Kolia (4 page)

TSIRK

THAT AUTUMN, THE CIRCUS'S
menagerie of animals was on tour in the Ukraine, accompanied by their trainers and big cat tamers, leaving the rest of the troupe — the obligatory contortionists, acrobats, tightrope walkers, high-wire acts, trapeze artists, and clowns — to entertain the crowds in Moscow. The various acts made their entrances and exits according to a carefully choreographed program. The Bounines, whose entrances were designed primarily to entertain the audience between acts, had begun to draw full houses and were quickly becoming the stars of the show.

Bounine was also an acrobat. By nature, he was sullen and ill-tempered — but not in the ring. Born in Moscow before the Bolshevik Revolution to an aristocratic father and a mother who was an actress, he developed his penchant for play-acting at an early age. During his twenties, he had shared the affections of a woman with an aging Futurist poet. This went on for about six months, and the poet eventually won out. In an attempt to completely forget her, Bounine created a comic character which he transformed into an auguste clown. The circus hired him, and over the course of many years, he had trained all the great clowns. At the age of thirty-five, he picked up the guitar and discovered that he had absolutely no ear for music — it was in the words he crafted to make the crowd roar with laughter that Bounine truly found his voice.

There were no dwarfs in the troupe — with the possible exception of the little girl who kept wandering around babbling at everyone. She was three years old and had learned to walk on the red boards of the ring and in the rehearsal studios where most of the acts were conceived. Her mother had taken off with a second-rate actor when she was barely two, but that subject was to be avoided and her mother was rarely spoken about. It was Pavel, her father, who looked after her now, in a former palace that had been converted into
kommunalka
flats
where circus performers lived communally. Her name was Maria, but her circus family called her Masha. She attended all of her father's rehearsals, and went with him on all the tours within Russia. On the nights that Pavel performed in Moscow, Masha was cared for by a rather unexceptional but competent girl named Eva, the troupe's seamstress and resident tarot card reader.

Masha didn't go to kindergarten, and spent very little time in the company of other children. Everyone assumed that one day, when she was fully trained, she would join a troupe and begin practising her chosen art — maybe as an equine acrobat and trick rider, or a high-wire artist like her mother. But certainly not a clown.
Women who make people laugh don't find husbands
, Pavel would say. A woman shouldn't clown around, and that was that. By watching Eva take care of Masha, Pavel had learned how to feed her and bathe her. During lunch one day, without any coaxing at all, Masha suddenly started talking.

Pavel had two vices — women and vodka — which he attempted to hide from his daughter with varying degrees of success. He knew how to braid her hair, and would shape the braids into a crown on her head. But he also knew how to entertain women, and rarely slept alone in the salon. At the time, he was seeing three women — none of them aware of the others' existence. Juggling was part of his job, and having to keep three women in the air was an occupational hazard.

Every morning, he would have tea with Bounine in the communal kitchen. They would often have to put up with the racket coming from the next room. The lighting technician who lived there with his wife regularly slept in late and snored like a donkey — prompting his wife to launch dishes at the wall to prove she could make more noise than him. Pavel and Bounine sat at a huge round table. Masha had taken her first steps on it and now she sat beside them, eating her breakfast of puréed vegetables. She babbled away in her singsong voice, which they didn't mind at all because it helped to mask the din of the neighbours.

Their breakfasts together followed a strict ritual. Pavel prepared the tea, while Bounine scoured yesterday's newspapers for anything that might be worked into their act. Together, they would agree on how a certain item in the news should be portrayed, and then write a few gags. Sometimes, when they weren't able to come up with anything usable, they would seek out a writer who worked for the circus. After throwing a few words and phrases back and forth, they would invariably dismiss the writer's ideas in favour of their own. They were both extremely proud men.

On the morning of October 31, 1961, Pavel hesitated over a headline —
STALIN'S REMAINS REMOVED FROM MAUSOLEUM.

Like all masters, Bounine had the last word. There would be no mention of disturbing the corpse. They had to choose something else.

“Tomorrow night we'll be in Yaroslavl. You know those cheap dresses with the yellow flower pattern that women are sick of wearing and we're sick of seeing? Well, I'm going to ask Eva to make us a couple of costumes with yellow flowers all over them.”

The next night, they performed their short gag a total of ten times — frolicking around an Oka-3 refrigerator in yellow dresses, while the other acts got ready. Eva and Masha slept in the caravan.

For five years, Eva had used the same deck of tarot cards. The backs of the cards were so worn that the elaborate design embossed on each card with her initials,
EAB
, was barely distinguishable. On the other side, the cards depicted the usual archetypical images of the Tarot, but they were set in everyday scenes from the nineteenth century. Bounine was not in favour of Eva doing tarot readings in Moscow. On tour, he would look the other way on the condition that she didn't ask for money — bread, flowers, a sausage, or a book were okay. Regardless, Bounine would never let her do a reading for him. The darker tone of her skin and her distinct features betrayed her Roma heritage. She was attractive, but most importantly, she was reliable and took good care of Pavel's daughter.
In time, he relented and allowed the gypsy to give him advice about his health.
Be careful in the ring tonight. You could injure your right hand.
And about women.
Stay away from the brunette — she's got diseases
. Advice which, once again, he was too proud to follow.

