The Red Magician (14 page)

“I want,” Vörös said slowly, “some medicine. Anything. Please.”

The woman looked at him closely. Then she seemed to make up her mind. “Just a minute.” She turned and closed the door behind her.

A few minutes later the door opened again. “Here,” she said, giving Vörös some aspirin. She hesitated for a while, and then said suddenly, “Good luck to you, traveler.”

“Thank you,” said Vörös. “The same to you.” He went down the steps and headed toward the camp.

The sun had set by the time he got there. The nurse was gone, probably resting. He hurried to the barracks, to Kicsi. She was asleep. Her breath was shallow and her condition had not changed. Sweat pooled around her eyes, and her forehead was hot as flame. He opened her mouth and tried to make her swallow the aspirin. Then he gave some aspirin to the people who were awake and put the rest in his pocket. He breathed deeply, went outside, and sat down propped against a wall of the shelter. After a while he drew his coat around him and went to sleep.

The nurse came up to him the next morning as he opened his eyes. He stood and stretched.

“I don't know what you did to those people in there, but they seem to be doing much better,” the nurse said, nodding toward the barracks. “I'm—I'm sorry if I seemed rude to you yesterday. I—There's a good deal on my mind.”

“I understand,” said Vörös. “How's Kicsi?”

“The young woman?” The nurse shrugged. “There's been no change. But she's still alive. We didn't expect that much yesterday. How did it go in town?”

Vörös pulled the aspirin from his pocket. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand and started toward the barracks. “Not much, I'm afraid,” he said.

The nurse nodded. “It's more than we've got,” she said, following him. “The shipment of medicine didn't come through today. Apparently things are much worse than we first thought. Why—How could people do a thing like this?” She made a gesture that covered the camp.

“I don't know,” Vörös said. He stopped, aware that she wanted something more from him. “I'm sorry.”

“Well,” she said. “There's a pot of tea in the shelter. It was still warm the last time I checked.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I'll be there later.” He continued to the barracks.

Inside the barracks he blinked, adjusting his eyes to the dim light. He sat down by Kicsi and felt her forehead, speaking words to her as cool as a stream. She moaned and turned away. Someone behind him whispered, “It's him. Vörös,” and he looked around.

Two girls stood in a narrow corridor between cots. One nudged the other and said, “Go on, tell him.” Vörös smiled at them.

“I wanted to tell you,” the other girl began. “My sister—she said she had seen you. She said you were going to take her away. She was a little crazy by then—we all were, I guess—and I thought the red-haired man was her name for death. She even sang a song about you. And then she—she disappeared. I thought she had died. But we just heard from the Red Cross—she's alive, she had been taken in by a family and lived in their cellar for a year. So—thank you. I don't know how you did it, but thank you.”

Vörös nodded. “And,” the girl went on, “well, I'm feeling better, and the nurse says my fever is down, so—” She stopped, then continued in a rush, “if you need a cot for that woman there so she can sleep by herself, well, she can have mine. If she's a friend of yours she can have it.”

“Why, thank you,” said Vörös. He looked pleased for the first time since he had come to the camp. He lifted Kicsi and carried her to the empty cot. “Thank you very much.”

“I hope—I hope she gets better,” the girl said, and went outside.

Vörös sat for a long time by the cot, his eyes half closed. Then he got up and went to check on the other patients, giving them the rest of the aspirin, soothing their fever with cool words. Once he stopped, smiled, and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. The man he was talking to accepted it thankfully. A long time later he went to the shelter for some food.

The nurse was there, talking to a few soldiers. As Vörös came in, she turned and went up to him. “Hello,” she said. “How've you been?”

Vörös shrugged. “Busy,” he said, helping himself to tea.

“The patients seem to think you're some kind of miracle worker,” the nurse said. “Quite a lot of them have recovered faster than I'd looked for. And they tell stories about you, and there's a song—I'm sure you've heard it.” Vörös shrugged. “You know, it's odd. Sometimes I believe them. After all, if nightmares are real, then miracles should be too.”

