Nights at the Circus (21 page)

The guttering paraffin lamp cast awry shadows on the blackened walls, shadows that did not fall where the laws of light dictated that they should. One by one, each accompanied by his twisted shadow, the clowns climbed up on the table, where Grik and Grok remained seated one at each end, like gravestones, humming and drumming.

One lanky, carrot-haired fellow, whose suit was latticed in prismatic colours like a matador’s suit of lights, took firm hold of the window-pane check baggy pants of a tiny creature in a red velvet waistcoat and poured the contents of an entire pint of vodka into the resultant aperture. The dwarf broke out in a storm of silent weeping, and, with a backward somersault, attached himself to his aggressor’s neck to ride there like the old man of the sea although the harlequin now began to spin round in such a succession of cartwheels he soon disappeared in a radiant blur, to reappear in his turn on the back of the dwarf. At which point, Walser lost sight of this couple in the mêlée of the savage jig.

What beastly, obscene violence they mimed! A joey thrust the vodka bottle up the arsehole of an august; the august, in response, promptly dropped his tramp’s trousers to reveal a virile member of priapic size, bright purple in colour and spotted with yellow stars, dangling two cerise balloons from the fly. At that, a second august, with an evil leer, took a great pair of shears out of his back pocket and sliced the horrid thing off but as soon as he was brandishing it in triumph above his head another lurid phallus appeared in the place of the first, this one bright blue with scarlet polkadots and cerise testicles, and so on, until the clown with the shears was juggling with a dozen of the things.

It seemed that they were dancing the room apart. As the baboushka slept, her too, too solid kitchen fell into pieces under the blows of their disorder as if it had been, all the time, an ingenious prop, and the purple Petersburg night inserted jagged wedges into the walls around the table on which these comedians cavorted with such little pleasure, in a dance which could have invoked the end of the world.

Then Buffo, who had been sitting in his Christ’s place all this while with the impassivity of the masked, gestured to Little Ivan – to innocent Little Ivan – to bring to the table that black iron cauldron from which the fish soup had been served and place it before him. And so the tranced child stepped into the act.

Rising ceremoniously to his feet, the Master Clown fished within the cauldron and found there all manner of rude things – knickers, lavatory brushes, and yard upon yard of lavatory paper. (Anality, the one quality that indeed they shared with children.) Chamber-pots appeared from nowhere and soon several wore them on their heads, while Buffo served up more and yet more disgusting tidbits from the magic depths of his pot and dealt them with imperial prodigality about his retinue.

Dance of disintegration; and of regression; celebration of the primal slime.

Little Ivan gaped, near panic, near hysteria, yet all was silent as a summer day – only the drone and pulse of Grik and Grok and, like a sound from another world, the occasional snore and groan of the baboushka on the stove.

In spite of Fevvers’ ministrations and the attentions of the doctor, Walser was still stiff and sore from the embrace of the tiger and, although he knew this display was, in some sense, put on for his benefit, was even a kind of initiation, he had no great taste for it and slipped through one of the fissures of the revelry into the freezing alley outside. At the touch of cold, his wound buzzed like a saw.

On a crumbling wall, reluctantly lit by a meagre streetlamp, was a freshly pasted poster. He could not read the legend, in Cyrillic, but he could see her – Fevvers, in all her opulence, in mid-air, in her new incarnation as circus star. The Colonel had taken the French dwarf’s design but added to it, by some less skilful hand, representations of the Princess of Abyssinia, the cats, the apes, the clowns themselves, so that they all seemed sheltered by Fevvers’ outspread wings in the same way that the poor people of the world are protected under the cloak of the Madonna of Misericordia.

As Walser eyed this poster sardonically, a shadow detached itself from those beneath the streetlamp, crossed the street like a gust of wind and threw itself, weeping, at Walser’s feet, covering his hands with kisses.

FIVE

And that was how Walser came to inherit the Ape-Man’s woman, although he did not understand one word she said, except her name, Mignon, and she continued to grovel in the street, clinging to his short pants with her poor, bony hands.

She was still dressed as she had been that morning, in the thin, faded, cotton wrapper, no coat or shawl, so her bare arms were dappled mauve with cold. The little white rabbit-bones of her ankles stuck out above the torn, felt carpet slippers on her bare feet. Her limp, light hair dangled from her small head in draggled rats’-tails. With his left hand, his good hand, he pulled her upright and she came easily, she was light as an empty basket. She leant against him whilst she finished off crying, knuckling her eyesockets like a child. The dark marks on her face could have been either tearstains or bruises.

