The Red Magician (12 page)

The prisoners were given shirts and pants made of flimsy cloth, and worn shoes. Kicsi put them on awkwardly, trying to hide her left hand. The woman in uniform waved them on into the next room.

“Next,” she said. Kicsi stepped up. “All right, you can go. Straight through that door there.”

Kicsi began to walk away. “Wait a minute,” the woman said. “Your hand. No, the other hand. Let me see it. Do I have to open it myself?”

Slowly Kicsi opened her hand and showed the woman the star. The silver glistened in the dim light. “Ah, I thought so. Here. Give it here. Oh, don't be childish.” The woman put her hand on the star and turned to go. The star did not move.

“What? What is this? Don't play games with me, young lady, or I will see to it that you are not so fortunate in the next room. Give me your necklace.”

Around them people were moving, begging to keep just one trinket, crying softly. Another train pulled up outside and the dogs began to bark again. Kicsi heard none of it. The world had narrowed down to her and the woman in uniform and the star in the palm of her hand. Blood sang in her ears.

The woman tried once more to take the necklace. “Have you got it glued to your hand, then?” she said. Her eyes narrowed. She pulled harder. A drop of red blood appeared at one of the points of the star and clouded the silver. Kicsi cried out in pain. The star began to come loose, leaving deep welts where it had been. Blood welled up from the scars.

The woman in uniform hissed. “Witchcraft!” she said, looking at the bloody necklace in her hand. She tossed it quickly into the pile of jewelry. “You're a witch!”

Kicsi stared numbly at her palm. Beneath the running blood she could see the faint outline of the star, and she knew she would have the scar for life. Perhaps it was true then. Perhaps she was a witch. She often knew things without knowing how she knew. And Sholom—hadn't he once said that she had been touched by magic? Oh, Vörös, she thought. What is happening to all of us?

“Go on into the next room, witch,” said the woman in uniform. “They know what to do with people like you there.”

In the next room were several men. Only one of them spoke. When she got close enough to hear what he was saying she saw that he said only two words. “Left,” he said. “Right. Right. Left.” As each prisoner came up to him he indicated the direction they were to go. “Left,” he said monotonously. “Left. Right.”

Up ahead Kicsi could see Sarah. She had not seen her mother since leaving the cattle car. “Left,” the man said, but not to Sarah. It was as if he thought Sarah could not understand him. A guard moved her over to the left.

“Right,” he said in the same tone as Ilona stepped up to him. “Left,” to the rabbi's daughter. He studied Kicsi. Her left hand was clenched against the pain. Finally, “Right,” he said.

Those on the right were taken to the barracks—low buildings that contained beds built like shelves for hundreds and hundreds of people. “This is where you will stay,” said a guard.

Night had fallen, and the prisoners could see people stacked like wood, sleeping fitfully. A few had woken when they heard the guard.

“What—what happened to the others?” said someone.

“Them?” he said. “They came in through the doors, but they'll go out through the furnaces.” He studied the small group of women. “Just as you will. Just as you will.”

“But why?”

“Why? They were too old, or too sick, or too young. Troublemakers.”

“No, I meant why—” someone said. Kicsi did not hear her. A roaring built up like a wave inside her. Troublemakers. That meant Aladár. He was dead. She had known it from the time they had said good-bye. Aladár was dead, and she was a witch, someone who had been touched by magic. How else had she known with such certainty that he would die? And Sarah, and poor Imre with his paralyzed arm—they were dead. All of them dead.

The world folded over like paper, and the other side was blank, was empty. She sank gratefully into that emptiness, and for a long time she knew no more.

They had shaved her head to prevent lice, but she had lice anyway. Her teeth had begun to hurt, and she was hungry all the time. She could not wash herself, and her clothes and skin were caked over with mud and ashes from the furnaces. The scar on her palm had never healed, but had remained the color of old blood.

Every few weeks the barracks would be visited by guards, and a few people taken away. She did not know where the people went, and she did not try to find out. She said nothing to anyone, and the others ignored her.

