TSIRK

THAT AUTUMN, THE CIRCUS’S menagerie of animals was on tour in the Ukraine, accompanied by their trainers and big cat tamers, leaving the rest of the troupe — the obligatory contortionists, acrobats, tightrope walkers, high-wire acts, trapeze artists, and clowns — to entertain the crowds in Moscow. The various acts made their entrances and exits according to a carefully choreographed program. The Bounines, whose entrances were designed primarily to entertain the audience between acts, had begun to draw full houses and were quickly becoming the stars of the show.

Bounine was also an acrobat. By nature, he was sullen and ill-tempered — but not in the ring. Born in Moscow before the Bolshevik Revolution to an aristocratic father and a mother who was an actress, he developed his penchant for play-acting at an early age. During his twenties, he had shared the affections of a woman with an aging Futurist poet. This went on for about six months, and the poet eventually won out. In an attempt to completely forget her, Bounine created a comic character which he transformed into an auguste clown. The circus hired him, and over the course of many years, he had trained all the great clowns. At the age of thirty-five, he picked up the guitar and discovered that he had absolutely no ear for music — it was in the words he crafted to make the crowd roar with laughter that Bounine truly found his voice.

There were no dwarfs in the troupe — with the possible exception of the little girl who kept wandering around babbling at everyone. She was three years old and had learned to walk on the red boards of the ring and in the rehearsal studios where most of the acts were conceived. Her mother had taken off with a second-rate actor when she was barely two, but that subject was to be avoided and her mother was rarely spoken about. It was Pavel, her father, who looked after her now, in a former palace that had been converted into kommunalka flats where circus performers lived communally. Her name was Maria, but her circus family called her Masha. She attended all of her father’s rehearsals, and went with him on all the tours within Russia. On the nights that Pavel performed in Moscow, Masha was cared for by a rather unexceptional but competent girl named Eva, the troupe’s seamstress and resident tarot card reader.

Masha didn’t go to kindergarten, and spent very little time in the company of other children. Everyone assumed that one day, when she was fully trained, she would join a troupe and begin practising her chosen art — maybe as an equine acrobat and trick rider, or a high-wire artist like her mother. But certainly not a clown. Women who make people laugh don’t find husbands, Pavel would say. A woman shouldn’t clown around, and that was that. By watching Eva take care of Masha, Pavel had learned how to feed her and bathe her. During lunch one day, without any coaxing at all, Masha suddenly started talking.

Pavel had two vices — women and vodka — which he attempted to hide from his daughter with varying degrees of success. He knew how to braid her hair, and would shape the braids into a crown on her head. But he also knew how to entertain women, and rarely slept alone in the salon. At the time, he was seeing three women — none of them aware of the others’ existence. Juggling was part of his job, and having to keep three women in the air was an occupational hazard.

Every morning, he would have tea with Bounine in the communal kitchen. They would often have to put up with the racket coming from the next room. The lighting technician who lived there with his wife regularly slept in late and snored like a donkey — prompting his wife to launch dishes at the wall to prove she could make more noise than him. Pavel and Bounine sat at a huge round table. Masha had taken her first steps on it and now she sat beside them, eating her breakfast of puréed vegetables. She babbled away in her singsong voice, which they didn’t mind at all because it helped to mask the din of the neighbours.

Their breakfasts together followed a strict ritual. Pavel prepared the tea, while Bounine scoured yesterday’s newspapers for anything that might be worked into their act. Together, they would agree on how a certain item in the news should be portrayed, and then write a few gags. Sometimes, when they weren’t able to come up with anything usable, they would seek out a writer who worked for the circus. After throwing a few words and phrases back and forth, they would invariably dismiss the writer’s ideas in favour of their own. They were both extremely proud men.

On the morning of October 31, 1961, Pavel hesitated over a headline — STALIN’S REMAINS REMOVED FROM MAUSOLEUM.

Like all masters, Bounine had the last word. There would be no mention of disturbing the corpse. They had to choose something else.

“Tomorrow night we’ll be in Yaroslavl. You know those cheap dresses with the yellow flower pattern that women are sick of wearing and we’re sick of seeing? Well, I’m going to ask Eva to make us a couple of costumes with yellow flowers all over them.”

The next night, they performed their short gag a total of ten times — frolicking around an Oka-3 refrigerator in yellow dresses, while the other acts got ready. Eva and Masha slept in the caravan.

For five years, Eva had used the same deck of tarot cards. The backs of the cards were so worn that the elaborate design embossed on each card with her initials, EAB, was barely distinguishable. On the other side, the cards depicted the usual archetypical images of the Tarot, but they were set in everyday scenes from the nineteenth century. Bounine was not in favour of Eva doing tarot readings in Moscow. On tour, he would look the other way on the condition that she didn’t ask for money — bread, flowers, a sausage, or a book were okay. Regardless, Bounine would never let her do a reading for him. The darker tone of her skin and her distinct features betrayed her Roma heritage. She was attractive, but most importantly, she was reliable and took good care of Pavel’s daughter.
In time, he relented and allowed the gypsy to give him advice about his health. Be careful in the ring tonight. You could injure your right hand. And about women. Stay away from the brunette — she’s got diseases. Advice which, once again, he was too proud to follow.