mischar Ha’sefer is crowded with English paperback books, imported pornographic magazines hanging from the rafters by thread like condemned convicts, a tasteful spread of romantic novels, and a dusty bargain bin overflowing with cookbooks, modern fiction, and the occasional title in Russian. On the opposite side of the street is a shawarma stand, and the smell of roasting meat arising from its confines accompanied Danny as he stepped into the bookshop.

He browsed happily as blue-haired ladies came and went for their daily fix of Mills & Boon, a literature student haggled over a paperback War and Peace, and a young uniformed soldier with an M-16 slung over his shoulder obscured the science fiction and fantasy shelves from view.

Behind the counter the formidable owner, a Romanian immigrant of indeterminable age, whose name Danny had never learned, was marking books, occasionally raising her voice in a shrill call for her son—“Itzik! Itz-ik!”—following which her son, himself of an age whose exactitude could not be determined, would pop his head out of the stockroom in the basement to assist with whatever query needed addressing. Danny made his way through shelf after shelf, accumulating half a dozen titles in the process for his collection, prominent amongst them three Patrick Kim—The Karate Man titles, comprising The Thousand Lakes Conspiracy, The Statues of Doom, and Demon of Pale Death. He also purchased two Ringo western titles: The Gun of Revenge and Death at High Noon, and finally, the highlight of his visit, a rare paperback from the Series of Horror, with a cover showing a grinning, deformed skull: Dan Shocker’s Creatures of the Devil Doctor.

But it is not Danny’s literary taste, as lamentable as it may be, that concerns us. The books were mysteries. In that, Danny felt, they reflected life. They asked important questions, such as, What is the meaning of Life? Is love Eternal? And what exactly was it that the Doctor’s devilish creatures do?

Behind the counter, Itzik had replaced his mother. He wiped sweat from his balding head, added up the prices, and said, “Nice selection. You get back half if you return them.”

“I think I’ll keep them,” Danny said.

Itzik shook his head. “Everyone’s a collector,” he said sadly. “D’you know,” he said, as if imparting a great truth to his young audience, “these are marginal titles. A boy like you—you should be reading Agnon, Grossman, Oz, Appelfeld. Serious literature, not this trash. These books you got there, half of them don’t even appear in the National Library catalogs. They don’t even officially exist. Take my advice, kid: Don’t waste your time.”

When he had finished at the Book Trade, Danny progressed down the stairs beside the store, paid a perfunctory visit to the textbook shop underneath, and stepped into Sirkin and to his second favorite bookshop, Martef Ha’sefer—the Book Basement.

The Book Basement’s only concession to advertising was, and remains, an ancient hand-painted sign laconically saying BOOKS, with an arrow pointing farther down the hill. Follow the arrow, and you are confronted with more steps, a rubbish heap, the smell of urine, and, going past these delights, a door. Danny opened the door and went in.

The Book Basement resembles a crusaders-era monastery in its interior. Books are huddled together in dusty catacombs that spread out in all directions from the vaguely L-shaped main corridor. Shelves rise from the vault of the floor and disappear in the darkness overhead. The smell of the interior is of dust and old paper, a smell a little like bad breath and a little like well-preserved perfume. It was inside the shop, after he had wandered somewhat aimlessly between the aisles, that, in the darkest corner deepest into the maze of books, he came across his find.

It was not, at first or even second glance, much to look at. It was sitting on a bottom shelf sandwiched between two disintegrating books and seemed initially to be a book itself. It was bound in black leather, and Danny’s fingers left marks on the thick layer of dust that covered the binding. There was no title. The book felt warm, like body temperature. When he opened it, however, Danny discovered it was, rather than a book, a sort of thick notebook, with blank, off-white pages that had been filled by hand sometime in the past in an untidy cursive script scribbled with black ink. He leafed through it.

Saturday, February 5, 1942.

Birthday party for Dr. Katz—daughter.

Rabbit from hat.

Linking rings.

Handkerchief routine.

Streamers from mouth production.

Cigarette routine—vanish, materialization, multiplication.

Milk pitcher.

Silk in egg.

Doves routine.

Levitating vase.

Went well. Around 25 children. Used regular patter. Katz paid promptly, in cash.