One day a few months later she was among those taken away. She was led outside and put on another train heading to another camp. During the trip a prisoner died of the heat, and no one came to collect his body. As soon as the doors were opened the prisoners flung the corpse outside.

Because Kicsi was quiet and docile she was given what was considered a good job: she was to work in the kitchen squad. “Get us some food—a carrot, maybe, or some bread,” they would say to her, the people that slept in the barracks with her, and they would try to bribe her with cigarettes, with the promise of the use of a toothbrush. She did not hear them. She went to work, often for twenty hours a day, came back to the crowded room and slept, and went to work with the dawn, woken by the dogs. Occasionally she would eat from the food she was preparing, but she did not remember it.

The kitchen workers were watched by guards, and no one spoke. Everyone was tired and hungry. A few were sick, but they tried to work anyway. The smoke from the furnaces was everywhere; it rose to the sky and blotted out the stars, and it reminded them of what would happen to them if they could not work.

One day Kicsi heard laughter in the kitchen, and she looked up, surprised. A short bandy-legged man with dark black hair and eyes had come in and given the guard a piece of paper. The guard shifted his rifle and read the paper slowly, and over his shoulder the short man mimicked him with exaggerated gestures. The guard looked up, and the laughter stopped suddenly.

“It says here you were a
Feuermann
, a stoker,” said the guard.

“Yes, that's right,” said the short man.

“And that you're to be transferred to the kitchens,” the guard went on, slowly. He sounded puzzled.

“That's right.”

“Why?”

“Why?” said the short man, amused. He shrugged, as if to say, Who knows why they do anything around here? “I don't know.”

“All right, then, get to work. Get that bucket over there and boil some potatoes. And don't expect me to tell you what to do after that, because I won't. You find your own work.”

The short man nodded and turned to work, and quiet settled among the workers again.

A few minutes later the woman next to Kicsi was laughing softly. Kicsi stopped her work and moved closer to her. The short man was spinning her a tale about an elaborate black-market scheme he had set up, about the ways he planned to sell the food he was going to steal from the kitchens. As he finished the woman wiped her eyes with her sleeve and sighed.

“Ah, that's good, my friend,” she said. “You almost make me believe we will get out of here alive.”

Kicsi went back to cutting potatoes.

The short man whistled as he worked. At first the guard frowned at him, but he did not threaten him, and the man continued to whistle. Kicsi found that she could ignore the short man, could turn the whistling into background noise.

For weeks he whistled the same tune over and over; then suddenly he began to sing the words.

“Naming names the wisest know,

Soft he'll come and softly go,

Taking one or two away,

Comforting the ones who stay.

When you're doing all you can,

You'll see him come—the red-haired man.”

Kicsi looked up. Her throat was full of unspoken words, and she was painfully close to crying. She tried to speak, but could not. The short man began to sing again.

“Passing forest, passing field,

Unheralded and unrevealed,

He comes to comfort we who stay,

And takes one or two away—”

“What—what do you mean?” said Kicsi. Her voice was dry. No one heard her. She cleared her throat. “What do you mean, about the red-haired man?”

The short man turned to her and shrugged. “Nothing. I don't know. It's just a song.”

“Where did you hear it? What does it mean?”

“Over at the barracks. They say—” He looked around him and lowered his voice. “Well, a friend of mine said—I know this sounds crazy—he said that there's this man. A red-haired man, a traveler. A sort of magician. You can see him sometimes, standing out past the barbed wire, and then all of a sudden—
poof!
—he's inside. And he takes you out with him. He—my friend—he taught me the song.”

The short man was silent for a while. “Then—yesterday—my friend disappeared. I know—I know they took him away, to—you know—to be killed. But I can't help myself. I think that he met the red-haired man, and that he's safe now.”

“I know him,” said Kicsi. “The red-haired man. Your friend is safe.”

“
You
know him? How?”

