Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

  For the next three months, he drank in the taverns around the old Hay Market. He told people he owned the biggest circus in New York City and owned a troupe of pure-bred white Arabian horses. He described the red plush, the chandeliers, the gilt boxes, the bobbing plumes on the horses. Every time he lay down to sleep, the circus he owned played in front of his eyes in the dark. Other days he woke up feeling obscurely oppressed and walked about all day in a state of mortal fear. Marie made him sleep on the sofa because he muttered in his sleep. He let his beard grow. He stopped washing and started to smell. She nagged him to go to the doctor, shouted at him, jollied him along, pleaded with him to pull himself together. “You’re scaring me,” she said.

  Oscar still leaned against him and it still made him sad. Sometimes every little thing touched a nerve and he wanted to cry. Sometimes he wanted to kick things. Then a mood of defiant joy would burst up from somewhere, and he’d spend all his money and go down Nevsky Prospect singing out loud, a hundred months have passed, Lorena, not caring a monkey’s toss what anybody thought of him. At last he let her drag him to the doctor, and the doctor gave him morphine for the pain in his bones, along with some kind of pills he kept forgetting to take. He couldn’t follow a thought along its track for more than a few seconds without losing it. The lost thoughts writhed around each other like a mass of bisected worms looking for their other halves. And when that happened he was nothing, only the irrational beat of each moment passing.

  Knowledge, he explained to his vagabond-faced friend in the tavern, resides with pain in the bones. Jesus knew that. Bones. Flesh. Pain. Beauty. Truth. Words in the head.

  Just words in the head.

  Then one night he came home in the early white night of a Petersburg summer, and Julia was waiting for him in the foyer of his wax museum. She was sitting on the bench in front of the magnificent figure of Peter the First, resplendent in his furs and finery. Her eyes gleamed at him. Theo Junior was asleep on her knee with his thumb in his mouth and his hand cupped over his nose. She was real. Both of them were real. His heart melted and he ran to her, but she vanished; there one minute, gone the next, she and her baby.

  Marie came down in her nightgown to see what all the noise was about and found him dressed up in Peter the First’s clothes, carrying the naked emperor out into the street where snow was beginning to settle.

  “What the hell are you doing!” she cried.

  “Taking him to the river to see if he can swim.”

  “Get back in here!”

  Half out of the door, Theo looked over his shoulder at her with a grin.

  “You’ve got that twitch again,” she said. “You’re not well. I’m calling the doctor first thing, you come in now and go to bed.”

  “I’m bringing them back,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I need his space. I’m bringing Julia and the boy back, and I need that space.”

  “That’s the best spot in the whole place, Theo,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I can do what I like,” he said, hoisting the emperor higher. “It’s my museum. I can throw them all out if I want to.”

  “Oh, please, Theo, stop all this. You’re driving me mad.”

  “Am I? Am I really, Marie? Driving you mad, am I? Try this!” He shrieked, a short ear-splitting yowl like a cat’s. It scared her, so she slapped his face.

  “Shut up!” she hissed, grabbing his arm and dragging him back across the threshold with the dummy. When she turned from locking the door, he’d thrown the dummy aside and was crouching at the foot of the stairs with his arms over his head, weeping harshly.

  “What did you do that for?” she said sternly. “Why did you scream like that? Horrible sound!”

  “Why not scream?” He looked up, his face contorted.

  She walked toward him. “Stop it! Stop it, Theo. Stop this right now. I can’t stand it.”

  “Scream then,” he said and jumped up, grabbing her by the shoulders and staring intently into her eyes. “We should all scream.” He looked terrible, ridiculous in Peter the Great’s clothes, wasted and wet-eyed, and the look of trouble in his eyes was painful.

  Marie put her hands up and wiped his eyes. “Come on now,” she said, “you come on upstairs and I’ll make you some tea. You need to lie down.”

