Nights at the Circus (42 page)

Bruin, now free of his fleshy envelope, would carry messages to the dead; those who ate him would partake of the strength and valour of the bear; and, besides, since death was not precisely mortal in this theology, bruin would soon be up and about again, to be born again, captured again, reared again, killed again in a perpetually recurring cycle of return.

And, golly! didn’t he taste good!

After the flesh was boiled away, his skull would be tossed on the heap in the god-hut that, were it to have been counted out, would have announced the extreme antiquity of these customs. But nobody ever counted the heap because none of them knew in what way the past differed from the present. They weren’t too sure of what was different about the future, either. Meanwhile, the bear lived on in happy ignorance.

Walser shared with the Shaman and the bear a large brass bedstead which the Shaman, waste not, want not, had retrieved from the garbage heap at the railhead of R. Soon Walser shared the bear’s vermin, too.

The Shaman believed that bears could talk to all other animals in the forest and so, sooner or later, his bear would strike up a meaningful conversation with Walser but time passed and, though the young man and the bear got on well enough together, they showed no signs of conversing. However, for want of anything better to do, time lying heavy on his hands during the long evenings, Walser taught the bear to dance. Following a deep, almost instinctual prompting, Walser led, although the bear was male too.

The first time the bear got the hang of it, another piece of the jigsaw of Walser’s past fell into the incoherence of his present, although the jigsaw was not only incomplete but not yet recognised
as
a jigsaw. He and the bear circled the hut. His feet knew better than his brain what he was up to and obeyed the dictates of a certain otherwise forgotten rhythm:
one
, two, three,
one
, two three . . . He and the grunting bear circled the floor in front of the stove on which the dried juniper cracked and smoked, as once he had danced on a floor of sawdust with another clawed predator. As once he had danced a –

‘Waltz!’ he cried. And then, with glad recognition: ‘Walser! Me, Walser!’

And let go the bear in order to beat himself on the chest.

‘Walser is me!’

The Shaman understood perfectly and, for once, correctly. He was very pleased when his apprentice, in his ecstasy, executed a barbarous dance and, in an ecstasy, gave himself his professional name. Walser would be able to make his debut as a sorcerer very, very soon. The Shaman stretched the reindeer hide he had prepared over the hoop of the drum and left it to cure. The Shaman carved a drumstick from alder wood, trapped a variable hare, skinned it and covered the drumstick with the pelt that, at this season, was as white as the snow that lay all around. Now all that remained was the patient wait until such time as Walser exhibited the signs, the frothings at the mouth, the fallings, the shrieks, that would show he was ready to begin drumming.

Walser, by this time, was willy-nilly picking up a few words of the Shaman’s language, hard and lumpy as it was, spiked with k’s and t’s, clogged with glottal stops, all the clicking, gulping noises of axe on wood and boots in snow. In the haphazardly functional manner of a child learning to speak, he first acquired nouns: ‘Hunger’; ‘Thirst’; ‘Sleep’. Then he acquired a rapidly increasing number of the seventy-four words in their language expressing different varieties of cold. Before long, he began to adventure with their rococo grammar.

His gradual acquisition of the Shaman’s language set up a conflict within him, for his memories, or his dreamings, or whatever they were, were dramatised in quite another language. When he spoke out loud in that language, the Shaman paid him far more attention than he did when he asked for another glass of tea in proto-Finno-Ugric, because the Shaman assumed Walser’s remembered English was the astral discourse that must be interpreted according to his own grand hypothesis, a set of conundrums that became perfectly scrutable with the aid of meditation and that distillate with which he continued to dose Walser.

The Shaman listened the most attentively to what Walser said after a dream because it dissolved the slender margin the Shaman apprehended between real and unreal, although the Shaman himself would not have put it that way since he noticed only the margin, shallow as a step, between one level of reality and another. He made no categorical distinction between seeing and believing. It could be said that, for all the peoples of this region, there existed no difference between fact and fiction; instead, a sort of magic realism. Strange fate for a journalist, to find himself in a place where no facts, as such, existed! Not that Walser would have known what a journalist was, any more. He was increasingly visited by memories; had he but known it, his head was clearing more and more day by day – he no longer crowed like a cock – but his memories were incomprehensible to him until the Shaman interpreted them.

