The Only One in the Beautiful Magician’s Audience Who Did Not Look Like Kafka

by J. J. Steinfeld

I think it was when I was eleven or twelve that I first became conscious of my attraction to magic. I told my parents I wanted to be a magician, a professional magician, and with an exaggerated movement of my small hands made a tiny black comb disappear before their very eyes. They both smiled at my youthful exuberance. It is good to have dreams, my father said, and my mother looked at him, and whispered, It is best to have realistic dreams. They were deeply in love, at least through my young boy's eyes. No accident that I emphasize my eyes, eyes that my mother said were the most beautiful imaginable, a generous creation of God's. Yet I had a face unlike any other child in our neighbourhood, or at school. I understood that I was not pleasant to look at, despite my sky-blue eyes, with my protruding jaw and lopsided face. My parents, both high-school teachers, discussed getting me surgery, but my father thought it would be cosmetic against my mother's argument it would be therapeutic, help me to fit in. My father characterized my looks as unusual, claimed that from certain angles I had a most intriguing face. A year later, I told them I was going to be a doctor, a famous physician who could make the sickest person well. And my face I would change—a doctor could do that even if a magician might be thwarted in such a trick. A magician and a doctor. Again, my parents smiled at my pronouncement. You are precocious, my sweet sky-blue-eyed child, my mother said, and my father, patting my head, told me that I could accomplish anything I wanted, that intelligence and character and determination, which I had, were necessary for achievements in the world, and a person's looks were external qualities. Besides, I was above-average in height and I did have a physical presence that was well-proportioned. My father, in describing me, always seemed to be trying to get me a job in the movies. I took my father's hat off his head, his favourite kicking-around-the-house ball cap, said a few words in a made-up language, and made a fancy gold-plated pen appear in place of the ball cap. Where did you get this pen? my father demanded to know, as if I had robbed a store and was standing there with the stolen money in my hands, and I laughed. I tried not to laugh, but it just came out, a powerful laugh. This is a very expensive pen, my father said in a most accusatory way, taking the pen from me and tapping it repeatedly into the palm of his right hand. I made it appear, by magic, I insisted, my laughter dwindling, and my father sent me to my room. I never told him where I had found the fancy pen. My determination, you could say. A little while later my father came into my room and asked for his ball cap back, and I said I couldn't do that, refusing to tell my father where his ball cap had disappeared to. I was angry at him for not being respectful to my youthful ambitions. After he left my room, I sneaked out of the house and buried the ball cap in the backyard. That night I had a dream that made me feel more different than even my looks: I dreamed that I sat down at the desk in my bedroom, and in the dark, wrote at one sitting a biography of the author Franz Kafka. I had never even read anything by Kafka back then, only heard my parents discuss him a few times at the supper table. My father had said once that he would trade anything to be able to write like Kafka, and my mother asked if he would trade their marriage. That was the only argument I ever saw my parents have, and it was a long, loud, and angry argument. For the next few months I read everything I could find by Kafka at the library, but I certainly didn't understand a lot of what he wrote about. Strangely, I never bothered rereading anything by Kafka when I got older.

My parents wanted me to go to university, claimed I had the grades to get into our city’s excellent university, which was not all that far from our house—they never suggested I apply to any school away from their loving protection—but I had no desire to go to university and found my first job, in the bakery department of a grocery store, a week after I graduated high school, and it is the same job I've been at for the last ten years. One day, when I was nineteen and living on my own in a rooming house, against my protective parents' wishes, I went to visit them, and intended to dig up the hidden ball cap, but my mother greeted me at the door with the horrible news that my father had died. He was healthy, I argued, but my mother bent her head, and said his mind had snapped. The next year, my mother passed away, a tragic illness, not any kind of snapping, and I had lost both of my dear parents before I was twenty-one, well before their times. I rented out their house, a most needed addition to my income, but stayed in my rooming house. I liked where I lived, the simplicity. And I never became a magician or a doctor. But I never lost my attraction to magic and magicians.