Danny stared at the bound volume in his hands. It was a magician’s journal! Every page seemed to be the same: a list of magic tricks that varied little from one performance to another; sometimes a short record of some new patter used or deviated from the norm; a record of the locations (which included the British Army barracks, a function for the harbor officials, birthdays, weddings, and the obligatory bar mitzvahs); notes on the number of people in the crowd; the date; and notes—though no amounts—concerning the payments.

Dotted amongst the pages were a few (a very few) newspaper clippings, which inevitably described a performance particularly worthy of the public’s notice. The paper of these clippings was yellow like bad teeth. Danny would have pursued these items further, but he was already gripped by that most-unbeatable of compulsions, which is aroused by the collector’s discovery of what is called a find.

“How much?”

The owner of the Book Basement looked up at him in amusement. He was busy marking a pile of ancient-looking Tarzans. “What have you got there?”

Danny wordlessly pushed the diary across the desk. The owner leafed through it unhurriedly. “Where did you find this?” he asked at last. Danny pointed.

“What do you want this for?” the owner said. “I thought you liked detective novels.”

Danny cautiously mentioned having once practiced the art of magic (which was not entirely the truth. His one performance—one Saturday at the flat, for an audience comprising several family members—did not go as well as could have been hoped for: he failed twice to guess the card picked, was left with two pieces of rope that he couldn’t join back together, and finally—and he still didn’t know how—the wand broke as he waved it in the air. Danny was, in other words, a terrible magician, and that performance contributed in great measure to the conjuring set’s eventual exile up in the boydem).

“Oh? I had a magic kit once,” the owner said. “You know that thing with the egg?”

Danny denied any knowledge of a thing with eggs.

“Little plastic thing. Had like a blue egg in the middle. You could make it disappear. Just a toy, really…” He seemed to gaze into the air nostalgically, lost in thoughts of better days. Danny said, “So how much?” and then, because he was a polite kid, said, “Please?”

“Oh, have it for fifty,” the owner said. “Anything for a fellow magician, eh?”

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 the deck toward Danny, cards fanned. “Hi, Arik.”

“What are you doing?” Uncle Arik demanded. The owner grinned, somewhat apologetically. “Always wanted to be magician, you know. Go on, pick one.”

Danny picked a card. It was the Queen of Hearts. “Now, put it back, here. Let me just shuffle them for a moment.… Here, take the pack. Now, is your card there? No? Well…” He reached behind Danny’s ear. “Was this your card?”

“Very good!” Danny said. He didn’t have the heart to tell him that he saw him palming the card just a moment before.

“Don’t encourage him,” Uncle Arik said.

“Well, anyway,” the bookseller-turned-magician said, “I better go. Oh, that reminds me, Danny. I found this the other day. It must have fallen from that book you bought last time. Do you want it?” And he handed Danny a small slip of paper. “It’s in English.”

“The boy has good English!” Uncle Arik said. “Like his uncle.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, see you later.” And he hurried down the road, his hands still busily shuffling cards, the top hat precariously balanced at a crooked angle on his head. Danny looked at the slip of paper.

The Palestine News, 5 February 1945.

MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT DISAPPEARS

HAIFA—In a public performance last night outside the Jewish Technion building, magician Mordechai Itzikovic performed his renowned trick, The Projected Girl, for what may be the last time. In the show’s finale, the magician uses a projector to seemingly make his assistant shrink, only to appear moments later inside a picture on the wall. The assistant is then returned—but not last night. “I don’t know what went wrong,” a distraught Mr. Itzikovic was reported as saying. “Where did she go?”

The assistant, a young Jewish woman, was sought last night for questioning by the Palestine Police Force, and Mr. Itzikovic has been detained by the PPF to help with their inquiries. In a baffling turn of events, the projected picture of the girl remained last night on the wall despite the magician’s apparatus being turned off shortly after the performance.

“So she disappeared!” Danny said.

“Ha? Who’s disappeared?” Uncle Arik said, and then with a broad grin, “Are you having girl trouble, Danny?”

“What? No!”

She’d disappeared. And the magician never performed again. (That was a feat of deductive reasoning on Danny’s part, for why else would the notebook be left blank?)

Questions.

What happened that night?

“So tell me about her,” Uncle Arik said.

Danny sighed. He felt adult beyond his years. He was a detective on the trail of a missing girl. He was the keeper of a mystery only he knew existed. He was assailed by the adult’s sense of importance mixed with doubt, power mixed with confusion. How can such opposite feelings coexist?