  He pulled away, rubbed his face and ran upstairs with his patchy ermine flowing behind him. Marie swore, gathering up the clothes he’d discarded for the emperor’s. As for the emperor, she got him to his feet and leaned him naked against the wall. He’d have to wait for tomorrow for his clothes.

  When she went upstairs, he’d gone to bed on the sofa and lay with his back to her.

  “That’s not the way, Theo,” she said quietly to his back. “Giving in to these mad kind of feelings. Resist them. Just stop. You don’t have to go mad.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’m warning you, Theo. You’re getting too much for me to handle. If it carries on, I don’t think I can live with it.”

  She returned to her own bed in the next room.

  Next day the doctor gave him a powder, and left some more for him to take. He drooped nervily about the flat for a few days, till one night the sound of the people in one of the houses in the street tipped him over the edge. Snow fell lazily past the window. Marie was giving Oscar his supper, and there was peace in the air till those idiots started. It sounded to him as if a regiment of soldiers were getting very drunk.

  “What in God’s name are they doing in there?” He started up and went to the window.

  “What?” Marie asked, wiping off the spoon on the edge of Oscar’s dish.

  “That god-awful racket!”

  She listened, poised. “What?” she said again.

  “Are you deaf?”

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  “You can’t hear that?” He threw open the window and stuck his head out. He could hear them, a couple of houses down, continual bursts of brash, deafening laughter.

  “Don’t shout,” she said.

  “Me? What about them?”

  She put down the spoon, went over and stood beside him. “What is it?” she asked patiently.

  “Listen!”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s only those people with the dog. They’ve got some friends in.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! They can have their friends in but why should the whole street have to put up with them?”

  “It’s not that loud.” She took him by the arm and closed the window firmly. “See. If we close the window you can’t hear it.”

  “Completely inconsiderate!”

  He wouldn’t sit down. Backward and forward he went with a murderous look, to the window, in and out of the bedroom. He kicked the fireplace screen.

  “Now,” said Marie to Oscar, whose full attention was on his pacing father, “just finish this last little bit and we’ll have a story.”

  Theo cursed like a man being dragged to the gallows.

  “Theo!”

  “If you can’t hear that, you’re mad,” he said.

  “Ssh! Voice down!”

  “Me? Voice down? Me?” He laughed horribly, and she thought he might be about to burst into tears. “Why don’t you go and tell them! Voice down!”

  “Calm down, Theo, please.”

  Another burst of laughter broke over his head, stupid, mocking and viciously indifferent. He screamed harshly, covering his ears and slamming his eyes closed.

  “Theo! Please!”

  He wanted to storm over there and beat them all to death. He roared. Oscar laughed.

  “It’s not even that bad,” she said, “I can just about hear it if I stand really still and…”

  “Are you deaf?”

  “No, Theo,” she said, raising her eyes to heaven, “I am not deaf.”

  He put his head down and ran toward the wall as if he were going to butt it, but stopped short and swept all the things off the writing table instead. Then
he swung around and dashed the samovar across the floor. Oscar started to cry. Marie swept him up in her arms.

  “Get out!” she shouted. “Get out if you can’t behave like a respectable person.”

  He ran out, down through the museum and into the street. He started shouting up at the house next door but one, cursing and screaming and damning them all to death, then ran away.

  “Oh my God,” Marie whispered, and went to call on a neighbor to watch the child.

  The police were called because there was a madman on Tuchkov Bridge, pulling money out of his pockets, tearing it up into little pieces and throwing it into the black water of the Little Neva. After that, out came handfuls of copper. That went over too. Then he took off his clothes down to his socks and drawers and tossed each item separately out into the void, cheering and laughing as each one landed on the water and was carried away. A large crowd had gathered at the entrance to the bridge. Two policemen approached. “Enough now, old man,” one of them said.

  “Shut your trap,” said Theo.

