In a state of mental tumult, conflict and disorientation, he wanders the freezing city night, now gazing at the ice thickening on the dark waters of the Neva, now peering at the great horseman on his plinth with a vague terror, as though the horseman were not the effigy of the city’s founder but the herald of four yet more mythic horsemen who are, indeed, on their way to confound Petersburg forever, though they won’t arrive yet, not quite yet.
SEVEN
Brisk, bright, wintry morning, under a sky that mimics a bell of blue glass so well it looks as if it would ring out glad tidings at the lightest blow of a fingernail. A thick rime of frost everywhere, giving things a festive, tinsel trim. The rare Northern sunlight makes up in brilliance for what it lacks in warmth, like certain nervous temperaments. Today the Stars and Stripes billow out bravely, as if they meant it, above the courtyard of the Imperial Circus, where the courtyard is as full of folk and bustle as a Breughel – all in motion, all hustle-bustle!
Amid laughter, horse-play and snatches of song, rosy-cheeked, whistling stable-boys stamp their feet, blow on their fingers, dash hither and thither with bales of hay and oats on their shoulders, sacks of vegetables for the elephants, hands of bananas for the apes, or heave stomach-churning pitch-forkfuls of dung on to a stack of soiled straw. Well-mittened and mufflered, the little Charivaris practise their familial occupation along the Princess’s washing-line, teetering along with much hilarity while the washing-line’s owner, a sack over her habitual morning deshabille to keep out the cold, oversees the unloading of a hideous cargo of bleeding meat from a knackers’ van drawn by a gaunt, restive hack an inch away from horseflesh itself.
Noisy vendors from the town invade the Colonel’s peripatetic empire to hawk hot jam pies and kvass from wheeled barrels. A lugubrious gypsy strays into the courtyard to add the wailing of his fiddle to the clatter of boot-heels on cobbles, the babel of tongues, the perpetual, soft jangle as the elephants within the building agitate their chains, the sound that reminds the Colonel, always with a shock of pleasure, of the outrageous daring of his entire enterprise. (‘Tuskers across the tundra!’)
For Colonel Kearney, up betimes, presides over the carnival-like proceedings; how he loves hurry-scurry, loves it purely, loves it passionately, for its own sake! He feels about bustle like Russians feel about sloth. He sticks his fingers in either pocket of the starry waistcoat that swells as if his paunch were pregnant with profit as he struts about on his bandy little legs in their striped trousers, bright and twisty as candy sticks. He has just shone up his dollar sign belt-buckle. He is the living image of the entrepreneur.
He dodges back and forth amongst his employees as they fly about their business, fending off the native salespersons with quick flips of the elbow under which Sybil, squealing intelligently, has been stowed, a moving cloud of blue cigar-smoke round his head and an affable and optimistic smile on his well-satisfied visage as he tosses a cheery word to one and all.
That morning, the newspapers carry an anonymous letter which claims that Fevvers is not a woman at all but a cunningly constructed automaton made up of whalebone, india-rubber and springs. The Colonel beams with pleasure at the consternation this ploy will provoke, at the way the box-office tills will clang in the delicious rising tide of rumour: ‘Is she fiction or is she fact?’ His motto is: ‘The bigger the humbug, the better the public likes it.’ That’s the way to play the Ludic Game! With no holds barred! Another motto, in one word: ‘Bamboozlem.’ Play the game to win!
Yessir!
He plots a news item, tomorrow, inserted in the foreign news by his contacts. This, contradicting the vicious ‘clockwork’ rumour, will proclaim that Fevvers, all woman as she is, is, back home in England, secretly engaged to the Prince of Wales.
Yessirree!
The apes had already emptied their chamber-pots on to the dung-heap and rinsed them out under the pump. Back in their quarters, they swept up, laid down fresh straw and made up their bunk beds. They composed themselves in silent groups, heads bent over books. Now and then, one would gesticulate in that measured, urgent fashion of theirs and another would nod or shake its well-brushed head or answer with a little dance of fingers. Monsieur Lamarck, the Ape-Man, was nowhere to be seen, slumped in drunken slumber on the sawdust of a low bar.
