Gog, Magog, and Little Ada

There once was an old man named Gog. That wasn’t his real name, of course. Perhaps at one time, many years ago, there lived people in the little town who knew the old man’s name. Yet, for as long as anyone could remember, the old man lived in his three-story house alone. All those years, he never bothered to speak to anybody unless he had something to complain about.

Now, a three-story house might sound like a very grand place to live, but in fact each level was a single room. You see, Gog (we will call him Gog for now, since that is what everybody else calls him in town) was born to a young couple who immigrated from Romania by boat. They had no money for a house, but they did have enough for some land, a hammer, a box of nails, and an axe. So the husband, along with a Hungarian neighbor they came upon, set to building a house just large enough for a young couple. It was a fine little house, and they paid the Hungarian neighbor with stuffed cabbage rolls and cakes with swirls of jam and walnuts.

As Gog came along, the house started to feel a little small. Once Gog was three years old, his mother grew rather fed up of having a toddler running about between her legs as she was cooking. So she demanded a larger house. Her husband obliged but, having no saws to cut down the walls, he instead decided to build upwards. When Gog’s little sister came along, they build upwards once more. That was how the house came to stand at three stories tall, despite being only three rooms large.

Some years passed, and Gog’s sister grew to be very beautiful. She was thought to be a princess, for all her beauty, and she soon caught the attention of a kind-hearted young doctor who took her to New York.

Gog, meanwhile, might have been a handsome young man, but few people knew of him, for he spent all his days at his desk. He had been a very sweet child, and he had many friends. Yet, one day, he was sitting in the meadow with two of his pals when a sparrow landed in a nearby oak tree and began to sing a sweet little song. At once, a poem came into Gog’s mind. It was a strange thing, for Gog had never much liked poems himself. The only poem he knew was one he had been made to recite in school, and even that one gave him trouble, as he always forgot how line six went.

Gog stood up at once and said, “I must go home and fetch a pen and some paper.” And that was what he did. The bird’s song had run in his chest, and a piece of the tune must have gotten stuck in his heart, for he spent the rest of his life writing poetry.

All this sounds very romantic, and it might have been so for Gog, had the story been of a different kind. The trouble was that the tune which had become lodged within his heart began to grow with each poem he wrote until, one day, it filled his whole heart. And so Gog had no room left for love.

By the time Gog had grey hair and wrinkles on his face, he had become a recluse. He wrote only for himself. Gog did not wish to share the song with anyone else out of fear that someone else might take his muse away from him, leaving him with nothing. For this reason, Gog grew into a very wicked and selfish old man. If there were five apples left in the market, and a young mother was behind him with her child, he would take all five, for he liked apples very much and would have, in fact, liked seven of them—one for every day of the week.

That, and the fact that he wore an old green Macintosh coat whose waterproof rubber was wearing away, made him appear very beastly. The children of the town believed him to be a terrible creature who had been transformed by a witch to look like a man. That was where the name Gog came from, after the wicked pair Gog and Magog, of which the children learned in their readings. Magog was the tabby cat who often sat on the stone fence by the road outside Gog’s house, hissing and batting her paw at anyone who dared pass by.

Sometimes, Gog would be out in his garden as some children were passing by, and he would scold them for talking over the birdsong. As such, between Gog and Magog, most children did not dare pass by the three-story house of Gog.

One day, a little girl called Ada was walking along the lane. She had just moved to town with her mother, father, and little brother from Chicago, where her father had been working in the factories. Her mother had been born to a Transylvanian shepherd, and her father was a Prussian merchant. Little Ada spoke broken English, for there had been a large community of immigrants in her neighborhood in Chicago, and she had not been old enough to go to school to learn English. As such, she often walked alone and played by herself, for she knew not how to speak to the other children. Besides, her brother was only a babe and was not very fun to play with.

Perhaps, if Ada spoke English, she might have been the most well-liked child in the schoolyard. After all, she made friends with all the strays about the town, and there were at least three different crows who came to her window in the mornings to leave her little gifts such as buttons and lost earrings. Even Magog didn’t dislike her quite as much as other children.

On that particular day, Ada had tears in her eyes, for the grammar lesson of the day had been about the rules of commas, and Ada had been the unlucky child chosen to recite the rules aloud. Seeing as Ada didn’t know much English at all—let alone such rules of grammar—she had done rather a poor job with her recitation, and she had been given the cruel punishment of standing in front of the blackboard for the rest of the day, writing out all the many ways in which one may use punctuation.

Although Ada was a kindhearted child, she was still a child, and so as she was walking home that day, she was stormily crafting a terrible poem in her head. She composed it first in German, then in Romanian. Those were the languages her parents had grown up speaking in Prussia and Transylvania, but here I will recount it for you in plain English:

Ah, how wicked is Miss Fisher,

Who is as smelly as her name.

Well, she must be a witch;

Perhaps I would know this

If I might only hear her cackling laugh,

For which witches are famed.

Alas, Miss Fisher will not laugh

Nor even give a smile.