Danny took a deep breath. “There was once this magician.…” he began.

you cry in bright petals

and sometimes I pick your tears

to press between the pages of a book

left on the shelf for someone else to find:

some other time,

long after forgetting why we cried,

when only our names remain like flowered shreds

entwined in the margins.

There was once this magician. And he made a girl disappear. Or the girl disappeared despite the magician. It all happened long ago in another town that resembled this one only slightly. It was a town of crusaders and templars, of Bedouin sheikhs and Ottoman Empire builders. City walls were built, destroyed, built up again. The Russians built a wharf; the Turks put through a train line; the British rebuilt a harbor that once saw Phoenician ships dock, their sails bellowing, with cedar from Lebanon and spices from Africa. Seagulls cried and dived overhead. Jews came, went, came back. The city was an old lady, draped in the patchwork clothes of centuries, worn with the dust of holy books.

It was not a holy city. It was not a Jerusalem preening in white stone, cold and aloof on its hills. It was a working city, an immigrant city, a city of sailors and prophets, of prostitutes and monks. Elijah fought the priests of Ba’al on Mount Carmel, and Napoleon quarantined his soldiers, sick with the plague after the Siege of Acre, in the monastery of Stella Maris and had them executed there, leaving a plaque behind. It was a city whose history was written in the margins, between the market stalls and the houses of ill repute, between the narrow lanes that separated dusty stores selling the produce of other, more-exotic places, and outside the bars and inns that had served the armies and navies of all the vanished empires.

It was a city that, sometimes, it was not too hard to disappear in.

Some of this Danny had learned from his Uncle Arik, who in his solitary pursuits, whose nature could never be adequately explained, had had plenty of time to learn the history of his city and some of its secrets. Some he had learned later, through books, through stories—which are the lies that people put in books to make them true—and some of it and more he learned eventually from his fearsome and formidable Great-Aunt Zsuzsi.

“You must ask Aunt Zsuzsi,” Uncle Arik said when Danny had finished his story. “She will know who your mystery girl was.”

Danny did not take kindly to that idea. He had the Jewish boy’s natural fear of elderly relatives, and Great-Aunt Zsuzsi—blue haired, cigarette smoking, stooped but not at all frail Zsuzsi—was by far the worst. She tended, amongst other things, to test at assorted family functions (be they weddings, funerals, birthdays, or bar mitzvahs, the four cornerstones of the familial social calendar) Danny’s knowledge of the classics by speaking to him loudly and ponderously in the ancient Latin she had learned in ancient days at school in Transylvania. Since Danny’s knowledge of that venerable old tongue was precisely none, the conversation was rather one-sided; and he could only take comfort in the hope that a cousin might shortly come along and be pounced upon in his stead.

Great-Aunt Zsuzsi had a voice thickened by cigarettes; she liked to pinch cheeks; she had a blue number tattooed on her arm; and she could remember everything you’d ever done, from the time you were three years old and peed your pants at Cousin Ofer’s bar mitzvah onward. She had been an archivist for the harbor authorities, and she had lived in the city for decades in a small third-story flat in the Stella Maris neighborhood, a family invitation to which caused children to develop immediate and lasting symptoms of flu, chicken pox, mumps, or measles, depending on the season and the child’s knowledge of medical matters.

“No way,” Danny said.

Uncle Arik laughed. “Who ever said being a detective is easy? Come on, I’m still hungry. Fancy going to McDavid for a burger?”

Danny gravely acknowledged that he was indeed amiable to such a suggestion.

On his way back that day he passed by the Technion building again. The painting of the girl in the field of sunflowers was still there. He looked at her with new eyes, and he had the strangest feeling that she was looking back at him from across the wall, and that she was smiling.

That night, Danny looked through his bookshelves again. Answers could be found there, he was sure. The shelves were like a packed convention of detectives, bursting with clues, feats of deduction, witnesses, and dissemblers, clouded with pipe smoke, bellowing with cloaks. The books of David Tidhar were there, and Danny was drawn back to the volume where he had secreted that mysterious letter on the day of his birthday. He pulled out the slim volume. Disappearance on Mount Carmel. He opened the book at random.

“What is it?” the commandant asked short-temperedly, pausing from his examination of the case files that had been baffling him and the entire force for the past week.

“It is I, Tidhar,” said the newcomer.