A casual observer might have thought the apes, dedicated little troupers or well-programmed organisms that they were, could not leave off their act for even one moment and now were rehearsing for the ‘apes at school’ routine. In fact, it was their dedication to self-improvement that was boundless. Even the absence of Mignon, for whom they felt disinterested pity, did not interfere with their studies. The female with the green ribbon spared a thought for the wounded clown, however.
If all was quiet on the monkey front, fearful sounds erupted from the cages of the cats as they prowled their confined space. The tigers roared, first one, then another, then all at once: Where is our breakfast? We never got delicious clown, yesterday! Now we want our beef, our horseflesh, our legs and ribs of goat!
When she heard their imperatives rise above the clamour, the Princess filled her arms with bleeding meat.
The Princess of Abyssinia had never visited, even on business, the country whose royal title she usurped, nor did she come from any other part of Africa. Her mother, a native of Guadeloupe in the Windward Islands, taught the piano for a living until she upped and ran away with a man who visited her sleepy town with a travelling fair. This man kept a mangy, toothless lion in a cage, for a sideshow, and called himself an Ethiopian, although he hailed, in fact, from Rio de Janeiro. The impetus of their elopement took them as far as Marseilles, where their daughter was born. Her parents were devoted to each other. Her mother sat in the cage and played Mozart sonatas. They prospered. Her father crowned himself King and went into tigers; if tigers are not native to the Horn of Africa, then neither was he. When her parents died, the Princess inherited piano and cats. She polished the act to its present splendour. So much for her history, which was only mysterious in that she told it to nobody because she never spoke.
In the ring, she looked like a member of the graduating class at a provincial conservatoire, in a white frock with starched flounces, white cotton stockings, flat, strapped shoes of the kind called Mary Janes, and a butterfly bow of white satin in the crisp hair that stuck out halfway down her back. In this garb, she played the piano and the tigers danced.
At the beginning of the act, the cats bounced into the ring, roaring to illustrate their own ferocity, while the grooms ran round the caged arena firing off blank shots from guns. She came after, in her good girl’s dress, and sat down at the Bechstein grand.
This was the only time, as she seated herself with her back towards them, that she felt lonely. Uneasy. At the first chords, the cats, whom she could not see, leapt on to the semi-circle of pedestals placed ready for them and sat there on their haunches, panting, pleased with themselves for their obedience. And then it would come to them, always with a fresh surprise no matter how often they performed, that they did not obey in freedom but had exchanged one cage for a larger cage. Then, for just one unprotected minute, they pondered the mystery of their obedience and were astonished by it.
Just for that moment, while she knew they wondered what on earth they were doing there, when her vulnerable back was turned towards them and her speaking eyes away from them, the Princess felt a little scared, and, perhaps, more fully human than she was used to feeling. Sometimes, then, she thought how much she’d like an accomplice, somebody else in the ring with her, not a stable-boy, not a groom, but somebody she trusted, somebody who could keep an eye on the cats during that tense moment when she played the invitation to the waltz whilst she asked herself, if, today of all days, this might be the day when they decided they would not take up her invitation. Whether tonight, of all the nights of their mutual treaty, the cats would not, one by one, succumb to the music and come down to choose their partners, but would . . .
She always k
ept a gun on top of the piano, just in case, and this gun was not loaded with blanks.
Nevertheless, she lived in the closest intimacy with her cats, nesting beside their cages in a bale of clean straw. She washed their eyes with boric acid and Argyrol, to prevent infection. She rubbed their tender feet with ointment for them. But she never smiled at her cats, because theirs was not a friendly pact; it existed in order to prevent hostilities, not to promote amity. And: ‘Cat got your tongue!’ you might have said to the Princess. Because, early in her career, she discovered how they grumbled at the back of their throats and laid their ears flat when she used that medium of human speech which nature denied them.
It was rumoured she was herself a tigress’s foster-child, abandoned in the jungle and suckled by wild bears. But there is no jungle near Marseilles. Since she said nothing, she never denied these stories. The Colonel spread them freely.
