The October Circle

by Robert Littell

  Tacho laughs. “You say that as if the weather makes a difference.”

  “But it does, it does,” Poleon insists. “You don’t believe me? I can see you don’t believe me. Listen. My morning censor has rheumatism. The wet weather makes him irritable. When he’s irritable, he makes fewer concessions. My afternoon censor has a mistress, and the mistress has two small children who stay in and watch television when it rains. The censor can only go over there when the sun shines and the children are out playing. So when it rains, he never concedes a point. He just sits there shaking his pointed head and obliterating the offending words or sentences with thick black ink.”

  “The things that go into a film,” Mister Dancho marvels, glancing over his shoulder toward the door. Tacho remarks:

  “You should do a film on how you make a film.”

  “Tried that,” Poleon snaps. The waiter sets a brimming cognac in front of him and he brings his head down to the glass and sips it so that it won’t spill. “The project was killed at birth by the evening censor — the one who is oblivious to the exigencies of time and weather, the one” — Poleon smiles sweetly — “who deals with ideas.”

  Tacho snickers sympathetically. “Your new film, the one the morning censor is working on, what’s it about?”

  “It’s a portrait of a fictional capitalist country where everyone, in one way or another, works for the police. The characters have no names, only numbers. The hero, whom I call ‘Eight-eighty,’ is the chief of the directorate that provides an appropriate amount of crime in order to justify the existence of the police. I call the film Police State “

  “But that doesn’t sound like something you should have problems with,” Tacho observes.

  Poleon snorts. “So I thought, but my morning nemesis flares his nostrils and sniffs the air and says he smells ambiguities which might place my fictional police state closer to home. I argue, with as straight a face as you’ll find in the movie industry, that one has only to look around one to realize that this is absurd, but my friend the censor persists, lifting words as if they were rocks and poking around underneath for worms of treason.”

  Poleon laughs hoarsely and takes another sip of cognac. “Sometimes I almost feel sorry for the poor sons of bitches,” he says seriously. “With what’s happening these days, they don’t know which way to jump.”

  The Racer remembers the conversation at Krimm and asks Poleon what he thinks about Czechoslovakia.

  Poleon lowers his voice. “I don’t have anything against the Schweiks, but I’ll be goddamned if I know what they expect to gain from all this. They’re just building up people’s hopes with all that talk of real elections and a free press. The Russians will never put up with it, mark my words. I heard Novotny’s already in Moscow organizing his comeback. Meanwhile the rest of us have to suffer.” Poleon leans forward. “They’re holding everything up until this thing sorts itself out. I got that straight from a make-up man who has a brother who works for the Central Committee.” Tacho starts to say something, but Poleon cuts him off. “A friend of mine was supposed to have his novel in the stores this week — it was cleared two, maybe three months ago — but they’ve stopped distribution. When he asked why, they told him there was a shortage of cartons for shipping.” Poleon leans back. “Cartons my ass. They’re just afraid to put themselves on the line as long as this thing with Czechoslovakia is up in the air. I heard another story — “

  Someone two tables down starts to scream. It isn’t a very loud scream, but it is a scream all the same and it brings conversation to a stop. Everyone turns to see — except the Japanese, who are too discreet. A second person at the table opens her mouth to scream, but clamps it shut again without a sound.

  “Try,” a man coaxes.

  “I can’t do it,” the woman groans. “I just can’t do it.”

  “What’s going on?” Mister Dancho whispers.

  “Don’t you know about the Scream Therapist? No, of course, you were out of the country — “

  “Scream what?” Tacho demands.

  “Scream Therapist.” Poleon swivels around so he can get a better look at the table. “See the bald guy, the one sitting between the two women. Name’s Hristo Evanov. He’s Bulgarian by birth. His father was a factory owner who fled just ahead of the Russians in forty-four. Took Hristo with him to America. He’s a psychiatrist now, but a special kind of psychiatrist — he practices something he calls scream therapy. He came here last week to bury his mother. Since then he’s been going around trying to get everyone to scream.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything,” Mister Dancho scoffs.

  “No, it’s really very interesting. The odd part is he hasn’t been able to elicit one good ear-splitting, glass-shattering scream in all of Bulgaria. Or so he says. You’ve got to meet him —it’ll make your night. Here” — Poleon starts to get up —”I’ll ask him to join — “

  The girl materializes out of thin air. One second there is nobody there, the next she is standing before the table looking from Poleon to Dancho to Tacho, and the waiter is stammering:

  “Excuse the intrusion, please, but this lady asked me to point you out —eh, she insists on meeting you. I’m sorry if—”

  It all happens so suddenly that Poleon, who has had quite a bit to drink, thinks she is an apparition. Sinking back into his seat, he tries to blink her away.