The commandant jumped from his seat as if bitten by a tiger and hurried toward the newcomer. “Welcome!” he said, reaching out his arms to the famous detective. “Welcome!”

Danny leafed ahead.

David Tidhar sat alone in his office. The pipe dangled from his lips. It had all but gone out, but he hadn’t noticed. The stale smell of tobacco hung in the air. His mind was abuzz with speculation. Where was the missing girl? The situation was difficult. The detective did not believe in magic, but he was troubled. She was a girl without papers, without identity. He had heard she came from the ships, that she had, as they said, “smuggled the border.” If he found her, would not the British send her back to the lands of the great fiend?

“Perhaps,” he mused aloud, “it is the work of my great enemy, the Hangman of Corfu! Only such a devious mind could devise such a devilish scheme!”

He reached for his matches and absentmindedly relit his pipe. The solution was close at hand, he could feel it!

“Danny? Dinner’s ready.”

“Just a minute, Dad!”

How did the book end? He’d read it before. It was about a girl who went missing in Haifa, and the great David Tidhar was called to assist the police, coming down all the way from Tel Aviv. But the case, naturally, became more complex the more David probed, and involved a secret plan by the Yishuv leadership to smuggle in two ships full of refugees from Germany, an Arab revolt, and Nazi spies. In 1942, Danny knew, it had seemed as though Hitler was very close to achieving one goal of his war and overrunning Palestine itself. Were that to happen, Haifa and Carmel would become the last bastion of Jewish resistance. In the event, Rommel was turned back at Al Alamein, and the German invasion of Palestine never happened. In the book, however, worry remained. But what of the girl? Danny leafed to the end of the book. Surely the great David Tidhar at least had solved the puzzle!

David Tidhar shook hands with the British commandant and boarded the car that was to take him back to Tel Aviv. He had stopped the spies—just in time, it seemed, before they could communicate their vital information to the Nazi fiend!—and at the same time had assisted the Palyam to safely smuggle the refugees into Eretz Yisrael. But the commandant had no need to know that!

“David,” the commandant said, “if it weren’t for you, I believe a Nazi invasion would have been inevitable—and imminent! Thanks to you, we can continue the fight. Fight until the Germans are defeated!”

“I was only doing my job,” David Tidhar said, and he nodded to the driver. The engine started, and they were off, away from the green mountain and this old and belligerent city that was so unlike his own modern Tel Aviv. I was only doing my job, he thought, but he could find no satisfaction. The girl! It was the one case he would always, afterward, remember. His one failure.

He never did find the missing girl.

“What?” Danny said, and despite all his budding bibliophile’s instincts, he threw the book across the room.

“Danny? Are you all right in there?”

“No! Yes! I’ll be out in a minute, Dad!”

Wearily, he went to pick up the book. The letter fell from it, and he picked it up. The scent, a woman’s perfume, was still on it. “Daniel, whatever is happen, I will always love you.” Somehow, he was convinced it was from her. But what did it mean? He sighed, a sound older than his years, replaced the letter in the book, and at last went to dinner.

A week later he was at the German settlement, the old templar village that sits beneath the Baha’i gardens. He was walking along the Fighters of the Ghetto Road when he passed a large ancient-looking pine tree surrounded by fallen cones. He nearly missed it, but something, some irregularity in the color of the bark, perhaps, drew his attention suddenly, and when he approached it he found, carved in small neat letters into the flesh of the tree, a dark and old tattoo that said as if mocking him:

I WILL LEAVE YOU SIGNS, MY LOVE, IN THE MARGINS OF OUR CITY.

That day Danny decided to make the ultimate sacrifice, and as a first step got his dad to phone Great-Aunt Zsuzsi.

“You phone her!” his father said. In matters of his aunt he was not unlike Danny.

“Dad…”

“What do you want from Zsuzsi? She’s an old lady. She shouldn’t be disturbed. She needs to be left alone.”

Danny was wholeheartedly in agreement with his father on this matter. The image of a strange blond girl, however, drove him. “It’s a history project for school,” he said. “Please?”

The phone call was made, reluctantly. Danny’s father spoke briefly into the mouthpiece. He nodded, though the other party clearly couldn’t see him. He spoke into the mouthpiece again. The sun came through the window and illuminated him: no longer a young man, with pouches under his eyes and hair that had been receding steadily away from his high forehead like a crusader force being driven back from a fortress by hostile Saracens. For all that, there was still something sunny about him, though more and more often now the sun seemed submerged in the sea, just beyond the horizon. He said, “Aha. Yes. Aha,” and cradled the phone. “She wants to speak to you.”

