Nights at the Circus (34 page)

But I’ve no proper recollection of all this; I only know what Liz told me. That I am screeching like one possessed as I scratch and scrabble in the wreckage and push them pettishly away when they come prodding me with their guns. At which I’m picked up bodily and dropped on my face in one of the carts. Lizzie thinks to throw over me a blanket which she’s salvaged as I am too far gone to think of covering meself up.

So off we go at gun-point, and the rest of the survivors, why, they don’t give a monkey’s! They’ve just found the liquor cupboard and don’t so much as turn their heads to look though Liz says I’m making an awful racket. But I remember nothing.

They say the Angel Tubiel watches over
small
birds but I’m a little on the large side for such protection; big birds must look after themselves, so I’d better snap out of it sharpish, hadn’t I!

TWO

Walser was buried alive in a profound sleep. Knocked out by a blow on the head when a cupboard door in the bulkhead above him flew open, he immediately submerged beneath an avalanche of stowed-away tablecloths and napkins, some clean, some soiled. The busy elephants piled various other items from the demolished dining-car, cruets, corkscrews, boxes of biscuits, on top of the soft tomb in which his adventures would have ended except, after a lapse of time and consciousness, a murderess came and dug him up.

THREE

Although no signpost points the way there and even the track made by the shackled feet of its inhabitants in the course of the dolorous journey to the place is soon obscured by the rapid summer growth of mosses and small plants or erased by winter’s snow so that no trace remains of their arrivals, we are in the vicinity of the settlement of R., near which, in the year, 18—, the Countess P., having successfully poisoned her husband over a period of years with an arsenical compound and got away with it, and finding herself, in her widowhood, much possessed by the idea that other women had committed the same crime as she with less success, set up, with the permission of the government, a private asylum for female criminals of the same stripe as herself.

Do not run away with the idea it was a sense of sisterhood that moved her. If, though the years passed, she herself never forgot the precise nature of the seasonings she’d added to her late husband’s borsht and piroshkis, she assuaged the conscience that pricked her by becoming, or so she claimed, a kind of conduit for the means of the repentance of the other murderesses.

With the aid of a French criminologist who dabbled in phrenology, she selected from the prisons of the great Russian cities women who had been found guilty of killing their husbands and whose bumps indicated the possibility of salvation. She established a community on the most scientific lines available and had the female convicts build it for themselves out of the same kind of logic that persuaded the Mexican
federales
to have those they were about to shoot dig their own graves.

It was a
panopticon
she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows. In that room she’d sit all day and stare and stare and stare at her murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and stared at her.

There are many reasons, most of them good ones, why a woman should want to murder her husband; homicide might be the only way for her to preserve a shred of dignity at a time, in a place, where women were deemed chattels, or, in the famous analogy of Tolstoy, like wine bottles that might conveniently be smashed when their contents were consumed. No reasonable female would hold it against their Countess P. that she poisoned her obese, oafish count, although the blend of boredom and avarice that prompted her to do so was in itself the product of privilege – she suffered sufficient leisure to be bored; her husband’s wealth provoked her greed. But, as for Olga Alexandrovna, who took a hatchet to the drunken carpenter who hit her around once too often, Olga Alexandrovna acted out of a conviction that His eye was on the sparrow and therefore on even such a weak, timorous and unworthy creature as herself, so that the life being beaten out of her was surely worth as much, in the general scheme of things, as the life of the man with the fists – perhaps, since she was a loving mother, more. But it turned out the court thought otherwise than she and so, for a time, she suffered atrocious pangs to find the court believed she was a wicked woman.

‘You’re in luck,’ the turnkey told the convicted woman after the French phrenologist measured her head and asked the court that she should be transferred to the Countess’s ‘scientific establishment for the study of female criminals’. Good luck, indeed! No hard labour, no flogging for Olga Alexandrovna, bound as she was for the Countess’s seminary. And the turnkey laughed, raped her and chained her. Next day, she set out for Siberia.

