Nights at the Circus (18 page)

Fevvers, nestling under a Venetian chandelier in the Hotel de l’Europe, has seen nothing of the city in which Walser lodges. She has seen swans of ice with a thick encrustation of caviare between the wings; she has seen cut-glass and diamonds; she has seen all the luxurious, bright, transparent things, that make her blue eyes cross with greed.

Their paths converge only upon the brick barracks of the Imperial Circus.

TWO

The Colonel coaxed, wheedled, insisted, demanded that the Old Glory should, during his visit, replace the Tsar’s own flag on the pole that topped the Imperial Circus and there it slumped, as if succumbed to the lethargy of the alien air. The Circus itself, constructed to house permanent displays of the triumphs of man’s will over gravity and over rationality, was a tall hexagon of red brick with a pompous flight of steps up to an entrance flanked on either side by ten-foot stone caryatids, splashed with pigeon droppings, in the shape of caparisoned elephants, squatting on their hind legs and holding their front legs up in the air. Such were the guardian spirits of the place, the elephants, the pillars of the circus itself who uphold the show upon the princely domes of their foreheads as they do the Hindu cosmos.

Once the paying customer successfully negotiated the ticket window, one left one’s furs in a cloakroom that, during performance, became a treasury of skins of sable, fox and precious little rats, as though there one left behind the skin of one’s own beastliness so as not to embarrass the beasts with it. Thus disencumbered, one entered an ample foyer with a mirrored champagne bar and climbed another, this time a marble and interior, staircase, to reach the arena.

Along the ringbank were red plush boxes trimmed with gilding, the plushest signed with the Imperial Eagle, in gold. Above the performers’ entrance hung a gilded platform for the band. All was elegant, even sumptuous, finished with a heavy, rather queasy luxury that always seemed to have grime under its fingernails, the luxury peculiar to the country. But the aroma of horse dung and lion piss permeated every inch of the building’s fabric, so that the titillating contradiction between the soft, white shoulders of the lovely ladies whom young army officers escorted there and the hairy pelts of the beasts in the ring resolved in the night-time intermingling of French perfume and the essence of steppe and jungle in which musk and civet revealed themselves as common elements.

Under the ring, in the cellarage, was housed the menagerie which the imperial beasts had temporarily vacated in favour of those of Colonel Kearney. A tunnel led to a walled courtyard out at the back. Into this courtyard Walser now let himself by means of the modest wicket gate, the performers’ entrance.

At this dead hour of the afternoon, under a sad sky tinted the lavender of half-mourning, the courtyard was empty but for a small bird with long legs who pecked with a gourmet air the fibres out of a mound of yellow elephant dung on the cobbles. A smashed bottle, a rusting can; a pump dripped water which froze as it hit the ground.

The only sounds drifting from the menagerie, the continuous murmuring purr of the great cats, like a distant sea, and the faint jingling of Colonel Kearney’s elephants of flesh and blood as they rattled the chains on their legs as they did continually, all their waking hours, since in their millennial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years’ or a thousand years’ time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour’s time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there
was
a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.

It was a forlorn place. The homeliest touch, a row of freshly washed white muslin frocks pegged out on a clothesline, and they were creaking already in a rigor mortis brought on by the first hints of frost.

The Princess of Abyssinia must have put
all
her frocks in the wash because, when she came out to collect her laundry, she had on just a petticoat, and a chemise with, over everything, a terrible apron stiff with blood from waitressing her carnivores. She unpegged each frost-starched garment and rapped it sharply at the waist so that it bent enough to hook on her arm. She was a slim thing with dreadlocks to her waist. In the ring, she looked like a child as she sat at the white Bechstein grand, big enough for two of her, and played for her roaring familiars, but, close to, her face, though neither lined nor wrinkled, was ancient as granite, with the blunt, introspective features of Gauguin’s women, and a soft, matte, bitter brown in colour.

Crack! of her thin, musician’s hand on her dresses of ice.

The gate into the lane outside opens. Enter Lizzie, in her jacket of the fur of, it might be, dog, her stiff boater of unseasonal straw, carrying a tray covered with a white cloth that does not quench the delicious smell of fresh pancakes. Lunchtime. She kicks the gate shut with her foot and trots up a clanging metal fire escape to an upper door she leaves a-swing behind her.

