Nights at the Circus (38 page)

‘The sun shines bright,’ warbles the Colonel, ‘on my Old Kentucky home.’

Sybil appeared to have given up on him now he was in his cups and was nesting down in the bearskins as far away from the fire-boy as she could burrow but we thought we might as well ‘consult the oracle’ and Lizzie extracted the letter cards from the Colonel’s pocket without him taking a blind bit of notice. But all the advice Sybil will give is: ‘w-a-i-t a-n-d s-e-e’, while, outside, the snow started to come down again, which spurred the fire-boy into action, I’m glad to say.

Then we heard the unmistakable sounds of the bandits drowning their sorrows and, comic operetta brigands as they were, they now indulged in a bass baritone chorus of laments, in parts, although, as time wears on, the part-singing becomes increasingly ragged. And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.

‘Here we are,’ opined Liz, ‘lodged up the arsehole of the universe with a bunch of scabby bandits so sunk in false consciousness they thought the Queen of England would shed a tear for them if only she knew their misery, and your wing is broken so we can’t fly away. And our clock is gone for good.
And
no means of knowing if that last lot of mail got home or not.’

Which seems the least of our problems, whether the comrades in London got hot news of the struggle. When I say that, we fell out, first time in our lives! Hard words pass between us. We withdraw to separate corners of the shed, to sulk, and, what with our bad feeling, and the Princess moping and mowing, and Mignon carrying on, and the Colonel running through the Stephen Foster songbook in ever a more discordant manner, as if vying with the lamentations of the outlaws outdoors as by the water of Babylon they sit down and weep, add to that the ululations of the wolves and the raucous laughter which accompanies the increasingly indecent games in which the clowns engage the fire-boy, I’m beginning to think I must have done something wicked in a former life to land in such a mess in this one.

And, silly superstitious little tremor as it is, childish and whimsical . . . all the same, the little sword that always armed me, and Father Time, who was once on our side – both these are gone, quite gone.

Besides, I suspect that not only my wing but also my heart has been a little broken.

No dinner brought us, because the bandits are too preoccupied with their dirges. But Lizzie, whose doings I keep watch on out of the corner of my eye, begs a knife off the fire-boy and starts in on cutting up the bearskins, so I see she’s a plan to make us all some good new clothes of a kind to withstand the weather outside and I can’t help but wonder if she’s cooking up some scheme of her own in her wily old head. But I don’t care to ask, since we’re not on speakers.

Then comes a knocking at the door and a strange, new voice in educated tones demands: ‘Anyone at home?’

‘Bolt’s on the other side!’ I sings out. ‘Open up and walk in!’

Which is how we made the acquaintance of the escaped convict.

SIX

Early morning. The dark blue sky stains the snow dark blue. The moon appears and disappears teasingly behind a scarf of blue gauze. Everything looks transparent. A volatile figure with its jaw now lightly clad in silvery beard flits through the thickets, evidently impervious to cold, for it exhibits no discomfort although it is half naked since it has lost its trousers, its comedy suspenders and its wig. There are feathers of the snowy owl, the goldeneye, the raven, stuck in its hair, along with burrs, thorns, twigs, mushrooms and mosses. This man looks as if both born in and born of the forest.

He mistakes the stars for birds and chirrups at them as if he knew no other language. Perhaps that angel who keeps the small birds under his wing has, in spite of his size, adopted him, for, apart from scratched shins, no harm has befallen him, and the odds and ends of cast-offs knocking about inside the box that used to hold his wits sometimes come together, kaleidoscope-wise, in the image of a feathered, tender thing that might, once upon a time, have sat upon his egg.

Although his cockscomb is long gone, he still cries: ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’

The empty centre of an empty horizon, Walser flutters across the snowy wastes. He is a sentient being, still, but no longer a rational one; indeed, now he is all sensibility, without a grain of sense, and sense impressions alone have the power to shock and to ravish him. In his elevated state, he harkens to the rhythm of the drum.

Strange phenomenon of the landscape! as if it might have been sounds from the earth under the snow, or the heavens above it. A hollow, insistent drumming, soft at first, then increasing in intensity . . . a pitter-pat, a rat-tat-tap, and then a bim-bam-bom. Ruddeby-dubbedy-dub and rat-a-tat-a-tat, tattoos and riffs of more than Afro-Caribbean complexity.