During the hours of darkness, the cells were lit up like so many small theatres in which each actor sat by herself in the trap of her visibility in those cells shaped like servings of
baba au rhum.
The Countess, in the observatory, sat in a swivelling chair whose speed she could regulate at will. Round and round she went, sometimes at a great rate, sometimes slowly, raking with her ice-blue eyes – she was of Prussian extraction – the tier of unfortunate women surrounding her. She varied her speeds so that the inmates were never able to guess beforehand at just what moment they would come under her surveillance.

As for the inmates, indeed they toiled not, neither did they spin, just as Olga Alexandrovna’s turnkey had foretold. Not even the lash disturbed the even tenor of their days. They were fed morning and evening; the food, black bread, millet porridge, broth, was delivered through a grille and it was certainly as good, if not better than Olga Alexandrovna was accustomed to. A bucket of water arrived in the mornings, when the previous day’s toilet pail was taken away and a fresh one delivered. The bedding was changed once a month. No mail was permitted and the isolation of the place itself, far off in the taiga, would alone have precluded the possibility of visitors, even if they had not been strictly forbidden.

By the standards of the time and place, the Countess conducted her regime along humanitarian, if autocratic lines. Her private prison with its unorthodox selectivity was not primarily intended as the domain of punishment but, in the purest sense, a penitentiary – it was a machine designed to promote penitence.

For the Countess P. had conceived the idea of a therapy of meditation. The women in the bare cells, in which was neither privacy nor distraction, cells formulated on the principle of those in a nunnery where all was visible to the eye of God, would live alone with the memory of their crime until they acknowledged, not their guilt – most of them had done that, already – but their
responsibility.
And she was sure that with responsibility would come remorse.

Then she would let them go for, by their salvation, strenuously achieved through meditation on the crime they had committed, they would have procured hers.

But, so far, the gate had never opened to allow one single departure.

You could think of this wheel-shaped House of Correction as a kind of prayer-wheel, intended to rescue the Countess who was its hub from perdition, although the only thing in it which rotated like a wheel was herself, on her revolving chair.

Olga Alexandrovna was no great reader, although, unlike many of her neighbours, she knew her letters well enough, hard and pointless as the task of learning them had seemed when imposed on her in her childhood. All the same, she’d have liked the scriptures with her, to help her out in some of the ethical discussions she conducted with herself, but books were forbidden because they helped time pass.

So she sat and pondered, inside the House of Correction in which there was no hint of the wide world outside, for there were no windows to let in daylight, ventilation being provided by a system of ducts. Above the arched gateway that let in a glimpse of daylight only when it opened to admit another inmate, there was a clock that told the Moscow time that was not the time of these latitudes and this clock regulated their risings, their feedings, registered every slow minute of incarceration and sometimes the face of this clock seemed indistinguishable from the livid face of the Countess.

The Countess intended to look at them until they repented. But sometimes the women died, it would seem for no reason, or as if life, in that perverse honeycomb, was such a faint and faded thing that anything would be an improvement. When one died, a guard humped the corpse out of the cell and buried it under the paving stones of the circular passage in which they took their morning exercise. Even death was no escape from the House of Correction. As soon as a cell was empty, another murderess was delivered up to the gate which closed upon her with a definitive clang.

So the ordeal of penitence began; an ordeal constructed from a perfected variety of the bitterest loneliness, for you were never alone, here, where her gaze was continually upon you, and yet you were always alone.

But, so far, although the Countess lived in hope, not a single one of the objects of her gaze had shown the slightest quiver of remorse.

By the end of the third year of her incarceration, Olga Alexandrovna would never have said she was innocent; she’d always admitted her crime freely. But every day she offered extenuating circumstances to the lenient and merciful judge in her mind and every day they made more and more impression on the judge. Each night, before she stretched out on her straw mattress and slept, he brought in another verdict of self-defence, so that Olga Alexandrovna was more and more startled to wake up again in her cold cell to discover the eyes of the Countess raking over her as if they were raking over the ashes of the crime, always finding there more significance than mere manslaughter. Then the devil’s advocate in Olga Alexandrovna’s mind found it necessary to order a retrial and she had to start all over again. So her days passed.

