Nights at the Circus (36 page)

‘Here’s a treasure-trove of useful things left in the wilderness as if by some miracle, especially for us!’ she said. She was a practical woman.

After a heartening meal of bread and sausage they had brought with them, taken in the welcome heat of the forest fire, they set to to salvage what equipment they could.

First, Olga Alexandrovna found the gilded figure of an old man with a scythe that had evidently snapped off a broken box of springs and small brass wheels. Vera Andreyevna tentatively identified the figure of that of Father Time.

‘But, wherever we go, we’ll need no more fathers,’ she pronounced. So they threw it away.

Following on from this notion, Vera implored her friend to forbear from the use of the patronymic when she addressed her, which Olga promised to do, and asked her friend to do the same as regards herself.

Under a mass of broken chandeliers and torn upholstery, Olga next found a shard of mirror strangely painted with umber stripes on orange. When she touched it, it burned her fingers. She dropped it. It broke into a thousand lesser fragments, leaving, to her horror, a trace of smoking liquid in the snow. A superstitious fear overcame her.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said to Vera.

‘Where shall we go, my darling?’

Under the glazing stars, the railway track ran from its fiery terminus back, back, back, the thousand, thousand miles to St Petersburg, to the narrow tenement in which Olga’s aged mother crouched before the charcoal under the samovar in the continuous repetition of her daily toil, while the little boy who no longer remembered her played outside in the alley at games at which she could no longer guess. Vera kept her eyes down, as she had done before their fingers touched. She knew that to look is to coerce and, whatever else might lie in store for them, at this moment, they were free to choose.

Olga, in inner turmoil, sat down on the pile of table-linen that had been disclosed when the last elephant cleared the last cupboard. By the shattered remains of tables, vases, bottles and silverware around them, this must have been the restaurant car. Other women, decisions made, picked over the detritus of the kitchen near at hand, putting on one side all manner of things that would come in useful – saucepans, kettles, cauldrons, knives, all of such large sizes as would suit communal kitchens.

They carried out stocks of food, sacks of flour and sugar and beans, although they left behind the gravy browning with which the kitchen was so plentifully stocked. There were even a great many eggs, in wire baskets, that, on a whim of the explosion, had escaped destruction.

Above the clatterings and the exclamations: ‘Here’s strawberry jam!’ ‘I say, chocolate!’ ‘Would you believe, my dear, a patent
ice-bucket
!’, Olga’s prison-quickened ears now believed they detected a moan such as a sick or frightened child might make, coming from inside the place where she sat. She leapt to her feet and hurled aside the cloths and napkins.

So she uncovered him, a ruddy, flaxen-haired young man in a child’s short, white trousers, sleeping sound as if between white sheets on a feather bed. His breath did not smell of liquor. There was a contusion on his forehead.

‘How shall we wake him?’

‘The old tales diagnose a kiss as the cure for sleeping beauties,’ said Vera, with some irony.

Olga’s maternal heart did not heed that irony. She pressed her lips to his forehead and his eyelids slowly fluttered, slowly opened and he lifted up his arms and slowly put them round her neck.

‘Mama,’ he said. That universal word.

Smiling, she shook her head. She saw that Walser no longer knew enough to ask: ‘Where am I?’ Like the landscape, he was a perfect blank.

They lifted him to his feet, to see if he could walk. After a few tries and demonstrations, he got the hang of it and laughed out loud with delight and pride as he toddled with increasing confidence back and forth from Olga’s arms to Vera’s less welcoming ones, until he could manage by himself. Shortly after that, he discovered in himself sensation. He rubbed his hand on his belly in a circular motion and searched the absence that had been his memory but he could find nothing there to tell him what to say. So he kept on rubbing.

Olga Alexandrovna found a can of milk in the kitchen, crumbled bread in it and got him to take some of that from her fingers because he no longer knew how to use a spoon. He was pleased with everything and cooed, gazing round him with eyes the size of saucers. When he finished his bread and milk, he rubbed his belly again, to see what might be forthcoming
this
time.

Olga Alexandrovna picked up the wire basket of eggs.

‘Does he want a nice eggy, then?’