From this open door, drifting on the stagnant air, a raucous voice raised in not unmelodious if brassy song.

‘Only a bird . . . in a gilded cage . . .’

Then that door, too, banged shut.

Walser wrenched his eyes from the closed door and ducked down the tunnel, on his way to the ring.

What a cheap, convenient, expressionist device, this sawdust ring, this little O! Round like an eye, with a still vortex in the centre; but give it a little rub as if it were Aladdin’s wishing lamp and, instantly, the circus ring turns into that durably metaphoric, uroboric snake with its tail in its mouth, wheel that turns full circle, the wheel whose end is its beginning, the wheel of fortune, the potter’s wheel on which our clay is formed, the wheel of life on which we all are broken. O! of wonder; O! of grief.

Walser thrilled, as always, to the shop-soiled yet polyvalent romance of the image.

The magic circle was now occupied by Lamarck’s Educated Apes. A dozen chimpanzees, six of either sex, all in sailor suits, were seated in pairs at little wooden double desks, each with a slate and slate pencil clutched in their leathery hands. A chimp in a sober black suit with a watch-chain looped athwart his bosom, a mortarboard at a rakish angle on his head, stood at the blackboard armed with a cue. The pupils were hushed and attentive, in marked contrast to the young woman in a grubby print wrapper who sat on the plush-topped barrier of the ring idly filing her nails with an emery board. She yawned. She paid them no attention. The chimps put themselves through their own paces; the trainer’s woman was no more than their keeper and Monsieur Lamarck, a feckless drunkard, left them to rehearse on their own.

Walser could make no sense of the diagram chalked on the blackboard yet the chimps appeared to be occupied in transcribing it to their slates. The partings in the centres of their glossy heads were white as honeycomb. The Professor made a few swift passes with his left hand and pointed to the lower right-hand corner of the diagram; a female towards the back of the class raised her arm eagerly. When the Professor pointed his cue at her, she performed a sequence of gestures that reminded Walser of the movements of the hands of Balinese dancers. The Professor considered, nodded and chalked in another arabesque on the diagram. The neat, shining heads at once bent in unison and the air shrilled with the scratching of a dozen slate pencils, a sound like a flock of starlings coming in to roost.

Walser smiled under his matte white; how irresistibly comic, these hirsute studies! Yet his curiosity was piqued by this mysterious scholarship. He squinted again at the diagram but could not tease a meaning out of it. Yet there seemed to be . . . could it be? Was it possible? . . . was there
writing
on the blackboard? If he crept round towards the Tsar’s box, he might be able to see better . . . Stealing softly across the tiered benches in the clown’s long shoes he had not yet learned to master, the clumsy toe knocked against an empty vodka bottle left in the angle of a step. The bottle skipped down the rest of the tiers and banged against the barrier.

At this unexpected noise, the silent group all turned and fixed the intruder with thirteen pairs of quick, dark eyes. Walser slipped on to a bench and tried to make himself inconspicuous, but he knew he had stumbled on a secret when the lesson immediately stopped.

The Professor whipped out a yellow duster and wiped off the diagram in a trice. The girl who’d asked the question solemnly stood on her head on the lid of her desk. Her desk-mate took a catapult from his pocket and struck the Professor full in the face with a juicy ink-pellet, inducing in him a farcical and gibbering outrage.

Their bored keeper went on filing her nails. It was only the ‘apes at school’ number.

Faced with this insurrection in the classroom, the Professor happily discovered a cache of dunces’ caps stacked behind the blackboard. He bounced round the ring, disposing a cap on each capering head; then, on impulse, leapt lightly across the barrier and Walser got a dunce’s cap, too. The Professor’s face, grinning like a Cheshire cat, was not six inches from Walser’s own as he popped it on. Their eyes met.

Walser never forgot this first, intimate exchange with one of these beings whose life ran parallel to his, this inhabitant of the magic circle of difference, unreachable . . . but not unknowable; this exchange with the speaking eyes of the dumb. It was like the clearing of a haze. Then the Professor, as if acknowledging their meeting across the gulf of strangeness, pressed his tough forefinger down on Walser’s painted smile, bidding him be silent.

