A Thorn for Miss R.: Book I: The Night Watchman

by Sakiv Koch

  “That’s my son you are manhandling,” Father said quietly, coming nearer. His voice was low, but there was a raging sea of menace in his tone.

  Shyam stood petrified. Except for his eyes, which blinked rapidly, no other part of his body moved by a hair’s breadth. I remained hanging in midair until Father took me in his arms and placed me on my feet again. I glanced at Rachna, who stood pale-faced in her doorway, watching her father and mine with large, frightened eyes.

  The sun had sent a direct probe of its rays into the street by now. A few men and women were beginning to come out from their houses.

  “I-I didn’t realize that this is R-Runa’s boy – your boy. I’d never harm your child intentionally. I-I am sorry, Ravi.”

  Father didn’t look at me, as though his purpose in being there had nothing to do with his child.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Shyam,” Father said, his head still bent in the manner of a predator, the dark light in his eyes glowing more distinctly and more dangerously than before. "And here you are – hiding in plain sight.”

  In height, he towered a full head over Shyam. But in the breadth of shoulders, the bulge of the chest, the thickness of the neck, and the sheer mass and muscularity of arms, Rachna’s father was built like a bull.

  Father, with the sneer on his lips deepening, took a step forward. In the same motion, his left arm swung out from his side and struck Shyam on the jaw. It happened so fast that I could only tell that Father had hit Shyam after I saw the strongman stagger.

  Rachna cried out. Shyam glanced at his daughter and opened his mouth to say something. Father’s fist flew out again with amazing speed and slammed once more into Shyam’s face.

  Rachna cried out more piteously this time. Two trickles of blood started from Shyam’s mouth and met at his chin to dribble drop by drop onto his shirt. His eyes glazed over. He shook his head to clear it and turned to face my father.

  “Don’t—aah.” He doubled over in pain, clutching his midriff with his hands. Rachna clung to her father’s leg and began to weep silently. A knot of people watched from their doorways or windows, but nobody dared to interfere.

  I approached my father timidly to take his hand in mine and stop him from doing further damage. I was distressed to see Rachna’s extreme distress. But I was afraid, too, that Shyam would eventually get angry enough to hit back and make mincemeat of my father.

  The very thought of the lifelong, unendurable humiliation that my father’s defeat would entail filled me with an undefinable dread. Father gently pushed me away as I came near him from behind, as though he had a pair of eyes at the back of his head, too. He then very tenderly disengaged Rachna’s arms from around her father’s leg and stood between her and Shyam.

  “Please…,” Rachna said, folding her hands and crying, but Father turned back toward Shyam, who still stood bent over. After a full minute, during which nobody moved or said anything, Shyam straightened and, for the first time, looked squarely into my father’s eyes.

  A twisted smile sprouted on Shyam’s mouth and his eyes mirrored the strange light that burned in Father’s eyes. Something tightened in my chest as Shyam wiped his chin with the back of his hand, bent a little, and sprang at my father. Father stepped aside lightly, much in the way I later saw Matadors do with charging bulls in Spain. Shyam recovered his balance and turned around with a speed defying his sheer mass.

  I would have liked to say here that they fought like little boys or like animals, but they battled like the most ferocious of all beasts — angry men. The small crowd moved around the two men as they left the street and went tumbling down a slope.

  People speculated upon the number of the madman’s bones Shyam would break by the time he was finished, but the ferocity of our fathers kept everyone at bay.

  At the end, when a dense cloud of dust settled down and the air cleared, we saw Shyam lying on his stomach and my father kneeling over his back. Father’s knee was grinding into the small of Shyam’s back, and his hands clutched the strongman’s throat in a tight grip.

  I was still inexpressibly miserable and tired, but a great weight lifted off my heart. I ran toward Rachna, who stood crying behind a woman. I took Rachna’s hand in mine.

  “It is okay,” I said consolingly. “It was a fair fight—.”

  She flung my hand aside and turned violently upon me.

