Lisa Goldstein’s fiction features motifs common to science fiction, including time travel, visits to exotic alien worlds, and future dystopia. In Goldstein’s hands, however, these elements are usually means to literary ends that are more properly categorized as magic realism, mythopoeic fiction, and contemporary fairy tales. She achieved instant recognition in 1982, when her first novel, The Red Magician, an allegorical treatment of the rise of Naziism and the holocaust, won the American Book Award. Her next two novels are her most conventional excursions into science fiction. The Dream Years forges a link between the surrealist art movement of the 1920s and the French countercultural movement in 1968, through the adventures of a time-traveling novelist who finds the two eras more similar than not. A Mask for the General is set in a future America under the rule of a dictatorial soldier and explores ideological and social differences that have shaped different factions in the revolutionary subculture. Tourists, expanded from the novella of the same name, gradually eases its characters into Amaz, an uncharted third world country that serves as the setting for some of Goldstein’s short fiction and runs on its own peculiar rules of logic. Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon presents the historical era just prior to the Enlightenment as one where fantasy and mythology are still accepted and thus regularly permeate daily life. Summer King, Winter Fool, set in a world where gods and mortals interact, is Goldstein’s most overt detour into high fantasy. Walking the Labyrinth, in which a young woman comes into her heritage as the descendant of stage magicians who practiced real magic, and Dark Cities Underground, which deploys the familiar theme of the breakdown between reality and the world of a literary fantasy, are both examples of Goldstein’s talent for conveying a sense of magic potential in the everyday through a slight, often imperceptible twist of ordinary events. Her short fiction has been collected in Daily Voices and Travellers in Magic.
HE AWOKE FEELING cold. He had kicked the blankets off, and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie—Where was she? It was still dark out.
Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was—he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.
He got up and opened the curtains. The ocean ten stories below was black as sleep, paling a little to the east—it had to be east—where the sun was coming up. He turned down the air conditioning—the soft hum stopped abruptly—and headed for the bathroom. “Debbie?” he said, tentatively. He was a little annoyed. “Debbie?”
She was still missing after he had showered and shaved and dressed. “All right then,” he said aloud, mostly to hear the sound of his voice. “If you’re not coming I’ll go to breakfast without you.” She was probably out somewhere talking to the natives, laughing when she got a word wrong, though she had told him before they left that she had never studied a foreign language. She was good at languages, then—some people were. He remembered her saying in her soft Southern accent, “For goodness’ sake, Charles, why do you think people will understand you if you just talk to them louder? These people just don’t speak English.” And then she had taken over, pointing and laughing and looking through a phrasebook she had gotten somewhere. And they would get the best room, the choicest steak, the blanket the craftswoman had woven for her own family. Charles’s stock rose when he was with her, and he knew it. He hoped she would show up soon.
Soft Muzak played in the corridor and followed him into the elevator as he went down to the coffee shop. He liked the coffee shop in the hotel, liked the fact that the waiters spoke English and knew what an omelet was. The past few days he had been keeping to the hotel more and more, lying out by the beach and finally just sitting by the hotel pool drinking margaritas. The people back at the office would judge the success of the vacation by what kind of tan he got. Debbie had fretted a little and then had told him she was taking the bus in to see the ruins. She had come back darker than he was, the blond hairs on her arm bleached almost white against her brown skin, full of stories about women on the bus carrying chickens and temples crumbling in the desert. She was wearing a silver bracelet inlaid with blue and green stones.
When he paid the check he realized that he still didn’t know what country he was in. The first bill he took out of his wallet had a 5 on each corner and a picture of some kind of spiky flower. The ten had a view of the ocean, and the one, somewhat disturbingly, showed a fat coiled snake. There was what looked like an official seal on the back of all of them, but no writing. Illiterates, he thought. But he would remember soon enough, or Debbie would come back.
Back in his room, changing into his swim trunks, he thought of his passport. Feeling like a detective who has just cracked the case he got his money belt out from under the mattress and unzipped it. His passport wasn’t there. His passport and his plane ticket were missing. The traveller’s checks were still there, useless to him without the passport as identification. Cold washed over him. He sat on the bed, his heart pounding.
Think, he told himself. They’re somewhere else. They’ve got to be—who would steal the passport and not the traveller’s checks? Unless someone needed the passport to leave the country. But who knew where he had hidden it? No one but Debbie, who had laughed at him for his precautions, and the idea of Debbie stealing the passport was absurd. But where was she?
