MAGIC CARPETS
A story about gold mines, Persian rugs, and the fine thread between truth and inheritance.
When being admitted to hospital, they say you must leave your dignity at reception.
It is also advisable to leave your paranoia.
Because once you’re inside, everything is a threat.
You are under surveillance and health arrest.
The nurses look like spies.
The machines are AI trying to kill you—or still you—depending on your scheme option.
Even the other patients—especially the ones who speak gently—might be agents of ancestral karma or the Israeli Secret Service.
Kostaki had been admitted for a bleeding ulcer.
This was the Sunday lunch’s beetroot that turned out not to be beetroot—left in the potty as a warning from the gods of admin. From mind the gap to medical aid co-payments.
It was serious. A high-grade fever and a long-term dependency on Grandpa Headache Powders, from one too many film shoots and not enough electrolytes.
Kostaki, however, wasn’t worried. He brought his own pillow and a copy of Breakfast of Champions. He told the nurse he didn’t need a drip unless it came with a chaser.
After four days in ICU, Kostaki was moved to a two-bed ward. The silence was comforting—an upgrade from the mechanical lullaby of the nearly dead.
He slept soundly.
Until he didn’t.
The Curtain Opens
He woke to the sound of lunatic shouting.
Was he back at Witrand, installing a TV aerial for Radio Sonic, with the psychiatric patients running off with the ladder while he adjusted the aerial for the SABC test pattern?
His first job in the TV business.
No. This was worse.
This was targeted shouting—purposeful, pointed fury.
It came from behind the curtain.
A man was berating someone, relentlessly. Then—click—silence.
The kind that says: I’ve just hung up. And I meant it.
Kostaki clutched his bedsheets and pulled the bedpan closer.
Weapon or relief—he hadn’t decided.
Then came visiting hour.
Four adult children arrived. The tone shifted from volume to litigation. A multilingual deposition. English. Hebrew. Accusations volleyed across the fabric partition:
“You escaped.”
“You’re unfit.”
“You lied to the manager at Shalom Village.”
And then they were gone.
The curtain pulled back with the dramatic flair of a stagehand on opening night.
“My name’s Hymie,” the man said. “And I’m not going back.”
He was slippered, sharp-eyed, and smug. A man with the charisma of a retired pawnbroker and the volatility of a B-grade Shakespearean actor.
He had escaped from a care facility. Claimed he was addicted to sleeping pills.
Kostaki immediately hid his in his toothpaste. And anything else resembling narcotics for “better recovery.”
What followed was cultural ping-pong: Jews, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese. Family shops. Olive oil. Leather shoes. Smuggled cheese. Stories of shoes worn to death and uncles who bribed customs with salami. National clichés hung out like damp washing in the sun.
Then Hymie leaned closer.
“Kostaki,” he said. “I’m going to tell you a story. About family, carpets, and the kind of con artistry you can only learn in exile.”
The Carpet Plot
“After the Second World War,” Hymie began, “people weren’t just fleeing bombs—they were fleeing betrayal. Neighbours, business partners, former lovers. Europe was a suspense film with no credits.”
“So the smart ones—your people, my people—left.
Jews. Greeks. Armenians. Cypriots. Anyone with a suitcase, a forged letter of introduction, and a story they could say in more than one accent.”
“Many came through London, or Rotterdam, or any city with a port and a blind customs officer. And they brought something with them.”
“Carpets.”
“Persian carpets. From Isfahan. Shiraz. Kashan. Dyed with pomegranates, woven with ancient knots, carrying dust from places only poets remembered. Shipped through a co-op in London that wasn’t a shop, but an operation.”
“They trained salesmen. Gave them lines. And sent them to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth. Each one arrived with a rolled rug and a rehearsed gospel.”
Bring beauty to your new home.
Bring something ancient. Something that remembers more than you do.
A carpet you can cry on. Or bribe customs with.
“And it worked. The carpets gave them something deeper than comfort. They gave them cover. Emotional, spiritual, and—when properly invoiced—taxable.”
The Golden Cave
“But here’s where things turned,” Hymie whispered, eyes flickering like a pilot light.
“They made a fortune. These carpet men and women. And they got greedy.”
“Why sell the floor when you can own the ground itself?”
“It was the early 1950s. The South African gold rush was winding down but the myth of the next ‘big find’ still lured fools and foreigners.
Welkom was booming—thanks to Free State Goldfields, Anglo American, and whatever was being cooked up between government, geology, and good old-fashioned graft.”
“They were introduced to connected people—a man in a white suit, a woman in a purple two-piece with a clipboard and no surname. They said they’d discovered a ‘virgin seam’—a forgotten mine just outside Virginia.”
“They entered the cave. It sparkled like Mecca. Walls painted in metallic gold. A halo of fake eternity.”
“They signed. They toasted. They danced a little.”
Pause. Hymie sipped from his imaginary thermos.
“It was a con. The cave had been painted with leftover spray cans from a Chinese hardware shop. The man vanished. The woman was airlifted to Durban. The cave collapsed during a thunderstorm.”
“No plaque. No closure. No refund.”
Knots and Revenge
“And then what?” Kostaki asked.
“They started again,” Hymie smiled. “With nothing but wool, spite, and stories.”
“They formed Vidchi Carpets. They returned to the rugs. Each one came with a tale. A smell. A whisper of an empire lost in translation.”
“They didn’t just sell floor coverings. They sold legacy.”
“And what did they really sell?” Kostaki asked.
“Stories,” Hymie said.
“And underfelt. Always underfelt.”
Gone Without Discharge
The next morning, Hymie was gone.
No record. No chart. No discharge. No thermos.
The nurses said there had been no such patient.
Kostaki asked if perhaps he’d imagined him.
They shrugged.
“It happens,” they said.
Back home, Kostaki walked across his old rug.
It didn’t fly.
It didn’t sparkle.
But if you stood in the right light—just so—and tilted your head...
You could see it:
A faint shimmer.
A ghost of gold spray paint.
Or a well-told lie
stitched into a beautiful floor covering.