  “I hate, hate, hate you,” she cried. “Go away, and never come near me again! Never!”

  Chapter 14: The Misty Bridge

  A man doesn’t just walk into a street on a fine morning, ignores his absconding son, and starts to bash another man without any apparent reason for doing so. My father had crossed over to that point on a bridge the other end of which lay somewhere in Nadya’s story.

  My mother had already walked me a good deal over the span of that bridge. I, in turn, had shown Rachna the entire tract familiar to me. And although large stretches of it still lay shrouded in mist for us, we knew enough by that morning not to be greatly surprised (though we were very scared and sad) at the fight between our fathers.

  In fact, Rachna and I had been hoping that our fathers wouldn’t come face to face before we had both grown up. We had hoped for many other things, too, which never came to pass. Hope, this hope.

  ◆◆◆

  The night was cold and clear. There were music and song in the air. There was also a mosaic of snort, grunt, roar, groan, whinny, bark, chatter, trumpet, snarl, and yelp weaved together in one long, tattered fabric of sound.

  Firelight flowed from four large bonfires in continuous streams and danced over a crowd of men, women, and children to the tune of a light breeze. Behind a line of wagons bearing immense cages was a scattering of tents, most of them dark and empty. A hoarse, choked voice repeating something over and over again could be heard from one of the tents.

  “She is Hope,” the old midwife said, kissing and rocking the baby in her arms inside the clown’s tent.

  “She is Nadya, my Nadya.”

  “Ahem, ahem,” Illya the Bumbler cleared his throat politely, unobtrusively. His face was painted over with a mix of greasepaint and powder. He wore a ridiculously small hat over his large head, a tight coat with enormous, multicolored lapels, and a shirt entirely made out of gaudy patchwork.

  “She’s—er—n-not actually N-Nadya, old mom,” he said in his professional bantering tone while, at the same time, appearing a little scared of the gruff midwife.

  Akilina smacked a kiss on the baby’s cheek and shot Illya a venomous glance with her glittering eyes.

  “Would you have the goodness to repeat what you just said, good sir?” she asked in a shrill voice, pressing the thin lines of her mouth tight together.

  “Just t-that I had—er—c-c-christened her Alyona—.“

  “Would you have the goodness to stop stammering, good sir?”

  Illya said nothing for a few moments. He merely put the thumb of his left hand into his mouth, cocked his head, and started to blink his big green eyes slowly. In spite of his babyish expression and the thick coat of greasepaint that covered his face, pain dripped palpably from his countenance.

  After a few moments, he suddenly swooped down on some cutlery heaped in a corner of the tent and started to sing a crude song to the accompaniment of the music he produced out of tapping a china cup with a spoon:

  Illya’s thumb was his mother,

  he never knew any other.

  Illya’s wife was fair and lovely,

  she eloped with someone slovenly.

  Illya found a fairy, a little bundle of joy,

  but Old Mom made Illya’s baby her own toy.

  Never-ending is Illya’s spell of grief,

  his happiness is weak and so very brief…

  Nadya started to cry in a tinny, sweet voice that promised a future richness, but it failed to put a stop to Illya’s hoarse, pathetic song.

  “Stop your foolery, you fool!” Akilina cried, snapping her head at Illya.

  He close
d his mouth, opened it again, and his left thumb shot back into it. A zigzag track of his skin showed beneath the paint on either side of his nose. Green, dirtied beads of tears hung suspended from his pointy chin.

  Akilina grunted as she rose from the floor with the bawling baby held in the crook of one arm. The old woman lunged at the thumb-sucking, silently-weeping clown. Illya cowered before her. She wound her free arm around Illya’s neck and jerked his head down.

  The clown gave in meekly. He stood like a lamb whose head is pinned to the butcher’s slab.

