Calling

One afternoon we read a book about witches, and grandmother stopped.  She read aloud to me almost every day, even when I was in my teens, but although we had discussed the mistakes in fairy tales many times she had never before looked so serious.

“Katya, one thing you are going to have to learn is that for every truth about us that people understand, there are ten falsehoods that they think they understand.  For instance, they think that the magic is something we do.”

“Isn’t it?” I said, less interested in her response than in what was going to happen next in the book.  The English translation of French prose contrasted strangely with my grandmother’s Bavarian accent as she pronounced the words so carefully.

“No.  The magic is…”  She tapped the paperback with one bony finger.  “It is something that happens to us, Liebchen.  Or through us.”

“But you can make things happen, Oma.  You do it all the time.  And Mutti says—”

“Your mother does not believe in the old ways,” said Oma, her whiskered upper lip twitching with either distaste or sadness.  “Though how she thinks you arrived in this world if they are not true, I do not know.”

We’re all what you’d call female.  With all my study, I haven’t run across anything that makes its babies exactly the way we do, but I think we’re closest to ferns.  They open their leaves and send out spores, and witches mold little waxen babies and breathe life into them.  I’ve speculated that something about the breath or about the Ritual of holding the figure so long in your hand is what transmits whatever life we have to give.

Presumably what Oma meant was that I started as a tiny wax figure, blinking up at my mother, who then nourished me until I came all the way to life.  I never felt that exotic.  Mutti moved us to London when I was three, and I had what seemed like a pretty normal childhood.  If I could occasionally move things without touching them or tell when a classmate was going to get the chicken pox, well, there were all sorts of regular people—boys even—who could do that.  And I was content, I think, if a bit solitary.  Oma told me about the old ways, and Mutti told me about music, and all through school I didn’t really miss having friends.  After all, it was safer.  I was happy.

I think I was happy.

He must have been about twenty.  I was eighteen.  I saw him first standing in a queue, waiting for a bus.  I was buying a magazine from the stand on the corner, and I stood there leafing through it, not seeing the silly, elaborately coiffed boys who somehow managed to make the records I liked.  I was watching him over the top of my magazine as he hunched his shoulders up closer to his slender neck, his hair brushing the collar of his blue pea jacket.  He had an ugly, noble face, like an Elizabethan privateer, and before I got on the bus I had decided I loved him.

I had to know his name for the charm to work, that much I was certain of.  I might even have to get a piece of his hair or clothes somehow.  I got on the bus after him, paying for my ticket as best as I could without taking my eyes off him.  He’d met a friend and they were sitting next to each other, talking in exuberant Cockney accents.  I caught his name.  It’s not important that you know it.  I wished there was some way I could get something of his, just to make it sure.

As often happens when I wish for something that fervently, it happened.  A button that had been hanging by a thread on the sleeve of his coat detached and rolled along the bus floor, coming to rest beside the toe of my left loafer.

I waited to see if he’d notice the button was gone, but he was laughing with his friend and I don’t think he even saw me.  I bent down and picked up the black plastic button and held it in my doubled fist.  There was nothing to do now but ride the bus until it came to a stop where I could catch another bus back home.

My cheeks were glowing as I ran up the steps to our apartment, and Oma knew immediately.  Her black eyes swiveled away from the lace she was crocheting and rested on me.

“What is it?” said Oma.  Something in her tone made Mutti look up from the newspaper she was reading at the kitchen table, her teacup halfway to her lips.

I’m not sure why I never considered lying to them.  Perhaps they would have known anyway.

“There was a boy,” I said, and Mutti set her teacup down in its saucer with a dangerous clack.  Oma clicked her tongue in a half-annoyed, half-pleased way.

“Well, well, it was bound to come one of these days,” said Oma.

“What are you thinking?” said Mutti, watching me.

“I thought—maybe a charm…”  My voice faltered, not at all the strong, wise voice I had wanted.  Still, I could feel the magic pulse through me, and I knew I could bring him to me if I wanted to.

“No.  No.  Absolutely not.”  Mutti was shaking her head, her stylish, toffee-colored bob bouncing.  “It leads to nothing but trouble.”

“If we do not help her,” said Oma, “she will only do it herself some night.”

“Help her?” said Mutti, turning to look at Oma for the first time.  “Help her?  Like you helped me?”

“Always you lose control of yourself,” said Oma.  “You are sentimental, and all because you lost one man in one war.  I have lost fifty men, but I do not become sentimental about them.  After all they are short-lived creatures at the best of times.”

“It’s different,” said Mutti, picking her newspaper back up and staring at it with reddening eyes.

“You think I never cared for any of mine?” said Oma, raising her black eyebrows that always sat so strangely underneath her bone-white hair.  “And did I not call him to you to make you happy?  I have had many men, but I have only one daughter.  We must be practical.”

Mutti slapped the newspaper down on the table and addressed me.

“You’ll be able to see through his eyes, feel what he feels, hear what he hears.  But he won’t be yours, even if you call him.  He’ll only be hag-ridden, and sooner or later they die of that.  Usually sooner.”

My hand tightened around the button I clutched.  “But… I love him.”

“Then you’ll have nothing to do with him,” said Mutti.  “They’re not for us.”

“Tcha, tcha,” said Oma.  “Next you will be turning vegetarian.”

