Nights at the Circus (40 page)

We lit the lamp and fixed up a fire in the stove with some wood Samson found in an outhouse to fumigate the old mortality from the place before we opened the door to the third room.

To find, of all things, as if in answer to a prayer, not the photograph of a grand piano but the very thing itself! With the lid open, like a big, black butterfly just come to rest, and, upon it, a metronome. The Princess said nothing but the glaze lifted from her eyes and she flexed her fingers and clapped her hands like a delighted child. Coming back to herself in an instant, she sprang forward to the instrument but, just then, a tall, gaunt something, hitherto hidden from us by the ebony wings, starts up from an unseen stool at the keyboard and gives out with a wail.

The shadows cast by the lamp Liz held turned him into something frightful, ghoulish, even. Hair down to his bum and mixed in with the beard that reached his navel, and his fingernails were as long as those of Struwwelpeter in the picture book, you could see he hadn’t had the heart to touch his piano in a month of Sundays for all he threw himself protectively across the keys, letting forth such a clatter of discordant notes you could tell it hadn’t been tuned in years, either.

No doubt, when he first caught sight of us, he thought a pack of bears had come visiting. He whinnied with terror, jerking his grasshopper limbs in all directions, producing a cornucopia of atonal effects, and then he scrambled up on top of the thing, waving his arms as if either he’d protect it with his life or else dive into its innards to hide – he seemed undecided as to which course to follow. He dislodged the metronome, which fell to the floor on its side on the carpet of fishbones, and commenced to tick like a clock.

‘Mad as a hatter,’ said our Liz. ‘Fit to be tied.’

The Princess made faint, mewing sounds, stretching her hands towards the piano beseechingly in a manner fit to melt a heart of stone but the mad old man no longer knew he had a heart. Mignon it was who, restraining Lizzie with a brusque gesture, kicked the ticking metronome to death, cleared her throat, expectorated neatly, and began to sing.

When we first heard her sing, in my room in the Hotel de l’Europe, it sounded as if the song sang itself, as if the song had nothing to do with Mignon and she was only a kind of fleshy phonograph, made to transmit music of which she had no consciousness. That was before she became a woman. Now she seized hold of the song in the supple lassoo of her voice and mated it with her new-found soul, so the song was utterly transformed and yet its essence did not change, in the same way a familiar face changes yet stays the same when it is freshly visited by love. If she sang
a capella
and so only gave us half the song, still it was almost too much for me because she chose the last song of the ‘Winter Journey’, where the mad young man drifts off into the snow, following the organ-grinder. And will the winter journey of the young man wandering so far away from me turn out so badly? And what of my own journey, what of that? Bereft of my sword, as I am; crippled, as I am . . . yesterday’s sensation, a worn-out wonder – pull yourself together, girl.

The hairy old man went on scratching himself during the first verse but slowed down somewhat during the second and, during the third, he stretched out first one leg, then the other, you could hear the bones creak, and flopped back down on the piano stool. I never heard an instrument so out of tune and harsh as he picked out the little phrase in the accompaniment that mimics the hurdy-gurdy. Very slowly, with a perceptible clicking of the finger-joints, he picked out that phrase, again, then again, and the discords made no difference because it was supposed to sound out of tune, like a hurdy-gurdy.

‘Course, a baritone should sing it, really.’

I’d never heard the Princess say so much as ‘good morning’, before, so it came as a shock, the real, rough French of Marseilles and, as one might have expected, a low voice, like a growl.

‘Fuck and shit,’ she said. ‘That piano needs a screwdriver.’

Happily the old man, after some thought, discovered a bit of rusty French and tried it out and we left the three of them quarrelling happily about how best to strip the piano down and so on. You could not make out any change in the old man’s facial expression, due to his abundance of facial hair, but he seemed to be taking everything in his stride.

