Strange Folk You'll Never Meet

by A. A. Balaskovits

  “I made them cry,” she told him, grasping that sentence to her heart like a ruby. Yet, the next night, as she heard and saw the audience cry, she wondered who their tears were for.

  * * *

  Gerda and Wilhelm were the only ones with dry eyes during the performances, though Wilhelm could be forgiven as he ended up wet at the end of it, regardless. Gerda refused to look at her, much like she refused to don a dark wig to play a mother or any makeup to make her look older than she was. She said it would get in the way of her dancing.

  “I should dance in front of you,” Gerda said to Maria, though she was addressing the two managers who were shifting behind her. “Your grand jeté is too low.”

  Maria acquiesced to the demand easily; she didn’t want to dance at all anymore and would not if her traitorous body did not require bread, meat and cheese. The managers were less than thrilled with the suggestion, but Maria left the three of them to argue alone, confident that they would let her know if the choreography changed.

  She found Wilhelm outside the tent smoking a thin cigarette, wearing his costume. He offered her one but she refused. She’d never seen her father smoke.

  “Gerda wants to dance in front of me,” she told him, not because she liked talking to him, necessarily, but every time she heard his voice she was reminded that he is not my father.

  “That’s all wrong,” he said. “She’s beautiful, but people don’t come to this place to see beautiful things. Here, look.” He opened the tent flap a little, showing her the mismatched chairs of varying degrees of rotten wood littering the ground, and Gerda whipping her hands up into the air while the two managers attempted to placate. One of them was on his knees. “See the ground? It’s dirt. That should tell you everything.”

  She told him it didn’t tell her anything at all.

  He let the flap fall and adjusted his clay nose. “Everything beautiful worth seeing is kept in beautiful places. Jewels? A velvet lined box. An opera singer with a voice as clear as glass? You’d sit on a fur lined chair on a marble floor for the pleasure.”

  “They come here to see…trash?” she asked.

  Wilhelm shrugged. “An affordable joy. What they think their happiness is worth. But you give them something else.” He said this with a sort of curiosity a cat would have for a sparrow fluttering before it. “What do you think that is?”

  The managers came fumbling out of the tent flap, followed by a red-faced Gerda, who took one look at Maria and stomped off.

  “Well,” said the thin manager. “I would say that went well. Fraulein, we have reached a compromise.”

  “What do you think of polar bears?” the fat one asked.

  * * *

  In the end, Gerda danced behind her and, as a result, barely anyone looked at the girl in the back. Not when she was jumping in the air or twirling on one pointed toe. It was just as well. She danced like a doll that was thrown into the air by a cruel child. But Gerda was not the only performer off their game that evening. Wilhelm flubbed several of his lines, perhaps distracted by Gerda’s laconic performance. Or maybe he stumbled because behind the audience in thirty rusted cages were great white bears in all manner of size. They humphed and moaned through the performance, sometimes so loudly that the men playing the executioners had to yell their parts.

  “Why bears?” Maria asked Wilhelm.

  “It’s a circus,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  She understood why the managers had brought in the bears when she stepped into the circle for her first series of twirls. It was the symbol of her homeland, though those bears were brown (it’s a circus, of course it is a little over the top, a little wrong around the edges). More than that, the audience was forced to weave between the cages to get to their seats, and those in the back row had the unfortunate effect of the smell and breath of the animal right next to their faces. It made them jumpy. It gave them pause. They came in feeling afraid.

  “Marvelous, isn’t it?” the short manager asked her after the performance, when the crowd was teetering into a frenzy. At least two of the audience members fainted—no matter, it was to be added to the advertisement—and one unfortunate mustached fellow released his bladder, which caused the bears to growl louder and slam their bodies at the cages. “Why come for just tears when you can have the whole range of emotion in one quick go?”

  Maria, who had not stopped crying, only nodded.

  * * *

  One afternoon, Wilhelm asked Maria to join him for lunch, which she declined. It was not as fancy as when a man asks a woman outside the tent to spend an evening together. The circus ate together out of the same pot of perpetual stew, added to and regulated by a crass hunk of a woman who must have never tried her own dish with the amount of cigarette ash she’d let fall from the stick in her mouth. Maria never ate with them if she could help it. She would grab her bowl and walk to a secluded corner where she could eat and wipe her eyes away from her father. She walked to her corner only to find Wilhelm there, placing a half-clean towel on the dirt and uncorking a bottle of wine with his teeth. Wearing his costume.

  “Sit,” he said, indicating the half of the towel he was not taking up. Out of a desire not to eat with the others, and also not to give up her spot, she did.

  He poured them each a bit of red wine in wooden cups and toasted her, even though she held the wine limply in her hand and then put it down once he was finished thanking mother Germany for her bounty.

  “You were very good today,” Wilhelm said to her. “I didn’t know if you would reach everyone over the bears.”

  She carefully removed a suspicious black chunk from her bowl and put it on the ground for the ants. He looked like he wanted to say more, but discouraged by her silence, he started in on his own bowl, pouring himself another cup of wine.