  He ran from them, and a chase began. He laughed and leapt in the air, shrieking his cat yowl, raving. “Hypocrites,” he roared, as the first policeman gripped his arm. “I’m a bad man.” They pulled him through the crowd. The cold was getting to him now. “You make such a fuss about all this,” he said through chattering teeth, “but what about you? You wouldn’t want her, would you?” He was slurring his words as if drunk, but curiously, for once, he wasn’t. “Marry her, would you? Give her proper love like a man should? No, you wouldn’t, so you shut your trap.”

  The crowd doubled and a carriage appeared on the far side of the bridge. Three men emerged from it.

  “Off to the madhouse,” someone said.

  They put him in a straitjacket and took him to the police station, where Marie waited, veiled, statuesque, forbidding. She had been waiting to see what state he was in, wondering what she should do. But when she heard the hysteria in his laugh as he looked at her, and saw the wild look in his eyes, she knew she couldn’t cope anymore.

  “You may as well keep him in that,” she said, “I’ve done all I can. It’s not fair on the child. He must be committed.”

  The paper chains had come as several packs of red and gold paper strips half an inch wide. Licking the sticky ends to make links had made the insides of Rose’s cheeks feel sour, but it was worth it for the way they looked, hanging in U shapes all ’round the tops of the walls, above the mirror, around the doors and windows. Tattoo, away being fixed, had given up his place in the center of the mantelpiece to the tree. The crinkled gold paper of its pipe cleaners shone in the fire and candlelight. High above the fireplace, red and gold links also shone. Half asleep, Rose was still in some way aware of a gentle festive peace enfolding the room.

  Eyes closed, once more adrift in the magic wood, going deeper.

  Deeper.

  She was never more complete, more sane, than when she was here, every little dropped discarded thing around her also sleeping. The flickering of light from two half-burned-down pink candles, one on either side of the tree, played on her closed lids and she opened her eyes. Half seeing, they misted over with affection. Who cares for these lost things? Things once touched. The touch, still there. Someone was alive and loved them once. Somewhere. How they pull at the heart, and yet they tell me I have no heart. I’m not clever, the world runs rings ’round me. But I’m thickening out now, going somewhere bigger than the world and all its cleverness. Music afar, a thrill in the air.

  Closed lids.

  The woods. One day instead of falling asleep, she’d get there—the opening of the trees, the castle across the moat, the drawbridge. Welcome, long awaited. She’d walk across the bridge and go inside. Nothing was more sure. But first she’d fly to the island. No one else around, the waters stirring with the wading feet of a ghost girl, the moon throwing light on smiling mouths, pink and soft, on little feet, little hands, on the eyes of the dolls, some closed, some wide, some gone. And if in some imagining, some fever, the dolls, called by the moon, suddenly opened their mouths in unison and sang together, and she, wherever she may be—very, very far away, glancing sideways—if she should hear even the smallest flicker on the edge of hearing, the edge of sleep, what would it sound like?

  Fast asleep now, beyond the woods and the island, unaware that the rain had begun, that it gently flecked her window and set off a sweet singsong in the gutters and drains.

  With no sound at all a gold link gave way in one of the paper chains. The chain whispered as it dropped down the wall, bunching on top of the tree but also pulling at some Blu-Tack holding up the next drape, so that that fell too, and the gold link at its end touched the top of the straight gold flame of the candle on the right-hand end of the mantelpiece. The flame reached up, welcoming.

  It was free, and ran all over the room, so ripe and lush and ready for the taking, carrying the whole thing and everything in it out of the world.

  Afew years later Hermann Otto ran into Julia in Munich. He’d been standing for a long time in front of the large glass cabinet, falling into a melancholy state as the rain teemed down on the canvas, remembering the living Julia while gazing at what remained.

  The Anthropological Exhibition had been set up under the awning of a big marquee, so that you had to pass it on the way into the circus. Gassner, the owner of the place and an old acquaintance, approached. “Marvelous, isn’t she?” he said.

  “Indeed.” Otto spoke gruffly. “And the poor little chap.”

  “No matter how much you look at her,” Gassner said, “she never becomes more believable.”

  Otto smiled. “She’d have made a good mother,” he said.

