The Barter (25 page)

The rumors about the magician's final show had been dark ones. The handbills had declared that Herr Krause possessed the power to read minds, predict the future, and foresee death, and that his final performance would be devoted to the exhibitions of those blacker,
more mystical talents; therefore, no one under the age of fifteen would be permitted to attend. It was said that this was the pattern of his engagements from town to town: a few shows of straightforward magic, of the sleight-of-hand, cabinet-of-wonders, knife-throwing variety, and one final performance that revealed such grim mysteries that afterward, presumably, no one in the town would want to see the magician again and he'd be welcome to depart. It was said that his performances had ruined families and driven men to desperation. How exactly these wreckages had been accomplished was less clear. To Rebecca it all sounded delicious.

The Hirschfelders skirted the crowds huddled in the cold on the schoolhouse steps and made their way into the close, smoky, gaslit interior of the building, weaving their way through the throngs to the ticket taker and thence to their seats. Men came to say hello to John, and women nodded their braided heads to Rebecca. While John made small talk over the seat backs, she looked around at their neighbors, at the curls of smoke hanging in the air overhead, and at the lantern stage lights and the heavy curtain that had been contrived for the magician's performances. What a strange place to find oneself is a theater, or a room made into a theater, she found herself thinking. Lines and lines of people, their heads and shoulders, a whole bobbing sea of consciousness, are all laid out in neat rows like supper on a table. A monster's dream. Rebecca could positively swear that she wished no harm to a single person in the room, and yet she imagined a dragon laying waste to the entire assemblage with the swing of a thorny tail or a single breath of fire. It was easy enough to imagine, in fact, that they had all gathered here for precisely that purpose.

The appointed hour arrived, and the lights dimmed in warning, and the good country people said their good-byes to each other and
found their seats in a great clamor. The old hinges on the bottoms of the auditorium chairs sang and yawned like an orchestra tuning in the moments before the opening note.

The magician appeared from behind the curtain and bowed deeply to their applause. He removed his hat, and they all held their breath. Nothing came out. Herr Robert Krause treated them all to a wry smile and put the hat back on his head.

“I'd like to tell you some stories,” he announced, adding, “There's no reason to be afraid.” He turned then, and the curtains parted on a cue. “As I tell my stories, you may, if you choose to look, see the truth of them revealed in the mirror behind me.” They could all now see emerging from the gloom the frame of a tall, wide, oval glass—just the sort of thing, Rebecca thought, delighted, that Snow White's stepmother would consult for wicked ideas. The audience shifted, dimly seeing themselves in their rows.

“You will see by my demonstrations that the mirror is an ordinary mirror.”

He walked closer to it so that they could all see his reflection in the glass, and themselves behind him, nodding in the glimmering gray.

“It is as solid as I am myself,” Herr Krause said. He put his hand out and touched it, then made a fist and knocked on it. They all heard the sound. He removed a cloth from his coat pocket and efficiently polished the evidence of his hand away from the glass.

“It is, in short, a plain mirror. If one of you ladies would like it for your dressing room, I'll sell it to your husband,” he added, again as if he were ejaculating a few last thoughts he hadn't intended to vocalize, and again they all laughed in surprise.

He turned back to them and pointed to an old woman seated at the end of the front row. “Beautiful
Fräulein
”—and there was some
charmed laughter here—“will you come up to the stage by yonder stair and inspect my mirror? I will meet you and guide you to it,” he blurted, in what seemed to be an unpremeditated flash of gallantry, as she began to start up with some difficulty from her chair. He fairly dashed across the stage and down the five steps that descended to the first row, and the audience clapped. The two of them made a dear sight, the young blond man in his straight black clothes with his arm extended supporting the older woman, bonneted and yellow faced. She smiled handsomely and he smiled back at her and they ascended the steps and the cheering grew louder.

“Who is that?”

“Mrs. Brandt, the dear thing. Her daughter teaches at the school.”

“Oh, yes, the pretty teacher—”

He led Mrs. Brandt to the mirror and invited her to touch it, which bravely she did. Her hands, in the old-fashioned fingerless lace gloves women who'd lived through the war sometimes still wore, flattened against the glass as if it were a windowpane, then withdrew, leaving the impressions of her fingers.

“
Ach,
let me clean that off for you,” she said, reaching instantly for her handkerchief, and the audience roared with laughter as she set to work on the glass with it. Herr Krause bowed again, and gently put his hand over hers.

“Allow me,
gnädige Frau
. If you would touch the frame, there? Is it solid?”

Mrs. Brandt laughed and ran her hand around the wooden frame of the mirror, nodding as she did so.

“And if you would, please, walk behind it?”

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Brandt said, surprised, and the audience laughed and clapped for her again. Herr Krause allowed a smile himself.

“Oh, yes, please. If you would do me the kindness.”

She was seen to disappear briefly behind the tall mirror, and while she was gone, if the room did draw itself up into a plate-just-dropped silence, then what of it? What did it mean but that the magician's performance had already begun? Mrs. Brandt emerged on the other side and gazed at Herr Krause. “It is only a mirror,” she said distinctly.

“
Danke, verehrte Dame.
” He bowed to her and with a wave of his arm invited the audience to applaud her intrepid explorations again. “Will you remain here with me while I tell the first of my stories?”

“I will,” she said.

“Good sirs, will you bring a chair for Mrs. Gerda Brandt?” Herr Krause called offstage. While the audience, no less than Mrs. Brandt herself, absorbed the information that he in fact
knew
her, knew her name, two of the young boys from the high school who had been trained in lifting and lowering the curtain and obeying the magician's calls for remarkable articles bustled a high-backed dining room chair out onto the stage and left it in the position to which the magician directed them.

He saw Mrs. Brandt settled into the chair and said to her, “Are you ready?”

