The Magician

To Daniil Kharms, a wellspring of ideas.  (Translated from the Russian.)
  January 31, 2007

The magician was a tall drink of water.  When he walked home past the playground, the children in the sandbox would point their fingers at him and shout: “Look at the maypole!”  He would just smile and keep walking.  He was a good-natured fellow and teasing from children or adults did not bother him.  The reason for this, of course, were his magical powers.  He could burn anyone who offended him to a crisp with the tiniest move of his littlest finger.  He could expel the bully into outer space, or turn him into a worm and let the birds have him for breakfast.  But he had never in his life done any such thing.  It was enough for him to realize that even his pinky could command such awesome, unstoppable powers.

“I can do whatever I want,” he would often reflect with satisfaction, and his eyes would squint with pleasure like a cat’s.  He was, however, a bit absent-minded, not to say flighty.  His actions often failed to follow his thoughts.  For example, he could come across a pothole in the street and think: “I only need to snap my fingers and this road will become as smooth as glass.”  He would then pass by the pothole beaming, having forgotten utterly to snap his fingers.  Or he could overhear his drunk neighbor in the adjacent apartment beating his wife again, and think: “A blink of my eye is all it would take to have them make peace.”  He would then fall asleep with a happy grin on his face, having blinked neither eye.  And so on.

He lead a  happy life.  Happiness favors cheerful people and none has more reason for cheer than the world’s mightiest magician.

It is true that his flightiness could be outrageous.  Take, for instance, the time when his building’s superintendent knocked on his door and told him to vacate his apartment.

The magician was incredulous.  “How do you mean?” he asked.

“Just how you heard it.  Gotta pack your things and move out, pal.  I got the papers right here.”

“Who would issue papers like that?”

“Are you daft?” the super jeered.  “The higher-ups, that’s who.  Look: here’s the seal; here’s the signature.  Everything’s in order.”

And sure enough, there were both a seal and a signature on the paper.  The magician studied it for a while, then sighed and thought: “I’d just need to breathe on this corner here and the signature would vanish as if it had never existed.”  This thought cheered him up considerably and he went off to pack his things in perfectly good spirits.

The clothes were easy to pack but the furniture gave him trouble.  He tried to lift a big armchair off the floor but could only strain and grunt.  “Damn antique,” he thought.  “They’re always heavy.  All I have to do is sneeze, though, and then I’ll carry it with one hand.”  He was just about to sneeze when a funny picture arose in his mind: himself, standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets as various pieces of furniture orbited around him, carried aloft by magic.  Even the heaviest objects were flying: the wardrobe, the fridge, the old unwieldy television set.  The magician laughed with delight at this vision, then grabbed the antique armchair and, in a daze of happiness, brought it out to the street without even realizing what he was doing.  There, the chair joined an already sizeable pile of his possessions.  “How wonderful it is to be so powerful,” the magician said to himself, trying to catch his breath.  “Look at these passers-by.  They have no idea that if I wanted to, I could make the whole building move to some other place.”

He ran back to the apartment and there discovered, to his surprise, a team of painters and plasterers.  Two of them were busy stripping his favorite wallpaper from the wall.  Two others were repainting the ceiling with no regard for the remaining furniture, which was left uncovered and now had paint spatter all over it.

“Wait!” the magician cried.  “What are you doing?  I haven’t finished moving things out yet.”

“Well, you should’ve hurried up,” the super buzzed in his left ear.  He had materialized out of nowhere.  “Now they’re busy doing their work.  What took you so long?”

“I tried to hurry up,” the dazed magician stammered.  Inside, he was feeling guilty for his irresponsible failure to speed up the eviction with magic.  “It hardly matters when I use the magic, though,” he reflected.  “What’s to stop me from doing it later, after they have finished?  Right now they really are busy, so I’d better wait.  It doesn’t matter if they drip paint all over things; I can clean it up later in a second.”  He said to the super: “I guess I’ll stop by to pick up the rest of my stuff later, then.”

The super was delighted: “Exactly!  Stop by later.  How ’bout tomorrow morning?”