  “Get that thumb out of your mouth right now!” Akilina commanded in her shrill voice, unmindful of the deepening notes of Nadya’s ululating crying. “Small wonder that the silly hussy you married ran away with another man — at least that slovenly man was a man. Look at you—all tearsy-pearsy and ruining your paintwork with your girlish waterworks! You are sissier than the sissiest sissy I have ever known!”

  Illya stood with his head bent. His chest heaved with muted sobs.

  “This fairy, this little bundle of joy,” Akilina continued, pointing toward Nadya with her chin, “is no toy of mine. She is yours. From today on, she is your daughter and I am your mother. And I never, ever want you to...” Akilina prattled on for a long time, so long that Nadya gradually stopped crying and started dozing. Illya inched back slowly at first and then back-flipped out of the tent, taking off into the night as fast as his legs would carry him.

  But quick though he was, he did not vanish from Akilina’s sight before she had seen the corners of his mouth curled in a small, shy smile.

  Nadya was a special child. She gained complete acceptance not only for herself but also for Akilina in the closely-knit social fabric of the circus’ community. There were several other babies around, but not one amongst them pulled the crowds that Nadya did right from her infancy. Most of the women and older children in the circus made frequent pilgrimages to Illya’s tent to see and play with Nadya.

  Nadya’s history was definitely a part of her attraction — Akilina had repeated the tale of her (Akilina's) sins countless times since stepping into the circus, but histories were plentiful in the often scarcity-ridden confines of the circus.

  Vosk’s Great Roving Circus and Menagerie was fairly big — more than two hundred horses pulled its wagons, and the canvas of its main tents covered more than an acre of land. Within a few weeks, it became apparent to everyone, including Akilina herself, that Akilina was not going to leave that rigorous-but-charming life.

  Sasha Vosk had been a rover long before he started his own circus. He had wandered through large parts of Europe, South Asia as well as America, and so, his establishment included elements from several circus-cultures throughout the world.

  When Vosk’s was not performing in one town or on one village green, it was traveling. The immensely long train of wagons, filled to their capacities with people, animals, and equipment, rolled sometimes under clear, star-rich skies, sometimes under brutalized heavens pregnant with massive storm clouds.

  Irrespective of weather and circumstance, irrespective of the presence or absence of a paying audience, the show at Vosk’s went on. And on.

  “Akilina doesn’t live on charity,” Akilina would declare oftener than she needed to before throwing herself into the grueling tasks of setting up the circus whenever they arrived at a new location and dismantling everything whenever they left for a fresh destination.

  She insinuated herself into the canvas crew of the circus, making already hard things harder for the regular members of the crew by constantly being in their way and by doing umpteen number of things which they would have to undo and redo. Her complete unsuitability to the task and her one-hundred-percent defective work-quality never fazed her, never lessened her zeal by an iota.

  She instantly and garrulously nipped in the bud any suggestions that she should try her talents in some other department — working in the kitchen, for example, or (spoken more surreptitiously) cleaning the toilets. No one resented the old, eccentric midwife. The crew members had built a very high tolerance-threshold for her due to several reasons.

  The chief amongst these was her dedication to Nadya, the entire circus’s darling. Secondly, in spite of her age and the severity of her facial features, she possessed a tireless, infectious, and cheerful energy that chased off others’ fatigue and refreshed them. Thirdly, she had appropriated to herself all the myriad duties related to childbirth and would not accept a single kopek for her services. Fourthly, in the circus community’s not-infrequent tussles with ‘outsiders’, Akilina could take on any number of adversaries by using the dangerous weapons of her barbed tongue, her wildly gesticulating, clawed hands, and her rage-contorted face … you could compile a list running into ‘ninthly’ and ‘tenthly’ of such amusing-but-effective factors, at the end of which you would always write this: lastly, she had an impregnable façade, a fiery, intimidating front, but she exuded something that immediately called up every kind man and woman’s pity.

  In spite of her rough appearance and her tough manner, Akilina was an immensely pitiable old woman. And the circus was full of kind people. After the circus had been completely set up, Akilina would invariably take Nadya in her arms and occupy a grandstand seat in the big top.