  She won’t go.

  Dancho is the first to pull himself together. “Dear lady, by all means,” he beams, adjusting his cuffs as he hefts himself out of his seat.

  “Eh, excuse me again, please, but she doesn’t want to meet you” the waiter interrupts apologetically. “She wants to meet you” He looks at the Racer.

  “Me!” exclaims Tacho. He looks at Mister Dancho, plainly embarrassed and at a loss for words.

  The girl takes a step toward Tacho. She is wearing embroidered Kazan felt boots, a khaki miniskirt, a thin white T-shirt through which no bra straps are visible and a bright yellow scarf tied around her neck cowboy style. She is almost as tall as the Racer, and thin, with the bone structure of a small bird. Her hair is cropped short, and dark. She is flat-chested and round-shouldered and straight-hipped and nervous, though the nervousness isn’t so much in her body as in her eyes — ghetto eyes, permanently wide, ready for flight. She stares at the Racer without changing her expression, as if her facial muscles or her emotions are paralyzed, as if her appetite is dulled, as if her anger or her fear or her sexuality has lost its edge. Later, the Racer will tell her that she gave him the impression, the first time he saw her, that whatever she wanted, she could wait to get it.

  Mister Dancho pokes the Racer in the ribs. “Tacho, dear boy, where have you been hiding this flower?”

  “I never saw her before in my life,” Tacho swears, reddening.

  “Look at those eyes, will you,” Dancho plunges on. “They’re enormous. What do you take her for, Poleon? German? Swiss? Dutch perhaps?”

  “I’m neither German nor Swiss nor Dutch,” the girl says in flawless Russian.

  Dancho’s jaw sags. “My god, you don’t look Russian!” he blurts out, lapsing into Russian himself.

  “You don’t look Bulgarian,” the girl fires back.

  Poleon laughs and Dancho, regaining his composure, bows from the waist. “I take that as the ultimate compliment, dear lady. You hear that, Poleon, she says I don’t look Bulgarian.”

  Dancho offers the girl his seat and she slips into it. The waiter brings another for Dancho. The girl looks at the waiter. “Please — I think I’d like a cognac now.”

  Dancho covers her hand with his. “Dear lady, if you are really Russian, then our opinions on womanhood in that vast motherland of importunity, that Mecca of antireligious fervor, will have to undergo revision.”

  The girl slides her hand out from under his. “I am American,” she informs him quietly.

  For a moment nobody says anything. “American!” Dancho looks around, stunned. “Dear lady, say it isn’t so?” He turn
s on Poleon. “She says she’s American!”

  “I have ears,” snaps Poleon. Through all their minds races the same thought: things being what they are, this is not exactly the time to be seen with an American.

  The girl fixes her eyes on the Racer as if she knows him, as if they have a past. “You are Abadzhiev,” she observes. “You look like your photograph — the one with your hand reaching into the sky.” And she half demonstrates.

  “What is it you want of me?” Tacho asks.

  The girl thinks about that for a moment. “I’m not sure,” she says finally. Then, as if it will explain a great deal, she tells him:

  “My family name is Krasov.”

  “Krasov,” Tacho repeats. It is vaguely familiar —no, he knows the name, but from where?

  “The Krasov who …”

  The girl looks at him without changing her expression.

  Tacho nods slowly. “Now I … I’m sorry.”

  The waiter brings the girl’s cognac. He leans close to the Racer’s ear. “Please believe I had no intention — “

  Tacho shakes off the apology. “It’s all right,” he says. He pushes the cognac toward the girl and motions with his head for her to drink. She hesitates, then lifts the glass to her lips and sips the liquid as if it is medicine. All the while her eyes are fixed on his.

  There is another half scream from the next table, but nobody turns toward it this time.

  “Who is Krasov?” demands Dancho.

  “I’ll explain later.” Tacho says this in a way that leaves Dancho no room to repeat the question. To the girl, Tacho says:

  “What is your given name?”

  “Melanie.”

  The Racer tries to pronounce it, and she has to say it several times before he can produce a reasonable facsimile.

  “And your patronymic?”

  “Americans don’t have patronymics,” she informs him. “I have what is called a middle name — Daisie.”

  Tacho tries it out, then Dancho. “It’s very melodious,” concedes Mister Dancho, who comes closest to getting it right. “Melanie Daisie,” and he rocks his head back and forth on his shoulders in appreciation.

