The Pinch

by Steve Stern

  It wasn’t until sometime after he’d returned to Minsk that Muni began to succumb to pangs of conscience. Hadn’t he been a fundamentally dutiful son? He had after all sat shivah for his father and helped facilitate his burial; he’d assisted his big sister, Zilpah, in installing his unstrung mother and her younger daughter in a Dubrovna asylum run by the Society for the Poor and Sick. But while he assured himself he’d done all in his power, that his responsibilities were faithfully discharged, Muni was unable to resume his studies with his former equanimity. He tried meditating on the words from The Pomegranate of Ibn Zimri: “The Torah is fulfilled only by one who offers his life for it”; instead he brooded over reports that a handful of Jews in Olevsk—teamsters, patch tailors, a glazier, a clerk—had taken up clubs to defend themselves, only to be shot by soldiers from the local garrison for attacking the attackers. He attempted a midrash on the occupations of the Messiah while He tarried in the Palace of the Bird’s Nest, but the exercise seemed frivolous to him now. He could hardly concentrate, and, improbable though it seemed, he missed his study mate, who’d been truant since his return. There were topics he would have liked to discuss with Yoysef.

  Muni looked for him in the narrow streets where conversations among the laborers grew hushed whenever he passed by. He crossed an iron footbridge over the open sewer of the Svisloch River into the teeming Bitza District at dusk. Soot from the tanneries and sugar refineries blanketed the crooked passages in black snow; rank perfumes mingled with the odors of boiling noodles and pitch. Ladies with unspooled hair, wearing wrappers like draggled fog, beckoned from eroded doorways. University students, themselves on strike in sympathy with the conditions of the factory workers, loitered in the noisy courtyards and teahouses. It was among them that Muni eventually located Yoysef Tsentsifer, seated at a table in a seamy tavern—the first Muni had ever entered—along with both male and female comrades.

  “Look at what the red heifer dragged in,” greeted Yoysef with his trademark mixture of antagonism and mirth. The pretty girl at his side yawned like a cat, then winked at the tense newcomer. “Nu, Reb Pinsker, what can we do for you?”

  In the first instance Muni didn’t know; then he did. “You can tell me how to volunteer for the Jewish Labor Bund.”

  13

  The Floating Palace

  A drunk in a shabby mackintosh stumbles from the audience into the sand-and-sawdust ring. The ringmaster, attired in white jodphurs and scarlet tailcoat, is announcing through his bullhorn the high-wire act of Mademoiselle La Funambula. He’s visibly disturbed by the intrusion of an inebriated member of the audience, who’s pantomiming his desire to perform. The crowd of nearly a thousand in the floating amphitheater is confused but entertained by the unscripted trespass. The ringmaster tries to shoo him away, but the drunk lingers on the margin, leaning against then grabbing hold of a guy wire attached to a platform high above the ring. As the ringmaster continues his spiel, the intuder swings onto the cable and manages by clumsy degrees to mount it, wobbling and lurching in a bungling attempt to maintain his balance. Alerted by the laughter of the audience, the ringmaster turns about and blows his whistle. A pair of burly roustabouts come running in to grab the drunk before he does himself an injury. They bob for his ankles, but kicking and squirming, the man evades his would-be captors and continues his lubberly progress beyond their reach. Ringmaster, roustabouts, and audience are helpless to do anything but watch the fool in his reckless ascent up the inclined cable. There’s a universal intake of breath as the man pitches frantically to and fro, losing items of his wardrobe—the mackintosh, the porkpie hat—in the process. Then somehow he’s managed to gain the platform some forty feet above the ring, where he sheds the rest of his garments and shakes out a head of crow-black hair to reveal the lithe form of La Funambula in spangled tights. The crowd goes wild.

  She proceeds to cavort on the wire, returning to the platform for various props—a unicycle, a pair of stilts—while far beneath her two men and a gargantuan lady position themselves to spot her in case she falls. The three of them compete for the ideal placement, though no one pays them much attention, all eyes riveted on the girl prancing in the amber followspot.

