“So what do you do about it?” Magda said.
“I . -. .” She licked her lips. Eventually she shook her head and stared down at her hands, folded in her lap.
“See. Don?” Magda said. “That’s what a foster-reb like me is trying to stop. Someone like Lora ought to be able to-to go somewhere, do something, stack up new experience and dig around among it in case the answer’s somewhere underneath.”
“I-uh-I guess I can see you have a case there,” Sheklov said cautiously. “But what one hears about the result .”
• “You mean the popular picture of a reb?” Magda interrupted. “I guess if you’re Canadian” (did she lay too much stress on that or was his imagination working overtime?) “you’ve been fooled by the media. I’m not talking about fakes, phoneys, borderline psychopaths, what they used to wrap up under one handy label like `beat’ or `hippie.’ That went out of style when the courts started holding that long hair was prima-facie proof of vagrancy because it meant you couldn’t pay the barber, and the pigs grunted with joy and reached for their guns!”
Reflexively Sheklov touched his chin. Back There he’d
sported a beard. Why not, in an area where the winter temperatures regularly dipped to -30° Centigrade?
“Yeah beards too,” Magda agreed. “And when that happened the phoneys folded up and went home. Leaving just the few, just the handful, who couldn’t be folded up. And what can they do? If they apply for a passport, the pigs come running and turn over their homes. grill their families, their friends, until no one wants to know them any more. ‘Everything’s great here, why should you want to leave?’-that’s the principle, and saying you’re curious about the rest of the world is no excuse. You’ve been told all your life that this country is the best, the finest, the most wonderful. So they want to know why you aren’t satisfied. And how can you say why you aren’t? You haven’t done the things that might tell youl”
“But if you do try and leave, you have to leave for good!” Lora burst out. “I’ve thought about it, and-and I just daren’tl I might get shot at the borderl”
“A lot of people do,” Magda sighed. “Which is why most rebs go exploring in a different direction altogether.”
Sheklov looked at the ouija board, the tarot deck, various other significant items on display. He said at last, “You must mean-inside their heads.”
“Yes.” Magda gave him a puzzled look. “I usually have to spell that out to people when I’m defending the rebs. I guess north of the border you aren’t quite so calcified, hm? But that’s the long and short of it, yes.”
“How did you get involved with these rebs?” Sheklov queried. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
Magda seemed to be overcome with a fit of self-consciousness. She said, avoiding his eyes, “Oh . . . 1 Oh, I guess I was one of the half-and-half cases. Sometimes I felt I ought to stand up for what I believed in, and sometimes I was just lazy enough to coast along with the gang, and I drifted into a marriage on that basis. Which turned sour, and taught me-much too late-that my laziness was a crime against myself. And, too, I found out that I have
“Yes?” Sheklov prompted.
“I have a talent,” Magda said after a brief hesitation, and pointed at the card in the window. It was so thin the word CONSULTATIONS could be read on it, backwards, against the light sky of late afternoon. “You see,” she continued, licking her lips, “I do have more-uh-empathy
than some people. I trained as a nurse when I quit college, thinking maybe I’d go to work for the Red Cross or some other international aid organisation, in some broken-backed poverty-stricken country. It turned out I wasn’t allowed to, because-well, because I’d been kind of wild as a kid and they wouldn’t give a passport to anyone with a drug-bust on their record. Smoking pot was all, but quite enough. So here I am, a professional shoulder to weep on in an age when most people won’t admit they can cry. Won’t even confide in their best friends. It doesn’t require a licence, so that’s cool.”