Nights at the Circus (46 page)

‘Tuck her up,’ said Liz to Fevvers, taking charge of the baby.

‘What the ’ell is going on?’ demanded Fevvers as she did as she was bid.

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ said Lizzie. ‘Unless this tableau of a woman in bondage to her reproductive system, a woman tied hand and foot to that Nature which your physiology denies, Sophie, has been set here on purpose to make you think twice about turning from a freak into a woman.’

Lizzie held the baby to the young mother’s breast but either the young mother’s milk had not yet come or she had none, for the baby grasped the nipple in its mouth and sucked furiously, then, with a sharp cry of disappointment, let go, and, face crumpling, began to bellow and shake its fists. At that, the mother wept as much as her exhaustion and fever permitted her. Fevvers rubbed the cold hands in her warm ones while Lizzie tucked the baby snugly inside her fur.

‘I’m not leaving this little babe out here and that’s flat,’ she announced. ‘Poor little scrap’ll catch its death as well as starve.’

‘You always was partial to a foundling,’ said Fevvers with an acid edge but also with renewed affection. ‘What about its poor old mum, though? Ain’t she a foundling, too?’

‘You can manage her, ducks.’

‘She’s not much of a weight,’ acknowledged Fevvers, heaving. The woman came to herself, briefly, and smiled. If she had realised Fevvers was not a bear but a woman, she would have complained bitterly because the taboos surrounding childbirth had been broken. As it was, she let herself be carried off with a good grace to, as she thought, the land of the dead. She was pleased to hear the babble of little cries as her baby set off in the same direction.

They kicked aside the walls of the shelter, the easiest way of returning to the open air. As Fevvers stepped over the scattered branches with the well-wrapped young mother in her arms, she glimpsed something in the disturbed snow that made her cry out.

‘Oh, Liz!’

A miracle of frail violets, frost-nipped and pale, the colour of tired eyelids, yet big with perfume and optimism, were in full bloom among the sheltered roots of the big pine. Violets!

‘Violets,’ said Lizzie, ‘on New Year’s Eve.’

‘Look at ’em, the little darlings,’ bubbled Fevvers. ‘Like a message from little Violetta, to say we’re not forgotten. Here, did you say it’s New Year’s Eve?’

Liz nodded. ‘I’ve been keeping count. By
my
count, it’s New Year’s Eve; we’re on the cusp, my dear, tomorrow is another time-scheme.’

Fevvers hoisted the young mother over her shoulder and stooped but Liz adjured:

‘Don’t pick ’em, leave ’em to seed theirselves. Snow violets. Must be rare as rare.’

Beneath her apparent indifference, she, too, was moved, and the two women smiled at one another, knowing a truce, or even peace, had been declared again.

‘I spy.’ And Lizzie pointed. There was a footprint in the snow beside the violets; they had not been the first to stop and admire them. Print of a soft-soled boot. One footprint only, like Man Friday’s, just as mysterious, just as ominous.

‘Over there!’ Fevvers turned to point. A rag of red ribbon was caught on the twig of a tree. The magic midwife took care to hide the tracks she made when she came to tend her hidden patient; but not sufficient care. Had not the bears come and kidnapped mother and child? A few yards beyond the red ribbon they came across a little tin bell lying at the side of a dissolving track of beaten snow. Now they were on the high road to somewhere, and strode along in better spirits than they’d known for days.

Soon they saw before them lights, faintly gleaming through thick windows paned with horn, and the roof of long, low, wooden houses, and smoke rising from chimneys, and a rich, strange smell of unfamiliar suppers cooking on unfamiliar hearths, and it was evening.

Fevvers’ heart, already stirred by the surprise of the violets, warmed still further at these homely sights and odours. A village! Homes! The signs of the human hand keeping the wilderness at bay! Life seemed to her to have been held in suspension during their wanderings in the solitude; now the solitude existed no longer and things were about to pick up again. She might even find bleach or dye in this village, might she not, and start to put herself back together again.

And surely he was here; one of the wooden houses must shelter the young American. And she would see, once again, the wonder in the eyes of the beloved and become whole. Already she felt more blonde.