  She skipped rope, turned cartwheels, and somersaulted through a tasseled hoop. Children gawked and women covered their eyes, peeping through parted fingers; godly men expressed shock at the briefness of her costume, then surrendered to fantasies. Journalists penned tired bromides—“she’s more a creature of the air than the earth”—and cited the dramatic contrast between the grace of her aerial daring and the limp she exhibited as she plodded out of the ring. And it was true that, capering above the upturned faces, she was beyond the reach of memory and heartbreak, always just a giant circle away from a total liberation from the terrestrial sphere. But Jenny Bashrig had no wish to liberate herself. Like the poet that the sad clown had read aloud to her, she was less in love with the products of eternity than of time.

  Not that the circus had much in common with ordinary time. Plying the river from Dubuque to New Orleans, Forepaugh & Broadway’s Floating Carnival of Fun weighed anchor at towns fixed to the regular calendar. But after a run of no more than three days in any designated port of call, the circus was launched again like the Flying Dutchman in a perpetual navigation of the Mississippi. The river flowed and the towns stood still along its banks, where time passed, while the river remained impervious to its passage. For Jenny, the equilibrist, this was a fine arrangement, the balance between rolling river and stationary shore, a state of affairs much more preferable than, say, a North Main Street stuck in its everlasting chronological rut. She’d become adept at observing the bluff reefs, falling chutes, and shoals, and could interpret what lay beneath dangerous dimples on the surface of the water as well as the roustabouts that doubled as deckhands. Her fondness for riding the river was rivaled only by her excitement on disembarking at the cities and towns, when the entire company, mounted on horses, elephants, velocipedes, and a thundering calliope, paraded through streets thronged with rubbernecking locals. She liked sampling the bazaars of places with names like Festus and Andalusia, places not always welcoming to circus folk. Over time her sea legs had become steadier than were her same halting limbs on dry land, and the wire was never so compliant as when she felt the slap and sway of the Palace in its watery berth.

  Of course the great floating extravaganza had seen better days. The old packet boat that towed the barge and menagerie behind it was in a constant state of disrepair; its kingposts, hogchains, and stern wheel had been replaced so many times that the vessel could no longer qualify as the original Yellow Wren. (Defaced by weather or wags, the name painted across its bow now read Yellow W en.) While it still maintained a few showy staterooms for its principals, the Yellow Wen seemed to anticipate its own wreckage: the plush banquettes had long since given up their stuffing, the gingerbread trim broken off to feed the high-pressure engine when fuel ran low. The ancient boiler pulsed like a dilated heart; pistons sputtered and would have come to a shuddering halt were it not for the occasional nudge from a passing bum boat. The grand saloon was converted to a mess hall, where performers practiced their juggling and the less carnivorous beasts—the ones not confined to the trailing menagerie scow—roamed free. Excluding the bedlam, however, when viewed from a levee at night, the moonlit Carnival of Fun in its musical progress constituted a siren-like tableau, luring small-town boys to swim out after it and sometimes drown.

  Jenny had never meant to outshine her partners. After all, the Piccolomini Brothers—not really brothers but comrades involved with one another in a way Jenny didn’t at first understand—had voluntarily taken her under their wing. Impressed with her natural ability, they helped develop her talents until she was equally proficient on the bounding wire and the tightrope. Dubbing her Mimi Piccolomini, they broadened their repertoire to accommodate her, introducing various properties: unicycles and stilts. But Jenny, a quick study and already accomplished after her years of self-taught en
deavor, soon surpassed the skill of her mentors and, without trying, upstaged them. Finally the Piccolominis, complaining of chronic seasickness, took their injured vanity and left the Carnival of Fun at Vidalia for a spot in a circus that thankfully traveled overland.

  After that Jenny retired Mimi and, graduated now to center ring, carried on solo as La Funambula, Mistress of the Air. There were other mistresses of the air: Rosa Bunch in her hourglass corset, spinning like a whirligig from her swivel loop, and Yvette, who hung from a single trap by her fuchsia hair. Each regarded herself as a prima in her own right and in that capacity snubbed all other claimants to the title. La Funambula was snubbed as a matter of course, but never wholly integrated into the circus community, she was spared much of the usual venom. In any event, so preoccupied was Jenny with the demands of her midair ballet that she scarcely noticed the cold shoulders she received on the ground.