  “Well,” said Gassner, a short dapper man with an oiled goatee, “they’re mine now.”

  “You’ve bought them?”

  “Acquired,” said Gassner. “You could say they’re donations. I think she just wants to be rid of them. Have you met La Nouvelle Pastrana?”

  Otto hadn’t. Gassner conducted him through a red curtain, along a draped passageway, and through another curtain decorated with yellow moons on a deep blue background. A small, comfortable grass-floored area was laid out with sofas and easy chairs and low tables set with pastries and wine. Zenora Pastrana sat veiled on one of the sofas but rose to greet Otto.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said.

  She was wearing a black straw hat, highly feathered. The voluminous veil of spotted lace, pulled tight ’round her throat, obscured but did not completely hide her features. When she loosened the ribbon and unveiled, the effect was so much less startling than with Julia. Her face, broad-featured and masculine, was immaculately groomed and very friendly. She shook his hand firmly, and they sat down and drank wine. She was in town to offload the mummies en route from St. Petersburg to Karlsbad, she said.

  “Ah, yes, to Karlsbad,” said Otto. “And what do you intend to do there?”

  “Oh, I’m not staying there.” She straightened the veil above her thick black brows. “I’m just going to see the old place and then—well, I’ll take my son to Paris. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to see. I’d like to buy a house and retire.” She reached for her wine. “My husband left me very comfortable, you know. We had a successful business in the center of Petersburg. You knew him quite well, I believe?”

  “Reasonably. So very sorry to hear of his misfortune.”

  “His death, you mean,” she said. “Yes, a tragedy. Five years now! My goodness. Time!”

  A brain fever, he’d heard.

  “Will you miss them?” he asked.

  “Julia? Baby?” She looked down, considering. “I will,” she said after a while, “but I won’t be sorry to see them go. It’s time.” She smiled. “And I certainly won’t miss those long Petersburg winters.”

  Otto wished her luck and went on his way. In the main display area the rain was a tattoo on the canvas. The flap was open. The grass shone, the lights were yellow. She’d thrive, he thought. Prob
ably get another man. She could. Fine figure of a woman in her way. Poor old Lent. Always something fishy about the man. That simpering smile.

  Marie sat on for half an hour making small talk with Gassner, picking with her long manicured nails at a pastry and nibbling delicately. Then she had a carriage brought to the side entrance. But first, she took a last farewell of Julia and the boy. She could hardly look at Baby, the sight of his pretty chin made her too sentimental. So she looked at Julia, grand old thing, still standing proud and defiant. They’re not keeping up very well with her hair, she thought, and was almost tempted to pop in and give it a quick brush-up, a little readjustment here and there. But no, all that was past.

  “ ’Bye, sister,” she said and marched away straight-backed to where her cab was waiting.

  The grinding of carriage wheels on a million roads. The man with the money, first one man then the next, and the next; the men who stand at the entrance and call in the crowds that jog by in a choppy ever-changing sea, all grinning and gazing and wondering, avid for mysteries, drifting from the glass cabinet to the two-headed baby floating in a jar, to the waxwork of Robespierre losing his head. Germany, Holland, Belgium, Vienna, where life had been good, where one night when the show was just about over and everyone was getting ready to close up, three last-minute people came in through the open tent flap. A well-preserved woman of about fifty held the hand of an aging pinhead in a long blue raincoat.

  “There,” said the portly older man with a fine shock of curly gray hair. “Over there, Niece.”

  “Cato, don’t pull,” said Berniece, dragged unceremoniously across the grass to stand in front of Julia’s cabinet. “God, Ezra,” she said, “now I wish I hadn’t come.”

  Ezra came to loom behind them, gazing solemnly, remembering seeing Julia for the first time across the yard in New Orleans, how he’d thought, God, God, impossible, even though he’d been warned.

  “Hoo-hah,” said Cato in a soft, puzzled tone.

  Berniece put her arm ’round his shoulder and pulled him close.