On the rare, random occasions when she took some other human back to her bed in the straw beside the sleeping tigers, she always made love in the dark because her body was, every inch, scarred with clawmarks, as if tattooed. That was the price they made her pay for taming them.
Now the crackling perfume of frying sausages and bacon mingles with heavy odours of dung, meat, pastry and wild beasts in the courtyard. The cookhouse – a stove, a counter – has opened up and is: heaven be praised! cry the stable-lads, serving honest English breakfasts.
When Samson, the Strong Man, brushing aside the Russian peddlers with a xenophobic oath, came to get his morning mug and doorstep, he suffered a deal of joshing from the roustabouts munching their bacon sandwiches, to have lost – according to the swiftly disseminated gossip of the circus – his inamorata to a clown. Samson never once let on he’d left Mignon to the mercies of the escaped tiger and that was when the clown stepped in; far from it! He boasted, flexing his gleaming pects, of what he’d do to that bastard clown when he got his hands on him and, indeed, his pride was genuinely piqued because Mignon had run off to Clown Alley after her saviour. In all this, Mignon assumed a woman’s place – that of the cause of discord between men; how else, to these men, could she play any real part in their lives?
The Colonel doffs his billy-cock hat with delighted glee as Fevvers, looking not in the least like india-rubber but very much flesh for the Prince of Wales, that connoisseur, stumps past. She is as ugly a walker as an unhorsed Valkyrie but her amazing curves promise delights of which the Colonel often dreams.
Lizzie, humping her handbag, which could look like that of a midwife or of an abortionist, hurled the Colonel a black look from some unguessable depths of Sicilian malice. For himself, the Colonel regarded the chaperone as the stumbling block between himself and an intimate diner à deux with the aerialiste which might lead – who knows to what? Yessir!
He burst out with a veritable plume of smoke at the thought, crushing Sybil to him in his enthusiasm so vigorously that she shrieked.
Lizzie paused to toss the gypsy fiddler a kopek, receiving in return a burst of incomprehensible gratitude and, for some reason, a tract or ballad sheet of some kind, which she stowed away in her handbag without a glance. The Colonel thought no more of it, although the hot jam pie vendor, in reality a member of the secret police, would have been curious to see the transaction. But Fevvers chose just that moment to disencumber him of his entire stock and lavishly distribute them among the Charivari children, who came tumbling off the washing-line for the treat, jumping about the pieman with such Latin enthusiasm he could scarcely see to take the money.
The two women had some girl with them, or, rather, a young lady – fair-haired, slim, nattily turned out in red wool. She impressed the Colonel only with a vague familiarity: ‘Ain’t I seen that somewhere before?’ And she made no impression at all on the Strong Man, so engrossed was he in describing to his friends the injuries Walser would suffer when they met again.
The Colonel chewed his cigar and sighed, because Fevvers gave him only the brusquest nod as the two females, with their guest, disappeared into the menagerie as if hot on the track of the bloody spoor the Princess had left behind her. The Colonel’s admiration for Fevvers grew in direct ratio to her indifference and the advance bookings.
But: ‘Hi, there! Hi, hi, hi!’ His easily distracted attention fixed on the tumultuous entry of the clowns and their pack of yapping dogs. His own recruit, he noted happily, was present and correct, if looking a little worse for wear – arm in a sling, and all.
‘Now’s your chance!’ said the guffawing stable-boys to Samson, but Samson took one look at Buffo, big as a house and already half seas over, shepherding his flock into the circus with his customary deranged majesty and the air of one about to commit grievous bodily harm. ‘Not ’alf,’ opined the Strong Man, judging discretion the better part. He shoved his mug back on the counter and buggered off. Catch ’im when ’e’s on ’is tod.
Buffo, leading the clowns. The dozen clowns. Hold hard, what’s this? A baker’s dozen clowns! Where, yesterday, had been twelve, today there were thirteen, and the thirteenth distinctly on the small side.