  Marital status notwithstanding, the lordly ladies of the floating circus each had her circle of admirers, sometimes several at a single destination. The sons of senators and cotton barons showered their favorites with flowers and bonbons after every show. Heated competition among these young gallants sometimes moved them to fistfights and even duels, outrages that translated into boasting rights for the ladies in question. Naturally the young men gave their offerings in the hope of receiving favors in return, and while a few of the ladies did reciprocate amorously, all were deft at keeping their suitors at bay. Such artful teasing, however, only increased the tensions that stoked the disorderly atmosphere of the Yellow Wen, and many an embarkation was marked by jealous husbands flinging bouquets and bijouterie overboard.

  Jenny, who shared tight quarters with Madame Hortense the Female Hercules, had no room for housing her own gifts, the loving cups and potted viburnums she gave away to the sideshow performers. She had no more need of tchotchkes than of romance, the pain of which she had not the least wish to repeat. Besides, Madame Hortense (whose weightlifting apparatus increased the steamboat’s draft by a foot) had conceived a maternal fondness for the wirewalker, and as Jenny’s self-appointed protector kept the predators at arm’s length.

  It was the last of its kind, the Carnival of Fun, a relic from the days when showboats featured canebrake troupers in temperance comedies like Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. While nearly every other touring company or tent show had taken to the rails, Forepaugh and Broadway persisted in the novelty of their riverborne spectacle. With hyperbolic publicity and the promise of shared profits they’d lured a boatload of bally broads, kinkers, and clowns on board the Wen and the Palace that followed in its wake. Later on, as the carnival evolved into an authentic circus, first-class animal and aerial acts were added to the ranks. But in the end, for all its variety the floating “argosy of wonders” was a losing proposition. Salaries aside, the maintenance of the porous packet absorbed the lion’s share (sometimes literally) of the season’s revenue, and even the draw of a loop-the-looping automobile could barely compensate for the cost of steam-heating the amphitheater. To say nothing of the repairs to damage caused by the river itself—the fogs that led to collisions with driftwood, the runnings aground on islands and sandbars. There were medical bills due to accidents and injuries incurred in attacks by the natives of the towns where they played. No matter that the circus went to excessive lengths to convince the yokels of the show’s inherent morality, going so far as to label the menagerie living relics from biblical times: the hippopotamus was “the blood-sweating Behemoth of Holy Writ,” and so forth. Let there be a rumor of godless fornicators among the troupe, and the citizens, under the influence of sanctimony and drink, would rise up to punish the heathen. This was especially the case south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the show people were often assumed to be of a debased Yankee persuasion. Then pitched battles would ensue, when the company had to defend themselves with guy stakes against knives and firearms.

  Nor were the townspeople always satisfied with directing their malevolence toward the human performers. There were the boys that threw pepper between the bars of the gorilla’s cage or fed plug tobacco to the black bear. There was the time in Morganza, Louisiana, when Celeste the elephant, spooked by urchins who poked a broom in her hindquarters, bolted from the parade and crushed an alderman’s wife underfoot. When the town demanded vengeance, the circus had no recourse but to bow to public sentiment. Perfectly tractable now, Celeste was led by the bull handlers to the railyard, where a seven-eighth-inch chain was wrapped round her neck and she was hoisted into the air from a railroad derrick. The chain snapped and Celeste fell to earth in a stupor but made no resistance as a second chain was secured. When she was raised again, she sighed, died, and in keeping with the age-old protocol of lynchings, was dismembered, her bones and tusks displayed as trophies in the courthouse and barbershop.