The Shaman effortlessly reconciled the facility with which Walser spoke in tongues with the tenets of his own complex metaphysics. But, if Walser came to accept the notion he was unusually gifted with the power of dreaming, for this was the only theory of his difference available to him, sometimes, as with the rediscovery of his name, he brought himself up short:

‘Is there, as I sometimes imagine, a world beyond this place?’

Then he would sink into troubled introspection. So Walser acquired an ‘inner life’, a realm of speculation and surmise within himself that was entirely his own. If, before he set out with the circus in pursuit of the bird-woman, he had been like a house to let, furnished, now he was tenanted at last, even if that interior tenant was insubstantial as a phantom and sometimes disappeared for days at a time.

But, in the circumstances, it was useless to ask if there was a world beyond – because the Shaman knew quite well there was! Didn’t he visit it constantly? During the trances for which he possessed a hereditary disposition, he often travelled there. The Shaman was not alone in his familiarity with the world beyond; whenever he took a trip, he found the air above Transbaikalia thick with flying shamans! That world was as familiar to him as the one in which he had temporarily dropped anchor in order to discuss the proposition of another world with Walser, and that world and this world must surely be the same as the world Walser visited in
his
trances, because all worlds were unique and indivisible.

And that was that. End of discussion. The Shaman fell to caressing his bear.

But Walser, one day, wandered down by the railway track and found there a little tribal boy squatting on a stump in the snow, his eyes fixed on the middle distance upon whose whiteness a smudge of smoke from a departing train gradually erased itself. And on the face of this child Walser saw an expression of yearning that moved him, and, more than that, stirred his memory, for he recognised that expression, not with his eyes but with his heart; for just one moment he became again the tow-haired urchin who, a quarter-century ago, had gazed at the swelling sails, the belching smokestacks, of the ships that set out from San Francisco Bay towards the four corners of the world.

And so he remembered the sea. When he remembered the landless wastes, the infinite freedom of the eternally shifting waters, the fugal music of the deep, he knew the Shaman could never believe all that; the Shaman lived so far inland he would have taken an oar, had he ever seen one, to be a winnowing fan. And he could not interpret
this
vision; he could not decide what the sea
meant –
although, as his grasp of the Shaman’s language grew, he was able to make a few stabs at interpreting the dream material as he went along.

‘I see a man carrying a’ – he fumbled for the word – ‘a pig. You don’t know what a pig is? A little animal, good to eat. The upper part of this man’s apparel mimics the starry heavens. The lower part, by a system of parallel bars, represents, perhaps . . . felled trees . . . He brings light, and he brings food, but he also seems to bring . . . destruction . . .’

Wajser had learned to speak in images in order to recount his visions so that the Shaman would understand them but the Shaman understood them in his own way. He identified the ‘little, delicious animal’ as the bear, of which Walser was almost as fond as he, and therefore interpreted this dream as the one in which the spirits named Walser as the bear’s executioner, for the bear’s time was drawing nigh. The spirits must also be using the dream to place an order for Walser’s shamanising costume.

The Shaman therefore carved a dress out of elk-hide and cut some stars out of the remains of an old bully-beef tin he’d picked up in R. He went to a female first cousin of his who worked in a minor pastoral capacity as village midwife and wise woman and asked her to sew up the eik-hide dress and appliqué the tin stars to the bosom. She consented to do this in the spare time left over from the complex rituals surrounding the birth of her eldest daughter’s first child. These rituals were especially complex because births were relatively rare in the community, these days, and it was necessary to deceive the spirits – to convince them no birth had, in fact, taken place, lest they come and steal away the little newcomer in order to increase the population of the other world, rather than this one.

