Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

  “Yes,” said Ezra, “it’s Julia.”

  “He remembers,” said Berniece.

  “Of course he does.”

  “I liked her, you know,” said Berniece.

  “Baby,” said Cato, pointing.

  They stood in silence.

  “Oh! He’s crying,” said Berniece.

  Tears were pouring down Cato’s old face. She got out her hankie and wiped his eyes. “Oh, those eyes of yours, Cato,” she said.

  Budapest.

  Krakow.

  East and east again to skirt the Russian border. Twenty years, and somewhere along the line Julia and Theo Junior acquired a grand Russian carriage, with velvet and ruching. Back and back and back it carried them, very far, though time of course no longer existed. Years, no more than circles in water. There were oceans and the roaring of waves and weather. Over and over, light, dark, high summer, bitter skies, snow, rain dripping on a puddle, circles, a dark rattling community of pickled curiosities, abnormalities, fakes, freaks, things of no provenance. More years, more roads. The shriek of a train. Ten years of Norwegian byways. Darkness moving on, progressing through something. Could have been a swamp, a birth canal, a long dream. Wars, rumors of wars. And the men and women, their faces changing like the faces on the closed canvas of a half-awake eye. A banner over the entrance to the tent read: HUMANITY, KNOW THYSELF.

  The business had been falling off for years. A couple of times they opened up and no one came. Blame it on the war. Her glass eyes stared at the wall in a loft in Sweden as the war passed.

  Years, creeping slowly by, nibbled by moths, her hair straight and lank, the flowers and feathers long gone. The boy tipped sideways. Someone dusted her off, set the boy straight, rattled them back to Norway on a diesel train and hauled them ’round on tour again. In a garage in Oslo a spider made its home in the boy’s hair. Someone somewhere took Julia’s pearl cross and replaced it with a cheaper version, because it made no sense for such a pretty thing to languish on the neck of a corpse. Once in the far frozen north they were delayed for a few days by weather, and the young daughter of the woman who kept the showground came in every day and talked to the boy as if he were a doll. He did look like a doll. His eyes were always open, his face always surprised. In Malmo, the cabinet was dropped as it was being moved and a big crack appeared up the back of it. No one fixed it, and they were on the road again but the crowds were thin. A trickle.

  Ten more years of fabric fading, of varnish chipping, seams fraying, fabric fading.

  Ten more in storage.

  There’s no call for it anymore. Really, in this day and age.

  Try America. But the ocean changed nothing, it was just the same there, roads, trains, midways, boardwalks. And back across the ocean, third time, to the north, the snow.

  There was a warehouse in Oslo full of old fairground stuff. She ended up there with her baby and her Russian carriage, with half a dozen go-karts, a few tarnished bumper cars and all the crew: the phrenological heads, the Anatomical Venus, the piglet Cyclops, the pregnant, hairless six-footed rat and a dusty jar with two sleeping faces at peace, side by side, scarcely discernible these days through the yellowish glaze of grime.

  One night, four boys came up to the old industrial estate from the high-rise flats nearby. They fooled about for a while, riding their bikes ’round the padlocked units, chucking cans of Coke into the weeds growing thickly between them, till one of them, taking a piss in front of an old lockup with boarded-up windows, saw that the corrugated metal that covered the door had rusted away at the bottom where it met the grass. He zipped up, hunkered down and pulled at it. Rust fell into the grass and the strip of metal started coming away from the rotting wood behind.

  “We can get in!” he called out.

  His friends leaned their bikes up against the concrete wall and gathered ’round. It only took a few minutes to rip the metal away and expose the old doors, which weren’t even locked but only tied together with a bit of wire. The darkness inside made them pause on the threshold, daring themselves silently to go in. One of them took a flashlight from his saddlebag and bravely led the way in, the others keeping close. The light shone on boxes and closed crates, hulking shapes. Farther in—

  “Go-karts!”

  “Must have been a fair. Look. Bumper cars.”