  She watched him while he ate out of the corner of her eye. Her father did not drink. Not in front of her.

  As a child, she was not trained to be a dancer, but she danced as all little children do on any clean surface they can find. She did not jump into the graceful lines of the ballerina, nor did she tuck her body in half and stretch out of her legs like the Barynya dancers who entertained the Tsarina and her children. Instead, she moved as her body allowed her to, this way and that, arms stretched and then tucked and then stretched again, fingers waving at her father, who always laughed in his kind way when he told her that her movement was beautiful, no matter the tempo.

  Her father did not drink. She did.

  “Why do you never change?” she asked him. “Your costume,” she clarified to his bemused hum.

  “Do you not like it?” He asked her, winking as if he was sharing a private joke between the two of them.

  She made quick work of her wine, gulping it down in one long swig and stood up. Wilhelm reached for her hand, but she was stopped by the strongman, a muscular beast of a person, chasing a huffing baby white bear across the field in front of them. The strongman shouted in several languages for it to stop, as though he believed if he tapped into the bear’s vernacular, it would sit and wait.

  “The cages are too rusty,” Wilhelm said. “That’s the second one that’s gotten out.”

  “The second?” Maria asked, shocked enough to sit back down.

  “Cheap metal and cheap seats,” he said.

  The strongman yelled in a language Maria did not recognize and, in a great exertion, flung himself on the bear. He wrestled with it, pinning its front paws to the ground and sitting his weight on the furry back. He grabbed it by the skin of its neck, as one might with a hissing cat, and walked with the struggling animal far in front of his body.

  “He should be careful,” Maria muttered. “If the managers see him, they will have him wrestling the adults.”

  * * *

  That evening the tent was packed. The sweat of the men, women and children in the audience made the bea
rs especially rowdy. Perhaps it was the wine, which Maria still felt swirling in her veins like a hot snake, but she started crying earlier than her cue. Wilhelm gagged over the poisoned tea cakes. He always bent down to do so, his hair falling in front of his face, and for a brief, terrible moment, Maria remembered her own mother tearing the newspaper out of her hands, the one that described, with an aching amount of titillated exclamation points, how the mad monk survived a poison that would have taken down at least twenty fully grown bears. Why, he must have had a stomach made entirely of gold and evil. How the newspaper delighted in the tale, almost jokingly saying it was a shame his forehead was not made of the same stuff to deflect bullets, for then he might not have been brought so low as to bloat in a river.

  She fell to her knees and held her head in her hands, trying not to make a noise, trying to contain her grief so that it was hers, hers, hers alone, but she shook so hard her hands could not cover her, and she wept a high falsetto. Gerda, an artist, decided this was her moment, and danced so beautifully in front of Maria it would have warmed the skin of a man encased in ice, but the audience had no eyes for her. They yelled for her to move. One man was so distraught by not being able to see the crying woman he yanked the lit cigar from his mouth and threw it at Gerda, striking her arm. She yelped and backed away so the audience could see Maria on her knees.

  “Show us your face!” they yelled to Maria. She shook her head back and forth, pressing the palms of her hands into her eyes. The audience rose to its feet, yelling at her to let them see, show them all of those tears and her dark brown eyes, the same eyes her father had. The bears threw themselves against the bars of their cages, a cacophony of men and metal.

  It was Wilhelm who, gently, pried Maria’s hands from her eyes. “You must look at them,” he said. “They’ve come to see you.”

  There was a story her father once told her on a cool summer night about a young, beautiful boy who had been born into silk and bad blood. His veins were rotting from the inside out, and no matter how many doctors bled him, no matter how many mystics threw bones onto the floor and made the boy drink tinctures of lye and salt, his blood remained sick. Because of course it did; sometimes, the only way to heal someone is to leave them alone. She asked her father what eventually cured the little prince, and he said it was the boy’s mother, who quietly wept at the foot of his bed, and made sure that no one else came into the room to disturb him.

  Some grief must be left alone.

  Yet she was not so lucky to be born into silk. She looked at the crowd who had come to disturb her. The crowd, even the bears, quieted themselves for a long moment; the time it takes for blood to move from brain to toe, and then she saw Wilhelm with a crease near his eyes, such a familiar crease, and his executioners raised their pistols to those eyes.

  She screamed.

  Screaming through the tears? Of course. A daughter can scream with water in her eyes, it is their great ability. She screamed for all those faded memories she knew no pantomime could ever accurately portray and no man in a wig could replace. The audience danced its own role alongside her, like a starving snake aching for its tail, and as she wailed they did too, and even the bears moaned. Did they hear her in Berlin? In Saint Petersburg? How far does the sound of loss travel?

  The weeping went on for a very long time, that night. Even Gerda wailed.

  Before he went into the bathwater, Wilhelm gave her a curious look, but his eyes were very dry.

  * * *

  It was Gerda who came to her after the managers left her that evening. The two men were both displeased and overjoyed by her performance, and the warring emotions did nothing attractive to their faces. She’d cried too soon, the screaming had not been approved, but really, who could argue with the results? Why, some people bought their tickets for tomorrow on their way out.

