Travellers in Magic (15 page)

Pieces of the night before were coming back to him. He remembered dreaming, remembered that they had all dreamed, that they had all had the same dream. It was the dream of the tribe's origins, how Ana, mother of the Jang, had disobeyed her mother the moon and was sent out to wander the world forever.

His headache was gone. He was trembling with excitement now.
They had all had the same dream.
What had he discovered? This was bigger than he had thought. He would be the next Carlos Casteneda, legend of the UCLA anthro department. Best-sellers, lecture tours, his paper on “The Collective Unconscious of the Jang” considered seminal in the field.… He dressed slowly, organizing his notes in his mind.

He dreamed of the feast in the meadow nearly every night that week. Clara was there, bending over him in the moonlight, kissing him. Sometimes it was Linda instead of Clara, and then he would wake dissatisfied, feeling that something had been taken from him. He began to avoid Linda, stopping by Dr. Glass's office only when he knew Linda would not be there. He visited Dr. Glass every day now, excited, hardly able to wait for the next session with Mustafa, but he said nothing about the feast night. He wanted to save that for later.

Clara, not Mustafa, answered his knock at the next session. “Where—Where's your father?” Simon said.

“I don't know,” Clara said.

“I was supposed to meet him today,” Simon said, a little impatient. “At—” He looked at his watch. “At three o'clock.”

Clara laughed. “And you expected him to be here?” she said. “You don't know much about the way we figure time.”

“Well,” Simon said. “Can I wait for him? Or could you—Would you answer some questions?” He wouldn't mind getting to know Clara better. And her answers would give him insight into the customs of the women of the tribe.

Clara shrugged. “All right,” she said.

“Great,” Simon said. She led him into the room with pillows and sat down.

Simon sat and took out his notebook. “To begin with—” he said.

“Why don't you use a tape recorder?” Clara asked.

“I—” Simon stopped, confused. “Your father told me you think it steals your souls.”

“He told you that?” Clara said.

“Here,” Simon said, showing her the page in the notebook as if that would prove something. Was she laughing at him? “My first entry. ‘Recorder steals souls.' You mean he wasn't telling me the truth?”

Clara leaned back in the pillows. “Everything we say is a lie,” she said. Simon sat upright and started to say something, but she wasn't finished. “Our native tongue is quite different from yours. Everything we say must be translated, put in sounds foreign to us. What would be pure truth in my language comes out muddy and unclear in yours. We cannot help but lie, you see. We are exiles, and all exiles lie.”

What was she telling him? How many of his notes were wrong? He chose a question at random. “Why did your father tell me the recorder would steal his soul?”

“I don't know,” Clara said. “You'd have to take that up with him.”

Simon paged nervously through his notes. “Trickster god—see Amer. Indian myth,” he read. He wondered what he had gotten himself into. “Where—Where did you learn to speak English?” he asked, to gain time. “You speak very well.”

“I was at the university,” Clara said. She tucked her legs inside her long skirt. “Same as you.”

“The university?” Simon asked. Clara looked at him impassively. “I—Well, I'm surprised. It doesn't seem like the Jang would send their children to the university. Especially the daughters.”

“Why not?” Clara said. Simon winced a little under her even gaze. “It's the daughters, the women, who have to make a living, after all.”

“You—You do?”

“Well, of course,” Clara said. “The men's status depends on how well their women support them. The more money his wives make the more prestige the man has. Men aren't expected to work.”

“They aren't?” Simon asked. He was aware he sounded stupid, unprofessional. “But Mustafa told me—” He looked through his notes. “Mustafa was a horse trader, a carpenter, a guitar player.”

Clara laughed. “He plays the guitar, certainly,” she said. Then, aware that something more was being asked of her, she said, “I don't know why he told you that. You'd have to ask him.”

