Stella Descending by Linn Ullmann Page A

When, at the age of twenty-three, he finally recognized that his dream of becoming the new Houdini was never going to come true, he was miserable. For four years he remained miserable. He lay under the eiderdown in his lodgings in Majorstua, feeling miserable and wishing only that he could disappear. His landlady threatened to throw him out. His parents threatened to cut him off without a penny. His friends threatened to deny him solace and financial support. Then two things happened. Toward the end of the fourth year he started to think; he hitched his demons to his cart and made
them
work for
him
instead of the other way round. He summoned all the beasts of his depression and asked them, How can I become the world’s greatest conjurer? And the beasts replied as they always had: You do not exist! You are not!
    “For four years El Jabali had lain under his eiderdown wishing he could disappear. And to some extent he had succeeded. No one spoke to him anymore. No one cared about him. No one gave him a second thought. And then it came to him in a flash: His destiny was not to become the new Houdini; it was not to present himself to the whole world, proclaiming I exist! I am! Quite the opposite. His destiny as a conjurer, as a magician, as El Jabali, was to make things disappear: cards, dice, silk scarves, top hats, doves, rabbits, maybe even a beautiful woman, and finally, of course, himself.
    “A little flourish, he thought, and everything is plunged into darkness. Everything disappears.
    “Toward the end of his four years under the eiderdown, two things happened to El Jabali. One was that he started thinking. The other was that once he took up with his friends again, he met a half-Russian, half-Congolese circus artiste named Darling and fell in love with her. Darling returned his love, and not long after their first tempestuous encounter, they were married. Darling’s father was a ringmaster, and El Jabali promptly became a natural part of his father-in-law’s small but well-established Circus Bravado. Every night he performed a number of conventional conjuring tricks—entertaining enough, but nothing really sensational. Not yet.
    “Then the Circus Bravado set out on its tour of Norway. For the young newlyweds life was, on the whole, pretty good. Everyone knew that El Jabali was cooking something up. Before every show he would lie on his bed in the trailer he shared with Darling, listening to Schubert’s
Die Winterreise
and contemplating his grand disappearing act. Eventually he got around to telling his wife about his plans: how he could make absolutely anything vanish without trace right before the very eyes of the audience, just like that—no cabinet, no trapdoor, no fluttering draperies, nothing—simply the most stupendous optical illusion, a gradual fade-out, right there in the middle of the ring, in front of hundreds of astonished witnesses. Darling took to the idea immediately and offered to be his assistant.
    “Darling was a trapeze artist. She had grown up in the circus. It was not in her nature to be anyone’s assistant. This half-Russian, half-Congolese girl was a diva by the age of nine, when she was the top of a human pyramid consisting of her grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, five brothers, two sisters, three boy cousins, and one girl cousin. Darling had faith in her husband’s talents as a magician. He had the hands for it, good hands. There was no doubt in Darling’s mind that he had a magician’s hands. But she was also prepared to be his assistant for another reason: She dreaded his black moods, which sometimes threatened to send them both plummeting into the abyss, so she was more than willing to vanish from the ring a little at a time, once a night, to the entrancing sound of the audience’s applause—if that was what it took to make him happy.
    “His disappearing act was a sensation from the very first show, and the press was soon hailing El Jabali as the greatest magician