“You’ve never understood,” said Mutti, standing.  Her hands were still gripped on the edge of the table.  “You think of them like dogs.  Pets.  They’re not animals.  They’re souls.”

“It is as it is, Trina.  They eat cows and chickens to survive, and ever since we came to this world we have used them the way they use other animals.  That is all.”  Oma shrugged.  “And at any rate, it is not as though we can do much more than decide in which direction the magic will go.”

“That’s a lie.”

The sudden silence was as brittle as Mutti’s gold-rimmed teacup.  I was afraid.  I had never seen the two of them look at each other like this, both of them abruptly showing their age as the tender net of illusions flickered.  My stomach crawled tight against my backbone.  I’d heard the stories about what happened when two witches began shouting at each other.

“Forty years.”  Oma’s voice was soft.  “It is a long time.  Are you still so angry with me?”  Mutti held her ground for a moment longer before drawing a deep breath and turning to me, the magic knitting up around her, making her once again my modern, stylish mother.  I knew she and Oma were much older than they looked, but it still disturbed me when I saw their medieval faces.

“Katya, listen to me.”  I obeyed, trying not to stare at the places where the illusion was still repairing.  Under one ear I could see a fold of leathery, wrinkled skin, and the other ear was pierced in seven or eight places with rune-carved silver rings.  “The magic comes through us,” said Mutti, “but we can control it.  It’s just like speaking.  You can choose not to speak.  You can choose not to take this boy’s life.  It’s not love, dear.  It wouldn’t feel like love to him.  Please, put all thought of this out of your mind.  They’re not for us, and I forbid you to try to call him.  Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mutti.”

She scanned my face for a long time, the illusion complete by now, and at last went back to her paper and began turning over the pages.  Oma shrugged again and went back to her crochet, but later that night when Mutti ran down to the corner to buy us a tin of milk, she motioned me over into the corner.

I had been touching the button all afternoon, on and off, putting my hand in my pocket and mourning the boy.  Oma put her crochet bag down on the sideboard and slid her arm around my shoulders.

“Your mother means very well,” she said.  “But she does not believe in the old ways.  Perhaps she is not old enough yet to do so.  I do not wish you to blame yourself, Liebchen, when things happen.  The magic does what it wills.  We do only what we must.  Remember that.”

Later that night I went to the loo and stood above the powder-blue sink, looking down at the drain.  It was the safest way I could think of to dispose of the button so that I couldn’t get it again, even if I weakened.  Letting it go would mean letting him go, for I had no hope that the Ritual would work without something of his.  As much as I loathed the idea of riding him until his life wasted away, there was something alluring about experiencing someone that thoroughly.  I’d wager that most couples couldn’t boast such intimacy.

But…I had decided I loved him.  I forced myself to open my hand and heard the button tinkle against the porcelain and roll down into the drain.  I kept my eyes up and on their own dark reflection in the mirror as I turned on the taps to wash it down.  The eyes in the reflection stayed dry.

A week passed.  Mutti went back to making Oma a boiled egg every day for tea, Oma finished crocheting her doily, and I stretched out on my bed in the afternoons listening to records.  And sometimes I dreamed and woke up sweaty and frightened and exulting.

I dreamed things I’d never seen, felt things I’d never experienced.  Every now and then a girl shot through my consciousness like fireworks, but mostly I floated in a weird masculine haze, a place so foreign I barely understood the language.  It frightened me, because how could I be dreaming about what happened to him?

One night I dreamed about the office of the Royal Navy, and enlistment papers.  In the morning I remembered the pea coat.  I sat on the bed, shivering in my nightgown, thinking.  I’d held that button all day, wishing for him.  Then I’d put it down the drain and put all that water on top of it, on top of him.  All that water.

What if Mutti was wrong?  What if the magic wasn’t something we did?  What if it was something that worked through us?

In the dream he talked of being on his ship in the next week, so he couldn’t have drowned yet.  And I loved him, I loved him so.  There was only one way to protect him if I’d hexed him.  Oma had gone to buy more crochet cotton.  Mutti was at work.  This was the only time.

I turned on the record player while I got dressed.  By now I didn’t need to dream.  As I fastened the last button on my blouse, I heard the doorbell chime.  I went downstairs slowly, the music still howling from the speakers.  I could see the outline of a man’s head and shoulders through the frosted glass of the front door.  When I opened it, I saw he was wearing the pea coat.  He already looked thinner than he had at the bus stop.

He opened his arms and I tumbled into them.  Burying my face in his coat, I inhaled deeply of a smell I had never before encountered, a salt tang, a deep, spicy musk.  He caressed my hair with one rough hand.  My body crackled with energy.  He loved me.  I could feel it.  The magic couldn’t have done all that, could it?

I wasn’t like Mutti.  But I wasn’t like Oma, either.  It could be different for me.

“Hello,” I said, and looked into his eyes, those luscious eyes as green as Ireland, as wide as the sea.  He smiled down at me as I pulled out of his embrace.

Almost jocular, and only a little confused, he spoke.  “Why am I here?”

I thought about how to answer.  I thought about telling him that I had called him, that I had built our fates, that I had to be with him to protect him.  I thought about telling him I was a witch, about showing him my other face.  It could be different for me.

But in the end I kissed him, because I loved him, and because he loved me.  He tasted like nicotine, and chocolate, and stars.  I locked the door of the flat behind me.

We walked away in the cold sunshine, hand in hand.