  The light wandered.

  “Let’s take them out.”

  “What? The karts?”

  “Yeah. Give us a hand.”

  They dragged two out. They were hauling another two when someone yelled (afterward, no one could say who), and they gagged on fear, freezing in their tracks. The light shot up to the blank ceiling, bounced off shapes suddenly monstrous and unearthly, quavered about queasily till it came once more to rest on the ghastly face of an ape thing with big staring eyes.

  After the shock, they laughed.

  “It’s a waxwork!”

  Hearts still thumping, they approached.

  “Must be from the House of Horrors.”

  It stood in front of a fancy carriage in a big glass case, an ape with a great jutting mouth, an ape in a dress. A baby one stood next to it.

  “Does it open?”

  It did, with a long slow creak so classically scary it made them laugh some more.

  “Get her out.”

  It wasn’t heavy. The little one came off its stand. It was rotten underneath and all its hair was gone.

  “Put her by the door! Scare the shit out of someone.”

  “This is falling to pieces.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look—if I put her arm up like this—”

  It came off.

  A great guffaw.

  “Woo-woo, it’s coming to get you!”

  The arm, bent at the elbow, still wearing a gold bracelet, waving about, chasing faces.

  Someone must have seen the light.

  When the police car came winking up from Rommen, they fled on their bikes. The one with the flashlight still had the severed limb, tucked under his arm as he skimmed his bike one-handed down the hill. When he got home, he laid it down on the kitchen table and started examining it. His older brother came in to get something from the fridge.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Wood. Wool,” said the boy, poking the gaping wound where it had ripped from the body. “It’s from a waxwork.”

  “Where’d you get that? Where’ve you been?” His brother bent down, a look of concentration on his face.

  “Sorry, kid,” he said when he looked up again, “this is no waxwork. I have to ring the police,” and went out to make the call.

  There was not too much of a fuss. The police put the big mummy along with its arm in their basement. The identity was established without much difficulty; after all, this thing had a history. No one claimed it and no one seemed to want it. And there was, of course, no crime to answer for so the police had no need to hang on to it. The university took it and put it in the vaults. The rats had been at the baby and he was in such bad shape they stuck him in a bin at the back of police headquarters. Sometime in the early hours a cat nosed the bin open. Later, a stray dog on the scavenge took him in her mouth and ran away. She chewed on him enthusiastically, tearing bits off, then dropped him in a stairwell, where a young man picked him up and, taking him for some sort of voodoo fetish, hung him over the door of his room, which was painted purple and black and decorated with animal skulls and esoteric symbols. A year later, one of his friends, drunk, removed it. It was thrown over the wall of an empty house and lay in the yard till the clearance people turned up and dumped it with a load of other bits and pieces into one of several boxes that ended up in the back room of a junk shop. A dealer, seeing that the wheat and chaff was hopelessly mixed, bought the boxes as a job lot, stuck them in the back of a van, drove them onto a ferry, crossed the North Sea, and hauled them down to London to his bric-a-brac shop in Camberwell. He cleaned up the good stuff. The rest he chucked in a big yellow garbage bin down the road.<
br />
  Theo Junior lay on top of a pile of rubble in the bin, legless, armless, one-eyed, till a woman called Rose came along, felt sorry for him and took him home.

  Dreamlike, silent, the island drifted into view like an absurdist painting, a profusion of small faces, blind eyes, sweet lips, smiles, serenity, blight. The roots of the willows reached out, clutching the bank like dragon claws, seeming to anchor it in its place. Cane grew high. The soil was alive, growth was lush. Apart from oak and horse chestnut and silver birch, Adam knew nothing at all about trees, but there was an abundance of type and shade, a richness of sap and leaves and bark, and the water smelled of green darkness.

