Nights at the Circus (35 page)

Having survived all those who had been in the place when she was shipped there, she now qualified as a ‘long-stay’ prisoner. She decided the time had come to make herself at home and began to sit up and take notice.

Now, according to regulations, the silent wardresses wore hoods when they delivered meals, hoods which concealed all the features of their faces except their eyes, for even the Countess was forced to concede they must be able to see where they were going. But she wanted them to remain anonymous instruments, to exhibit no personal qualities that might obtrude upon the isolation of each inmate, so they never lifted their eyes from the ground, not when they served breakfast, or when they served supper, or when they unfastened the cages to let the women out for exercise.

But their gloved hands were at risk, as they slid the trays through the grilles. Olga Alexandrovna, who, in a former life, had followed the profession of a seamstress, possessed fine, slim fingers and, besides, was of a sociable temperament. Though speech and looking were denied her, still she thought she might be able to touch one of these fellow-prisoners – because Olga Alexandrovna, sitting and thinking, thinking and sitting as the clock ticked the days that turned to weeks to months to years, had come to the obvious conclusion that the guards were as much the victims of the place as she.

That morning, she sat waiting at the grille for breakfast, one eye cocked on the revolving Countess, the other on the clock, and, when the minute hand hit the hour, the bell rang and the grille slid open with a metallic rasp, she slipped one lovely hand (for lovely hand it was) into the gap and clasped the hand in the leather glove that pushed in the tray from the other end.

At the touch of Olga Alexandrovna’s white fingers, the hand under the black glove quivered. Emboldened, Olga Alexandrovna clasped the leather glove more warmly. With a courage far beyond Olga Alexandrovna’s imaginings, the woman in the hood raised her eyes to meet those eyes that Olga Alexandrovna now fixed on her.

Then the bell rang and the grille clanged down and Olga Alexandrovna lost her breakfast because the tray fell to the floor outside the cell and the porridge spilled, but she did not care about that.

Though the light was burning behind the Venetian blinds, the Countess must have nodded off for a moment for she did not see this mute exchange, although they saw one another clearly. And that was the moment, even before the gate opened and let them all out, as it was bound, sooner or later, after that touch, to do – at that moment, Olga Alexandrovna knew whoever it was who might truly sit in judgment on her had elected to dismiss the charge.

That evening, after a free if surreptitious exchange of looks as supper was served, Olga Alexandrovna found a note tucked into the hollowed-out centre of her bread roll. She devoured the love-words more eagerly than she would have done the bread they replaced and obtained more nourishment therefrom. There was not a pencil nor pen in the cell, of course, but, as it happened, her courses were upon her and – ingenious stratagem only a woman could execute – she dipped her finger in the flow, wrote a brief answer on the back of the note she had received and delivered it up to those brown eyes that now she could have identified amongst a thousand, thousand pairs of brown eyes, in the immutable privacy of her toilet pail.

In her womb’s blood, on the secret place inside her cell, she drew a heart.

Desire, that electricity transmitted by the charged touch of Olga Alexandrovna and Vera Andreyevna, leapt across the great divide between the guards and the guarded. Or, it was as if a wild seed took root in the cold soil of the prison and, when it bloomed, it scattered seeds around in its turn. The stale air of the House of Correction lifted and stirred, was moved by currents of anticipation, of expectation, that blew the ripened seeds of love from cell to cell. The slow hour’s walk around the covered inner courtyard, where the guards kept pace with the inmates, when, for just that single hour, the bars did not divide them, took on something of a bridal, a celebratory quality, as the flowers that sprang from those seeds grew in silence, as flowers do.

Contact was effected, first, by illicit touch and glance, and then by illicit notes, or, if either guard or inmate turned out to be illiterate, by drawings made in and on all manner of substances, on rags of clothing if paper was not available, in blood, both menstrual and veinous, even in excrement, for none of the juices of the bodies that had been so long denied were alien to them, in their extremity – drawings, as it turned out, crude as graffiti, yet with the effect of clarion calls. And if the guards were all subverted to the inmates’ humanity through look, caress, word, image, then so did the inmates wake up to the knowledge that, on either side of their own wedge-shaped cubes of space, lived other women just as vividly alive as themselves.

