Among Others

Sam spent the afternoon in my room, talking to me. He’s an old man and he’s had a strange life—imagine finding out your whole family had been killed. It would be as if Wales sank under the sea this minute and only I was left out of everyone. Well, Cousin Arwel’s in Nottingham, but just the two of us out of everyone I grew up with. It was just like that for Sam. When he went back after the war they were all gone and strangers were living in his house, and the neighbours pretended not to know him. He saw his mother’s bread-bin on the neighbour’s table, but she wouldn’t even let him have that.

“And they mean nothing to you,” he said.

“Not nothing.”

“They’re strangers. Even I am a stranger. But my family were your cousins. They’re talking, different governments have been talking for years about giving some compensation. But how can anyone compensate me for my family? How can they give you back your cousins that you never knew, and your cousins who were never born, the ones who would be your age now?”

That made me feel it. I could write a poem about that. “Hitler, give me back my cousins!”

I think Sam’s a bit sad that I’m not Jewish, that his descendants won’t be. But he didn’t say so, and he isn’t reproachful about it at all. He said he didn’t stay in Poland because he could feel the dead everywhere, as if they could come around any corner. I understand that. I almost talked to him about magic, then, about the thing I did to have a karass, about Mor wandering around with the fairies. I might have if there had been time. But Daniel came in and said they should be going to catch the train, so I said goodbye.

Sam kissed me, and he put his hand on my head and said a blessing in Hebrew. He didn’t ask, but I didn’t mind. At the end of it he looked at me and smiled his wrinkled old smile and said, “You’ll be all right.” It was remarkably reassuring. I can hear it now. “You’ll be all right.” As if he could know.

I can smell the snowdrops. I’m so glad he came.

Tuesday 22nd January 1980

Sam was right about the acupuncture.

It is, in fact, magic. The whole thing is. They call it “chi,” but they don’t even pretend it isn’t magic. The man who does it is English, which surprised me after all the fear of wily orientals the aunts tried to put into the procedure. He was trained in Bury St. Edmunds, which is in the Fens, near Cambridge, by people who had been trained in Hong Kong. He had framed certificates, like a doctor. On the ceiling was a map of the acupuncture points of the human body. I got to look at it a lot, because most of the time I was lying on the table with huge enormous needles stuck in me, not moving.

It doesn’t hurt at all. You can’t feel them, even though they’re really long and they’re really stuck in you. What did happen was that when the last one went in, the pain stopped, like turning off a switch. If I could learn to do that! One of them, in my ankle, he put in slightly the wrong place first, and I did feel it, not real pain, but like a pinprick. I didn’t say anything, but he immediately moved it to a spot a fraction of a centimeter to the side and I couldn’t feel it. It’s body-magic plain enough.

Even if it just turned the pain off for the hour I was there, it would have been worth the thirty pounds, to me anyway. But it wasn’t. I’m not miraculously cured or anything, but I hobbled up the stairs to his room and I walked down them, no worse than before they put me on the rack. He wants me to go every week for six weeks. He said that today he was just doing what he could for the pain, but if he saw me regularly he might be able to see what was wrong and do something about it. He admired my stick—I’ve been using the fairy one, as it seems to give me more strength than the metal one, as well as being less ugly.

“Take me back to school,” I said to Daniel as we walked back to the car. A pale wintry sun was shining and the rose-gold buildings of Shrewsbury were flushed with it. If we’d set out right away, I could have been in school in time to go off to book club as normal after prep.

“Not until we see how you are tomorrow,” he said. “But how about a Chinese meal, as Chinese medicine seems to agree with you?”

So we went to a restaurant called the Red Lotus and ate spare ribs and prawn toast and chicken fried rice and chow mein and beef in oyster sauce. It was all delicious, the best food I’ve had for years, maybe ever. I ate until I was full to bursting. While we were eating I told Daniel about the convention in Glasgow, Albacon, this year’s Eastercon, and about what Wim had said about the Worldcon in Brighton and how he’d met Robert Silverberg and done nothing but talk about books for five days. He said he didn’t think his sisters would let him get away at Easter, but he agreed that I could go, and said he’d pay!