“He can have it.”

The teacher doesn’t know what to do, and the boys are urging Kaytek: “Don’t give it to him, you dope. Look at him, the cheat. He says he had it on the windowsill, in his pocket, and in his schoolbag. He had different coins, but he says it’s his. He’s been found out, the wise guy! He’s lying. He never had it at all. He’s always cheating. Kaytek showed us outside that he’d found that money.”

Kaytek shrugs.

The teacher thinks for a while.

“Tell me, where did you find it?” she says.

He tells her what happened. He doesn’t say anything about the spells, of course.

“So you’ll give it to him?”

“He can have it, if he says he lost it. It’s not mine, after all.”

And the other boy takes it. His hands are shaking. And now he’s crying for real.

Once again, it’s all so strangely complicated.

“Maybe magic power gives to one and takes away from another?”

Because it was like that before, too.

He wants to try it a different way.

He wants to do a test, to see if he can transfer his magic spell to someone else.

So he gives a command for Mom to find a zloty.

And Mom comes back from town and tells a weird story:

“I found five zlotys. So I looked around to see who lost it. And I saw an old guy looking for something. So I asked him. He was overjoyed, the poor old boy. It was his.”

It came out so weird.

It’s all in such a pickle you can’t get your head around it.

Kaytek found a pocket knife and some crayons.

The pocket knife was lying in the middle of the street. It was lying there so obviously, but no one had seen it and picked it up.

It was just as if it was waiting for Kaytek.

It was the same with the crayons – a whole new box of them, and just when the teacher warned he’d give them a bad grade for the semester if they didn’t have crayons.

Even if it wasn’t magic, no one loses a whole new box of crayons, do they?

Then the pocket knife went missing. He left it on the bench, and after the recess, it had gone. Maybe someone took it, though he asked the janitor and the other boys.

Or maybe it just disappeared on its own?

Once again, who knows?

Two more of Kaytek’s spells worked out in the street. One time he pushed some little girls into the mud.

It was like this:

He’s walking along, on his way home from school, lost in thought.

“Maybe it doesn’t work in the street because there’s so much noise. Maybe there are too many people – something’s definitely getting in the way.”

There was a good reason why wizards used to live in isolated towers or in the last cottage at the very edge of the village. Maybe they hide in the forest, or at the bottom of the sea?

Kaytek himself can tell that his thoughts take shape most easily when he’s down by the River Vistula, far from the city, among peace and quiet; or in the silence of night, when he’s lying in bed.

So on his way home from school he’s thinking about it all, turning it over in his mind. And suddenly, there in front of him, are three little girls.

They’re taking up the entire width of the sidewalk, laughing, pushing, and fooling around. They won’t let him get past. If they were boys, maybe he wouldn’t have noticed, but girls! That makes him even wilder.

It’s raining.

Go splash in the mud! he thinks.

And at once they’re lying in it. All three of them. They’re filthy dirty, covered in mud.

“Serves them right,” he thinks. “That’ll teach them to cause a scene!”

The second time, he spilled a saleslady’s apples.

He knows her from way back – she’s always sold her apples here. Sometimes he used to buy from her.

He doesn’t like her because she’s rude to kids.