  As a first-of-May performer (and a Jew), Jenny was no stranger to the role of intruder. What bothered her more was the clamorous adoration of her fans, which could throw off her timing. For even a run-down riverboat exhibition was hailed by the rustics, starved as they were for entertainment, as heaven-sent. (Never mind that its artists might be judged pariahs from hell.) As La Funambula, who danced on a rope woven from a witch’s hair in the caverns of the djinn—or so claimed the ringmaster, Mr. Ephraim Peavey—she was viewed as a magical creature, and courted acordingly by hayseeds and gentry alike. What jerkwater Galahad wouldn’t want to pluck the sylph in her chiffon kilt out of the air and fetch her back to terra firma for a souvenir? (Even if on earth she was a bit of a klutz.) But Jenny had no truck with magic: the wire was the wire, the earth the earth, or anyway the promenade deck of a coal-belching steamboat. Unlike the ethereal La Bunch and Yvette of the iron jaw, who held court in their staterooms, she was content to hobnob with Madame Hortense in their stuffy cabin. There the lightly mustachioed strongwoman would read her tarot cards and massage her feet, which were always sore. (The thin doeskin pumps that allowed her toes to grope and steer along the cold-drawn steel left her soles sensitive to the sharpness of the wire.) At home with marginal types, she cultivated the company of various ten-in-one oddities, some with topknots and plates in their lips, a fraternization that consolidated her outlier status.

  So Jenny enjoyed the best of two worlds. Though Mr. Peavey might assure the audience that the upper atmosphere was her exclusive element, it wasn’t. True, there was nothing quite like a romp on the wire; few planetary pleasures matched the rapture of executing a midair flifus or one-wing crab. But Jenny took similar solace in reclining in a canvas deck chair watching the children and diapered chimps swarming over the boat. She liked observing the kingfishers perched on a floating bough: how they scattered like roof shingles flung by the wind when the paddle wheel walked over their perch with a crunching racket. During nights that the rousters said were dark as the inside of a cow, they passed timber rafts and coal barges, vessels visible only by the light of their bull’s-eye lanterns, and by lantern light Jenny conned the poetry that Bonkers the clown was teaching her to read. Above the ring she suffered the yearning of her admirers below, though she remained proof against their overtures even when they belonged to her own touring caste.

  He had christened himself Bonkers in an ironic counterpoint to his melancholy mien. During the specs, when the clowns disported themselves about the ring en masse, he wore a chimney-pot hat and tattered swallowtails like some ruined aristocrat, which in point of fact he was. His original name was Marmaduke Fortinbras Armbrewster the Somethingth, black sheep offspring of the potted meat Armbrewsters of Davenport, Iowa. Cut off without a sou after his expulsion from Princeton, he’d discovered in himself a talent for confidence swindles; but when his face became too familiar to the local constabularies in the river towns where he plied his trade, he boarded a steamboat hauling a cargo of gaudy misrule. He exaggerated his decadent pallor with greasepaint, accentuated the soot-gray bags under his eyes (from one of which leaked a diamond tear), and donned a sponge rubber nose. While his detractors (and there were ma
ny) claimed he’d merely swapped one bogus identity for another, the more sympathetic believed that in Bonkers the young wastrel had found his true nature.

  As it turned out, he had an aptitude for clowning. Athletic despite his dissipation, he incorporated complicated pratfalls into his gags; he climbed ladders that leaned against invisible walls and, during the walkarounds, carried a board on his head that remained fixed even as he reversed direction. But what made him a favorite with the crowds was his acquisition of a mangy goat he’d won in a crap game from a farmer in Vicksburg who’d already forfeited his shirt. He called the goat Medea and claimed she was a sorceress transformed by a rival into a unicorn. (She had, projecting from her shaggy forehead, a single off-center horn.) Bonkers was seldom seen without Medea, who nipped at his backside during his act and employed her horn in rude ways to impede his progress—this to the shock and delight of the audience. But outside the ring the goat was as brooding and aloof as her master. There was even something menacing about her that caused the circus folk to keep their distance and the big cats to recoil in their cages. Tethered to the pipes on the boiler deck, Medea would bleat disconsolately throughout Bonkers’s all-night larks ashore, from which he returned in the mornings weak-kneed and ruddy-eyed.