She poured herself some tea. “There's still no change in your young friend, is there?”

“No,” said Vörös.

“Well …” said the nurse. She sighed. “Sometimes it takes time.”

Vörös worked all through the next few days. The cots emptied as the patients got well or fell into fever dreams from which they never recovered. Once as Vörös passed his hand over Kicsi's forehead she looked up at him. Her eyes were fever-blind and bright as mirrors. She said nothing, and her eyes closed again wearily.

“I think the fever is about to break,” Vörös said to the nurse.

“I hope so,” the nurse said. “I didn't want to bring this up before, but—well, we'll probably be leaving here soon, going to places where they'll need us more. If she isn't well by then—I don't know. Can you take care of her?”

Vörös nodded, his face drawn.

The fever broke the next day. Kicsi opened her eyes slowly and looked around her. A patient in the cot next to her was being fed with care by one of the nurses. I don't understand, she thought. Why are they feeding us if they tried to kill us? And at the back of her mind she thought, I can't stay here—I have to go to work. But she felt so tired. She rolled over and went to sleep.

When she woke again she saw Vörös sitting next to her. At first she did not recognize him: his place was in the forest and the houses of her old village, not the barracks in which she had spent the last year of her life. She could only connect him with the song they had sung in the camps: “
When you're doing all you can,/You'll see him come
…” And he had come to her. She was puzzled. She felt that she should know him.

“Hello, Kicsi,” said the red-haired man softly. “When you talked about traveling to faraway places this was not what you had in mind, was it?”

Who was he? How did he know her name? The effort of concentrating on what he was saying was too much. She stared at the ceiling. She wished he would go away.

“I'm sorry,” the man went on. She could barely hear him. “I should not have joked with you so soon. You want rest, and food.”

She could not turn to look at him. Later, though she could not tell how much later, she heard him say, “What? I don't understand.” There was pain in his voice, but she did not know why.

“Were—did she lose many relatives?” she heard a nurse say.

“Relatives? I don't know. At least her parents, I think, and I haven't been able to find her brother or her sisters.”

“That's it then. She feels guilty for living when so many have died,” said the nurse. “And she feels disoriented as well. She doesn't know where she is. She may not even know who you are. She's just recovering from typhus, remember.”

“Guilty …” he said. “I've seen it too, of course, but I never thought that it would happen to her.”

The nurse shrugged.

“What happens?” he said. “What can I do?”

“What happens?” said the nurse. “Well, sometimes they die. Sometimes they return to life, though. Remember, these are the survivors.”

“Well,” said Vörös. “Is she well enough to eat, do you think?”

By the time he came back with a bowl and spoon Kicsi had remembered his name, who he was. He seemed as unimportant as a character in a forgotten dream, someone connected with a life that was now gone. She could not understand what he was doing in the barracks. She thought of the village, of the people who had gone and would not be coming back, but she could not feel anything for her old life. She remembered struggling to stay alive in the camp, but she could not remember why. They were liberated, but the world was still the same.

Vörös nursed Kicsi for several days. Almost everyone else had left. Slowly she began to realize what she had lost. One day she turned to him and said, “Dead.” Her eyes were as dull as old silver.

“What?” said Vörös.

“Dead. They're all dead. Do you remember what he said, the village no-good? He said that they were all dead. And he was right.”

“The village no-good?” said Vörös. “I haven't heard about him. Tell me.”

She ignored him. “Everyone died. Everyone. Except me.”

“Oh, Kicsi. Not everyone. There are hundreds of people, thousands, still alive. I've seen them, I've helped some of them …”

“Everyone. My mother and father. My sisters. Aladár.”

“How do you know? They may still be alive.”

“I know. I'm a witch.” Kicsi held up her palm and showed him the mark. The scar had faded to bone white. “See? They said that I'm a witch and I am. I don't want to live anymore.”

“Kicsi, please, you can't—I don't know what to do with you. Do you want to hear a story?”

The nurse came in and sat on the cot beside Vörös. “How—how is she?”