Whenever I have the opportunity, even if I have to travel a considerable distance from my home, I go to see the performances of professional magicians. I learned how to present myself in public, growing my hair long and wearing a large, floppy hat. Over the years, I lost track of how many magicians I have seen, but I still have the same enthusiasm for magic and its practitioners as when I was a little boy. Then, in the newspaper, I saw an advertisement for a magician, the most beautiful magician I had ever seen. And if a man could become infatuated with a picture in a newspaper, I certainly had. I purchased a ticket for the show, and as I was leaving the theatre box office, I stole a poster of her. For days, my sleep was uneasy and uneven, waiting for the evening of the show.

Nervous, a bit disoriented by my disrupted sleep, I arrived early at the old, recently renovated building. Outside, the weather was unseasonable, spiteful; inside, I found my seat near the centre of the third row, and sat with my eyes closed as the audience entered. It was not long before I was enthralled by the featured act, a young top-hatted magician, sensual, long-legged, superbly talented, creating a name for herself making small, growling animals and large, antique cars vanish from the stage. I am here for the beauty, not the magic, I shouted out, forgetting for a instant that I was not alone in the audience. But the magic is beautiful, I declared as a plea for forgiveness. I looked around, nervous about my outburst, waiting for the beautiful magician to perform her next feat of magic, and saw that everyone resembled Franz Kafka, their faces exactly the same. A joke, I thought, a peculiar coincidence, but no, how could that be. I thought of the photographs of the brooding dark- eyed writer I had seen in books, and the resemblance was indisputable. I counted over a hundred of the Kafka-faced, re-counted, looked for discrepancies, slight deviations, but no again, the evidence resolute as the Seven Wonders of the World. Confusion and fear exerted their boisterous language, and I was a poor translator, a frightened linguist. I ran to the washroom, my heart beating faster than confusion or fear, and looked into the mirror: ah, reprieve and a sigh of familiarity, recognizing the reflected face I knew, the well-worn, unhandsome shape. I studied my face half-heartedly, disappointed, and wiped the mirror in unmagical despair, mouthing the words homely and ugly, then peculiar, odd, hideous, unusual, my words a memory stammer. I wondered about the life I would have lived had Nature smiled more favourably on my features or dreams, or if a skilled surgeon would have fashioned my face into something else.

I returned to my seat to see the magician behaving magically, the Kafka-faced audience more in love with magic than ever before. From the body-restraining plushness I begged the top-hatted magician to give me a fresh face, handsomeness, to remove the distortion of my face and spirit, my need to hide in audiences, but she gave me only a tearful sadness of the eyes, my sky-blue eyes, a humble display of second-rate magic. My dissatisfaction was untouched as she returned to the growling animals and the large, antique cars, the growls growing louder and the cars becoming larger, her magic indeed astonishing. I never wanted her performance to end, wished I could be on stage with her. I thought of the small comb, my father's ball cap, the gold pen. I longed to make them appear, to have them hover above the top-hated magician, to win her love with my magic, but I could not make anything appear. The audience of Kafkas applauded a thunderous cacophony and I realized it was her greatest trick, the facial reconstruction, the conjuring of amazing conformity, but I was the failure for her magical perfection like an animal refusing to growl or magic upstaging beauty.

*Originally published by (the now defunct) Recliner Books (2010). Used by permission of the author.

BIO: J. J. Steinfeld is a Canadian fiction writer, poet, and playwright, who lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published 24 books, including An Unauthorized Biography of Being (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2016), Absurdity, Woe Is Me, Glory Be (Poetry, Guernica Editions, 2017), A Visit to the Kafka Café (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2018), Gregor Samsa Was Never in The Beatles (Stories, Ekstasis Editions, 2019), Morning Bafflement and Timeless Puzzlement (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2020), Somewhat Absurd, Somehow Existential (Poetry, Guernica Editions, 2021), Acting on the Island (Stories, Pottersfield Press, 2022), and As You Continue to Wait (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2022).