I found myself in what appeared to be a low storage space. My hand pressed into something soft and rubbery that gave a wheezing squeak. I snatched my hand away and brushed against a shape that began to fall over, giving a soft “Waaa.” Something poked up before me and I felt the cold top of a ladder, rising through a trap door. I swung my leg through the opening and began to climb down. Cloth rose up on all sides of me, it was as though I were sinking helplessly into a morass of thick, yielding folds — and half drowning in that mass of musty perfumed dresses I made my way down to the floor of a closet. There I thrust my way through clutching sleeves and buckles to a door that opened onto a hall.
In the branching corridors I turned left and right while plaster fell from the trembling walls. Behind me a picture struck the floor sharply, like the blade of a guillotine. I came to a door, pulled it open, and entered the dark kitchen. In the black dishrack a pointed black party hat sat upside down in the silverware box. I hurried through a door and found myself in the lamplit room of couches and armchairs, deserted except for a tired-looking woman with gray hair pulled back tight who was picking up teacups and glasses. Without looking up at me, she handed me a small wooden bowl containing a few peanut halves lying among glistening brown skins. I carried the bowl into the next room. Everyone had left, the room was nearly dark. Black furniture loomed against the night-blue windows. On the dark-gleaming piano bench I placed the bowl beside an abandoned mask. I tore off my mask and knocked my leg against a sharp corner as I hurried through the room and out into the front hall. Heavy pieces of plaster were falling, I could feel a fine dust sifting down. Somewhere above I heard a loud snap or crack. Before me the coat tree began to fall slowly, dreamily, landing with a muffled thud among its coats. I stepped over it, fumbled at the front door, and ran out onto the porch. One of the thick corner-posts appeared to be buckling. I ran down the stone steps onto a flagstone path, where I leaped over something that might have been a cat, and as I escaped from the collapsing house into the ruined garden, which was already wavering and dissolving under a rushing sky, it seemed to me that if only I could remain calm remain calm remain calm then I might be able to imagine what would happen to me next.
EISENHEIM THE ILLUSIONIST
In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished as never before. In obscure villages of Moravia and Galicia, from the Istrian peninsula to the mists of Bukovina, bearded and black-caped magicians in market squares astonished townspeople by drawing streams of dazzling silk handkerchiefs from empty paper cones, removing billiard balls from children’s ears, and throwing into the air decks of cards that assumed the shapes of fountains, snakes, and angels before returning to the hand. In cities and larger towns, from Zagreb to Lvov, from Budapest to Vienna, on the stages of opera houses, town halls, and magic theaters, traveling conjurers equipped with the latest apparatus enchanted sophisticated audiences with elaborate stage illusions. It was the age of levitations and decapitations, of ghostly apparitions and sudden vanishings, as if the tottering Empire were revealing through the medium of its magicians its secret desire for annihilation. Among the remarkable conjurers of that time, none achieved the heights of illusion attained by Eisenheim, whose enigmatic final performance was viewed by some as a triumph of the magician’s art, by others as a fateful sign.
Eisenheim, né Eduard Abramowitz, was born in Bratislava in 1859 or 1860. Little is known of his early years, or indeed of his entire life outside the realm of illusion. For the scant facts we are obliged to rely on the dubious memoirs of magicians, on comments in contemporary newspaper stories and trade periodicals, on promotional material and brochures for magic acts; here and there the diary entry of a countess or ambassador records attendance at a performance in Paris, Cracow, Vienna. Eisenheim’s father was a highly respected cabinetmaker, whose ornamental gilt cupboards and skilfully carved lowboys with lion-paw feet and brass handles shaped like snarling lions graced the halls of the gentry of Bratislava. The boy was the eldest of four children; like many Bratislavan Jews, the family spoke German and called their city Pressburg, although they understood as much Slovak and Magyar as was necessary for the proper conduct of business. Eduard went to work early in his father’s shop. For the rest of his life he would retain a fondness for smooth pieces of wood joined seamlessly by mortise and tenon. By the age of seventeen he was himself a skilled cabinetmaker, a fact noted more than once by fellow magicians who admired Eisenheim’s skill in constructing trick cabinets of breathtaking ingenuity. The young craftsman was already a passionate amateur magician, who is said to have entertained family and friends with card sleights and a disappearing-ring trick that required a small beechwood box of his own construction. He would place a borrowed ring inside, fasten the box tightly with twine, and quietly remove the ring as he handed the box to a spectator. The beechwood box, with its secret panel, was able to withstand the most minute examination.
A chance encounter with a traveling magician is said to have been the cause of Eisenheim’s lifelong passion for magic. The story goes that one day, returning from school, the boy saw a man in black sitting under a plane tree. The man called him over and lazily, indifferently, removed from the boy’s ear first one coin and then another, and then a third, coin after coin, a whole handful of coins, which suddenly turned into a bunch of red roses. From the roses the man in black drew out a white billiard ball, which turned into a wooden flute that suddenly vanished. One version of the story adds that the man himself then vanished, along with the plane tree. Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams, but in this case it is reasonable to suppose that the future master had been profoundly affected by some early experience of conjuring. Eduard had once seen a magic shop, without much interest; he now returned with passion. On dark winter mornings on the way to school he would remove his gloves to practice manipulating balls and coins with chilled fingers in the pockets of his coat. He enchanted his three sisters with intricate shadowgraphs representing Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel, American buffalos and Indians, the golem of Prague. Later a local conjurer called Ignazc Molnar taught him juggling for the sake of coordinating movements of the eye and hand. Once, on a dare, the thirteen-year-old boy carried an egg on a soda straw all the way to Bratislava Castle and back. Much later, when all this was far behind him, the Master would be sitting gloomily in the corner of a Viennese apartment where a party was being held in his honor, and reaching up wearily he would startle his hostess by producing from the air five billiard balls that he proceeded to juggle flawlessly.