‘Think of him, not as a lover, but as a scribe, as an amanuensis,’ she said to Lizzie. ‘And not of my trajectory, alone, but of yours, too, Lizzie; of your long history of exile and cunning which you’ve scarcely hinted to him, which will fill up ten times more of his notebooks than
my
story ever did. Think of him as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we’ve yet to tell him, the histories of those woman who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been, so that he, too, will put his poor shoulder to the wheel and help to give the world a little turn into the new era that begins tomorrow.

‘And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I. This young woman in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with the grisly bonds of ritual, will suffer no more of it; she will tear off her mind forg’d manacles, will rise up and fly away. The dolls’ house doors will open, the brothels will spill forth their prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will let forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new, the transformed –’

‘It’s going to be more complicated than that,’ interpolated Lizzie. ‘This old witch sees storms ahead, my girl. When I look to the future, I see through a glass, darkly. You improve your analysis, girl, and
then
we’ll discuss it.’

But her daughter swept on, regardless, as if intoxicated with vision.

‘On that bright day, when I am no more a singular being but, warts and all the female paradigm, no longer an imagined fiction but a plain fact – then he will slap down his notebooks, bear witness to me and my prophetic role. Think of him, Lizzie, as one who carries the evidence –’

‘Cushie-cushie-coo,’ said Lizzie to the restless baby.

There were no streets or squares or alleys in this village; the houses were set sometimes close to, sometimes far apart, as if the arrangement had been copied from the random way cows lie down in fields. No sign of any inhabitants, all indoors at this hour, but a reindeer or two raised its antlered head to peer at the newcomers, then settled back to scratching for moss. Bells and ribbons were attached to a larch tree outside the longest, lowest, somehow most official-looking building in the village, giving it a festive air. Lizzie knocked on the door, noting how the frame was decorated with more red ribbons, feathers and (h’m) bones. When she knocked, came a muffled growl from inside, a flurry and a thump and a man’s voice raised in an unfamiliar tongue.

‘Does that mean “come in”?’

Fevvers shrugged.

‘Open up. I’m perishing.’

They pushed the creaking door. No sign of life, inside, as far as could be seen – which wasn’t much, for the draughty interior was lit only fitfully by a primitive lamp consisting of a tinware-saucer filled with melted beargrease in which the wick floated in imminent danger of shipwreck. This lamp hung by cords from the cross-beam and moved in the draughts, so that the shadows came and went with eerie unpredictability, offering unprepossessing glimpses of strange-shaped, oddly coloured objects against the walls and in the corners, hinting at lumpish, silent occupants crouched hither and thither, but covering up everything with darkness again almost immediately.

Below the lamp stood a long table marked with one or two odd-looking stains, on which lay a big wooden platter, hollowed out not with a chisel but by the application of fire, and a stone knife of antique shape but very finely honed as to the blade. Spattered on the beaten earth floor around the table were traces of old blood, of fur and of feathers, trodden into the ground by, presumably, the feet of priests and worshippers. The smell was hideous, as of incense mingled with death, and it was very cold.

‘What did I tell you?’ said Lizzie. ‘One of their churches. Typical church atmosphere.’

Something – the wind in the rafters; a rat; a concealed priest – rustled when she spoke. And the place was so ill-lit the entire population of the village might have been concealed in the thick, haunted dark. There was a nightmarish sense of claustrophobia about the place, that was yet tense with expectancy, as if something hideous had been prevented from happening by their arrival, but the actors in the interrupted rite were patient, and could wait, were waiting and seeing what these beings who’d brought the mother and child back to the village were up to. Custom-built for holy, arcane, archaic practices, for revelations, for consultations with the dead, for sacrifices, the wild church was intended to impress, and was impressive.

But Lizzie and Fevvers owed their capacity for survival to a refusal to be impressed by their surroundings. Fevvers gently laid the young mother down on the table with a relieved grunt and stretched her weary arms. The young mother opened her eyes and took note of her surroundings. The god-hut of her native village! And why had the baby stopped crying? She found she felt a little less unwell and started to gather her strength in order to get up and investigate the preparations for her own funeral she was sure were under way.