  A man in a snow-white shirt and straw hat met them on the ramshackle landing stage, accepted their money and gave them a small talk in Spanish. Adam didn’t understand a word. Anyway, he knew the story. The quiet middle-aged Spanish couple who’d shared his trajinera on the long drift from the city listened intently, laughing once or twice when the guide made a joke. Adam laughed too to be polite, but his eyes, irresistibly drawn to the dolls, would not stay on the man. Faces emerged from the foliage wherever the eye rested, revealing themselves in greater and greater numbers. Even though he’d known exactly what to expect, the whole island disoriented him, and it had nothing to do with fear or superstition. It was the sheer defiance of the place. I am mad and pointless, it said. Here I am.

  The guide led them to a scattering of wooden shacks and shelters with corrugated roofs, most of them broken-down and half open to the elements. One had the word MUSEO in large colored letters painted above the door. They went in. The shrine was tacky. The hermit’s smiling face beamed out from a framed color photograph. The doll in the center had the pretty bespectacled face of a plain schoolmarm in an old Hollywood film, the kind revealed to be a beauty by the time the credits roll. Her eyes looked down on the heap of gifts in front of her, the touristy junk people leave, the sad appeasements and compassionate offerings. To comply with the custom, Adam had bought a couple of candy bars before getting on the boat, and these he added to the mix, wondering if the guide would take them home later for his kids. Walls, ceiling, beams crowded in, a fly-buzzing bazaar of misshapes and mutations. And oh, how time had feasted on the old ones, cobwebs rampant, dirt triumphant. Young, shiny new ones hung side by side with their own future selves. He reached up to touch the face of a friendly little girl with plump sweet cheeks, missing an eye and a leg. The holes that had once held the knots of her hair made dotted lines that zigzagged back and forth across the graying pink of her bald skull. Small, crossed pink feet nestled beside her ear. He looked up. A baby face smiled back.

  The guide had gone outside to give them more room. Adam and the Spanish couple, quiet, almost reverential, stood, looked, walked about. He was glad he didn’t have to talk to anyone. When their eyes met, he and the Spanish couple smiled at one another. The husband, a small fat man with a handsome face and flat gray hair, said something to his wife in Spanish, half whispering, and she said something back, half irritated, half laughing. Adam went out and wandered in and out of the other shacks. All were doll-strung. One had an old bed with a rotten mattress. Was that where he’d slept, the hermit? Imagine the old guy, living here alone all those years, the dolls becoming more and more each year. Crazy. He played with them, she said. They didn’t scare him.

  She’d have loved this.

  The Spanish couple had wandered away, seeming disinclined to explore much farther than the immediate area around the shacks and wooden shelters. The guide had gone down to the landing stage and was talking to the boatman. Adam wandered alone around the island, looking for a place to leave Tattoo. Wildflowers grew here and there. The high thin shriek of a bird cut the air. The sun was hot and high, and where the foliage thinned, it made the clear places almost blinding. Under the trees, the interplay of black shade and bleached-out white stung the eyes. Sun and rain had worked on the dolls, and worked still. Adam’s progress was slow and random, and he stopped constantly, compelled to study at length. Each hand, each limb, each face, ravaged as though with a terrible illness. But there were too many. Had anyone ever counted? Probably not. You could have a competition, like guessing the number of sweets in a jar.

  Thousands, he thought.