All there was in his larder was a tiny portion of smoked, at a guess, elk, and a semi-refrigerated rat, the latter – I should have thought – the accidental victim of a private misfortune rather than a regular item of diet. When we found the larder so bare, there fell out an ugly disagreement between the Colonel and the Escapee over Sybil, who looked like a good dinner to the one but, for the other, lay under the protection of the taboo against the slaughter of beasts whom we love. In spite of that taboo, Sybil might have escaped the gluttony of the fire-boy only to succumb to the democratic appetite of her friends because at last the Escapee said: ‘Let’s vote on it.’

Fond as I was of the little pig, not a bite had passed my lips since my interrupted breakfast and greater love hath no pig, that it should lay down its life . . . Sybil knew something was in the wind, although her clairvoyant talents did not stretch far enough to tell her what it was. She burrowed for cover down into the Colonel’s waistcoat, where she quivered like a disturbed paunch.

‘Eat me before you eat her!’ cried the Colonel. ‘Make a supper of
long pig
before you tuck into
my
pig, you cannibal!’ But the Escapee ignored emotional blackmail.

‘All those in favour of roast pork, raise your hands!’

Just as he, Liz, me and Samson formed a reluctant majority, the clown-dog, who’d tagged along with us thus far, now foolishly drew attention to himself by whining at the door to be let out, perhaps thinking to make a getaway, but we forestalled that, we ate him instead of Sybil, boiling him in melted snow because he was too tough to roast, so there was a bit of broth as well. Fido or Bonzo or whatever he was called didn’t go far amongst seven but he staved off the pangs so this last relic of the gigantic uselessness of the clowns served some function, in the end. And, next morning, or nearly noon, I should say, for day breaks in a sluggish fashion in the winter of these latitudes, the mad old man dragged himself away from the music room long enough to take those non-musicians amongst us to the river and show us how he did his fishing. So, as regards grub, things were looking up.

The old man’s clothes, if perfectly acceptable on the concert-hall rostrum, were a mite out of place in the middle of nowhere especially since, for outdoor wear, he donned a stovepipe hat somewhat concertina’d in the crown. But he knew what he was doing. He left behind the rod and lines and took a big knife with him, and what he did was this: he knelt on the solid ice, cut out a block and held it up to see if there was a fish in it. Third time, lucky; he’d cut in half a frozen carp. Then we all set to and carried home enough for breakfast, though the ice weighed very heavy.

Long before we reached the front door, we heard them. Sound travels far on that vacant air and it is possible the wooden halls of the little house, acting as a sounding-box, improved the tone of the piano whilst magnifying its sound. Anyway, clear as a bell. She’d fixed it so it was as good as new, the marvellous girl, and if I might prophesy squabbles in the future as to who should solo, the old man was too moved to hear them, at that moment, to complain.

Mignon’s song is
not
a sad song, not poignant, not a plea. There is a grandeur about her questioning. She does not ask you if you know that land of which she sings because she herself is uncertain it exists – she knows, oh! how well she knows it lies somewhere, elsewhere, beyond the absence of the flowers. She states the existence of that land and all she wants to know is, whether you know it, too.

Just as, drawn by the magnet of the song and insensible to all else, we reached the garden gate, humping the lumps of ice whose dripping weight we had forgotten in our pleasure, Sybil, tucked into the Colonel’s waistcoat, whimpered and her nose began to twitch.

We saw the house was roofed with tigers. Authentic, fearfully symmetric tigers burning as brightly as those who had been lost. These were the native tigers of the place, who had never known either confinement or coercion; they had not come to the Princess for any taming, as far as I could see, although they stretched out across the tiles like abandoned greatcoats, laid low by pleasure, and you could see how the tails that dropped down over the eaves like icicles of fur were throbbing with marvellous sympathy. Their eyes, gold as the background to a holy picture, had summoned up the sun that glazed their pelts until they looked unutterably precious.

Under that unseasonable sun, or under the influence of the voice and the piano, all the wilderness was stirring as if with new life. Came a faint shimmer of bird-song, and a whirring as of wings. Soft growls, and mews, and squeaks of paw on snow. And a distant crack or two, as if the ice in the river had broken up in ecstasy.