All right, he thought. I’ve got to find the American consulate, work something out. . . . Luckily I just cashed a traveller’s check yesterday. I’ve been robbed, and Americans get robbed all the time. It’s no big thing. I have time. I’m paid up at the hotel till—till when?
Annoyed, he realized he had forgotten that too. For the first time he wondered if there might be something wrong with him. Overwork, maybe. He would have to see someone about it when he got back to the States.
He lifted the receiver and called downstairs. “Yes, sor?” the man at the desk said.
“This is Room 1012,” Charles said. “I’ve forgotten—I was calling to check—How long is my reservation here?”
There was a silence at the other end, a disapproving silence, Charles felt. Most of the guests had better manners than to forget the length of their stay. He wondered what the man’s reaction would be if he had asked what country he was in and felt something like hysteria rise within him. He fought it down.
The man when he came back was carefully neutral. “You are booked through tonight, sor,” he said. “Do you wish to extend your stay?”
“Uh—no,” Charles said. “Could you tell me—Where is the American consulate?”
“We have no relations with your country, sor,” the man at the desk said.
For a moment Charles did not understand what he meant. Then he asked, “Well, what about—the British consulate?”
The man at the desk laughed and said nothing. Apparently he felt no need to clarify. As Charles tried to think of another question—Australian consulate? Canadian?—the man hung up.
Charles stood up carefully. “All right,” he said to the empty room. “First things first.” He got his two suitcases out of the closet and went through them methodically. Debbie’s carrying case was still there and he went through that too. He checked under both mattresses, in the nightstand, in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Nothing. All right then. Debbie had stolen it, had to have. But why? And why didn’t she take her carrying case with her when she went?
He wondered if she would show up back at the office. She had worked down the hall from him, one of the partners’ secretaries. He had asked her along for companionship, making it clear that there were no strings attached, that he was simply interested in not travelling alone. Sometimes this kind of relationship turned sexual and sometimes it didn’t. Last year, with Katya from accounting, it had. This year it hadn’t.
There was still nothing to worry about, Charles thought, snapping the locks on the suitcases. Things like this probably happened all the time. He would get to the airport, where they would no doubt have records, a listing of his flight, and he would explain everything to them there. He checked his wallet for credit cards and found that they were still there. Good, he thought. Now we get to see if the advertisements are true. Accepted all over the world.
He felt so confident that he decided to stay the extra day at the hotel. After all, he thought, I’ve paid for it. And maybe Debbie will come back. He threw his towel over his shoulder and went downstairs.
The usual people were sitting out by the pool. Millie and Jean, the older women from Miami. The two newlyweds who had kept pretty much to themselves. The hitchhiker who was just passing through and who had been so entertaining that no one had had the heart to report him to the hotel management. Charles nodded to them and ordered his margarita from the bar before sitting down.
Talk flowed around him. “Have you been to Djuzban yet?” Jean was saying to the retired couple who had just joined them at the pool. “We took the hotel tour yesterday. The marketplace is just fabulous. I bought this ring there—see it?” And she flashed silver and stones.
“I hear the ruins are pretty good out in Djuzban,” the retired man said.
“Oh, Harold,” his wife said. “Harold wants to climb every tower in the country.”
“No, man, for ruins you gotta go to Zabla,” the hitchhiker said. “But the buses don’t go there—you gotta rent a car. It’s way the hell out in the desert, unspoiled, untouched. If your car breaks down you’re dead—ain’t nobody passing through that way for days.”
Harold’s wife shuddered in the heat. “I just want to do some shopping before we go home,” she said. “I heard you can pick up bargains in leather in Qarnatl.”
“All we saw in Qarnatl were natives trying to sell us decks of cards,” Jean said. She turned to Millie. “Remember? I don’t know why they thought Americans would be interested in their playing cards. They weren’t even the same as ours.”
Charles sipped his margarita, listening to the exotic names flow around him. What if he told them the names meant nothing to him, nothing at all? But he was too embarrassed. There were appearances to keep up after all, the appearance of being a seasoned traveller, of knowing the ropes. He would find out soon enough, anyway.
The day wore on. Charles had a margarita, then another. When the group around the pool broke up it seemed the most natural thing in the world to follow them into the hotel restaurant and order a steak, medium-rare. He was running low on cash, he noticed—he’d have to cash another traveller’s check in the morning.