The session went a little better after that. Clara told him about burial customs, superstitions, the organization of the tribe. Toward the end Simon put away his notebook, and they talked a little about UCLA. Clara had even had a beginning anthropology class with Dr. Glass and she did an excellent imitation of him raising one eyebrow and looking out at his students. Simon was so charmed by her he forgot to ask about the dreams, about what really happened in the meadow the night of the feast of Ana. He wondered how he could ask about courtship rituals without offending her.

Finally he looked at his watch. “It's getting late,” he said. “I've got to go. Listen, when I come back next week could we pick up where we left off? I've still got a few questions to ask you.”

“Sure,” Clara said. “I don't see why not.” She walked him to the door. “Good night,” she said, and added a phrase in her language. She had told him it meant “Luck travel with you.”

Simon stopped at a fast food place on the way home and got a burger. Then he went straight to his room to look through his notes. He felt as if he were glowing, as if people on the street could see him radiate light. His thesis was turning out far better than he'd expected, and he'd met a dark exotic woman who seemed to like him. Maybe that's why I got interested in anthropology, he thought, remembering whole afternoons spent looking through his parents' copies of
National Geographic.
I wanted to meet dark exotic women.

A half an hour later he had to stop, aware that something was wrong. Mustafa had told him the Jang believed in an afterlife, but Clara had mentioned reincarnation. Mustafa had said the Jang didn't eat beef, but Clara had given him a recipe with beef in it. Mustafa had told him about a long and beautiful wedding ceremony, but Clara had said two people were considered married if they'd simply shared a meal and a bed.

Could there be two sets of customs, one for men and one for women? No, not with this much disparity between them. His agitation grew the more he compared Clara's and Mustafa's sessions. He knew he couldn't wait until next week. Angry now and a little frightened, he got into his car and drove to Mustafa's apartment.

He could hear voices raised in argument as he climbed the stairs. A man and a woman were shouting in the Jang's dark rolling language, exchanging insults like thunder. Simon hesitated a little before the door, but his anger overcame everything else and he knocked loudly.

The argument stopped in mid-sentence. Mustafa opened the door, his face flushed, his eyebrows lowered. Clara stood behind him in the hallway.

Simon had never seen Mustafa so angry. It terrified him, made him want to turn around and leave. Then he remembered his thesis, his future, and summoned up the courage to stay. “You lied to me,” he said to Mustafa.

“Did we?” Mustafa said. His voice was dangerously low.

“Your information is totally different from Clara's,” Simon said. “It's like two different cultures. One of you lied.”

Abruptly Mustafa's expression changed. “Well, come in,” he said. “Our guests do not stand out in the hall. Perhaps we can discuss this, yes?”

Simon followed them into the room with the pillows. A fire was lit in the fireplace, and candles glowed in front of the dark portraits on the mantelpiece. Clara sat down and looked at her nails, almost bored. She would not look at him.

“We would not like to mislead you,” Mustafa said. “This thing you write, it is very important to you, yes?”

Simon nodded, still too angry to speak.

“Well then, perhaps we can come to an agreement,” Mustafa said genially. “Is it worth, say, a thousand dollars? A thousand dollars for the correct information, for the truth about the Jang?”

“What?” Simon said weakly. He felt as if he'd been hit. He looked at Clara for reassurance but she did not look up. At least, he thought, she has the decency to be embarrassed.

“Come now, a thousand dollars,” Mustafa said. “That's not so much. And then your future is secure, you have a teaching job, you are all set.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Simon said. “I don't have a thousand dollars. And anyway I don't have to do my thesis on the Jang. There are millions of topics, millions of cultures.”

“Yes, but are you willing to spend another four years waiting for one of them?” Mustafa said. How did he know that? Simon thought. “Another four years at the university, waiting for a topic of interest? Come, we will be reasonable. Eight hundred dollars. In a few months it will be time for the Jang to travel again, maybe to cross the water. Think of your notes, your work, all wasted. We can finish our sessions before we leave, and then you can teach, you can settle down, you can marry Linda—”

“Marry Linda?” Simon said, shocked. “Why?”