“He was—he was a friend of my family. A friend of mine. I haven't seen him now for—oh, for years. But I know your friend is safe. He was a magician—a very good magician.”

“A magician? But—how do you know?”

Kicsi held out her palm. She had never shown her scar to anyone, had tried to keep it hidden. “He gave me this,” she said.

“He
gave
you—” The short man looked at her in amazement. His eyes lost their laughter, became confused.

A guard looked up. Kicsi turned back to the stove. Her face had gone wooden, dead. When the guard looked away, the short man turned to Kicsi and said, “What on earth did you mean by that?”

Kicsi said nothing. It was as if she had never spoken.

The next day the short man was gone. Kicsi did not know if he had been taken to the ovens or if he had met the red-haired man. She did not ask. She did her work and went back to the barracks to sleep.

That night she dreamt about Vörös. She saw Ilona and Sarah and the rabbi's daughter being herded onto cattle cars, exactly as before, but this time Vörös stood at the doors. She reached for her necklace, knowing that if she showed it to him she would not have to get into the train. The necklace was gone. She fumbled for it wildly, knowing that it had to be there. The red-haired man looked at her and said, “In that case, you will have to go with the others.” He smiled. He had no teeth.

Kicsi screamed. She woke up and lay for a moment without opening her eyes, trying to pretend that she was still back in the village with her family and Vörös and that everything was as it had been before. Someone else in the barracks screamed, and another woman joined her; soon everyone was awake.

“It's all right,” a woman on Kicsi's right said. She felt someone hold her hand. “You had a nightmare. You'll be all right now.”

“Will you for God's sake stop that noise?” someone said loudly. Kicsi opened her eyes. A woman was climbing down from one of the upper beds. Her hair might have been brown once, though it was cut so short it was hard to tell, but it had begun to turn to gray. She did not look older than thirty-five.

The woman knelt down so that her eyes were level with Kicsi's. “What on earth is going on here, Rachel?”

“She had a nightmare,” said Rachel. Then to Kicsi she said again, “It's all right now.”

“My—my mother,” said Kicsi. “And my sisters, and the man I was going to marry. They're dead now. All of them.”

“The hell with them,” said the gray-haired woman, not unkindly. “They're better off dead. We all would be.” Rachel started to speak; she turned to her in anger. “And stop saying it's all right—it isn't all right and you know it. This young woman here has better sense than you.” Someone wailed, a long keening note that stopped abruptly. “Now look what you've done. Once they get started they just don't stop.”

“I—I'm sorry,” said Kicsi. “I never realized before about—about—I never had a dream here until tonight, I think.”

“You just realized that they're dead,” said the gray-haired woman.

Kicsi nodded.

“And now you're trying to join them.”

“What?”

“Well, look at you. Look at your hair—it's hard to keep it that dirty when it's cut so short, but you seem to manage. And look at your shoes. Winter is almost over and you haven't even tried to bind the holes. You'll freeze to death, if you don't die of stupidity first. You could at least wash yourself. You could pay some attention to what goes on around here. Someday you'll wake up to find you've sleepwalked right into the ovens. God, people make me sick sometimes. We should all die. It would be for the best.”

“But what—how do I wash? They don't give us any—”

“Fool!” said the gray-haired woman, but Rachel said softly, “Some of us use the coffee they give us to wash in.” She smiled. “You can't use it for drinking.”

“Look around you, for God's sake,” said the gray-haired woman. “We're all experts in survival. Even Rachel here.”

“Why do you care?” said Kicsi suddenly, fiercely. Someone in the barracks began to cry. “If you hate people so much why don't you just kill yourself? Make it easier for them?”

“Why?” The gray-haired woman grinned triumphantly. “To spite them, that's why. Every day I stay alive is a victory. I don't worry about tomorrow.”

“I try to stay alive because—well, so I can tell someone,” said Rachel. “To be a witness.”

“Fool!” the other woman said again. “Who will you tell? You'll never get out of here. And even if you do, no one would believe you. Hell, I wouldn't believe it myself if anyone told me.”