But in the morning when he awoke, cold sober, he knew immediately what he’d done. He reached for his wallet on the nightstand, fingers trembling a little. There was only a five with its bleak little picture of a shrub left. Well, he thought, feeling a little shaky. Maybe someone’s going to the airport today. Probably. The guys in the office aren’t going to believe this one.
He packed up his two suitcases, leaving Debbie’s overnight bag for her in case she came back. Downstairs he headed automatically for the coffee shop before he remembered. Abruptly he felt his hunger grow worse. “Excuse me,” he said to the man at the desk. “How much—Do you know how much the taxi to the airport is?”
“No speak English, sor,” the man said. He was small and dark, like most of the natives. His teeth were stained red.
“You don’t—” Charles said, disgusted. “Why in God’s name would they hire someone who doesn’t speak English? How much,” he said slowly. “Taxi. Airport.” He heard his voice grow louder; apparently Debbie was right.
The man shrugged. Another man joined them. Charles turned on him with relief. “How much is the taxi to the airport?”
“Oh, taxi,” the man said, as though the matter were not very important. “Not so much, sor. Eight, nine. Maybe fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” Charles said. He tried to remember the airport, remember how he’d gotten here. “Not five?” He held up five fingers.
The second man laughed. “Oh no, sor,” he said. “Fifteen. Twenty.” He shrugged.
Charles looked around in desperation. Hotel Tours, said the sign behind the front desk. Ruins. Free. “The ruins,” he said, pointing to the sign, wondering if either of the men could read. “Are they near the airport?” He could go to the ruins, maybe get a ride. . . .
“Near?” the second man said. He shrugged again. “Maybe. Yes, I think so.”
“How near?” Charles said.
“Near,” the second man said. “Yes. Near enough.”
Charles picked up the two suitcases and followed the line of tourists to the bus stop. See, he thought. Nothing to worry about, and you’re even getting a free ride to the airport. Those taxi drivers are thieves anyway.
It was awkward maneuvering the suitcases up the stairs of the bus. “I’m going on to the airport,” Charles said to the driver, feeling the need to explain.
“Of course, sor,” the driver said, shrugging as if to say that an American’s suitcases were no business of his. He added a word that Charles didn’t catch. Perhaps it was in another language.
The bus set off down the new two-lane highway fronting the hotels. Soon they left the hotels behind, passed a cluster of run-down shacks and were heading into the desert. The air conditioning hummed loudly. Waves of heat travelled across the sands.
After nearly an hour the bus stopped. “We have one hour,” the driver said in bad English. He opened the door. “These are the temple of Marmaz. Very old. One hour.” The tourists filed out. A few were adjusting cameras or pointing lenses.
Because of the suitcases Charles was the last out. He squinted against the sun. The temple was a solid wall of white marble against the sand. Curious in spite of himself he crossed the parking lot, avoiding the native who was trying to show him something. “Pure silver,” the small man said, calling after him. “Special price just for you.”
In front of the temple was a cracked marble pool, now dry. Who were these people who had carried water into the desert, who had imprisoned the moon in pale marble? But then how much had he known about the other tourist spots he had visited, the Greeks who had built the Parthenon, the Mayans who had built the pyramids? He followed the line of tourists into the temple, feeling the coolness fall over him like a blessing.
He went from room to room, delighted, barely feeling the weight of the suitcases. He saw crumbling mosaics of reds and blues and greens, fragments of tapestries, domes, fountains, towers, a white dining hall that could seat a hundred. In one small room a native was explaining a piece of marble sculpture to a dozen Americans.
“This, he is the god of the sun,” the native said. “And in the next room, the goddess of the moon. Moon, yes? We will go see her after. Once a year, at the end of the year, the two statues—statues, yes?—go outside. The priests take outside. They get married. Her baby is the new year.”
“What nonsense,” a woman standing near Charles said quietly. She was holding a guidebook. “That’s the fourth king. He built the temple. God of the sun.” She laughed scornfully.
“Can I—Can I see that book for a minute?” Charles said. The cover had flipped forward tantalizingly, almost revealing the name of the country.
The woman looked briefly at her watch. “Got to go,” she said. “The bus is leaving in a minute and I’ve got to find my husband. Sorry.”
Charles’s bus was gone by the time he left the temple. It was much cooler now but heat still rose from the desert sands. He was very hungry, nearly tempted to buy a cool drink and a sandwich at the refreshment stand near the parking lot. “Cards?” someone said to him.