For the first time Simon saw Mustafa look confused. “Why? You are in love with her,” Mustafa said. He sounded uncertain.

Simon laughed. He felt as if he were pressing his advantage, but he had no idea what his advantage was. “What gives you that idea?”

“Because of the dreams,” Clara said suddenly. Mustafa said something to her in the language of the Jang but she ignored him. “Because of the dreams we gave you.”

“You gave me dreams?” Simon said. “Those dreams about Linda? And about Clara?”

Clara looked at Simon for the first time. He found it impossible to translate her expression. Surprise? Gratitude?

“You—You dreamed about Clara?” Mustafa said. It was easy to recognize Mustafa's expression, not so easy to find an explanation for it. It was defeat.

“Yes, I did,” Simon said. “Now will someone please tell me what's going on?”

Mustafa was silent. “We are the Jang,” Clara said finally. “We worship Ahitot, son of the moon, brother of Ana, our brother. The trickster god, you would call him. He tells us to defy authority and to aid lovers. He teaches us to dream together, and we dream the stories of the tribe. Like the story of Ana, that you dreamed with us. And he tells us to aid lovers. We were to help you and Linda.”

“Me and—and Linda?” Simon said. “But what gave you the idea we were lovers?”

“Ahitot told us in our dreams,” Clara said. “But then you met me. My father wanted to meet you. He called you and you came to learn about us. My father wanted to make money.” She looked at her father accusingly, as if to say, You see where your scheming gets you?

“Your father—called me?” Simon asked.

“Yes,” Clara said. “That is another thing Ahitot has taught us to do. We can change reality by our dreams.”

This was too much. This was worse than the conflicting information he had been given earlier. They were laughing at him, mocking him. “You can stop it now,” he said. “I give up, all right? I'm going home. I'm not going to listen to any more. This is crazy.”

“You do not believe me?” Clara said. Once again she looked at him impassively, incapable of being contradicted. Her eyes shone in the firelight. “Who do you think it was who changed the address on your piece of paper so that you would come here and not to your advisor's? It changed because we dreamed it.”

Simon could not move. He felt he was being called upon to assimilate too much, to believe too many impossible things at once. Mustafa spoke into the silence. “My daughter would like to share a meal with you,” he said.

Clara looked at her father, horrified. He had wanted to embarrass her, that much was clear, but Simon understood nothing else of what was happening. “A meal and a bed,” Mustafa said, clarifying.

Had Clara told him the truth about the significance of sharing a meal and a bed? “You want—you want to marry me?” he asked, and as he asked it it did not seem so absurd.

Clara looked into the fire. “That is what we were arguing about, my father and I, when you came,” she said. “It is rare—very rare—for a Jang to marry someone from outside the tribe.”

Simon thought of the wild music, the dancing in the moonlight. He thought of his years as a graduate student, four years of sterility, with more to come. Clara was asking him to live with the Jang, to share their dreams, travel to far countries with them and become involved in the weave of the tribe in a way impossible for any anthropologist. He walked over to the fireplace and looked at Mustafa. “I'm sorry if it disturbs you, sir,” Simon said. The blaze consumed his notebook. “But I would like very much to accept your daughter's offer.”

A
FTERWORD

Jang” was written around the same time as “Tourists” and shares many characteristics with it—a puzzled young man, a strange and magical society, an abandonment of a former life. If there is a theme to the stories in this volume it is seen most clearly in these two, which are about the ways in which magic makes its presence felt in the mundane world, erupting through the rime of everyday life like a flower pushing its way through pavement.

I have to admit to a heresy here: I've never agreed with Arthur C. Clarke's dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic is something utterly different from technology; it has a very different feel to it. A magician is part scholar, part poet, part warrior, part priest or priestess. Any idiot can turn on a light switch.

A T
RAVELLER AT
P
ASSOVER

The phone rang the minute Emily got home from work. She hung up her coat and yelled for Heather—“You home, kid?”—and finally answered it on the fourth ring.