Silently, surreptitiously, as the unacknowledged autumn changed to winter outside, a warmth and glow suffused the House of Correction, a glow so inappropriate to the season that the Countess herself felt the effects of the palpable change of temperature within, so she would sweat, yet she could not, no matter how hard she looked, detect a single visible change in the mechanical order she had laid down and, even though she gave up sleeping altogether and introduced a hysterical randomness into her revolvings, so that she sometimes made herself quite giddy and sometimes stuck stock-still for almost an entire minute by the authority of the clock, she never saw one suspicious thing.

She never thought the guards might turn against her; did she not keep their contracts in a locked iron box in her watch-room? Had she not bought them? Were they not forbidden discourse with the inmates? Did not the forbidden thing itself forbid?

Her white eyes were now veined and rimmed with red. As she went round and round, she drummed nervous tattoos on the arm of her chair.

The notes, the drawings, the caresses, the glances – all said, in various ways, ‘if only’, and ‘I long . . .’ And the clock ticked the time of another lifetime, another place, above the gateway that grew each day larger in their imaginations until the clock and the gateway that had signified the end of hope now spoke to them of nothing but hope.

So it was an army of lovers who finally rose up against the Countess on the morning when the cages opened for the final exercise hour, opened – and never closed. At one accord, the guards threw off their hoods, the prisoners came forth and all turned towards the Countess in one great, united look of accusation.

She took out the pistol she kept in her pocket and fired off shot after shot that banged but did not reverberate as they ricocheted off the bricks and bars of that echoless chamber. Her firing scored one bull; she stopped the clock, shot the time right out of it, broke the face and stilled the tick forever, so, henceforth, when she looked at it, it would remind her only of the time that
her
time ended, the hour of their deliverance. But that was an accident. She was too stricken with surprise to aim straight, she wounded nobody and was easily disarmed, chattering away with outrage.

They locked up her door, took away the key and threw it into the first snowdrift they encountered when they opened the gate. They left the Countess secured in her observatory with nothing to observe any longer but the spectre of her own crime, which came in at once through the open gate to haunt her as she continued to turn round and round in her chair.

Kisses, embraces and the first sight of unseen, beloved faces. After the first joy was over, the women formed a plan – to make their way to the railhead, since they lacked maps or even compasses, and orient themselves by the railway track. Once they were sure they knew where they were, then they would decide on where they should go, whether, as some of them, even in the first throes of their new loves, still wanted, to trek back four or five thousand miles to the village or the town where their mothers still tended children orphaned by the law, no matter what befell after, or to strike off by themselves and found a primitive Utopia in the vastness round them, where none might find them.

Vera Andreyevna knew the place Olga Alexandrovna kept in her heart for the small son she’d last seen when he had milk teeth, and kept her peace.

They were armed and all clad in good stout greatcoats and felt boots stuffed with straw taken from the guardroom. They had food with them. The white world around them looked newly made, a blank sheet of fresh paper on which they could inscribe whatever future they wished.

So, taking bearings by the pale sun, they set off hand in hand, and soon started to sing, for joy.

FOUR

When darkness came, they found themselves in the shelter of the forest and decided to bivouac in brushwood shelters for fear of losing themselves in the night. Once they were settled down, they noticed a red glow in the sky above the trees, in the direction of the railway. Olga Alexandrovna and Vera Andreyevna were chosen by common consent as advance party and crept forward, concealing themselves amongst what bushes they could find, until, from a bluff, they saw a remarkable sight: an entire train, disarticulated like a broken toy, the carriages scattered by the explosion that had twisted the tracks until they resembled knitting got at by kittens. Many of the carriages still blazed with the same fire that had set light to the trees nearest the railway track, although some ineffectual efforts seemed to have been made at putting the fire out.