Charles turned. The small native said something that sounded like “Tiraz!” It was the same word the bus driver had said to him in the morning. Then, “Cards?” he said again.
“What?” Charles said impatiently, looking for a taxi.
“Ancient playing set,” the native said. “Very holy.” He took out a deck of playing cards from an embroidered bag and spread them for Charles. The colors were very bright. “Souvenir,” the native said. He grinned, showing red-stained teeth. “Souvenir of your trip.”
“No, thank you,” Charles said. All around the parking lot, it seemed, little natives were trying to sell tourists rings and pipes and blouses and, for some reason, packs of playing cards. “Taxi?” he said. “Is there a taxi here?”
The native shrugged and moved on to the next tourist.
It was getting late. Charles went toward the nearest tour bus. The driver was leaning against the bus, smoking a small cigarette wrapped in a brown leaf. “Where can I find a taxi?” Charles asked him.
“No taxis,” the driver said.
“No—Why not?” Charles said. This country was impossible. He couldn’t wait to get out, to be on a plane drinking a margarita and heading back to the good old U.S.A. This was the worst vacation he’d ever had. “Can I make a phone call? I have to get to the airport.”
A woman about to get on the bus heard him and stopped. “The airport?” she said. “The airport’s fifty miles from here. At least. You’ll never find a taxi to take you that far.”
“Fifty miles?” Charles said. “They told me—At the hotel they told me it was fairly close.” For a moment his confidence left him. What do I do now? he thought. He sagged against the suitcases.
“Listen,” the woman said. She turned to the bus driver. “We’ve got room. Can’t we take him back to the city with us? I think we’re the last bus to leave.”
The driver shrugged. “For the tiraz, of course. Anything is possible.”
If Charles hadn’t been so relieved at the ride he would have been annoyed. What did this word tiraz mean? Imbecile? Man with two suitcases? He followed the woman onto the bus.
“I can’t believe you thought this was close to the airport,” the woman said. He sat across the aisle from her. “This is way out in the desert. There’s nothing here. No one would come out here if it wasn’t for the ruins.”
“They told me at the hotel,” Charles said. He didn’t really want to discuss it. He was no longer the seasoned traveller, the man who had regaled the people around the pool with stories of Mexico, Greece, Hawaii. He would have to confess, have to go back to the hotel and tell someone the whole story. Maybe they would bring in the police to find Debbie. A day wasted and he had only gone around in a circle, back to where he started. He felt tired and very hungry.
But when the bus stopped it was not at the brightly lit row of hotels. He strained to see in the oncoming dusk. “I thought you said—” He turned to the woman, hating to sound foolish again. “I thought we were going to the city.”
“This is—” the woman said. Then she nodded in understanding. “You want the new city, the tourist city. That’s up the road about ten miles. Any cab’ll take you there.”
Charles was the last off the bus again, slowed this time not so much by the suitcases as by the new idea. People actually stayed in the same cities that the natives lived. He had heard of it being done but he had thought only young people did it, students and drifters and hitchhikers like the one back at the hotel. This woman was not young and she had been fairly pleasant. He wished he had remembered to thank her.
The first cab driver laughed when Charles showed him the five note and asked to be taken to the new city. The driver was not impressed by the traveller’s checks. The second and third drivers turned him down flat. The city smelled of motor oil and rancid fish. It was getting late, even a little chilly, and Charles began to feel nervous about being out so late. The two suitcases were an obvious target for some thief. And where would he go? What would he do?
The panic that he had suppressed for so long took over now and he began to run. He dove deeper into the twisting maze of the city, not caring where he went so long as he was moving. Everything was closed, and there were few streetlamps. He heard the sounds of his footfalls echo off the shuttered buildings. A cat jumped out of his way, eyes flashing gold.
After a long time of running he began to slow. “Tiraz!” someone whispered to him from an abandoned building. His heart pounded. He did not look back. Ahead was a lit storefront, a store filled with clutter. The door was open. A pawn shop.
He went in with relief. He cleared a space for himself among the old magazines and rusty baking pans and child’s beads. The man behind the counter watched but made no comment. He took out everything from the two suitcases, sorted out what he needed and repacked it and gave the other suitcase to the man behind the counter. The man went to a small desk, unlocked a drawer and took out a steel box. He counted out some money and offered it to Charles. Charles accepted it wordlessly, not even bothering to count it.