The sight of the eggs set the jumble behind his eyes in motion. All manner of connections took place. Up he rose on tiptoe and flapped his arms.

‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’

‘Poor thing,’ said Olga Alexandrovna. ‘Lost his wits, may the Good Lord protect him.’

Then a shrill whistle pierced the night and, far off, they saw the sparks and glowing tender of a railway engine, arriving from the direction of the railhead at R., and they made out the shapes of men with torches, lanterns, ropes and axes, walking alongside the slowly moving engine. The white apron of a nurse flashed as she leant out of the cabin to catch a glimpse of the work that lay before her. So Olga Alexandrovna’s decision was made for her; and all now hastened to gather together bundles of useful tools and utensils, and to make off into the woods, towards the radiant uncertainties of love and freedom.

Olga, in a hurry, stuck a pin into an egg and gave it to Walser to suck, which he did eagerly.

‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’

‘I hate to leave the poor thing,’ she said to Vera.

‘He is a man, even if he has lost his wits,’ replied Vera. ‘We can do without him.’

Still Olga lingered, as if she thought there
must
be something useful this young man could do for them, if only she could think of it . . . but time was running out. When she kissed Walser goodbye, she kissed goodbye to her own son and all the past. The women vanished.

Walser crouched over the basket of eggs but found they were easily crushed. Disgruntled, he kicked the basket over and had some fun watching the eggs that remained whole roll around. The rescue party drew nearer, at a stately pace, for, however great the emergency, the antique stock would only chuff along at the most geriatric rate. Walser had some more fun jumping on the rolling eggs and smashing them, but not as much fun as all that. Bored, he flapped his arms, again.

‘Cock-a-doodle-do! Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’

When he realised the kind ladies were all gone, tears ran unhindered from his eyes. Crowing like a cock, flapping his arms up and down, he sprinted off among the trees in search of them but soon forgot his quest in his enchantment at the sight of dappled starlight on the snow.

FIVE

As soon as we turned our backs on the train, it ceased to exist; we were translated into another world, thrust into the hearts of limbo to which we had no map.

They took us further and yet further into the margins of the forest, which, no hasty gulper, swallowed us up at its primeval leisure. It took me a long while to somewhat recover my composure and by then we were inside it as securely as Jonah in the belly of the whale and in almost as profound a darkness, for the close boughs of the evergreens blotted out the sky except when a lump of the snow with which they were lined fell on our heads like the dropping of a big, cold-blooded bird, and then a few scraps of red light from the fire we left behind us showed through the gap, bloodying the night-time clouds.

Our hosts, of whose intentions I grew moment by moment more apprehensive, appeared, through long custom and the most intimate knowledge of the woods, to need no light to guide them along the path they had hewn among the close-grown trunks, and they did not speak to us or one another. Now and then I caught a whiff of the ones who dragged me along and they smelled like hell, I must say.

Once I’d come to myself, prone on that jolting litter, I pummelled their backsides until they let me off and there was our Liz, again, so I gave her a kiss on what bit of her anatomy I could get at, which turned out to be her nose.

‘Satisfied, now you’re on foot?’ she greeted me, the old witch. ‘Find this method of progress more appropriate to the scenery, do you?’

Now, when I call Liz a ‘witch’, you must take it with a pinch of salt because I am a rational being and, what’s more, took in my rationality with her milk, and you could say it’s too much rationality as procured her not altogether undeserved reputation, for when she puts two and two together sometimes she comes up with five, because she thinks quicker than most. How does she reconcile her politics with her hanky-panky? Don’t ask me! Ask that family of anarchist bomb-makers of hers! Who put the bomb in the
bombe surprise
at Jenny’s wedding? Work of a moment for our Gianni, for all his weak lungs; and who would ever think to look for dynamitards in an ice-cream parlour, amongst those bonny babies, to boot?

And, at this very moment, back home in Battersea, our babies may be asking: ‘Where’s our Auntie Liz, now? Where’s Fevvers?’ But, as for Fevvers and Liz, why, they can’t answer that question themselves! When I think of the babies, I feel on my front for the lucky violets my Violetta gave me last Christmas, and, of course, there they aren’t, they’ve dropped off somewhere in Siberia.