And, lying among the debris, toppled like giant ninepins, something untoward, something extraordinary – beings such as Olga Alexandrovna, in her childhood, once saw in the Tsar’s menagerie in her native St Petersburg. Elephants! Enough dead elephants to fill a fair-sized graveyard; and then a movement amongst the wreckage showed them that one huge beast was still living and was engaged, even in extremis, in lifting from here to there beams and twisted wheels with its trunk.

Then, most strange, the sound of music, of fiddle and tambourine, and Vera Andreyevna drew Olga Alexandrovna back behind a tree to let a peculiar procession pass. And pass it did, without the outlaws who policed it spying the women, for which they were grateful. Outlaws, bristling with weapons. Outlaws, with hostages – a fair girl, crying; and a huge brute, dressed like a peasant, comforting her in a language that was not Russian. And a little man in striped trousers who was shouting out, could the women have understood him, ‘I demand to see the U.S. consul.’ And there were a couple of primitive, wheelless carts, dragged by more outlaws, in which lay blanket-covered mounds, one silent but one bawling fit to bust. And a little grizzled, dark woman muttering to herself in a language different to the one the others spoke but which was not Russian, either. All most unexpected. And then more outlaws.

But it was the motley band who brought up the procession that made the women cross themselves, for these were men of all shapes and sizes, some small as dwarves, some long and lanky as clothespoles, less than a dozen of them, in the ragged remains of what had once been bright clothing in the strangest styles. Some had huge red noses, others big black rings round their eyes, but the paint was peeling from all the faces, so they looked piebald. Two of these men, wizened and old and inclined more to the stature of dwarves than of giants, provided the music for the party – but the fiddle was small, as if shrunken, and the other augmented his tambourine with a metal triangle hanging behind his back, at which he kicked up with every step he took. And they were playing, with a bravado that might have touched the hearts of Vera Andreyevna and Olga Alexandrovna, if they’d known the tune: ‘Rule Britannia!’

A few yapping dogs of breeds as various as this human zoo of odd types ran back and forth around, often coming in for a kick from an outlaw’s foot.

The escaped women looked askance at these representative examples of the world from which they had been exiled in the House of Correction.

As soon as the outlaws and their foreign captives were out of sight, the women returned to their comrades and debated what was to be done. They soon reached a decision: they did not feel they could take on the outlaws so would leave their captives in the hands of fate, which would make suitable provision, but they could and would go down to the wrecked train, even if a rescue party were to arrive and arrest them as escapees and deserters while they tendered what assistance they could to the injured and the dying.

Under the stars, the snow shone a nightmarish, glaring, luminous blue, as if the snow itself gave off a kind of corpse light. But, though the fires were dying down, still there was light enough for the women to see that, in fact, little was left for them to do.

As they approached, the last living elephant gathered its final reserves of strength together to lift a broken cupboard in its trunk and fling it towards the woods, where it scattered a hail of salt-cellars, pepper-shakers and vinegar bottles. Then, with a heart-rending bellow that, for a moment, filled all the great solitude, the elephant fell upon its side, fell not slowly, in stages, but in one crashing motion, down upon the melting snow. After that, a dreadful quiet, except for the crackling of the underbush that burned as if it might not be consumed.

Then Olga Alexandrovna stumbled over a body and thought at first it was a corpse but when she saw the bottle in its fist she knew it was still living, though kick and pinch it as she might, it would not budge. The entire train crew, as it turned out, conductors, waiters, cooks, were prone about the wreck, as at the conclusion of a peasant wedding. The warmth of the fires kept them from freezing. These appeared to be the only survivors and all seemed in perfect health. The women judged it wisest to let them lie, since it was clear they would come to no harm.

Olga Alexandrovna, attracted by the bright colours – she’d been starved of colours – picked out a quilt from a snowdrift, a quilt made of knitted squares sewn together such as children make.