So instead I pity her,

As the Lord would have me do.

Now, be sure to know that this is only a translation. The original poems rhymed well, and Ada changed it a little between the two languages, so this is the best that could be done to keep the poems’ meaning.

Ada had just finished composing this poem when she came upon Magog, who sat on the wooden fence outside Gog’s house. Magog hissed, though she did not bat her paws at Ada. This was how she showed her toleration of the girl.

“Good day,” said Ada to Magog as she wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater. Ada spoke first in English, then she spoke again in German and finally Romanian, for she knew that not all the animals understood English. The dog who belonged to the Dutch family, for instance, responded most often to German. At last, on the third “good day,” Magog looked at her and meowed.

Ada’s first thought, since she was only a little girl, was that the cat might also be Transylvanian. Then a second, more sensible thought came to her, and she realized that the cat’s owner must have migrated instead.

So Ada said to the cat in their shared tongue, “Does your friend speak Romanian? The one who lives in that funny house?”

Magog meowed again. This was a very miraculous thing, as Magog hardly ever spoke to anyone. It was almost magical, and Ada must have felt it was so, for she spoke on to the cat, as though Magog was a lady of polite company.

“Madam,” said Ada, “is your friend a man, or the Devil? The children do not like to come this way, for they are frightened of this house, and of you, its great guardian. If he is the Devil, then I would not be frightened, for he must be very lonely. Even so, I hope he isn’t the Devil, so that I might be able to speak to him without the Lord being upset with me for it.”

In reply, Magog leapt down from the fence and went over to the door of Gog’s three-story house. She opened her mouth and began to yowl. Soon after, the door swung open, and a red-faced Gog appeared at the door. He glanced down on the steps, looked at the cat, and waited for her to step inside. When she only blinked back at him, his face grew redder still and he demanded, “What do you want?”

“Good day, sir,” called out Ada, in Romanian.

Gog glanced up and stared at Ada in surprise. “Who are you?”

“Your neighbor,” said Ada, unfrightened by the old man.

Gog grumbled. “Alright. Good day to you too, then.” He was about to shut the door, but, all this time, Magog had dashed inside, and now she dashed back out, this time with something in her mouth. Gog’s eyes widened, and he stumbled towards the cat, reaching out for her. He said a few things which children ought not to hear, and then he cried out, “You! Thief! Come back with my work, you wicked cat.”

But Magog did not stop until she leapt up to the fence once more. She blinked at Ada, bidding her to take the paper. Ada did so, and she smiled when she saw what was written on it. for it was a sweet little poem about a fairy tale which tells the story of a princess called Marioara and a shepherd boy. It was said that Marioara let free a nightingale, in the hopes that her shepherd might come to her.

All this time, Gog limped along through his garden, coming towards Ada so that he could snatch the poem from her hands. But he stopped short when Ada began to sing. He stood and looked on, and he listened, for in her song he heard the words of the tale of Marioara and the shepherd boy. Ada sang in a sweet and pretty voice, for she had sung in the children’s choir in her little neighborhood of Chicago. She might have sang badly, and it would have had the very same magic to it. This was because the magic of this little moment came from the words, which were the very same that all Romanian children, even Gog, once heard.

In that moment, a little piece of the song flew against the hardened heart of old Gog, and a little crack struck through to the very center. Gog clutched at his chest, and he took in a great breath. As all this happened, the sparrow's song began to fall out through the crack. It fell and fell until it all came out through Gog’s toes, where it disappeared into the earth.

At once, the old man who the town knew as Gog was gone, and the man who remained stood with a twinkle in his eye.

“What are you called?” he asked Ada.

“Ada.”

He smiled. “They call me Petru. But I have not heard that name in many years.”

Ada nodded. “You had a piece of wickedness inside you, I think. It was a little like how a bitter current will ruin the whole bite of cake. But you seem a rather sweet man now.”

“That is very wise,” praised Petru. “I was like a bitter cake indeed, but I hope I can be as sweet as you say now. Did you like that little poem you read?”

“Oh yes, very much. It reminded me of home. I had to start singing, you see, the way my cousin used to sing of fairy tales as he played the piano.”

Petru thought this over for a moment. Then he said, “Pardon me, Miss Ada, for I think I will go inside to my house. I have at least a thousand poems in my house. They fill the second and third level to the brim, so that I can hardly walk about there without stepping on a verse. It is time to take them out of that little house. Perhaps they will like it better in a book of verses, or in a newspaper.”

Ada smiled. “I think your poems would like that very much. Farewell for now, Mister Petru.”

With that, Petru and his cat, who in fact was called simply Cat, went inside and Ada went on her way. From that day on the town was a little better, for the beasts Gog and Magog had gone and in their place were a poet and his pet. It even came to be that Petru’s sister saw her brother's name below a poem in New York's finest newspaper, and she came to visit that same winter. That Christmas, she, Petru, and Ada’s family all had a very fine dinner of stuffed cabbage rolls and walnut cake.