ONE HOT NIGHT

TWO LONG MUDDY TRACKS
trailed out of the cloakroom and pointed the way through the empty foyer, past Mitya's office, and down a hallway to the small smoke-filled theatre. It was packed. The house lights had been dimmed and on the stage, at the far end of the room, Kolia and a handful of other actors.

Pavel squeezed into a chair between a rather unattractive girl with long legs and a guy wearing a singlet with the word
Mir
printed on it in red, who smelled vaguely of rotting apples. Everyone was already in their seats, and the room felt as hot as a Turkish bathhouse. Girls were quietly fanning themselves with whatever was at hand, while the young men mopped their brows, necks, and underarms with handkerchiefs. Pavel's arrival had gone unnoticed, and he quickly removed his shoes and sat cross-legged on the straight-backed chair.

Most of the actors overplayed their roles, which Pavel found unbearable. The absence of subtlety and nuance showed an ignorance of the text that was almost criminal. They were ripping the play apart limb from limb — something any professional artist, circus clowns included, would find painful. Exerting as much self-control as he could, Pavel followed the performance attentively, closing his eyes or staring at the floor during the worst moments. Kolia had very few lines and hence little opportunity to overact. Alongside the characters of Oliver Twist and Fagin's pickpockets, who were all adolescents in this production, he had been given the role of the Artful Dodger. But the face that had intrigued Pavel when they first met in the tavern — an ageless face that was marked with a personal history that could be understood without him saying a word — was completely transformed. Kolia fully inhabited the character, he became someone other than himself. At least, he made the audience believe that. On stage, he moved with a fluid precision which his few lines in no way diminished, and it gave Pavel an idea.

The troupe took its final bow. After the audience's applause for their friends had been dispensed, and their cigarettes disposed of on the muddy floor, Pavel remained seated. He didn't want to be noticed. “Quite a performance for a kid from Kamchatka,” the man in the singlet said to the tall girl beside Pavel. “Mitya likes him a lot,” replied the girl, shrugging. Their conversation was drowned out by the noise of chairs and tables being moved and stacked.

Pavel stood up and headed directly backstage. He passed Mitya in the corridor, who gave him a discreet salute.

The narrow dressing room was already awash in the smell of alcohol. When Kolia spotted Pavel, he immediately excused himself from the celebration and walked up to him, placing his hand on Pavel's shoulder. He hadn't worn a speck of makeup for the performance.

“I gave it my best shot,” Kolia said, offering Pavel a drink.

“I always give it my best shot. You'll see.”

Kolia liked that about Pavel. His concise remarks were unambiguous and to the point. He invited him to join the others in a celebratory toast.

Kolia's new friendship with a bona fide star of the circus made quite an impression on his fellow actors. Pavel was suddenly bombarded with questions and invitations to dinner — he was even asked if he would be the surprise present at Vyacheslav and Oksana's wedding. He politely declined, using the pretext of a previous engagement to save himself from the pointless expenditure of energy such outings entailed. Spending time in the company of ordinary people exhausted him.

Word of Kolia's association with Pavel spread back to the mole at the hostel. The following evening, Alexei invited Kolia to join him in the reading room to sample some red wine from Spain. Other than partaking of the occasional toast, Kolia drank very little, and if he did drink, he would always cut himself off before reaching the limit imposed by the pain in his stomach. He detested losing control of his body and, even more so, his mouth — talking too much and saying nothing intelligible. But that night, both fatigued and still pleased with his performance the previous evening, he allowed himself to get drunk. Just this once. But Alexei was unable to pry anything out of Kolia that the others hadn't already mentioned regarding his association with Pavel. Even when drunk, Kolia could hold his tongue. Alexei changed the subject.

But something Kolia said in a moment of relaxed candour, somewhere between the wine and the vodka when time seemed to stand still, stayed with him. “You know, Alexei, it feels like I've just turned the page on the last chapter of a very long book.”

IN THE RING

KOLIA ARRANGED TO RETURN TO
the tavern the following Monday. Pavel had promised him a ticket for the circus. He kept his word. Kolia's features, while not particularly attractive, still fascinated Pavel. They seemed to be constantly in flux beneath the surface of his skin. His handshake was firm, his palms rough and callused. Kolia had mentioned his work in the sewers as an explanation for his blackened fingernails. People said that he was born in Kamchatka, that he could read French. A strange character.