The money bought a meal tasting of sawdust and sesame oil, and a sagging bed in an old hotel. The overhead fan turned all night because Charles could not figure out how to turn it off. A cockroach watched impassively from the corner.
The city looked different in daylight. Women in shawls and silver bracelets, men in clothes fashionable fifty years ago walked past the hotel as Charles looked out in the morning. The sun was shining. His heart rose. This was going to be the day he made it to the airport.
He walked along the streets almost jauntily, ignoring the ache in his arms. His beard itched because last night, in a moment of panic, he had thrown his electric razor into the suitcase to be sold. He shrugged. There were still things he could sell. Today he would find a better pawn shop.
He walked, passing run-down houses and outdoor markets, beggars and children, automobile garages and dim restaurants smelling of frying fish. “Excuse me,” he said to a man leaning against a horse-drawn carriage. “Do you know where I can find a pawn shop?”
The man and horse both looked up. “Ride, yes?” the man said enthusiastically. “Famous monuments. Very cheap.”
“No,” Charles said. “A pawn shop. Do you understand?”
The man shrugged, pulled the horse’s mane. “No speak English,” he said finally.
Another man had come up behind Charles. “Pawn shop?” he said.
Charles turned quickly, relieved. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know—”
“Two blocks down,” the man said. “Turn left, go five blocks. Across the hospital.”
“What street is that?” Charles asked.
“Street?” the man said. He frowned. “Two blocks down and turn left.”
“The name,” Charles said. “The name of the street.”
To Charles’s astonishment the man burst out laughing. The carriage driver laughed too, though he could not have possibly known what they were talking about. “Name?” the man said. “You tourists name your streets as though they were little children, yes?” He laughed again, wiping his eyes, and said something to the carriage-driver in another language, speaking rapidly.
“Thank you,” Charles said. He walked the two blocks, turned left and went five blocks more. There was no hospital where the man had said there would be, and no pawn shop. A man who spoke a little English said something about a great fire, but whether it had been last week or several years ago Charles was unable to find out.
He started back toward the man who had given him directions. In a few minutes he was hopelessly lost. The streets became dingier, and once he saw a rat run from a pile of newspapers. The fire had swept through this part of the city leaving buildings charred and water damaged, open to the passersby like museum exhibits. Two dirty children ran toward him, shouting, “Money, please, sor! Money for food!” He turned down a sidestreet to lose them.
Ahead of him were three young men in grease-stained clothes. One of them hissed something at him, the words rushing by like a fork of lightning. Another held a length of chain which he played back and forth, whispering, between his hands. “I don’t speak—” Charles said, but it was too late. They were on him.
One tore the suitcase from his hand, shouting “El amak! El amak!” Another knocked him down with a punch to his stomach that forced the wind out of him. The third was going through his pockets, taking his wallet and the little folder of traveller’s checks. Charles tried feebly to rise, and the second one thrust him back, hitting him once more in the stomach. The first one yelled something and they ran quickly down the street. Charles lay where they left him, gasping for breath.
The two dirty children passed him, and an old woman balancing a basket of clothes on her head. After a few minutes he rolled over and sat up, leaning against a rusty car up on blocks. His pants were torn, he noticed dully, torn and smeared with oil. And his suitcase with the rest of his clothes was gone.
He would go to the police, go and tell them that his suitcase was gone. He knew the word for suitcase because the young thief had shouted it. Amak. El amak. And suddenly he realized something that knocked the breath out of him as surely as a punch to the stomach. Every word in English, every word that he knew, had a corresponding word in this strange foreign language. Everything you could think of—hand, love, table, hot—was conveyed to these natives by another word, a word not English. Debbie had known that, and that was why she was good at languages. He hadn’t. He had expected everyone he met to drop this ridiculous charade and start speaking like normal people.
He stood up gingerly, breathing shallowly to make the pain in his stomach go away. After a while he began walking again, following the maze of the city in deeper. At last he found a small park and sat on a bench to rest.
A native came up to him almost immediately. “Cards?” the native said. “Look.” He opened his embroidered bag.
Charles sighed. He was too tired to walk away. “I don’t want any cards,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”
“Of course not,” the native said. “Look. They are beautiful, no?” He spread the brightly colored cards on the grass. Charles saw a baseball player, a fortune teller, a student, some designs he didn’t recognize. “Look,” the native said again and turned over the next card. “The tourist.”
