Chapter 4: Doubt

With a pointed stick, René drew a line in the dirt. He leaned against the Boots' dusty green jalopy and said calmly, "Your mother tells me you are studying with witch doctors."

"I—er—yes," stuttered Terry, wondering what Morag and Lisa, or even Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick, would think of that construction.

"You must be careful," warned René.

"It's not like that," Terry reassured him. "It's white magic. I—I mean—" he corrected, "I mean, it's not witchcraft." John and Sandra Boot had trained their children never to use "black" as a synonym for "evil" or "white" as a synonym for "good," but Eliza had learned the lesson better than Terry had, perhaps because she started younger. "It's good magic."

"No magic is good," asserted René, unperturbed. "No magic is bad. That is a European conceit." René had been educated by French Jesuits, and he argued like one. "What matters is what you do with magic. Do you listen to the ancestors?"

"I—er—well, I pray sometimes," stuttered Terry, blinking in the harsh sunlight. "I mean, I try to think what Jesus would want me to do."

"To pray is good," allowed René. "But do not ask too much. Do not set the agenda. You must listen." He paused. "I see you struggling. Do not struggle."

Terry bit his lip. He had never thought of himself as a struggler. On the contrary, he'd always been the peacemaker: at school, in the boys' choir, and now at Hogwarts.

"You have very nice manners," said René, reading his mind. "As good as an English public school boy." He paused. "Better than an English public school boy," he said on second thought. "And your intentions are good. You are a true Christian at heart. But I see you struggling. That is the mistake that the missionaries always make. They feel too much pain. They rush in, with the best intentions, and they set the agenda, and they do not listen. That is why your mother is so beloved."

Terry nodded silently.

"Some in the village say she is a saint."

Terry flinched.

"Yes, I know you do not like it. And your sister likes it even less. Myself, I do not say the good doctor is a saint, but she can exercise her medicine here—her magic—because she listens. She does not impose her will on the world. She does not think of her own pain. She does not think too much of her own power. That is what you must do," continued René. "Study well and master the art of magic, but do not get too interested in your own power, in exercising your own will. The missionaries would like to get rid of the witch doctors here, but I, who am a good Christian all my life, tell you as I tell them, there is no need. Because the witch doctors here do not live to display their own power, to do magic on their own behalf, but to serve the people and to listen to the spirit world. Not to ask, always to ask, but to receive. That is what will keep you on the right path. Be humble, and listen."

"Thank you," said Terry. He really didn't know what else to say.

"I will not say to you, do not do what you are doing," continued René. "I will not even say to you, do not involve your sister."

"Eliza makes her own decisions," mumbled Terry.

René laughed heartily, showing his white teeth. "She was like that when she was four years old. It is good, that. Both of you should make your own decisions. I say only, do not think too much think of your own pain, and do not think too much of your own power. Do not set out to solve all the world's problems before you reach manhood. Study well, heed your elders, and listen." He massaged the rusty green door of the jalopy lovingly, smiled a little sadly, and said, gazing out at the sandy fields, "Come now, I will drive you home."

Terry and Eliza shared a bedroom in the mission house, an arrangement that had been second-nature to them when they were six and four but was becoming dashed awkward now that they were fourteen and twelve—but Mum, of course, never noticed that kind of thing. Dad, when applied to, hung a prodigious amount of mosquito netting and pointed out that there were entire families living in one room in the village.

When Terry walked into their joint bedroom following his conversation with René, Eliza looked up from her work at the battered steel desk they shared and threw a case of drawing pencils at him. The case was soft-sided and, thankfully, zipped, but all the same, it seemed like an unnecessary aggressive gesture.

"What was that for?" inquired Terry, throwing the pencil case on dusty floor.

"Don't do that!" exclaimed Eliza. "Those are my best pencils, and anyway, they're the only ones I've got here—"

"Well, why did you throw them at me then?"

"Mum and Dad are plotting to send me to boarding school."

"So?"

"It's your fault."

"Huh?"

"They would never have gotten this idea if it hadn't been for you having to go to Hogwarts—"

"Eliza, that's ridiculous."

"It's true and you know it."

"Boarding school isn't all bad," ventured Terry. "If you make friends there, it can be kind of fun. Almost like a second home."

"I don't need a second home," sniffed Eliza. "I've already got this—place. And anyway, they're not going to send me to Hogwarts. You know what they're like. They're going to make me go somewhere all-girls and frightfully High Church—"

"I don't mean you should go if you don't want to," said Terry hastily. "But it's not my decision—"

"Will you talk to them at least?" asked Eliza. "Dad, I mean. There's no point with Mum. But you're the little magician. You can do anything. Will you at least talk to Dad?"

"All right," sighed Terry. He walked over to the desk and leaned over Eliza's shoulder. "Why can't you draw pretty pictures like other girls?" he asked waspishly.

"I think gallbladders are pretty," retorted Eliza. "Of course, they're prettier when they're healthy. This one had both polyps and gallstones, as you can see. Still, it's hardly the worst thing I've seen. Mum did a tubal ligation last week and the patient turned out to have a huge ovarian cyst—"

"I'd just as soon not see a picture of that, if you don't mind."