The floors of the cells were lined with felt and, as well as a similar lining of felt on the walls, there was, at a distance of five inches from the surface of both walls and ceilings, a wire mesh covered with paper, an arrangement intended to prevent the inmates communicating with one another by means of knockings and tappings. So there was perfect silence within this place, except for the muffled footfalls of the wardresses, who were forbidden to speak. Silence, but for their footfalls; and the sound of the metallic slidings of the grilles; and the shrill insistence of the bell that rang in the morning, to wake you, and the bell that rang in the evening, to tell you to lie down, the bell that told you dinner was ready, the bell that ordered you to have your dirty bowls and plates ready for collection, the bell that ordered you to stand by the door ready for the exercise hour, round and round the yard, the Countess turning slowly in her chair to pace you. The bell that said the exercise hour was at an end. Silence, but for these sounds; and that of the ticking of the clock.

Snow piled against the outer walls of the House of Correction; spring came and the snow melted but the inmates saw neither the fall nor the vanishing, and neither did the Countess, either, for the price she paid for her hypothetical proxy repentance was her own incarceration, trapped as securely in her watchtower by the exercise of her power as its objects were in their cells.

This merciless woman nevertheless believed herself to be the embodiment of mercy, which she conceived of as the opposite of justice, for had she not removed her women from the sphere in which justice, which is necessarily merciless, operates – the court, the prison – and placed them in this laboratory for the manufacture of souls?

With so much looking, her eyes had grown quite white.

How did she sleep and were her sleeps troubled? No; not troubled, but random and infrequent, for she never liked to close her eyes although even she, deficient as she was in common humanity, needs must recharge her batteries in the good old human way. But when she snatched a wink, she drew Venetian blinds down on her windows and left lights burning so her prisoners could not tell if indeed she slept or was only pretending to do so, because sometimes she would draw the blinds when she was
not
asleep in order to demonstrate that she could escape from the tyranny of their eyes any time she chose though they were never free of hers. This was the only area in which she was able to exercise freedom although she was the inventor and the perpetrator of this wholesale incarceration.

The wardresses were also trapped, women – for the House of Correction was manned exclusively by women – who lived barrack-style amongst those they policed, and were imprisoned by the terms of their contract just as securely as the murderesses. So all within were gaoled, but only the murderesses knew this was the case.

The longer that Olga Alexandrovna rehearsed in her mind the circumstances of her husband’s death in her ample, and, it sometimes seemed, posthumous leisure – for in that place she felt as good as dead – the less she felt she was to blame. She went over and over everything, again and again, starting from the beginning, childhood in the tenement. Her weary mother stooped with toil, marriage, birth of the son she would never see again, the way her husband repeated with relish old Russian proverbs in praise of wife-beating, how she pawned her wedding ring to buy the food only to have him rob her of the cash for drink – blame it on vodka! Blame the priest who married them! Blame the stick that beat her and the old saws that helped to shape it!

But, don’t blame me. And, having exonerated herself, let the judge think what he would – she at last slept easy, the first untroubled night she’d passed in that place.

She was a woman of considerable intelligence, which the phrenologist had classified as ‘low peasant cunning’. She had quickly learned to mark the passage of the days by making a scratch with her fingernail on the plaster surrounding the bars through which she and the Countess did their reciprocal observing; this was the only area of her cell which could not be seen from outside. Though never, until pressed by circumstances, any great shakes at arithmetic, she’d made considerable strides in simple addition since she’d been here and, the secret inner surface was fairly pock-marked with the scars of empty days when, the morning after that good night’s sleep, she did her sums and discovered her third year in the place was over and the fourth year just begun.