The chimps, effortlessly recapitulating their entire routine, now raced round and round the ring upon the fleet, single wheels of monocycles. They had all flung off their sailor suits to reveal satin shorts beneath and they played all manner of tricks on one another. Some stuck their clever, five-fingered feet in one another’s spokes to dislodge the rider while others clambered on to the saddles of their monocycles and balanced there on one leg until the force of gravity brought them low. But Walser noticed how the Professor glanced at these frolics with an air of grave melancholy while the chimps themselves seemed to take no pleasure from the sport, going through the motions with a desultory, mechanical air, longing, perhaps, to be back at their studies, whatever they were, for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.

In the distance, a vague roaring of the great cats.

The Professor, as if coming to a decision, took hold of Walser’s hand. Though no more than three and a half feet tall to Walser’s six plus, he was a remarkably strong and determined little fellow and forcibly persuaded Walser down the aisle to the ring. The spinning chimps came to a halt, dismounted, dropped their bikes and clustered round him in a gesticulating circle, so that he could have sworn they were discussing what to do with him, although the confabulation took place in noisy silence. Just then, Samson the Strong Man arrived, in his tigerskin loincloth, fresh from raising his weights, his thighs and biceps gleaming with oil, but the Strong Man paid as little heed to the chimps as they to him. The Ape-Man’s woman put away her emery board, however.

The Professor pointed to Walser’s dunce’s cap. The chimps rocked back and forth on the palms of their feet as if in soundless laughter. Then the female who’d asked that salient question – Walser recognised her by the green bow in her hair – startled him badly, she jumped right up in his arms and, clutching his torso with her hairy thighs, reached up and behind, found the stud at the back of his neck that released his entire shirt-front. Off it snapped. Down she jumped.

The Strong Man’s hand released a small, white breast from the overall of the Ape-Man’s woman, while her own freshly manicured fingers set free from its tigerskin cache-sexe a tool of proportions commensurate with the owner’s size, curved like a scimitar. Both were oblivious to Walser’s plight.

Green Hair-Ribbon laid Walser’s shirt-front carefully down on a nearby desk and gestured him to take off his patchwork jacket. Nervously, Walser looked to his new friend, the Professor, for advice. The Professor nodded: ‘Yes.’ What do they want of me? Walser asked himself, undressing obediently. When the Professor picked up his cue, again, the chimps returned to their desks to take up their pencils and Walser tentatively answered himself: ‘Perhaps . . . an anatomy lesson . . .’

Clearly the apes had suffered a surfeit of practical biology demonstrations, for they had no eyes for their keeper, stretched out as she was full-length on a red plush banquette while the twin moons of the bum of the Strong Man rose and fell above her, although outside her field of vision.

Now Walser wore nothing but the dunce’s cap, which they did not bother to remove, although they made him take his shoes off so that the Professor could check the number of his toes. It occurred to Walser they thought his white, red and black clown make-up was his real face and they were, perhaps, sympathetic to him because they thought he might be some relation to the baboon. Were they, he pondered, grappling with Darwin’s theory – from the other end? Green Hair-Ribbon returned to her desk and the lesson started in earnest. Walser stood before them, nude and exemplary, and the Professor prodded him in the thorax with his cue, not urgently, making those swift passes of the hands with which they seemed to communicate. Walser wilted under the scrutiny of the eyes of his little cousins twice removed. Squeak, squeak, went the slate pencils. Prod, went the cue; Walser obediently turned round to present the class with his backside. The Professor expressed particular interest in the vestigial remains of his tail.

A profound and unusual, even disturbing, silence now filled the building, broken only by the rhythmic grunts of the copulators.

The Professor made a few brisk movements as if introducing a new theme. He turned Walser round to face his class, once more, and the eructation of the slate pencils broke out again when the Professor lightly touched Walser’s mouth with his cue and persuaded his lips apart. Then the Professor went to fetch a bucket some careless hand had abandoned in the ring, upturned it and stood on it, the better to peer inside Walser’s mouth. After that, he stared directly into Walser’s eyes, producing afresh in Walser that dizzy uncertainty about what was human and what was not. How grave, how beseeching the Professor looked as he started to open and close his own mouth like a goldfish reciting a poem.