Hearing me give out a little sob, Liz says under her breath: ‘How’s the broken pinion?’

‘Bad enough.’

She gives my hand a squeeze.

‘
And
I’ve lost my lucky violets,’ I add. She drops my hand sharpish; she hates sentiment.

‘Bugger your lucky violets, wherever they are,’ she says. ‘Prepare yourself for the worst, gel; we’ve lost the bloody clock, haven’t we. Burnt to a crisp in the wreck, most likely. First your sword, now my clock. We’ll soon lose all track of time, and then what will become of us. Nelson’s clock. Gone. And that’s not all. My handbag. That’s gone too.’

This was a disaster so great I scarcely dare think of the distress it would cause us.

Forward, we went, deeper and deeper into an unknown terrain that was, at the same time, claustrophobic, due to the trees shutting us in, and agoraphobic, because of the enormous space which the trees filled. We dragged one increasingly weary foot before the other weary foot, all dreary and incomprehensible as a wet Sunday, until we got to a clearing full of dirty snow with, behind a spiked stockade, all manner of haphazard dwellings in it, some like wigwams made of skins, some like tents put up by soldiers, and a few sheds of raw, split logs with all the signs of the hastiest construction, cracks stuffed with earth. I could see everything by the light of sputtery torches of pinewood our captors now ignited and my suspicions there were no women amongst them were amply confirmed. I would not say this discovery gave me more confidence in my hosts.

They all crowded round especially me, stared at only me, and muttered and exclaimed to themselves, but for the Princess or Mignon they never spared a glance. It seemed I formed a special item on the menu, although I kept that blanket tight around me, I can tell you.

But they treated us quite kindly. They gave us hot tea and ardent spirits and offered us cold roast, I think, moose, but I could eat nothing, I was overcome by silly weeping at the sight of food, which Liz said, then, was the effect of shock, but afterwards assured me that to see me off my feed was the first cause of real concern I’d given her since I was a baby.

They showed us even more consideration that night; they forbore to subject us to interrogation or stuff of that order, since we were so distraught and travel-weary, but put us all in a largish shed, where, to sleep on, was a wood platform with piles of furs, principally bearskins, not too well cured, by the smell. They left us huddled up all together, the poor remains of the Colonel’s circus, and he chattering with indignation as, apart from the indignities we’d suffered, he’d no great liking for the vodka they had hospitably provided for us, craving his lost bourbon like a baby snatched too early from the nipple and forlornly demanding an American consul be summoned ‘toot sweet’, he said. ‘Toot damn sweet.’

There was a clang and a bang outside – the buggers have slid the bolt on us, amidst much disputation in the Russian language. For these men are not the natives of the place. The native woodsmen are low in stature, yellow of skin; sometimes we’ve seen ’em at the stations, loading skins from high-piled sleds into the baggage vans, and they wear curious hats, of a triangular shape, and chink with ornaments made of tin. But our men are big, sturdy fellows, although we’re far too far away from farmland for them to come of that peasant stock imported into Siberia centuries ago to till the soil. And I do think they’re strangers here as much as we.

There was a fire in the lodging and some of the smoke went up through a hole in the roof. A small boy was left with us, whose task was to sit by the fire all night and feed it with sticks, for they did not trust us with the means of combustion. The clown-dogs bounced around to see the little fellow, thinking they’d have a game with him, but when one black poodle bitch with its red satin bow still in its curls jumped up at him, beseeching friendship, this jolly little chap seized hold of her and broke her neck with one clean snap of his long-fingered hands, which put all the clowns in a terrible humour and didn’t reassure me as to the good hearts of our hosts in the least.

And the looks the fire-boy gave poor Sybil the pig were exactly those the ragged urchins that hopscotch on the Queenstown Road give Gianni when he calls out ‘Icey, icey, ice-cream!’ So I didn’t give Sybil much longer in this world, I can tell you, and she is clearly apprehensive herself and climbs right down inside the Colonel’s waistcoat and buries her snout in his breast, whimpering occasionally.