There was nothing to it. Like a Roman gladiator who might have once entered the arena in nearby Caesarea, Danny stepped forth.

“Aunty Zsuzsi?” he said.

“Mens sana in corpore sano,” the elderly voice on the other end of the phone pronounced.

“I’m sorry?”

“A healthy mind in a healthy body,” Great Aunt Zsuzsi said. “Still no Latin? For shame. You wish to see me?”

“I have some questions, it’s for this—”

“Monday, five o’clock. Bring waffles.”

“Waffles?”

“Are you deaf as well as ignorant? Good-bye.”

The phone went dead. Danny said, “Good-bye,” into the silent phone, and thought he heard the ghostly echo of a laugh returned to him over the wire.

“What did she say?”

Danny repeated his instructions.

“Oy,” his father said, and sighed. “You better go to the shop, then.”

Stella Maris, the “Sea Star,” sits on the northern peak of Mount Carmel and commands, like the diminutive French general who once held her, extraordinary and long-reaching views. Zsuzsi’s door, up three flights of stairs, opened onto a modest yet comfortable abode, where the entire Mediterranean Sea, it seemed, was spread outside like sparkling fresh laundry.

“Shalom, Daniel! Oh, you’ve grown so much! Give your aunty a kiss!”

Danny, that tireless pursuer of the balash, or “detective,” story, knew about informers. Many times they were crucial to the plot. They were sources of secret knowledge, purveyors of hidden information, and, naturally, had to be paid.

“I brought the waffles,” he said, after being subjected to his cheeks being pinched and the inevitable, tobacco-flavored kiss. “I brought both chocolate and lemon flavor; I didn’t know which one you liked.”

“How sweet of you,” Zsuzsi said, and when she smiled it made her seem for just a moment not young but yet terribly innocent; it was the face of a good-natured baby shortly after being fed. “Please, sit down, Daniel. I’ll make some coffee.”

She disappeared into the small kitchen, and the smell of Turkish coffee was soon wafting through the room. 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?”

“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 in the crowd.” He shook his head. “It couldn’t have been her. But if it was—”

“Yes?”

“She seemed happy.”

They sat together in silence and looked over the forest. At last Danny stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Heisikovitz,” he said.

The old man looked up at him, and his eyes twinkled; they were covered in a fine mist. “Brother Mordechai,” he said. “That’s what I am now. And anyway the family changed the name a few years ago. They wanted something more Hebrew.”

“Oh? What to?”

“Tidhar,” the old man said, and he shrugged. “I think it’s a kind of biblical tree.”

All stories, and even ours, must come to an end. A week later, Danny spent the last of his bar mitzvah money in the bookshops of Hadar and was returning home along Balfour Street. He had hoped to look at Eva again; but when he approached the wall, he was in for a surprise.

Two workmen were standing on the pavement, dressed in blue paint-spattered overalls with a bucket of white paint at their feet and brushes in their hands. They were painting the wall. Danny ran toward them. “What are you doing?”

“Cleaning graffiti,” the one on the left said. He had a bushy mustache and was smoking a cigarette. “Mayor’s instructions. Keep the city clean.”

“This isn’t graffiti!” He craned to look. They hadn’t done much damage yet, but—“What did you do to it?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” the one on the right said. He was thin and balding at the top. “We’ve only just started.”

“What happened to the girl?”

The two workmen looked at each other and back at Danny. They ponderously laid down their brushes. “What girl?”

Danny stared at the painting. It was somewhat obscured now by white, as if a screen of clouds were descending on the scene, hiding it from view. Still, he could make out the outline of the mountains in the distance, a sunflower nodding in the breeze, the deep blue skies behind the clouds of white. It was all still there, all but for one thing.

There was no girl.

“Kid, do you mind? We’ve got work to do,” the one on the left said.

“Yeah,” the one on the right said. “You got a complaint, go to city hall.”

The two workmen looked bemused as the boy wandered off. Inexplicably, he was grinning. “Funny kid,” the one on the left said. “Should be at school or something.”

“Yeah,” the one on the right said, looking quizzically at the picture. “I don’t see what he was getting at,” he complained.

His friend picked up his brush and shrugged. “Kids,” he said.