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fine magic from the famous clown Grok and from a mad Hungarian magician named Hornak. Again and again Wasserman stressed that there was no connection between Harotian’s natural wonder-working power and his skill as a circus magician. He put tremendous effort into his training, but never achieved the kind of perfection his natural abilities might have given him. He preferred legerdemain and illusion to mystery. He loved his work and devoted most of his time to it, deriving pleasure from the gaily colored scarves he pulled out of his sleeve, laughing in wonder each time the seven white doves flew out of his top hat; never tiring of the delighted cries of children and guileless adults. He loved to give them pleasure.

But the older and more experienced he grew, the more the smiling Armenian’s joy in life faded. He had always been a loner. He had no relationships with women to speak of (except for a number of brief affairs), and his entire family had been wiped out in the massacre of his native village. He had no past. He had no country. He had no continuity. He was rich enough to retire from Barnum & Bailey’s and travel around the world for his own pleasure. Whenever he needed money, he would join a local circus and astound the audiences. But life began to weigh on him. More and more he felt what the other members of the band were feeling, scattered through the world: the senselessness of their existence deprived of the daring adventures of old, the oppressive dullness of a life without aim or meaning, in brief, the regrettable absence of a writer to pave this doleful path they had walked for sixty years or more. Harotian decided he could no longer live this miserable life. It was at this point that Obersturmbannführer Neigel interrupted the story and asked why Harotian hadn’t used his talents to transform himself into a happy man. It seems Wasserman had been eagerly anticipating this question. Harotian, he revealed, detested wonder working, regarding it as an unfair advantage over his fellow man. The wiser he became, the more he realized that man is trapped in a dead end and the more he despised his supernatural gifts and the One who had bestowed them. They were like hush money from the Creator,His overgenerous alms to one of his beggars; to only one of them. This act of bribery, he felt, had corrupted his human side, the thoroughly unmysterious side.

When war broke out, Harotian the Armenian found himself imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw. By then he was a bitter old man. Otto found him one night in the street walking backward, crying like a lost child, dragging one foot on the sidewalk as he hopped along the street with the other. He explained that his feet were singing a canon, an old Armenian hymn, and invited Otto to listen. Otto: “The truth is, I heard nothing, maybe because I’m not particularly musical, but I understood immediately: Harotian was one of us again.” In fact, explained Wasserman, Harotian had discovered a way to become magical again without recourse to his original gifts. This is how he overcame the corrupting influence of the Alms Giver. It all started one evening at the Britannia Club, where Harotian was appearing as magician. His wages were his dinner. After the performance that night, he sat down at a side table and began to devour his food like a hungry dog. He was painfully thin, and his eyes were strangely incandescent. Most of his tricks that evening had fallen flat, and he was jeered off the stage. The audience had seen him performing the same tricks ten times before, and he was too weak tonight to get them right. He felt no resentment toward his jeerers. On the contrary, he blamed himself for having deprived them of their innocent pleasure—the pleasure of simple sleight-of-hand. Again he shivered. Strange. For a few days now his hands had been trembling, especially when he was onstage. He stopped chewing so frantically and looked down: there on his table was a small vase holding a single paper flower. On each table at the Britannia there was a vase with a single brown paper flower. Harotian had not seen a real flower for many months. He wanted the flower to be green. For his eyes only he wanted the flower to be as green as a flower should be. Neigel turned his nose up in protest—green flowers? Wasserman ignored him. Again he stressed that Harotian was careful not to turn the flower green with his magical powers, that he searched instead for other, more ordinary powers within himself. He gazed at the flower. Tears came to his eyes, and his face began to twitch with effort. People were staring at him now and laughing. He paid no attention. He gritted his teeth and stared through his tears till the flowery contours yielded and turned green. The green spread slowly over the petals. Harotian sensedthe new locus of his efforts: somewhere in the middle of his head, where—to quote Descartes—body and soul are joined. The old Armenian sat watching the paper flower till closing time. The waiter who cleared his plate dropped a leftover slab of horse meat into his pocket. The proprietor rudely helped him on with his tattered coat and screamed in his ear that he was dismissed: they wouldn’t be needing such a terrible magician anymore. Harotian didn’t hear him. He picked up the green paper flower and walked out into the night. He walked backward, because he could no longer abide his usual walk, which, he believed, had been inflicted upon him through no preference of his own. It was a rather silly idea, but REBELLION [q.v.]—and this was indeed rebellion—begins with a symbol, and Harotian (Wasserman, too) was not afraid of being laughed at. His vision raised him above petty contempt (from people like Neigel). He stopped under a streetlamp