Nothing else moved on the street of warped, shuttered houses. The fog closed down like the lid of a pot. A melancholy dog barked in the distance. In the lodging house behind him, the clown’s malign fiesta. Nowhere to take this waif delivered to him by chance except – the Madonna of the Arena waggled her bum from the poster; his decision was made. He lirruped and chirruped to the girl in the way the equestrienne invokes docility in a shy horse and led her through the maze of hovels until they debouched abruptly upon a glittering street.

What thundering noise! what brilliant lights! Crowds of people, of horses, of carriages! Walser was touched to see how little Mignon, accustomed only to poor lodgings, and caravans, and the underside of spectacle, soon left off sobbing and gazed about her with wonder and excitement. She was adenoidal and breathed through her mouth but she had a pale, undernourished, unhealthy prettiness. When she stopped crying, she had breath enough to cough.

They made a strange pair. A painted streetwalker with a veil over her eyes and a good, fur-collared coat turned to watch them pass. She crossed herself, she thought she saw a pair of holy fools, but the doorman at the Hotel de l’Europe, in his maroon dress-uniform, less superstitious, advanced upon them with his hand outstretched, barring entry through the glass door with the gesture of the guardian of paradise.

Walser tried out his few words of Russian, repeated ‘please’ several times, but the doorman laughed and shook his head. He wore the epaulettes and braided cap of, at least, a general. Mignon, hanging on Walser’s arm, gazed and gazed through the glass door at the fairyland inside, the dazzle of electricity, the furry carpets, the fine ladies, no prettier than herself, who showed their bosoms to bowing gentlemen in evening dress. She gazed with a joyous awe, almost a gratitude, that luxury should exist; she never expected the door-keeper might relent and let them in, why should he? She knew, better than the foolish clown, such treats were not for the likes of them, but, all the same, just the sight of that forbidden sweety-shop of a hotel foyer was sufficient in itself to compensate her for a day in which she had been abandoned to the mercies of a hungry tiger by her lover, then beaten to tatters and thrown half-naked on to the Russian winter streets by her husband. She made small guttural sounds of wistful admiration at the back of her throat. Her eyes were big and round as millstones.

Then Walser thought he might bribe the doorman but just as he fumbled under his shirt for the ‘grouch bag’, as Grik called it, in which he’d been taught to hide his roubles, a firm hand in a bronze kid glove descended on his good shoulder, whilst another, similarly clad, flourished before the doorman’s eyes two pink slips of paper which he recognised as complimentaries for the opening night of the Greatest Show on Earth. He and Mignon were swept at once into the warm, perfumed air inside in Fevvers’ wake as the doorman bowed almost to the ground with servility and gratitude.

Her suite appeared to be furnished exclusively in flowers but, peering beneath a couple of bushels of white lilac, Fevvers located a red velvet armchair of the size of a sitz bath and plumped down in it, kicking away her high-heeled shoes and shrugging off a flowery Spanish shawl with gestures of furious exhaustion. Under her shawl, she wore an extravagant satin dress in that shade of red blondes are told to avoid because it ‘drains’ them; but it did not drain Fevvers, whose rouge was even brighter. Her dress was decorated with flounces of black lace and cut down at the front almost to her nipples, probably in an attempt to distract attention from her hump. All the same:

‘Tomorrow,’ she growled morosely, ‘all the fine ladies in Petersburg will go hunchbacked. Another social triumph, Mr Walser.’

Misericordia was in a vile temper.

‘What’s this the cat’s brought in?’ she enquired, eyeing Mignon coldly. ‘Quick, our Liz, run her a bath before we catch something off her.’

Lizzie, throwing Walser an old-fashioned look, stumped off into the bathroom to do as she was bid.

Blissfully unaware of their cool welcome, the girl, looking no older than thirteen in the remorseless light of the electric chandeliers, was quite overcome by the drawing-room and turned round and round in one spot on the carpet drinking everything in – the beautiful pictures on the walls; spindly-legged tables holding onyx ashtrays and chalcedony cigarette boxes; the merry log fire; plush, glitter and high-piled rugs. Ooooooh!

