CIRCUS GIRLS

KOLIA HAD FREQUENTED THE SAME prostitute since the thaw of the 1960s. She was tall with ash blond hair, which set her apart from her colleagues who tended towards the platinum blond of Marilyn Monroe. He had called her once a week, until she was finally accepted into the theatre, where she changed her look and her name, and disappeared from the ranks of the sex trade. After that, Kolia had to make do with the girls in the circus.

After Pavel’s death and Masha’s departure from Moscow, Kolia started to see himself differently. He was convinced that he was getting uglier. He could see the clear signs of aging, and his skin seemed to be sagging in a way that made his skull more prominent. Ever since he had watched Pavel self-destruct and melt away before his eyes, the image that the mirror sent back to Kolia was slowly internalized. Death was imposing its mask upon him. What he saw couldn’t have been further from the truth. But he had no way of knowing that. Even though there was nothing repugnant about his face, he detested his reflection, and this unrecognizable image soon became an obsession.

At the time, Kolia was trying to put together a duo which would feature a young female auguste as his foil. He was still playing the pickpocketing mime in the ring, but would now regale the crowd with the occasional Hello! Achoo! Watch out! Hearing Kolia speak had become a highly anticipated part of the show. The act was also popular on tours outside the Soviet Union. Kolia had been granted a visa.

The new auguste was named Yulia. He had seen her perform a short sketch at the end of her training at the circus school, and had hired her on the spot, before she even had her diploma in hand.

Yulia was half a head taller than Kolia. Thick soles were discretely added to his famous red shoes, whereas she wore flamboyantly large but flat-soled shoes in the ring. They were trimmed with little bells, and the toe of each shoe ballooned out as if it had been struck by a hammer. Her costume was suitably understated and consisted of tight-fitting slacks, a matching oversized jacket, and a navy blue T-shirt. She wore a short blond wig, topped with a tiny black bowler hat, which she attached to the wig with a couple of rusty safety pins. She didn’t paint her face white, but highlighted her lips in a bold red, and put two red circles on her cheeks. Using an old bicycle horn, she crafted a purple nose that honked when she squeezed it. In the ring, she would appear at Kolia’s side, playing a guitar with a broken string, always remaining in his shadow. Kolia hadn’t made any changes to the costume which had brought him to the attention of the public in the beginning, excluding, of course, the minor adjustment to his footwear. Yulia said nothing during their act, and with the neutrality of her outfits, it was difficult for the audience to determine whether she was a man or woman. The posters for the show presented her simply as “Little Bell.” Kolia kept his name.

In the beginning, he attempted to adapt the sketches he had performed with the Bounines to their new duo, but it wasn’t working. Little Bell’s character didn’t lend itself to the role played by Pavel, and even less so to that of Bounine’s auguste. Kolia spent the entire summer of 1983 with the circus’s staff writer, developing a dozen original sketches for the duo to take on tour. By the end of their first few weeks of working together with the new material, they had found their voice, in a manner of speaking, and the duo caught fire — quite literally. To the delight of the crowd, one of most popular skits involved the immolation of a small mountain of books.

There was something about Yulia that fascinated him. In her eyes, he could see a childish innocence that he had never witnessed before in another adult. For the most part, people seemed to carry around a dark shadow that always kept him at a distance. Kolia wondered if this guileless generosity was a part of the persona she had created for the ring, or if it was actually her that he saw in those eyes. When they weren’t in costume, she avoided him. Not, as Kolia imagined, because she didn’t like him, but because she found him intimidating. Kolia, on the other hand, found her attractive, but didn’t risk the slightest advance in her direction. Since witnessing Pavel’s death and the absolute ugliness that death leaves on the body, he had become convinced that women would forever be repelled by the sight of him. He decided to concentrate on being Yulia’s colleague in the ring, and to give up any vague notions of meaning something else to her outside it.