I thought to myself: when those tigers get up on their hind legs, they will make up their own dances – they wouldn’t be content with the ones she’d teach them. And the girls will have to invent new, unprecedented tunes for them to dance to. There will be an altogether new kind of music to which they will dance of their own free will.

The cats were not our only visitors. A little way off, towards the margins of the forest, I made out a group of living creatures who at first seemed almost indistinguishable from the undergrowth, for they were dressed in skins and furs of the same tawny, brownish colour. But one of them was hung with little talismans of carved tin that glittered with an artificial brilliance now that the sun came out and struck him. First one, then another of them moved cautiously forward; although their Mongolian features were characteristically inscrutable, it seemed to me most of them wore a puzzled look. They were the native woodsmen; I could tell at a glance.

I did not see the big one riding the reindeer until the beast, until the attraction of the music, shifted out of the screening branches of the pines. A big one, a huge one, twice the size of the others. And, ooh! didn’t he shine; he was so hung with baubles he looked all lit up like Piccadilly and, though he was too far away for his face to be clearly visible, I could see that face was white as milk. The sunlight struck silver off his hair, and off his jaw, which at first seemed silver-plated, but it was a beard.

The beard, at first, deceived me; and his long, shaggy skirts, with the red ribbons on them. And the big drum he held in his hand, like a shield, so he looked wild. What a sea-change! Or, rather, forest-change, for we were as far from the sea as you can get on this planet Earth. I thought he was become a wild, wild woman and then I saw his jaws glint, as if silver-plated, but all it was, was – a beard. He has been gone from me long enough to grow a beard! Oh, my heart . . .

My heart went pit-a-pat, I can tell you, as I watched him listen as if he, too, like the savage beasts (though unlike his savage adopted brethren) were entranced, although he knew the singer and the song so well. My heart went pit-a-pat, and turned right over.

‘Jack! Jack!’ I cried, interrupting the last verse, I’m sorry to say, such was my impetuous haste, and breaking, alas! the entire spell.

‘Jack Walser!’

The tigers raised their heads and roared in a troubled, irritated way, as if wondering how they’d got themselves into such a state in the first place. The people who’d come out of the wood all shook themselves, too, took a good look at the tigers as if they hadn’t noticed them before and didn’t much like what they saw, now. Were they going to run away? Would
he
run away without seeing me?

I spread. In the emotion of the moment, I spread. I spread hard enough, fast enough to bust the stitching of my bearskin jacket. I spread; bust my jacket; and out shot my you-know-whats.

The Escapee’s mouth dropped open, which is a risky thing to happen in this climate, your lungs can freeze. The old man fell on his knees and crossed himself curiously. The woodsmen all looked in my direction. From the woodsmen, a great shout went up. In the gap left by the broken music, came a drumming; the other fellow with tin spangles on started to batter away on his drum for dear life.

My enthusiasm carried me a few yards through the air; truly, I forgot my wing was broken. With the aid of the other, I fluttered lopsidedly a few yards more, until I could no longer sustain myself aloft upon it and crash-landed on my face in a snowdrift as the woodsmen kicked up their mounts and fled, the drummer still drumming away, and the tigers, as startled as anybody else, all streaked off, too, and we were alone again.

EIGHT

The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties – that is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sight, nor with the mind’s eye’s visions, nor with madness. As Walser slowly began to recover his wits among the forest dwellers, those wits proved of as little use to him as one crazy eye would have been in a company of the sightless. When he was visited by memories of the world outside the village, as sometimes happened, he thought that he was raving. All his previous experiences were rendered null and void. If those experiences had never, heretofore, modified his personality to any degree, now they lost all potential they might have had for re-establishing Walser’s existential credibility – except, that is, his credibility as a dement.

Happily for Walser, his hosts thought none the worse of him for ranting away in strange tongues. Far from it. They did not treat him like a king but they
did
behave quite kindly to him – to exactly the extent that they believed him to be hallucinated, since, traditionally, the natives of those remote parts of Siberia regarded hallucination as a job of work.