As she watched the starveling girl’s delight, Fevvers’ good nature fought with her resentment. She sighed, softened and addressed Mignon in a clatter of languages, Italian, French, German, all barbarously pronounced and grammatically askew but rapid as machine-gun fire. When she struck German, the girl smiled.

Fevvers poked about beneath a festering collation of orchids, retrieved a beribboned box the size of a kettle-drum, cast aside the lid and revealed layer upon layer of chocolates packed in frilly tutus of white paper. She thrust the box at Mignon.

‘Go on. Stuff yourself. Essen. Gut.’

Mignon, gawky as a boy, clasped the box to her bosom, sniffing with half-closed eyes, almost swooning at the mingled odours of infantine voluptuousness, cocoa, vanilla, praline, violet, caramel, that rose up from the ruffled depths. She seemed hardly able to dare to touch them. Fevvers brusquely chose a fat choc with a lump of crystallised ginger pressed on top of it and popped it into the pale pink mouth that opened like a sea-anemone to engulf it. A glittering snail-track of the Strong Man’s dried semen ran down Mignon’s leg. She stank. Until she married the Ape-Man, she followed a strange profession; she used to pose for the dead.

She was the child of a young man who killed his wife, the mother of his children, for lying down with soldiers from a nearby barracks. This young man took the woman out to a pond on the edge of town, cut her throat, threw the knife into the pond and came back to their lodgings in good time to prepare supper for their children. Mignon and her little sister were playing in the square outside. Mignon skipped and her sister turned the rope. She was six, her sister was five.

They saw their father come back. ‘Supper will be ready soon,’ he said. He went into the house. There was blood on his shirt but didn’t he work in the slaughterhouse? Wasn’t his job that of washing down the slaughterhouse floor? So they took no notice of the blood on his shirt, or of his wet trousers.

But he came out of the house in a minute. ‘The breadknife is lost,’ he said. ‘I must go and find the breadknife.’ Later, people asked the children if he were acting strangely, but how can a six-year-old, a five-year-old, tell what is strange behaviour and what is not? The breadknife had never been lost before. That was strange. But father often got the supper because mother took in washing for the soldiers at the barracks and went out in the evenings to deliver the starched shirts so the officers could have them fresh in time for dinner.

‘Bath’s ready,’ said Lizzie from an open door, in a billow of flower-scented steam.

Mignon tussled with her wrapper, but, since she would not let go of the box of chocolates, shifting it from beneath one arm to beneath the other as she struggled with her sleeves, it took her some time to emerge. She hugged the ribboned box so close you would have thought she had fallen in love with the chocolates.

Since he could not make their supper without cutting bread, her father went off to look for the breadknife in the pond and searched for it so industriously that he drowned himself in five feet of water. They found the breadknife when they dragged the pond. ‘Is this your breadknife?’ asked the judge, quite kindly. ‘Yes,’ said Mignon, and stretched out her hand for it, but they would not let her take it back. That was later.

The little girls went on skipping in the square until it got dark. Mignon took her turn at turning the rope. The other end of the rope was tied to the doorhandle. Now all the windows in the house had lights in them, but not their window. Then her sister was hungry, so they untied the rope and went upstairs. Mignon didn’t know how to make a light but she found the loaf by touch on the table in the dark and broke pieces off it for her sister and herself, so they ate that.

‘Gawd!’ exclaimed Fevvers when she saw Mignon’s nakedness. Mignon’s skin was mauvish, greenish, yellowish from beatings. And, more than the marks of fresh bruises on fading bruises on faded bruises, it was as if she had been beaten flat, had all the pile, the shine banged off her adolescent skin, had been beaten threadbare, or as if she had been threshed, or beaten to the thinness of beaten metal; and the beatings had beaten her back, almost, into the appearance of childhood, for her little shoulder blades stuck
up
at acute angles, she had no breasts and was almost hairless but for a little flaxen tuft on her mound.

Unconscious of their startled looks, she dropped her wrapper on the floor and scampered to the bathroom, all legs and elbows. She did not forget to take her chocolates with her. Lizzie picked up the discarded garment with the firetongs and dropped it on the blaze, where it flared, crackled, turned into a black ghost of itself and disappeared up the chimney. Fevvers put a summoning finger on the room service bell.