"It's not finished yet, anyway," snapped Eliza. "Go talk to Dad, okay? Now."

Terry crossed the narrow hallway and stuck his head in the door of his parents' bedroom. Dad was sitting on the camp bed, darning his field coat and simultaneously reading the pharmaceutical agency's latest set of instructions regarding the cold chain for drug shipments. He didn't look much like a millionaire's grandson at that moment, but that was Dad's specialty, blending in.

"Dad, are you sending Eliza to boarding school?"

"Not this year."

"Well, she thinks you're planning to, and she's pretty miffed about it." Dad was silent. "It's Mum's idea, isn't it?" said Terry bluntly.

"She would like to concentrate on the mission more," said Dad slowly.

"Boarding school is expensive," Terry pointed out. "If you keep Eliza in Nottingham, there'll be more to spend on the mission—"

"Your mother is thinking about devoting herself full-time to the mission," said Dad coolly.

"Give up her practice, you mean?" exclaimed Terry. "Move here? What about you?"

"I'm not leaving the firm," said Dad, "but I might switch to flex-time, not work year-round, so I can be here a bit more—"

"Couldn't this wait until Eliza goes to university?" asked Terry. "Or at least till she's in the Sixth Form?"

"Nothing's been decided yet," said Dad, knotting his thread. "Don't worry." Terry stood motionless in the doorway. "I didn't want to send you to Hogwarts, you know," said his father conversationally, after a minute.

"Really?" Terry hadn't known that. He hadn't been so sure he wanted to go himself, actually, but the arrangements all seemed to have been made years before he heard about it—they told him his name had been down for the school since birth—so he followed the path of least resistance. In any case, he hadn't realized how decisive the separation would be. He had thought, in the beginning, that it would just be for a year or two, because how long could it take to learn to do magic? At eleven, Terry had assumed that magic was something one was born with, not something one learned. "Why not?"

Dad smiled sheepishly. "I thought I would miss you," he said. "And I was worried about your moral education. The culture is so different—I wasn't sure what sort of values might prevail—but your mother said you had to go. Children aren't their parents', but a loan from God." He knotted his thread and tore off the excess with a rapid jerk. "But it's not a bad moral education, really, having strange powers and having to learn how to exercise them. That in itself—" He shrugged, set down the clumsily mended field jacket, and started folding up the cold chain instructions. "It's not really so terrible, is it, leaving home?"

The cavernous old synagogue in Golders Green was three-quarters empty on the stifling hot August morning when Jake Goldstein was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah. In the front row, sandwiched between Anthony and Zaide Trotsky, Terry shifted uncomfortably in his scratchy dark blue suit and followed along uncertainly in the English of the twin-columned chumash. The Hebrew words were quite familiar, but in all the months of catering to Jake's preoccupation with fluent Hebrew pronunciation and perfect trope, Terry had never looked at the English.

"Tzedek, tzedek tirdof," sang Jake in a quivering voice, and Terry nodded happily over the English translation: "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:20). It was a lovely parsha, all about justice and organizing courts of law, so suitable, he thought, for Jake. The first man who had recited blessings over the Torah scroll moved aside, and a second was called up. A third, and a fourth. Behind him, Terry heard the old men nudging and whispering to each other. "A fine accent." "Such a credit to his parents." "Such naches!" And then Terry did a double-take. "Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. For anyone who does such things is abhorrent to the Lord . . ." (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) He read it again. And out of the recesses of his mind, out of the miscellaneous heap of teachings from his primary school religion classes, floated another phrase unbidden: "You shall not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:17). And now Jake was singing the words in his careful awkward baritone in front of two hundred people: "V'hover haver v'shoel ov v'yid'oni v'doresh el-hametim . . ."

Oh, hell, and I got my sister involved. Is that on a par with consigning one's daughter to the fire? Or consulting with familiar spirits? But she wanted to be involved. She figured out what I was doing, and involving her was the price I had to pay for her silence. She was only mashing scarab beetles—perhaps that doesn't count? I'm the one who did the magic.

And the Old Testament was superseded by the new one, right? Right? Surely the religion teacher said something along those lines, back in primary school. Except that Jake and Anthony don't believe that. Jake's trying to organize his entire life around this book, and his parents . . . his wonderful, warm, generous parents. They're so pious, so what do they call it—frum—surely they've read this, and how do they live with it? Ruth Goldstein doesn't think we're all damned, does she? Surely intention counts. That's what René was trying to say, that afternoon on the savanna. Love you neighbor as yourself. As yourself, but of course not selfishly. That's what I'm trying to do . . .

"You've got to let me out now," Anthony whispered. "I'm taking this aliyah."

"Anthony," he whispered, "whoever chose this Torah reading for Jake?"

Anthony shrugged. "We read the parshiyot in the same order every year. This is the one that goes with this date."

"Well, who chose the date?"

"Jake did," muttered Anthony, grimacing. "Jake did."