  Gerda brought her a small cup of water and told her to drink it.

  “Why are you being nice to me?” Maria asked, suspicious and worn out. Her own eyes stung from all the salt that leaked from them.

  Gerda shrugged and rubbed her arm where the cigar left an ugly, red mark. “I had a sister,” she said. She looked at Maria, as if this sentence explained everything, as though the past tense mattered the most, even more than the word sister. “I’ve never looked at you before, when you were up there. Well. I looked at your feet. Now I wish I had never looked up. If only I had stuffed my ears with cotton.” She wiped at her eyes. “My throat hurts.”

  They drank water together, like any family would.

  “Wilhelm asked after you,” Gerda said.

  * * *

  Wilhelm’s tent was smaller than hers, but that was no surprise. The only one larger than her own was the managers’ and the strongman, and the latter’s was only larger because he could hardly be expected to be contained in small spaces, unlike the polar bears. The inside was sparse, little more than a bed barely long enough for his frame, and a bit of extra room for a small dresser and folding chair, presumably for guests or for reading the slim volumes of poetry he kept piled on the floor. The only decoration was a small statue of the Pieta, except in this one, the artist crafted the Mother’s face to look up towards the skies, her blank eyes wide and her lips parted in a dull, horrified wail. The statue was gray, except for the cheeks of the mother, which shined as though fingers had rubbed across the smooth stone there again and again.

  She should not have been shocked to see him still in costume, and yet, like a windchime, it panged silver and raw.

  “Why?” she asked, pointing at the robes and his hair. There was no energy in her for any additional words. Even the water Gerda had given her felt like it was drying up in her veins.

  “Why not?” he returned, grinning too wide.

  He asked her to have a seat, but she refused, edging towards the front of his tent, prepared to run back to her own and cultivate her pain like a private garden. He sat on his thin, narrow bed and pointed to the small folding chair. Like an obedient daughter, she sat on the edge.

  “Why?” she asked him again.

  What could he have said to shock a woman who was shocked every night of the week, save Sundays? He could have said he had no other clothing and she would have believed him. He could have said he was ordered to never change by the managers, to keep her in a constant state of turmoil to guarantee a good show. He could have articulated a fantasy of incest and even that would not have come as a surprise, not really.

  Instead, he told her how he wanted to unlock her magic. That’s what he called it.

  “The sway you have over them,” he said in a way that was both shy and breathless. “It is as if you don’t even know what a circus is supposed to be.” He chuckled, a dry noise. “When they come here and sit in those seats…they come to forget. To laugh a little. To be amazed at the strangeness of our bodies. But you? When they look at you, they look inside themselves. And they weep.”

  Maria shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “No.”

  “I have to say my lines,” he continued, as though she said nothing. “I never get a good look at you. I wonder what I would feel if I saw you with those tears on your face?”

  He tilted his head to the side, and in the dim light of the tent he looked unlike himself. His blue eyes were not so bright. If she narrowed her eyes, then he could be her father. If she willed herself to pretend.

  And why shouldn’t she? For one evening, would it not be worthwhile to willingly pretend? For each night she was caught off guard by her father’s brutal murder, even though she expected it, would it be so terrible to, just once, pretend the man she saw with red jam in his mouth was, in a private moment, her father, alive and well?

  It was what her father always told her; be kind to all, even if they do not deserve it.

  She did not know if she was being kind to herself or to him.

  “My father called me Matryona,” she said.


  He said her name in a whisper, again and again. He placed the palm of his hand on her cheek when the first of her tears fell as if to cup them.

  “He would tell me stories before I fell asleep,” she said. “He liked to laugh.”

  “As any man does,” Wilhelm said, looking at the wetness on his hand as if it was an odd substance.

  She told him stories, through her tears, that she had never told another soul, not even her own mother. Those private moments between a father and child when he teaches her how the plants rest under the snow until it melts, and then burst through the ground towards the sun until they flower. How he taught her that suffering is temporary and must be endured.

  Each word she uttered did little to move the lines on Wilhelm’s face, and when the light reflected on the clay, she gulped down the last of her tears. His eyes were white and blue, not a touch of red.

  Wilhelm hummed and touched his own dry cheeks. “Not even a sniffle,” he said. “Perhaps you do not have any magic at all.”

  * * *

  Gerda came to her before the next performance and offered Maria her powder. “It is nicer than what you use,” she said. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  “Anymore?” Maria asked.

  Gerda nodded and bent down to adjust her slipper. “I have not seen my mother in many years. I will go to her. Before there is nothing to go to.”

  The managers came to Maria with a new poster: on it, an artist had painted her on the top of a polar bear, her arms spread wide, her hair draped across her breasts. All she wore on her body were the painted tears on her cheeks. Above her, and taking up most of the room, was Wilhelm’s face, his blue eyes, looking down on her with a wild look, like a demon from a child’s story.

  “My father had brown eyes,” she told them, because there were no words good enough to tell them how deeply she hated it.

  “Oh,” the thin one said. “Be that as it may, when they see Wilhelm they’ll see his eyes are blue.”