  She watched with rapt attention as the artists and the animals paraded around the hippodrome track. She would sometimes wave her hand at them, call out someone by his or her name, or hold up little Nadya to indicate where they were sitting.

  Akilina’s sparsely-toothed mouth would drop open and her glittering eyes would go round when the performance began and the trapeze artists hurtled themselves through space, tumblers tumbled, fire-eaters ate flames, sword-swallowers gobbled up glistening blades, and rope-walkers strode and danced upon thin cords.

  She sweated and trembled in fear for the performers’ safety as much as she enjoyed their astonishing feats. The only time she appeared to breathe easy was when the singing clowns came onto the stage and made the audience roar with laughter.

  She would flee the big top in mute horror as soon as the animals' acts began and the lion-tamer entered a cage full of tigers or lions. Once outside, she expressed in a shaking voice her unshakable belief that the poor ‘meddler’ would never be seen alive again, that he would never be seen whole again.

  When Ivan—the lion tamer—emerged very much whole and very much alive out of the cage, she would morbidly shake her head and turn away, signifying that Ivan’s fatal mauling was just a matter of time, just an impending catastrophe postponed to the next performance. She would spend this interval of time in watching the menagerie and the sideshow—the former populated by several exotic animals from foreign geographies, and the latter by unique human beings in different sizes and shapes, also from various parts of the world.

  Nadya quickly progressed from sitting in Akilina’s lap to taking up her own seat (little hands gripping the sides of the chair, little feet dangling in the air), and as rapidly — far too rapidly, it appeared to the old midwife — from the grandstand to the ring itself.

  She could juggle and ropewalk by the time she was eight. Her extraordinary ability to learn was matched only by her eagerness to expand her repertoire. In the following years, Nadya started to practice the rudiments of the more dangerous performances: trapeze and wild-animal training.

  Akilina went blue in the face when she first detected her precious, delicate, beautiful Nadya entering the cage of those terrible, terrible striped beasts from India — the Royal Bengal tigers — entering that horrible cage with that uncannily lucky meddler, Ivan, the lion tamer.

  In all probability, Akilina suffered a minor heart attack the night she walked into the big top after the day’s last performance and saw Nadya flying twenty feet high in the air, pitched from the hands of one slender aerialist into those of another—one who appeared incapable of catching and holding on to a lizard, far less a healthy, thirteen-year-old girl.

  After that day, Nadya had to coax and cajole A
kilina before undertaking anything that involved the least amount of risk to her. The old woman would clamp her mouth shut, pull her eye-patch over one of her eyes, cross her arms over her chest, and shake her head in a continuous motion, negating anything Nadya or Illya or anyone else might say to oppose her notions of safety.

  She would continue to shake her head while she sat in the audience, visibly wincing, sighing, moaning, frowning, growling, and shaking her fists at the performers and the animals, forewarning them against trying anything mean on her Nadya.

  Nadya did come to harm, though not at the hands of any man or through the claws of any beast. Nadya was practicing the fascinating art of contortion in the empty big top on a night as stormy as the terrible night of her birth. Gust after gust of a gale-force wind swayed and jolted the tent dangerously, but Nadya was so thrilled by the feel of her legs garlanding her neck that she paid no heed to anything else.

  The bale rings holding the canvas in place let go at one particularly vicious tug of the wind. The center pole collapsed, the tent blew off with a roar, and the rigging overhead came tumbling down into the ring, where Nadya sat trapped in her posture.

  They found her still half-tangled with herself, unconscious, and bleeding from a head wound. Contrary to everyone’s expectations and fears, this accident did not lead Akilina to force Nadya away from performing altogether — Nadya somehow convinced her that if one could be injured doing something as harmless in itself as a little stretching exercise, then no place and no occupation was really safe.

  Although her very first successful attempt at contortion had ended so painfully, Nadya started to devote most of her time to the mastering of that very art.