Smoke and Mirrors

The magician opened the door,

my grandmother stepped in.

Perhaps it’s not the same one, admitted my grandfather,

on reflection,

I think she had darker hair, the other girl.

I didn’t know.

I was proud of my grandmother, but also embarrassed,

hoping she’d do nothing to make me squirm,

that she wouldn’t sing one of her songs.

She walked into the box. They shut the door.

he opened a compartment at the top, a little door. We saw

my grandmother’s face. Pearl? Are you all right, Pearl?

My grandmother smiled and nodded.

The magician closed the door.

The lady gave him a long thin case,

so he opened it. Took out a sword

and rammed it through the box.

And then another, and another,

and my grandfather chuckled and explained,

The blade slides in the hilt,

and then a fake slides out the other side.

Then he produced a sheet of metal, which

he slid into the box half the way up.

It cut the thing in half. The two of them,

the woman and the man, lifted the top

half of the box up and off, and put it on the stage,

with half my grandma in.

The top half.

He opened up the little door again, for a moment,

My grandmother’s face beamed at us, trustingly.

When he closed the door before,

she went down a trapdoor,

and now she’s standing halfway up, my grandfather confided.

She’ll tell us how it’s done when it’s all over.

I wanted him to stop talking: I needed the magic.

Two knives now, through the half-a-box,

at neck height.

Are you there, Pearl? asked the magician. Let us know

—do you know any songs?

My grandmother sang Daisy, Daisy.

He picked up the part of the box,

with the little door in it—the head part—

and he walked about, and she sang

Daisy, Daisy, first at one side of the stage,

then at the other.

That’s him, said my grandfather, and he’s throwing his voice.

It sounds like Grandma, I said.

Of course it does, he said. Of course it does.

He’s good, he said. He’s good. He’s very good.

The conjuror opened up the box again,

now hatbox-sized. My grandmother had finished Daisy, Daisy,

and was on a song which went:

My my, here we go, the driver’s drunk and the horse won’t go,

now we’re going back, now we’re going back,

back back back to London Town.

She had been born in London. Told me ominous tales

from time to time to time

of her childhood. Of the children who ran into her father’s shop

shouting Shonky shonky sheeny, running away;

she would not let me wear a black shirt because,

she said, she remembered the marches through the East End.

Moseley’s blackshirts. Her sister got an eye blackened.

The conjurer took a kitchen knife,

pushed it slowly through the red hatbox.

And then the singing stopped.

He put the boxes back together,

pulled out the knives and swords, one by one by one.

He opened the compartment in the top: my grandmother smiled,

embarrassed, at us, displaying her own old teeth.

He closed the compartment, hiding her from view.

Pulled out the last knife.

Opened the main door again,

and she was gone.

A gesture, and the red box vanished, too.

It’s up his sleeve, my grandfather explained, but seemed unsure.

The conjurer made two doves fly from a burning plate.

A puff of smoke, and he was gone as well.

She’ll be under the stage now, or backstage,

said my grandfather,

having a cup of tea. She’ll come back to us with

flowers, or with chocolates. I hoped for chocolates.

The dancing girls again.

The comedian, for the last time.

And all of them came on together at the end.

The grand finale, said my grandfather. Look sharp,

perhaps she’ll be back on now.

But no. They sang

when you’re riding along

on the crest of the wave

and the sun is in the sky.

The curtain went down, and we shuffled out into the lobby.

We loitered for a while.

Then we went down to the stage door

and waited for my grandmother to come out.

The conjurer came out in street clothes;

the glitter woman looked so different in a mac.

My grandfather went to speak to him. He shrugged,

told us he spoke no English and produced

a half-a-crown from behind my ear,

and vanished off into the dark and rain.

I never saw my grandmother again.

We went back to their house, and carried on.

My grandfather now had to cook for us.

And so for breakfast, dinner, lunch, and tea,

we had golden toast and silver marmalade

and cups of tea.

’Till I went home.

He got so old after that night

as if the years took him all in a rush.

Daisy, Daisy, he’d sing, give me your answer, do.

If you were the only girl in the world and I were the only boy.

My old man said follow the van.

My grandfather had the voice in the family,

they said he could have been a cantor,

but there were snapshots to develop,

radios and razors to repair . . .

his brothers were a singing duo: the Nightingales,

had been on television in the early days.

He bore it well. Although, quite late one night,

I woke, remembering the licorice sticks in the pantry,

I walked downstairs.

My grandfather stood there in his bare feet.

And, in the kitchen, all alone,

I saw him stab a knife into a box.

You made me love you.

I didn’t want to do it.

CHANGES

I.

Later, they would point to his sister’s death, the cancer that ate her twelve-year-old life, tumors the size of duck eggs in her brain, and him a boy of seven, snot-nosed and crew-cut, watching her die in the white hospital with his wide brown eyes, and they would say, “That was the start of it all,” and perhaps it was.

In Reboot (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2018), the biopic, they jump-cut to his teens, and he’s watching his science teacher die of AIDS, following their argument over dissecting a large pale-stomached frog.

“Why should we take it apart?” says the young Rajit as the music swells. “Instead, should we not give it life?” His teacher, played by the late James Earl Jones, looks shamed and then inspired, and he lifts his hand from his hospital bed to the boy’s bony shoulder. “Well, if anyone can do it, Rajit, you can,” he says in a deep bass rumble.