“She doesn't want to live,” Vörös said. “She doesn't care anymore.” He sighed. “I don't know what hurts me more—what she says to me or the dead tone in which she says it.”

“I suppose you have to find a way to make her want to live.”

“I know,” said Vörös. “I don't know how.”

The nurse looked at him, puzzled. “I thought you knew her.”

“I did—I don't—I knew her family. I told her stories of faraway places.”

“Tell her some more.”

“I thought of that, but—well—don't you think she's seen enough of life outside her village? Once she couldn't wait to leave, and now she would go back if she had any chance at all.”

“Where do you think she wants to go?” said the nurse.

Vörös asked Kicsi the nurse's question. Kicsi said nothing. “I don't know,” he said.

“The reason I asked—well, we've been given our orders. We leave tomorrow. Everyone who's not well or who has no place to go will be sent to a Displaced Persons camp, but I can't guarantee what it'll be like there. You might want to take her with you, to your—your home. Where are you from?”

“Nowhere,” said Vörös. “I have no home.”

“Oh,” said the nurse. She sounded very tired, defeated. “Well, then. I just don't know what to do. Can you take her with you? I think she'll fare better with you than in an institution.”

“Of course,” said Vörös.

“Well then,” said the nurse. “I'll say good-bye to you now. I don't expect to see you tomorrow, what with all the fuss. Good-bye—and thanks.”

All the next day they heard the sound of jeeps and trucks as the soldiers came and tore down their temporary buildings. Patients who were leaving for the Displaced Persons camp came to say good-bye to Vörös. A few of them wept. “I'll never forget you,” one said. “You saved my life.”

Vörös went outside the barracks as the last of the patients left. “You there! Red!” called one of the soldiers. “Give us a hand here, would you?”

Vörös nodded. He walked over to the temporary shelter and carried the pieces of wood they handed him to the truck. For the next few hours Kicsi was left alone. She heard nothing but the sound of nails tearing from wood, boards knocking together, soldiers cursing, trucks rumbling down the dirt road. The men sitting at the back of the trucks called to Vörös as they left, and then everything was silent.

Vörös came into the barracks and sat down on the cot next to Kicsi. “Well,” he said. “I guess we're the only ones left. And this time, I swear it, I will make you interested in life again. I didn't pull you back from the dead for this.”

The walls of the barracks blew away suddenly, and the roof spun off into the sky. Kicsi gasped. Vörös took her hand and raised her up off the cot, higher, higher, until the cots, the camp, the countryside, dwindled to something she could hold in her hand.

“See, Kicsi. That is Europe,” said Vörös. “It's true that many people died. I can't lie to you.” As he spoke she could see columns of smoke rising up toward them—black smoke, clogged with the smell of death. Fires burned unchecked across the land. She heard people crying in pain, hungry and hurt, filling the earth with their tears, and far away, on the edges of the world, she heard the sea calling back to them.

“But the wounds will heal, Kicsi. See, the land revives. And the people—already the people are finding new ways of life, learning to live again.” She saw a tracery of green spread across the land, a slow stain of healing. People greeted relatives thought to be dead, rejoiced, moved in a great stream away from the burned lands, out toward the new lands of Palestine or America. “That is how it has always been. And underneath it, though you do not see it, though you will not believe me, is a kind of joy. The joy of life.”

They began to move above the world, seeing what it had become. In places the war was still being fought; in other places the soldiers were beginning to come home. They saw movement everywhere. Vörös showed her stone castles and tall cathedrals, lakes and forests and walls of mountains.

Then they moved faster. Kicsi understood that they traveled away from Europe now, over the Mediterranean, over vast deserts holding heat. The world sped by them in a blur—statues of stone and great palaces of ivory, ruined temples, arches and columns and long broken stretches of roadways. They saw cities standing by great rivers that flashed green as they passed, small towns nearly covered by trees, isolated houses far from comfort. Sometimes Kicsi saw something that she thought she recognized: the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China. And then they were speeding across another ocean, this one almost unbelievably vast, over toward America.