  By the stream he sat down on an old stump and took a bottle of water from the side pocket of his backpack. Duckweed quivered on the water. He looked up at the sky, tipped back his head and drank, then rolled a cigarette one-handed, sliding down to the ground to lean his back against the stump and contemplate the great display. So many hanging heads. A chubby baby in a blue romper suit, heavily inhabited with insect life, looked down at him. Who broke your neck? So hard not to humanize. It was an impulse, the brain just did it. They’ve got it wrong, those people who think this is a horror show, he thought. It has power, but it’s not that kind. It’s just dolls being creepy, because that’s what they do. Each once loved, now hanging broken. They belong here. They have company. The experience was strangely tranquil, like the feeling in an ancient graveyard when you’ve worked your way down to the forgotten overgrown heel of it and all the names have long disappeared from the tipsy old stones. The perfect place for old Tattoo. I said I’d do this. Adam lit up and sucked in hard. Rose is gone, and I’m here. She isn’t coming back. He stood up. Even if she touched him on the shoulder now, a touch so light it was scarcely there. Even if you believed in ghosts, she’d never be anything more than that, a shadow, a scent, even a fleeting glimpse perhaps. But she wasn’t coming back here, not to this life. Some other maybe, out there on another island, a planet not yet formed. Adam opened his backpack and drew from it the truncated mess that had lived for years on Rose’s windowsill. “Here we are, Tattoo,” he said. He could hear the distant voices of the Spanish couple talking to the guide. Adam had been drinking on the trajinera, and the beauty and strangeness of the place increased a sense that had been creeping closer and closer since Rose died, more than two years ago now. It had made him humble in the face of the great singularity of her disappearance, yet playful also, and more willing to indulge the meanderings of his own thoughts or mind or whatever it was that yammered on. Yes, she was a mess, but she’d known what it was to love the clay and there’d been some wisdom of a kind there, he thought, looking ’round at the eerie and companionable horde. Anyway everyone was a mess.

  She’d love this, he thought. She’d get it completely, this letting go, this final ritual, as sacred in its own way as a full requiem Mass or Viking ship burial. There was a bush near the stream, home to a doll in a long blue dress. She was big, maybe a foot and a half tall if she’d been standing upright, and she was wedged in a cleft between two branches, with her legs stretched out in front and her arms wide open. She was a bit of a hippie, with beads and a floppy hat, and shaggy red hair hanging in a wild tangle to her shoulders. Above her, thin spearlike leaves reached high.

  Adam placed Tattoo against the doll’s chest and folded her arms in to keep him in place. A bell rang at the landing stage. “There you are,” he said. “You’ll be fine here.”

  He stood for a while, just looking, took a picture, and felt it would be something brilliant and beautiful, the little doll in the mother doll’s arms, and everything, every last soul whose name had rubbed away, everything unsung, unkept, unrecorded, all running together with them into the grandeur of their ineffable disappearance. He stood a while longer, head slightly bowed as if he were in a cathedral. The bell rang again.

  “Catch you later, Tattoo,” said Adam.

  It was two hours back to the city, the boatman plying his long wooden pole, the boat with its carnival colors and painted arches sliding smoothly over glassy water. The low wetlands were beautiful. Wading birds stalked among water lilies in the shallows, and the trees’ reflections rippled. When they found themselves passing other boats, he came out of his dream. Small craft selling cold drinks and burritos drew alongside and soon they were surrounded. After such strange peace, how fine and gaudy—the flower bo
ats, the strident guitars of mariachi bands, the growing throngs of late afternoon.

  Afterword

  Julia lived between 1834 and 1860. The parts of this book that deal with her life are fictional, but the basic facts are true. She traveled, performed, married, bore a child, died and after death was exhibited along with her child.

  Theo Lent (not to be confused with Lewis B. Lent) died insane in St. Petersburg.

  Marie Bartel survived her husband and remarried.

  The mummies were found in a warehouse in Norway in 1976. The fate of the child’s remains is unknown. Julia’s body was kept for many years at the Department of Anatomy, Oslo University. After a campaign by transdisciplinary artist Laura Anderson Barbata and Mario Lopez, governor of Sinaloa state, it was repatriated to Mexico, and in February 2013, after a Roman Catholic funeral attended by hundreds, was finally laid to rest in the cemetery of Sinaloa de Leyva.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Melissa Danaczko, Octavia Reeve, Jo Dingley and especially Francis Bickmore, whose sensitive, insightful and relentless editing was invaluable.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carol Birch is the author of eleven previous novels, including Turn Again Home, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and Jamrach’s Menagerie, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist and long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the London Book Award.

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