Walser sat in front of the stove and thought of the stars and the stripes, and sang:

He tried to translate the song for the Shaman but words failed him and he carried on in American. The Shaman enjoyed hearing Walser sing, although to his ears, the noise was raucous and discordant in the extreme, further proof of the extraordinary things the spirits kept up their sleeves for such as he. He liked to sing along with Walser, especially after a tot of piss, modifying the alien melodies with a quarter-tone or two of his own.

But no! the flag was
not
there; no star-spangl’d banner unfurled in the perfumed, hazy smoke of the Shaman’s hut, with its brass bedstead, samovar, amulet bag and the bear with earrings scratching its armpits in front of the fire. The Shaman was busy fixing the drum. A stew of dried fish bubbled away for supper, adding to the rich odours of man and beast already present a reek as of a whore’s drawers.

‘A whore’s drawers,’ said Walser to himself, reflectively. ‘A whore’s drawers . . .’

The more of the past Walser put together in a crazy quilt out of the rag-bag of the memory he did not know
was
a memory, the more unlikely it seemed. He sat in the corner and puzzled away at it all until the Shaman shook him out of reverie in order to give him some lessons.

These lessons consisted of:

a) prestidigitation, or sleight of hand – the ability to conceal pebbles, sticks, spiders and, if any were obtainable, baby mice about his person and produce them in the course of a diagnosis or an operation;

b) ventriloquism – the assumption of a high, squeaky voice of the special kind associated with the voices of the spirits, and to ‘throw’ it, so it might seem as if it came from within the patient himself, or out of the fire, or from the muzzle of the earringed bear-cub, or from the carved mouth of an idol in the god-hut.

c) last but not least – the power of looking preternaturally solemn, as if he were the possessor of knowledge hidden from ordinary mortals.

Do not run away with the idea, from all this, that the Shaman was a humbug who would have been a prize addition to that series of Walser’s ‘Great Humbugs of the World’, if he’d still been looking for candidates. The Shaman most certainly was
not
a humbug. His was the supreme form of the confidence trick – others had confidence in him because of his own utter confidence in his own integrity. He was the doctor and the midwife of the village, the dream-reader and the fortune-teller, the intellectual and the philosopher, to boot; he also conducted weddings and burials. Furthermore, he negotiated with and interpreted the significance of those natural forces to which the circumstances of their lives made them especially vulnerable.

But, though the Shaman might know full well how it was an evil spirit in the form of, for example, a mouse that was causing his patient’s, say, diarrhoea, the patient would be convinced only by oracular proof and would continue to shit freely until the hypothetical mouse had been removed from his anus. The spirits took forms visible, unfortunately, only to the Shaman himself so that, to keep his customers satisfied, he must equip himself with corporeal imitations of these malevolent forms and then he could be seen to have cast them out. (‘Seeing is believing.’)

Hearing was believing too. The Shaman heard the idols in the god-hut speak quite clearly and listened avidly to the voices of the wind, but it was necessary to persuade those whose ears were not as sharp as his to harken also.

The solemn look was the prerequisite for the whole performance; who would believe a giggling Shaman?

And once the tribe stopped believing in the Shaman’s powers, then – Othello’s occupation gone. They might even have started thinking he was unbalanced. Or worse; for some of his habits, had they not been sanctified by tradition, would have seemed distinctly perverse. Worst of all, if they stopped believing in him, the Shaman might even have been expected to engage in – the spirits forbid! – productive labour, in the drudgery of hunting, shooting, fishing and the sporadic cultivation of late barley to which his neighbours were bound, of which labour, at the moment, he lived comfortably on the surplus, paid in kind by grateful patients or those whose dreams he had interpreted with a happy degree of accuracy.

He fully intended that Walser, the stray to whom the spirits directed him in the woods, the little bird hatched from an egg whose shell had disappeared in just the same way as the bear-cub’s celestial cradle did – he intended that Walser, his adoptive son, should one day inherit all his power, all his authority, all his special skills, even unto his reindeer and his samovar. Day by day, he grew fonder of Walser. At night, he fondled and cuddled Walser affectionately before they went to sleep. He was even fonder of Walser than he was of his bear. Now that Walser was here, he would not miss the bear when the time came to immolate him.