“All right,” agreed the magician, scratching his head.  He was already preoccupied with a different issue: where to sleep tonight.  Various plans raced through his mind as he went down the stairs; once out on the street, though, he stopped in his tracks and looked around in confusion.  The heavy antique armchair was gone.  It must have been picked up by a passer-by or one of the neighbors.  The magician gave an irritated huff and vowed to find the thief later with his supernatural divining powers and, for a good lesson, to tear off his limbs one by one.  In the meantime, however, there were more pressing needs.  He headed to the payphone to see if one of his friends would put him up for the night.

None of them could.  They were all away, or terribly busy.  The magician stood for a while in the phone booth, lost in thought.  Then some angry gentleman, apparently anxious to make a phone call, called him various names and made him leave.  The magician considered afflicting the angry gentleman with scabies, thought better of it and decided to go have lunch instead.  However, when he reached an eatery, he discovered that the last of his money had been spent on the phone.  There was only one thing to do.  He headed clear across the city to his office.  He would have gone there this morning were it not for all the excitement with his eviction.  Now he walked, still deep in thought and forgetting that he easily could arrive there instantaneously: all he had to do was wish for it.

He had no more luck at the office than elsewhere that day.  The payroll clerk refused to issue him an advance.  “Impossible,” she declared curtly and winced as the afternoon heartburn flared up in her stomach.  “In fact, the chief wanted to see you about something urgent.”

“What’s that?”

“How should I know?  They’ve been looking for you since this morning.”  She looked him up and down with her suspicious porcine eyes.  “Where have you been this whole time, anyway?”

“I— I’ll tell you later,” the magician promised and started inching towards the door.  “I really should be going now.  The boss is waiting and all that.”

With these words he rushed out the door, up the stairs, and to the fifth floor, where their department head, a distinguished, portly gentleman, spent his invaluable time smoking cigars and making momentous decisions.

“Well, my dear boy,” the chief told him.  “You see, um, hmm— We’re— well— in a way, so to speak, we’re making you redundant.”

The magician felt the ground disappear beneath his feet.

“What?” he stammered weakly.  “How do you mean?”

“Rather literally, I’m afraid.  Ahem!  You know how tight our budget has become, unfortunately.”

“What a day!” the magician thought bitterly.  “This can try the limits of any magic.”

“Don’t be so put out now,” the chief continued.  “There is plenty of demand for specialists of your kind in the job market.  You’ll be up on your feet again in no time.”

The magician at that moment longed for a storm, a mighty tornado to uproot his office tower as well as his now ex-home and even that bloody phone booth for good measure.  He did not bring about an actual storm, of course.  What’s the point of so much destruction when an issue can be resolved very simply with a slight jerk of one’s right leg?  As the chief continued to spout something unintelligible but vaguely encouraging, the magician had readied his right leg for a jerk— and then stopped.  A thought struck him like a thunderbolt from the sky: his stuff!  He had left his stuff out on the street, all of it, accessible to anyone, without any oversight!

He rushed home without even bothering to let the chief finish his speech.  It was too late.  The only thing left was a badminton racket, unusable as its head had no strings.  Everything else was gone.

The magician picked up the racket and looked it over absent-mindedly.  The sky was growing dark.  He had to figure out something.

An hour and a half later they kicked him off one of the suburban train lines.  He was bound for a place where a friend of his owned a summer home.  The house had a spare key hidden in a place where the magician could get to it.  He was only two stops from his destination when they caught him.

He watched the cars as they snaked away into the darkness and shrugged.  The station where they had left him was small: at this hour, there was no one on the platform but him.  Squadrons of bugs assaulted light bulbs half-concealed underneath metal shades.  A cricket started chirping loudly nearby, beyond the reach of the paltry station lights, but then stopped, embarrased by the sound of its own voice.  Under the cool blanket of night, on all sides, fields slumbered.

The magician stepped from the platform onto the road.  It flowed, lambent, into the unknown.  “Let’s go have an adventure,” he thought.  “The road shall take me somewhere interesting, I’ll bet.  Or, if it doesn’t, I’ll make it.”  He chose a direction at random and set off whistling and swinging the useless badminton racket carelessly by his side.

* * *

About two weeks later Ivan Yegorovich Sytnikov, a hobo, had chanced upon an abandoned shed somewhere in the fields around the M. train station.  Inside the shed stood a rough wooden cot.  On the cot, a strange man tossed and turned, delirious.  He was thin as a rail and must have gone for some time without a bath, if one were to judge by the smell that pervaded the air—the sour, rancid stench peculiar to the homeless.  The man’s clothes, on the other hand, were quite nice.  The stranger kept shouting meaningless, aborted sentences and trying in vain to snap his fingers.  His feverish look, his face covered with fiery spots and a glassy mask of sweat told Sytnikov that things were serious.  The bum closed the door and sat down by the head of the bed.