Charles had to laugh, looking at the card of the man carrying suitcases. These people had been visited by tourists for so long that the tourist had become an archetype, a part of everyone’s reality like kings and jokers. He looked closer at the card. Those suitcases were familiar. And the tourist—He jerked back as though shocked. It was him.
He stood quickly and began to run, ignoring the pain in his stomach. The native did not follow.
He noticed the card sellers on every corner after that. They called to him even if he crossed the street to avoid them. “Tiraz, tiraz!” they called after him. He knew what it meant now. Tourist.
As the sun set he became ravenously hungry. He walked around a beggarwoman squatting in the street and saw, too late, a card seller waiting on the corner. The card seller held out something to him, some kind of pastry, and Charles took it, too hungry to refuse.
The pastry was filled with meat and very good. As though that were the signal, the other card sellers he passed began to give him things—a skin of wine, a piece of fish wrapped in paper. One of them handed him money, far more money than a deck of cards would cost. It was growing dark. He took a room for the night with the money.
A card seller was waiting for him at the corner the next day. “All right,” Charles said to him. Some of the belligerence had been knocked out of him. “I give up. What the hell’s going on around here?”
“Look,” the card seller said. He took his cards out of the embroidered bag. “It is in here.” He squatted on the sidewalk, oblivious to the dirt, the people walking by, the fumes from the street. The street, Charles noticed as he sat next to him, seemed to be paved with bottle caps.
The card seller spread the cards in front of him. “Look,” he said. “It is foretold. The cards are our oracle, our newspaper, our entertainment. All depends on how you read them.” Charles wondered where the man had learned to speak English, but he didn’t want to interrupt. “See,” the man said as he turned over a card. “Here you are. The tourist. It was foretold that you would come to the city.”
“And then what?” Charles asked. “How do I get back?”
“We have to ask the cards,” the man said. Idly he turned over another card, the ruins of Marmaz. “Maybe we wait for the next printing.”
“Next—” Charles said. “You mean the cards don’t stay the same?”
“No,” the man said. “Do your newspapers stay the same?”
“But—Who prints them?”
The man shrugged. “We do not know.” He turned over another card, a young blond woman.
“Debbie!” Charles said, startled.
“Yes,” the man said. “The woman you came with. We had to convince her to go, so that you would fulfill the prophecy and come to the city. And then we took your pieces of paper, the ones that are so important to the tiraz. That is a stupid way to travel, if I may say so. In the city the only papers that are important to us are the cards, and if a man loses his cards he can easily get more.”
“You—you took my passport?” Charles said. He did not feel as angry as he would like. “My passport and my plane tickets? Where are they?”
“Ah,” the man said. “For that you must ask the cards.” He took out another set of cards from his bag and gave them to Charles. Before Charles could answer he stood up and walked away.
By midday Charles had found the small park again. He sat down and spread out the cards, wondering if there was anything to what the card seller had said. Debbie did not appear in his deck. Was his an earlier printing, then, or a later one?
An American couple came up to him as he sat puzzling over the cards. “There are those cards again,” the woman said. “I just can’t get over how quaint they are. How much are you charging for yours?” she asked Charles. “The man down the street said he’d give them to us for ten.”
“Eight,” Charles said without hesitation, gathering them up.
The woman looked at her husband. “All right,” he said. He took a five and three ones from his wallet and gave them to Charles.
“Thank you, sor,” Charles said.
The man grunted. “I thought he spoke English very well,” the woman said as they walked away. “Didn’t you?”
A card seller gave him three more decks of cards and an embroidered bag later that day. By evening he had sold two of the decks. A few nights later, he joined the sellers of cards as they waited in the small park for the new printing of the cards. Somewhere a bell tolled midnight. A woman with beautiful long dark hair and an embroidered shawl came out of the night and silently took out the decks of cards from her bag. Her silver bracelets flashed in the moonlight. She gave Charles twelve decks. The men around him were already tearing the boxes open and spreading the cards, reading the past, or the present, or the future.
After about three years Charles got tired of selling the cards. His teeth had turned red from chewing the nut everyone chewed and he had learned to smoke the cigarettes wrapped in leaves. The other men had always told him that someone who spoke English as well as he did should be a tour guide, and finally he decided that they were right. Now he takes groups of tourists through the ruins of Marmaz, telling them about the god of the sun and the goddess of the moon and whatever else he chooses to make up that day. He has never found out what country he lives in.