The clowns. See them as a band of terrorists. No; that’s not right. Not terrorists, but irregulars. A band of irregulars, permitted the most ferocious piracies as long as, just so long as, they maintain the bizarrerie of their appearance, so that their violent exposition of manners stays on the safe side of terror, even if we need to learn to laugh at them, and part, at least, of this laughter comes from the successful suppression of fear.
Little Ivan’s relations with the clowns went thus: first, he was afraid of them; then, he was entranced by them; at last he wished to become as they, so that he, too, could terrify, enchant, vandalise, ravage, yet always stay on the safe side of being, licensed to commit licence and yet forbidden to act, so that the baboushka back at home could go on reddening and blackening the charcoal even if the clowns detonated the entire city around her and nothing would really change. Nothing. The exploded buildings would float up into the air insubstantial as bubbles, and gently waft to earth again on exactly the same places where they had stood before. The corpses would writhe, spring apart at the joints, dismember – then pick up their own dismembered limbs to juggle with them before slotting them back in their good old sockets, all present and correct, sir.
So then you’d know, you’d seen the proof, that things would always be as they had always been; that nothing came of catastrophe; that chaos invoked stasis.
It was as though a fairy godmother had given each clown an ambivalent blessing when he was born: you can do anything you like, as long as nobody takes you seriously.
Buffo sewed bells on a three-cornered cap for his newest apprentice, so that he ‘won’t hear the trickle as his brains run out’.
Little Ivan, in cap and bells, somersaulted round the ring as if emancipated altogether from the bipedal posture until he bumped into Buffo somersaulting round the ring in the other direction. Then he got a thrashing for getting in the way and for at least five minutes thought better of running away with the circus but, though he sat sulking in the front row with his thumb in his mouth, still he could not take his eyes off the comedians.
Buffo thought up a routine especially for Walser, since he could no longer stand on his hands.
‘Crow like a cock.’
‘Cock-a-doodle-do,’ said Walser obediently.
‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’ amended Buffo as a little tribute to the Tsar of all the Russias. ‘Flap your arms about a bit.’
‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’ Entering into the spirit of the thing, Walser rose up on his toes and kneaded the air with his arms as best he could with one in a sling.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,’ intoned Buffo, ‘I give him – and you can take him! – the Human Chicken!’
Grik found an egg, not too fresh, inside his fiddle and tossed it between Walser’s eyes. Buffo creaked approval. Grok found a couple of eggs in the belly of his tambourine. Amid ululations of glee, all the clowns followed suit, whipping
eggs out of various parts of their clothing and anatomies, and pelted Walser until egg liquor streamed down his face, blinding him. Grik and Grok struck up ‘A-hunting we will go!’ on their various instruments. Little Ivan thought how many pancakes his granny could have made with all those eggs that now spattered the sawdust but he did not think so for long because he was laughing too much to think.
Walser’s invisible tormentors whisked their satin coat-tails out of his reach as he lunged at them, tripped him up with their long shoes, shoved out their stilts to bring him down. When he heard Little Ivan’s peals of merriment, his anger rose: ‘What the hell’s so funny about this?’ And he lashed out, he knew not where.
They told him, afterwards, that his baulked gestures of fury were the funniest thing, as they drove him round the ring with blows and mocking cries; his baulked gestures of fury and his comic wound.
Henceforward, Walser will wear a cockscomb. And Buffo, after a little thought, massaging his great, white lantern jaw, decided that, with his cockscomb and his crowing, the Human Chicken should forthwith feature on the menu at the Clowns’ Christmas dinner.
Walser’s new profession was beginning to make demands on him.
Meanwhile, Fevvers, in the menagerie, maintained an animated if one-sided conversation with the Princess in raw French.
‘Quelle chantoqze!’ she said. ‘Quelle spectacle!’
The Princess, in her bloody apron, opened a panel in the cage and tossed in half a butcher’s shop. The tigers fell on the feast, snarling and cuffing one another about the ears in their greed. As she watched them, the Princess’s dark face was that of Kali and the perfume round her dense enough, rank and pervasive enough, to act as an invisible barrier between herself and all those who were not furred. Fevvers knew she was a tough customer. She was undaunted.