Not that he can identify the drumming
as
drumming. It might, might it not, be nothing but the product of his disordered brains. He pauses on one leg, like a stork, sniffing the air as if to smell out from which direction, if any, this invocation comes but the cold snaps at his testicles when he stands still and, with a brief scream, he leaps off, again, coming to rest before the antlers of a reindeer bull sticking up out of the snow and looking for all the world like an abandoned hat-rack.

When Walser sniffed the air
this
time, his nostrils dilated at a whiff of something savoury, something aromatic on the cold-scoured air. The drumming grew louder and louder, more and more rhythmically innovative, as he pursued the delicious scent; until, among the trees, he found a brazier containing a small fire from which fragrant smoke issued. Beside the fire stood a being composed, or so it would seem, of fringed leather, gaudy rags and tinkling metal ornaments, applying the wooden stick he held in one hand to a skin drum the size of a dustbin lid, of the kind Irish musicians call a ‘bodrum’, brightly painted with all manner of strange devices, stretched on a wooden frame. This drum was talking to the wilderness in its own language.

The Shaman was not in the least surprised to see Walser, for he had drummed himself into that state of transcendental ecstasy demanded by his profession and his spirit was now disporting itself with a company of horned ancestors, of birds with fins and fish on stilts and many other physiologically anomalous apparitions, amongst which Walser cut rather an everyday figure. Walser squatted by the fire, enjoying the smoke and reacquainting himself with the sensuality of warmth until the Shaman’s eyes popped, his lips frothed and he fell down, dropping the drum, which rolled a little way on the snow and then toppled over.

Walser reached out for it but found he could coax only a few little muffled rumbles out of it. He did not know how to make the drum speak and, if he found out by accident, he could not have understood it.

Time passed. The Shaman sighed, got up, shook the snow off the skirts of his leather dress and saw that Walser was still there. The Shaman was prepared for anything when he took a spirit journey and greeted Walser affectionately, assuming he was an emanation of the wild which had elected to stick around a while after the drumming that summoned him stopped and would, in its own good time, softly and silently vanish away. But when Walser, recalling how nice things happened after he had done so once before, began to rub his belly with a circular motion, the Shaman had second thoughts.

He addressed Walser in his native tongue, an obscure Finno-Ugrian dialect just about to perplex three generations of philologists.

‘Whence cometh thou? Whither goeth thou?’

Walser giggled, went nowhere, went on rubbing his belly. From the satchel in which he transported his fetishes, the Shaman unpacked the tumbler in which he’d proposed to serve himself tea (prepared on the brazier with the aid of a tea-brick) to restore himself after his exertions. He modestly turned his back, raised his skirt and pissed into this tumbler. Then, with smiling formality, he offered the steaming glass of amber fluid to his unexpected guest.

‘No sugar,’ complained Walser. ‘No lemons.’

But he was thirsty and he drank.

Then his eyes began to spin round and round in his head and to send off sparks, like Catherine wheels. Even the Shaman, well used to the effects of fly agaric distilled through the kidneys, was startled. Walser entered an immediate fugue of hallucinations, in which birds, witches, mothers and elephants mixed up with sights and smells of Fisherman’s Wharf, the Alhambra Theatre, London, the Imperial Circus, Petersburg, and many other places.

All his past life coursed through his head in concrete but discrete fragments and he could not make head nor tail of any of it. He began to babble helplessly in a language unknown to the Shaman, which excited the Shaman’s curiosity all the more.

The Shaman packed up his belongings and slung his drum over his shoulder. He emptied the fire out of the brazier and stamped on it to put it out. He packed up the brazier. Himself, he was pretty sure, by now, that Walser, whatever he was, was
not
one of his own hallucinations, and might, he conjectured, be an apprentice shaman from another tribe, of, he noted, a markedly different physical type, who had wandered off-course during the ill-planned trip. He picked Walser up in a fireman’s lift – he was a small man, but tough – and started off back to his own village with him.

