Grey and misty weather cloaked Lisbon for several days. Not a breath of wind rippled the waters of the river and the smoke from all the coal-fired stoves in the city hung in the air and made it difficult to breathe.
Slowly the haze was dispersed by a warm and ominous south-west wind. Ragged white clouds stood out against the blue-black sky far out over the sea to the west. For the best part of a day and a night the storm remained motionless, growing in strength before it began moving towards the coast.
“I’ll have to get going immediately if I’m to reach Eulalia’s place without getting soaked,” Jenkins said, eyeing the clouds with a frown as I took over the merry-go-round from him. “The thunderstorm will soon be with us.”
Jenkins was right. The first, heavy drops came almost at once, followed by the cloudburst. The wind grew stronger and stronger and the rain whipped the sandy fairground into a field 70of mud. Low clouds rolled and plunged just above the rooftops and the whole city was lit up by flashes of white lightning. The last visitors to the fairground took to their heels. Instead of looking after the merry-go-round I had to help tie down and stow anything likely to blow away.
By late evening a full storm was raging. Director Brockdorff came running through the deluge in nothing but his long johns and told us to take down the big circus sign from the roof of the ticket booth. At the same moment I heard Margosha cry for help: the guy ropes supporting her tent were about to give way.
I found a long rope among the junk behind the merry-go-round and managed to tie her tent to a tree. Then I tightened all the guy ropes and hammered the pegs deeper into the ground. Meanwhile the fortune-teller, her face pale and anxious, was standing in the opening of her tent. When I’d finished, she clapped her hands softly and beckoned me to follow her in.
Margosha from Odessa was a big, powerful woman with beautiful eyes but a face that wouldn’t have been out of place on a harbour thug. She had gleaming black stones hanging from her ears and they had stretched her earlobes halfway down to her shoulders. Her tent was decorated with dark-coloured pieces of chequered cloth. Small lanterns close to the roof gave off a sweetish scent but very little light. There was a small table with two chairs and round it stood a collection of strange 71wooden sculptures. Every time a gust of wind shook the tent, the lanterns swayed and the shadows made by the sculptures flickered back and forth on the pieces of cloth.
“It was good of you to save my tent,” Margosha said. “Sit down at the table and I’ll make you a hot drink. We don’t want you catching a cold.”
She spoke an odd dialect, mixing together words from several different languages, in spite of which it wasn’t too difficult to understand her. I sat down while she fetched two small cups and filled them with hot, reddish-brown liquid from a brass pot with a long spout. I sipped at the drink, but couldn’t work out what it was.
“I’ve read the future for cats and for pet dogs,” Margosha said, taking the chair opposite me. “But never for an ape. Would you like me to tell yours? Free. As a thank-you for helping me.”
I didn’t have any desire at all to have my future told, so I shook my head. But then I thought about something Sylvie Dubois had told me on one of my first evenings at the fairground. She’d said that Jenkins had had some sort of “trouble” with Margosha, and it had been about me. What had Sylvie Dubois meant by that? I really wanted to know.
Somehow, however, Margosha was able to read my mind. I don’t know how it happened but I suppose reading minds is not unusual for fortune-tellers. She leant forward a little, looked 72me in the eye and said, “There’s something you are wondering about, isn’t there?”
I nodded.
“Does it have anything to do with the funfair?”
I nodded again.
Margosha took a sip of the mysterious drink before saying, “I believe you’d like to know how Harvey Jenkins went about arranging a job at the funfair for you. Am I right?”
Could this be what Sylvie Dubois had been talking about? I thought for a moment or two before nodding once more.
“I’m not one to tell tales,” Margosha said. “Especially not about myself. But I’ll make an exception in your case. Partly because you helped me, and partly because you can’t talk. A secret is in safe keeping with you.”
