He pointed at the white and red superimposed upon his own, never-visible features.
‘The code of the circus permits of no copying, no change. However much the face of Buffo may appear identical to Grik’s face, or to Grok’s face, or to Coco’s face, or Pozzo’s, Pizzo’s, Bimbo’s faces, or to the face of any other joey, carpet clown or august, it is, all the same, a fingerprint of authentic dissimilarity, a genuine expression of my own autonomy. And so my face eclipses me. I have become this face which is not mine, and yet I chose it freely.
‘It is given to few to shape themselves, as I have done, as we have done, as you have done, young man, and, in that moment of choice – lingering deliriously among the crayons; what eyes shall I have, what mouth . . . exists a perfect freedom. But, once the choice is made, I am condemned, therefore, to be “Buffo” in perpetuity. Buffo for ever; long live Buffo the Great! Who will live on as long as some child somewhere remembers him as a wonder, a marvel, a monster, a thing that, had he not been invented, should have been, to teach little children the truth about the filthy ways of the filthy world. As long as a child remembers . . .’
Buffo reached out a long arm and purposefully goosed Little Ivan as he passed by with glasses of tea.
‘. . . some child like Little Ivan,’ said Buffo, who did not know Little Ivan had watched from the top of the stove as his mother chopped up his father, and assumed the child was both innocent and naive.
‘Yet,’ he went on, ‘am I this Buffo whom I have created? Or did I, when I made up my face to look like Buffo’s, create, ex nihilo, another self who is not me? And what am I without my Buffo’s face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy.’
Grik and Grok, the pair of musical clowns, old troupers, always together, the Darby and Joan of the clowns, turned their faces towards Walser, bending to catch the feeble lamplight, and he saw those faces were mirror images of one another, alike in every detail save that Grik’s face was left-handed and Grok’s face was right-handed.
‘Sometimes it seems,’ said Grok, ‘that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the clown who will wear them, who will bring them to life. Faces that wait in the mirrors of unknown dressing-rooms, unseen in the depths of the glass like fish in dusty pools, fish that will rise up out of the obscure profundity when they spot the one who anxiously scrutinises his own reflection for the face it lacks, man-eating fish waiting to gobble up your being and give you another instead . . .’
‘But, as for us, old comrades that we are, old stagers that we are,’ said Grik, ‘why, do I need a mirror when I put my make-up on? No, sir! All I need to do is look in my old pal’s face, for, when we made our face together, we created out of nothing each other’s Siamese twin, our nearest and dearest, bound by a tie as strong as shared liver and lights. Without Grik, Grok is a lost syllable, a typo on a programme, a sign-painter’s hiccup on a billboard –’
‘– and so is he sans me. Oh, young man, you First-of-May, we cannot tell you, how would we have sufficient words to tell you just how useless we used to be before Grik and Grok came together and pooled our two uselessnesses, abandoned our separate empty faces for the one face, our face, brought to bed the joint child of our impotences, turned into more than the sum of our parts according to the dialectics of uselessness, which is: nothing plus nothing equals something, once –’
‘– you know the nature of plus.’
Having delivered themselves of the equation of the dialectic, they beamed with gratification beneath their impenetrable make-up. But Buffo wasn’t having any.
‘Bollocks,’ he said, heavily, belching. ‘Beg pardon, but balls, me old fruit. Nothing will come of nothing. That’s the glory of it.’
And the entire company repeated after him soft as dead leaves rustling: ‘That’s the glory of it! Nothing will come of nothing!’
Yet the musical clowns, such was their ancient authority within the tribe, stubbornly at once set out to prove they could at least make a little something out of it, for Grik began to hum the softest, tiniest kind of melody, while Grok, his old lover, started to drum, softly, his gloved fingertips against the table top, hum of a drowsy bee and rhythm faint as a pulse but sufficient for the clowns, for the others now rose up from their benches and, in the dim gloom of the Petersburg kitchen, they began to dance.
It was the bergomask, or dance of the buffoons, and if it began with the same mockery of gracefulness as the dance of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then soon their measures went sour, turned cruel, turned into a dreadful libel upon the whole notion of dancing.
As they danced, they began rhythmically to pelt one another with leftover crusts of black bread and emptied their vodka bottles over one another’s heads, mugged pain, resentment, despair, agony, death, rose up and pelted, emptied, turn and turn about. The baboushka lay drowsing on the stove by now, her ample sorrows forgotten, but Little Ivan, entranced, hid in the shadows and fearfully could not forebear to watch, his thumb stuck firmly in his mouth to give him comfort.
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 rop
e. 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.