‘Look out!’ hissed Lizzie.

There was a
man
in the corner.

No; not a man. The women breathed again. There in the corner, now lit, now dark again according to the swaying of the lamp, stood a wooden image, somewhat larger than the little life-size of the woodsmen, wrapped in furs, shawls and girdles, and there was one white shirt on him the front of which was stiff with dried egg-liquor. Fevvers’ heart went pit-a-pat when she saw that. The idol’s head bore several three-pointed caps made of black, blue and red cloth but it was hard to see much of its face because of the furs, shawls and bits of lace and tin and ribbon that covered it. Its maw appeared to be ravening, however, and its eyes, made of discs of beaten tin, flashed when visited by the wavering flame of the lamp.

The idol spoke.

‘Whence cometh thou? Whither goeth thou?’

The startled baby bawled to hear the idol speak in good American. The young mother leapt from the table –
that
yell was never posthumous! – and grappled with Lizzie for possession of the baby, adding her own shrieks to the din. Lizzie delivered up the baby so she could catch hold of a growling something as it came out from under the table where the Shaman had kicked it when the sacrifice was interrupted before it began. The bear, affronted, cuffed Lizzie about the head and they scuffled together, knocking over the table as they did so. The dish and knife fell clattering to the floor. They banged against the idol in their wrestling. The idol toppled against another one, similarly clad, with more of a stag-like look. Toppling in its turn, the staggy deity knocked the next in line of the row of idols from its perch and so on, in a domino effect of comprehensive desecration. A number of skulls rolled round the floor, released from their stash under the ursine idol. It was not at first apparent these were the skulls of bears. The disturbed lamp swished back and forth, faster and faster, splashing hot grease over everything. Fevvers kept her head sufficiently to dance backwards from the mêlée, singing out:

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

The lamp dipped and swung with such energy the lit wick flew off, hit the wall and was extinguished, leaving the god-hut black as pitch, in which unseen presences made themselves felt with a vengeance, pinching, punching, sometimes made of fur, sometimes of leather, emitting weird screeches and jingle-jangling away their little bells; had the women been attacked by the ghosts of a team of morris dancers? Fevvers wrestled with an invisible until she smelt flesh and bit hard. She bit bone and tasted blood. It was alive. There was an ugly but unmistakably human squawk. She made a grab; another squawk, as she ascertained she wrestled with a male.

Once Lizzie got an arm-lock on the bear, she located the dropped stone knife with her foot and kept her foot firmly down on it, in spite of the blows with which some leathery, gibbering, tinkling thing belaboured her. Fevvers did not let go of the hand between her teeth as she tumbled the rest of the faceless anatomy to the ground, where she plumped herself down on his chest, breathing heavily. It shouted in a language that sounded not as if spoken but as if knitted on steel needles. It must have asked for some light on the business, for, a moment later, came an odd cadaverous glow from somewhere in a corner, accompanied by a peculiar smell.

The fuss died down, as if the light calmed them; a last whimper from the baby, a snuffle from the bear and, in the ensuing hush, Fevvers saw whom she straddled.

Walser wore his ceremonial dress and a triangular cap with a fur trim and a piece of tin cut in the shape of a dollar sign at the front. He was a little thinner in the face. To a European eye, the pale gold beard, which now reached halfway down his chest, ill-matched his leather petticoats and he could have done with soap and water; he stank. And that was not the half of it, for there was a vatic glare in his grey eyes, his eyes of a glossy brilliance, his eyes with the pin-point pupils. A vatic glare and no trace of scepticism at all. Furthermore, they seemed to have lost their power to reflect.

Fevvers felt the hairs on her nape rise when she saw that he was looking at her as if, horror of horrors, she was perfectly natural – natural, but abominable. He fixed her with his phosphorescent eye and, after a moment, his voice rose in song:

‘Oh, my
Gawd
!’ said Fevvers. For he had translated the familiar tune into some kind of chant, some kind of dirge, some kind of Siberian invocation of the spectral inhabitants of the other world which co-exists with this one, and Fevvers knew in her bones his song was meant to do her harm.