Margosha, of course, had no idea that I can write. And there was no need for her to learn otherwise. She leant forward and continued in a low voice. “Before you came, Jenkins used to share the merry-go-round work with a man called Kowalski. He was Polish and had been working at the fair for about a year. A quiet, friendly man. Jenkins took the evening shift and Kowalski the afternoon shift. Jenkins came to me one day and asked for a favour. This was just a short time after we’d opened the funfair in Lisbon. He offered me a sum of money in exchange for me convincing Kowalski to resign and leave the funfair.” 73
Margosha took another sip before continuing. “Jenkins and I have known one another for a long time and he has done me a number of favours. So I couldn’t say no. That same day I invited Kowalski to my tent and told his fortune from tea leaves in a bowl. I told Kowalski that, unfortunately, he was going to die soon. It frightened the poor fellow out of his skin and he wanted to know what was going to happen. ‘You’ll be blown to smithereens,’ I said, ‘when the boiler of the merry-go-round explodes.’”
Margosha shrugged her shoulders and put on an apologetic face. “It was a lie, of course, but it worked. Kowalski refused to work on the merry-go-round one minute more. He scuttled off to Director Brockdorff and resigned immediately. A quarter of an hour later he’d packed his bags and disappeared. The following day Jenkins announced he had found a replacement for Kowalski. That was you, of course…”
My surprise must have shown in my face. And my confusion.
“You’ll be wondering, of course,” Margosha said, “whether Jenkins wanted to get rid of Kowalski in order to offer you the merry-go-round job instead. Is that so?”
I nodded.
“The answer is yes,” the fortune-teller said. “That’s exactly it. Jenkins told me that himself, though he wouldn’t say more. Or rather, there was one other thing, not that it made me any wiser.”
Margosha looked deep into my eyes before continuing. 74“I asked Jenkins why having you here at the funfair was so important to him. And this is what he said…”
Margosha leant closer to me and lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “The past has returned. And I’ve been given a second chance.”
The fortune-teller sat back in her chair. “Those were his exact words,” she said. “I had no idea what he was talking about, but perhaps you do. Do you?”
I stared at her, uncomprehending. Then I slowly shook my head.
The thunderstorm and the rain had moved away by the time I took the tram home at midnight. But the wind hadn’t eased and the tram swayed and creaked as the gusts hit it.
Time after time I ran through everything Margosha had told me. Harvey Jenkins had behaved appallingly, just to ensure that I could get Kowalski’s job. It was strange and incomprehensible. After all, Jenkins and I hardly knew one another.
It was possible, of course, that Jenkins’s motives had nothing to do with being kind to me. He may have been trying to win the director’s favour by arranging for there to be a live gorilla at the funfair? That would explain everything. And maybe it wasn’t even Jenkins’s idea, but Director Brockdorff’s! 75
I got off the tram at Rua da Alfândega and walked down towards the river. The waves were breaking against the quay, filling the air with foam. The storm had ripped open the roof of one of the harbour warehouses and the torn sheets of corrugated iron crashed and screeched in the wind. I walked faster. How had the Hudson Queen weathered the storm?
The ship lay in darkness but even at a distance I could see that she was scraping and grinding against the quayside. The strong west wind had caused the river to rise at least two feet and the Hudson Queen’s mooring ropes should have been tightened up hours ago.
I hurried on board. It took all my strength to pull the ship back into position but she was going to need more mooring ropes to hold her there.
We store heavy ropes and other useful bits and pieces in a box bolted to the deck behind the wheelhouse. I went to fetch the key to the padlock on the box—it’s kept along with all the other keys, hanging in a cupboard in the galley.
The moment I opened the cupboard I could see that something was wrong. The hook that usually held the spare key to the galley was empty. Where had the missing key gone?
I didn’t have time to worry about that just then. So I took 76the key to the deck-box from its hook and hurried back to make the ship’s moorings more secure.
My clothes were still soaking from the torrential rain so I lit a fire in the stove and hung my overalls over the back of a chair to dry. I didn’t have the energy left to make myself a cup of tea and, pulling an extra blanket over me, I crawled straight into my bunk.
I felt uneasy and couldn’t get the things I had discovered out of my head. For many hours I lay there, slipping in and out of uneasy sleep. Dreams and thoughts became tangled in my mind and I could hear Margosha’s and Harvey Jenkins’s voices talking to me in riddles.