“Shed—” the stranger mumbled.  “Puh-palace.  No problem—  Make it better than any sultan’s.  Peacocks— by the fountain— in the garden.  In the summer, play some bad-min-ton.”  As he overcame the last word, his eyes flew open and he beheld a man by his side.  “You again?” he addressed Sytnikov reproachfully.  “I’ve already told you that due to— state of health— cannot— vacate.  Besides—”  He propped himself on one elbow and pointed an unsteady indignant finger straight at his puzzled guest.  “What kind of papers are we talking—?  Why no— advance— from salary—?  Begone!” he yelled with the last of his strength and fell back on the bed.

“You don’t look too good, buddy,” Sytnikov said.  “Maybe we should get you a doctor.”

“A doctor?”  The stranger snorted with derision.  “I myself can cure anything you like.”  For a moment, his speech became more coherent and his eyes regained some luster.  “Do you know who I am?” he asked Sytnikov sternly.

“I could care less.”

“I am a magician,” said the magician, revealing his secret for the first time.  “Almighty and omnipotent.”

“No kiddin’,” Sytnikov said.  “Do me a favor then, will ya?  Gimme a new pair of shoes.  The ones I got is so old their holes got holes on ’em. That’s a fact, buddy.”

The magician lay back on his bed and closed his eyes.  “This guy doesn’t believe me,” he muttered.  “I could chase the sun from the sky if I wanted to, but this guy doesn’t believe me.”

“I’d be glad to believe you, buddy,” Sytnikov assured.  He was by nature a garrulous man.  “The problem here, see, is your lying half-dead in a dirty shed in the middle of nowhere and reeking up the place something awful; that’s the problem.”

“I reek?” the magician asked with surprise and tried feebly to sniff the air.  He frowned.  “I haven’t noticed.  About the shed and the half-dead part, that simply was bad luck.  I came here in the dark, see?  And before I got here, I fell into a stream.  The water was cold.  Eight days… no, ten days ago.  So, pneumonia!  But the shed…  Make into a palace.  With peacocks by the fountain.  Better than any sultan’s.”

His speech had grown slurred again.  He laughed.  Laughter became a strained cough and his face grew beet-red.  Between fits of coughing he managed: “You know what’s funny?  During my entire life, I keep intending to work some magic.  I never get around to it, though.  Never once.”

“If you are a magician then I’m Napoleon,” Sytnikov said.

The magician’s face grew redder, but this time not from coughing.

“I am all-powerful!” he wheezed.

“Then why don’t you cure your pneumonia?”

“Pneumonia?”  the magician cried.  With great effort he raised his left hand up to Sytnikov’s face.  “Nothing,” he forced out, “to it!”—and finally, at long last, snapped his fingers.  “There!” he breathed out exultantly and dropped dead.

Sytnikov stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Hey,” he called.  “Hey, buddy!  You alive?  Come off it, now.  Get up!  Never mind the damn pneumonia.  You can be Santa Claus if you wish; I don’t care.  Listen, you got anything to eat, huh?  Anything?”

The magician did not answer.  His eye were rapidly glassing over.

“Man, that’s a hoot,” Sytnikov said to no one in particular.  “He was gonna cure himself but instead he kicked the bucket.”

He looked at the deceased’s feet and suddenly noticed that they were shod in somewhat weathered but still very decent black boots.

“Fuckin’ A!” he exclaimed and tried pulling the boots off the corpse’s feet.  The laces were tied in tricky knots and gave him trouble at first but he soon figured them out. He immediately put the boots on his own feet, tired and sore from constant walking.  He could still feel the warmth left over from the previous owner.  The shoes fit perfectly.

“How’s that for magic?” Sytnikov said happily.  He looked over at the thin, wasted body lying on the cot before him and his face grew somber.  “Sorry, buddy,” he said.  “I need them more than you do.”

He sighed and closed the dead man’s eyes.  Then he got up, crossed himself for some reason, shook his head, and was gone.

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