She looked at him as if to ask,
What has it to do with me?
“All right,” she said, and they all laughed again.

Herr Krause nodded to her, then to the audience. “I shall turn toward the mirror, then, and begin. Whatever you should see, and whatever you should hear, you should not repeat outside this room.”
Herr Krause smiled at his audience. “We are all friends here,” he added.

“If I may ask also for your silence. These stories are very old, and it is difficult for them to hear. Now then.”

Rebecca wondered briefly if he'd meant to say that the stories were difficult
to
hear, but then understood that the magician wanted them to believe that the stories were in fact listening to
them,
somewhere on the other side of the mirror, and waiting to be drawn into the world of the living through the medium of the magician. She shivered with some excitement and thought how much Frau would have loved to see this. How Aunt Adeline would have relished being the old woman on the stage! But then the young man turned his back on them, allowing the full force of his features to be reflected in the mirror that held all of their faces, too, and the lights behind him dropped to almost nothing, and he began to speak.

He said to the mirror:

“Once there was a poor woman who loved children and wished for a child of her own. She and her husband prayed and prayed for a child to be born to them, but for many years their prayers went unanswered.

“This woman who loved children was also well loved by the children in the town, and they followed her everywhere while she sang to them and told them stories and taught them games. The people in her town were poor and worked hard, and they often had little to feed their children, but this woman fed them with her love, and the children always went home happy and rosy-cheeked as if they'd eaten cake and milk all day long, and they went to bed with their heads so full of songs and games that they didn't hear their bellies groan with hunger.”

In the glass could be perceived another dim shift, as if everyone in the theater had just turned in their seats at once.

“One day while the woman was in the fields with seven of the children from the town, a band of murderous thieves found them. Before the woman could call for help, catastrophe was upon them. One of the children was trampled to death under the men's horses, one of the children ran in fright into the river and drowned there, and two other children, a brother and a sister, were snatched up by the robbers and never heard from again. The woman gathered up the three remaining children and hid them under a haystack and, seeing there was no more room for her there, crawled under a haystack nearby to hide. But the men saw the children moving in the hay and stabbed into the haystack with pitchforks until the children were all dead. The woman hid until she heard the robbers ride away, and then she crept out, weeping, and locked herself in her house. No one in the town knew what had happened, and even the woman's kind husband could not convince her to tell him why she cried and cried and couldn't stop. The parents of the dead children looked everywhere for them, but the children, even the ones under the haystack, were never found, and winter came suddenly that year and covered the town with snow and ice.”

The surface of the mirror shifted as if smoke had blown across it, and a pale face was seen to emerge: a woman's face, smeary with tears, not beautiful but not ugly, either. Mrs. Brandt glanced at her and then stared fiercely at the floor, looking very much as if she would like to return to her seat in the front row next to her husband. A few people in the audience were heard to gasp, but as the sounds of alarm and amazement rose in the auditorium, the face in the mirror was seen to fade slightly.

“Please,” the magician said, and for the first time he sounded out of breath and tired. “Please, I must ask for your silence.”

They quieted. The face in the mirror began to shine with a terrible whiteness.

“The children's bodies slept under snow and ice, and during the winter that the woman wept and wept in her house, she and her husband found that, unknown to them both, just before her great sorrow descended, their dearest wish had been granted, and by spring they would have a child of their own. As the snow melted the woman's womb grew, but to her husband's dismay the woman's soul was melting away with the snow. She could not stop thinking of the dear babies she had allowed to die.”

In the mirror, as the magician spoke, the woman's face could be seen to change. An expression of anguish came over her, and she seemed to turn partly away, then force herself to look back. She wasn't pretty enough to be an actress, Rebecca thought.

“Her husband couldn't understand why she, with her dearest wish finally granted, would not be happy. She only melted further away. Even when the child was finally born, healthy and bloodred and snow-white, the woman was tormented with great unhappiness. Finally the husband took the child away to raise in the kitchen while the mother remained locked in her room, crying and crying, unable to stop, even with her happiness right outside the door.”

A second face appeared in the mirror, and to no one's great surprise, it appeared to be a child, infinitely beautiful and sad, neither boy nor girl. Mrs. Brandt shifted uneasily in her seat.

“Time passed, and the child grew, and the woman stayed in her room and wept. Times were hard, and they were often hungry. The child was a good girl with a generous heart who saw how unhappy her
parents were, and tried always to be obedient and helpful. With her mother locked in her room and her father working hard, she was constantly alone.

“But
not
alone. Because the ghosts of the seven dead children came to the house of the woman they'd loved so well, who'd always fed them with her good heart. They were hungry and cold from their first winter under the snow and always would be. Even though the child gave them her blankets, her bread, and even her clothes, the ghosts were always cold and hungry, and always wanted more.”

Murmurs of horror and alarm were heard throughout the theater. The faces of the woman and the child in the mirror had been joined by the spectral faces of sad, hungry ghost children: eyes huge and dark, mouths open and pleading. The face of the young magician, solid and handsome in the mirror with the ghosts, remained stern, and old Mrs. Brandt on the stage refused to acknowledge them by so much as a glance.

“The day finally arrived when the little girl had nothing else to give to the hungry, scared ghosts. There was no bread left in the house, and no wood for a fire, and the little girl's clothes were ragged and thin. The father worked hard, but times were bad, and many families were hungry and making do with little.

“The ghosts said to the little girl, ‘Please, please feed us and let us come by the fire. We're so cold and hungry and tired.'

“The little girl said sadly, ‘I don't have a fire, and we have nothing to eat.'

“The ghosts said, ‘Then you must let us eat your insides hollow and warm ourselves inside your skin.'”

In the mirror, the little faces became monstrous, prompting some cries of dismay.