Upside down Walser continued to upbraid the embroidered back of the Shaman’s ceremonial frock. The hallucinogenic urine put the sluggish motor in his skull into overdrive.

‘Oh!’ he declaimed to the oncoming Siberian dawn. ‘What a piece of work is man!’

SEVEN

The Escapee opened up, came inside, had a good toast at the fire and was tickled pink to discover such a motley crew held hostage in the outlaws’ camp. He was a well-educated man – boy, I should say, for he wasn’t above twenty and didn’t look his age, a fresh-faced, bright-eyed, eager little cherub who spoke very fair French and enough English to get by. And he was a breath of fresh air in this miserable place, I can tell you, for he never mentioned ‘yesterday’. All
he
could talk of was ‘tomorrow’, a shining morrow of peace and love and justice in which the human soul, ever through history striving for harmony and perfection, would at last achieve it. And to the coming century he looked for the delivery of the concentrated essence of all the good things of that ideal ‘tomorrow’.

He’d been sent off to exile for trying to bring Utopia one step nearer by blowing up a copper-shop, which made our Liz look kindly on him at first. But when he embarrassedly confessed there’d been no bang nor damage because the dynamite was damp, Liz ‘tut-tutted’ his inefficiency, her brow darkened with displeasure at him and with his ‘soul’, with his ‘tomorrow’, she ferociously took issue.

‘First place, what is this
soul
of which you speak? Show me its location in the human anatomy and then I might believe in it. But, I tell you straight, dissect away how much you like, you won’t find it. And you can’t make perfect a thing that don’t exist. So, scrub the “soul” from out of your discourse. Second place, as we say in our country: “tomorrow never comes”, which is why you’re promised jam tomorrow. We live, always, in the here and now, the present. To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with. Third place, how will you recognise “perfection” when you see it? You can only define the
future perfect
by the
present imperfect
, and the present, in which, inevitably, we all live, always seems imperfect to
somebody.
This present time seems quite sufficiently perfect to such as that Grand Duke that wanted my foster-daughter, here, to add to his collection of toys. For the wretched peasants whose rents pay for his extravagances, the present is merry hell.

‘If we abandon the grammatical metaphor, I’d certainly agree with you that this present which we contemporaneously inhabit is
imperfect
to a degree. But this grievous condition has nothing to do with the soul, or, as you might also call it, removing the theological connotation, “human nature”. It isn’t in that Grand Duke’s nature to be a bastard, hard though it may be to believe; nor does it lie in those of his employees to be slaves. What we have to contend with, here, my boy, is the long shadow of the
past historic
(reverting back to the grammatical analogy, for a moment), that forged the institutions which create the human nature of the present in the first place.

‘It’s not the human “soul” that must be forged on the anvil of history but the anvil itself must be changed in order to change humanity. Then we might see, if not “perfection”, then something a little better, or, not to raise too many false hopes, a little less bad.’

So I could tell she was feeling more chipper and the Escapee was getting more than he bargained for when he took shelter in the outlaw camp, but before he and Liz came to blows on how humanity might be most efficaciously rendered more virtuous, I steps in quick, asks him what’s going on, outside.

Seems the outlaws are so sunk in gloom to find I’m
not
the Princess of Wales, nor ever shall be, they are drowning their sorrows but it doesn’t cheer them up. The more they drink, the more they weep, as if what goes in must come out, and, if we don’t console them, somehow, the Escapee thinks it’s very likely that they’ll have a little shooting party and so, goodnight. God bless. Finito.

But he has more news. For it seems he fell in with a band of women, trekking towards the interior, all of whom had broken out of an institution for the criminally insane nearby, leaving the governess locked up inside behind them as, for what he said they said, she thoroughly deserved to be. These women planned to found a female Utopia in the taiga and asked a favour of the Escapee; that he should deliver ’em up a pint or two of sperm, which, speedily freezing at the inhospitable temperature of the region, could be stored away in a patent ice-bucket like an enormous thermos flask they carried with them, so they could use it, when they got settled, to impregnate such of them as were of child-bearing age and so ensure the survival of this little republic of free women. With this request, he had complied. I could see he was a perfect gentleman.