Kolia found his seat in the crowd. He was sandwiched between the pillars of a family — on either side of him, a man and a woman were each propping up a child. The children bore a definite resemblance to each other. The mother was cursing the woman who had sold them the tickets and “cut the family in two.” Kolia offered her his seat; the lights dimmed and changed hue. The crowd fell silent, and, for a moment, the world shifted.

After the troupe had made its entrance into the ring, Beria, the tightrope walker, commenced his act. The wire cable suspended high above the crowd had a soul. At its centre was a solid core of hemp. Beria advanced slowly, without any special manoeuvres, balancing with a pole that was much longer than he was tall, until he reached the other end of the cable. Then, proceeding in the opposite direction, he stopped to pay his respects to the guy line that was stabilizing the cable, and at mid-span, he greeted the crowd with an elegant wave, a flourish that most of them would have been unable to reproduce on solid ground. As a finale, he performed an irreverent pirouette, as if he were thumbing his nose at royalty. Beria walked between two invisible walls made of nothing more substantial than the gasps of the public. They were the guardrails he relied upon. A tightrope walker is a resistance fighter. His art lies in the subtle self-control he must exert in his constant struggle against the elements and against his own nature. It is an art anchored in faith and trust in that which cannot be seen.

The moment the Bounines made their first appearance, Kolia started laughing. It was a deep and strange laugh that might have broken the silence like a phlegm-filled cough at a concert, but it went unnoticed in the crowd's uproar. He felt like standing up and boasting that the white clown was a personal friend of his. Suddenly, he was eight years old, born in Moscow, and everybody loved him.

After the grand finale, Kolia decided to approach the ring. With the most pleasant face he could put together, he caught the attention of a technician who was coiling cables, and, raising a weak smile, asked him if he could see the clown. When asked which one, Kolia replied with Pavel's full name. The technician retreated to the dressing rooms and found Pavel in the process of removing his makeup.

“Petrov, someone wants to see you. He's standing by the ring.”

“Brown hair? Not that tall?”

“Yeah. A funny lookin' guy.”

Pavel extended his hand and invited Kolia to have a drink with him and Bounine. Just before he opened the door to their dressing room, Pavel turned to Kolia as if he were about to say something. Realizing that Pavel was waiting for some response to the evening's performance, Kolia made it clear that he'd really enjoyed the act and offered his praise.

Bounine was sitting in front of a mirror, stripped to the waist, wiping makeup from his face. He was in a foul mood. He had completely forgotten a part of the act and had been forced to employ some skilful improvising to cover up his memory lapse. The lapses were becoming more and more frequent. It had happened for the first time the previous year — before that, he'd always had an exceptional memory. He could recite all his monologues flawlessly, without skipping so much as a comma. It was clear that he felt like punching someone. Pavel presented Kolia to him nonetheless.

“I was thinking about bringing a dog into the act,” Bounine said, studying Kolia's physique in the mirror as if he were some type of caricature.

Half of Bounine's face was still pale, not exactly white, and the other side revealed the natural colour of his skin. He was as charismatic in person as he was in the ring.

“Us and a dog?” Pavel was clearly surprised.

“No . . . me, you, and a dog.”

“It's already been done, Ilya Alexandrovich.”

“Look, there's no shortage of students, we've got candidates lining up. Why him?”

“You'll see.”

Bounine's bluster impressed Kolia. Without turning around, the master asked him his age. Twenty-four.

“You look older than that. With that face, I'd say you were around thirty.”

He asked Kolia what he was doing at the moment, where he came from and where he was living.

“I'm a labourer. I work mostly underground, mainly on the subway.” Kolia was a little wary.

“You've got a wife? Kids?” Bounine persisted, taking a sip of wine.

“No. Why?”

Kolia turned towards Pavel, who had removed all expression from his face because the master was still staring at him in the mirror.

Bounine asked him for his employment booklet and flipped through its pages with fingers that were still covered in makeup. There was no sign of military service between Kolia's employment in Khabarovsk in 1954 and his job in Moscow, which puzzled him. Kolia responded by saying that the doctor who had examined him at the military committee office had given him a medical exemption because of the arthrosis in his hip, which left him limping by the end of the day. He kept quiet about the real reason. His documents contained everything Bounine needed to know.

Bounine interjected, “And you think the circus will be a cake walk? . . . That someone is going to follow you around and tickle your bad hip with a feather?”

Kolia frowned, then realized what Pavel was up to and decided to play along.

“I've been performing on stage for three years now,” he said, summoning up as much conviction as he could.

Bounine loved to get under someone's skin — prodding Kolia was simply a distraction from the evening's disastrous performance. But it was out of the question that Kolia could be admitted directly into the circus school. The master advised him to start preparing for auditions.
And then, if you show an aptitude for any of the disciplines of the circus, yes, we might consider taking you on and training you.

They opened a bottle of apple wine.

In the days following his meeting with Bounine, Kolia began to dream. That was permitted, and it was free.