  Tacho catches the girl looking at him. Flustered, he asks:

  “What are you? I mean, how do you describe yourself when someone asks you to describe yourself?”

  “I say I’m a practicing Capricorn,” the girl replies. Both Mister Dancho and Poleon explode in laughter, and she smiles for the first time — a slow smile that begins uncertainly in her cheek muscles, takes hold and spreads to her lips and to her eyes. It lingers deep in her eyes, obscuring the fright.

  Tacho starts to ask her something when he becomes aware of a shifting of weight, a moving of feet, a cutting off of conversation. There is no commotion, just a self-conscious silence that spreads from person to person — and then the scraping of a dog’s claws on linoleum. In the girl’s eyes, fright gets the upper hand.

  “The Dwarf,” someone whispers, and Mister Dancho observes with careful nonchalance:

  “Angel must be here.”

  The Hungarians come first, three pubescent girls with milk white baby’s skin and crimson lips and buds of breasts visible through their filmy dresses. All three are barefoot, and the one in the middle wears a garland of poppies woven into her hair, which falls in knotted ringlets over her bony shoulders. They walk with gawkily graceful children’s steps, holding hands and whispering to each other in Hungarian.

  The runt of a dog comes behind them, its short legs claw-dancing across the floor like a crab’s, its wrinkled rat’s head straining against the leash. “Down,” a voice commands, but the dog stands its ground, panting. Saliva spills from its jowls. Its unblinking fog-filled eyes stare straight ahead, seeing nothing.

  The dog is stone blind.

  “Down, Dog,” the voice commands again. A dwarf-leg shoots out and pushes its rear feet out from under it, and the dog sinks onto the floor. The girl with the poppies in her hair drops to her knees beside the dog and, wrapping her thin arms around its neck, buries her head in the folds of skin above the collar.

  The Dwarf looks down at the girl and mutters something in Hungarian. The girl looks up. He repeats the phrase. Lowering her eyes, she climbs to her feet and takes her place alongside him, slouching so as not to appear taller than he is, her arm hooked lightly through his.

  Smiling at some private joke, the Dwarf glances around. The people at the nearby tables turn away under his gaze and quietly resume their conversations.

  Angel Bazdéev is the most famous dwarf in the world. He is retired now, and incredibly rich by Bulgarian standards — he wears a diamond ring on his pinkie and drives around in a taxi that he hires by the year and pays for according to what is on the meter. But every Bulgarian over five, along with hundreds of thousands of Europeans, remembers him in his heyday — Bazdéev the king of clowns, with his painted angel’s face and his mocking smile and his exploding fedora and his baggy trousers out of which the dog called Dog leaped on signal to snap at the toes of his oversized shoes. At one time or another, Bazdéev has played in all the great circuses on the Continent. When television came into its own in the early 1950s, he became an international star, commanding huge fees for twelve minutes of antics. In France his forty-eight-inch figure with its bulging chest and slightly out of proportion head, his broad wrinkled brow, his jet black hair, became a comic-strip character and Bazdéev still gets royalties twice a year from this. The only sour note in his career came in 1956, when he applied for a visa to perform with Barnum and Bailey in America. There was some confusion when it was discovered he had been born and raised in Hungary, but was a citizen of Bulgaria; apparently the State Department handbook made no mention of this particular type of hybrid. This had barely been ironed out (by a command decision on the “highest level”) when a well-known Washington columnist accused Bazdéev of being a card-carrying Communist (true: he fought in the Flag Holder’s partisan unit during the war) who was “playing the clown to further the international Communist conspiracy,” as the columnist put it.

  The columnist also raised the specter of moral turpitude by revealing that Bazdéev had once been beaten up for molesting a child in Warsaw. This was an exaggeration. What had actually happened was that a small girl broke away from her mother during a performance and wrapped her legs around Bazd6ev’s as if she were a mating dog. The clown lost control of himself and had to be pried off her by a Rumanian lion tamer and two Jugoslav jugglers. Some peasants started into the ring to teach Bazdéev common decency, but the other clowns laughed as if the whole thing had been part of the act, and the show, or what was left of it, went on. Needless to say, the columnist’s rehashing of the incident resulted in the denial of his visa application — and the denial of the visa resulted in the breaking of every window in the American legation in Sofia.

  Bazdéev, who neither forgot nor forgave, was not without friends.

  At home Bazdéev had his detractors too. A woman professor accused him in print of really hating children because they were considered normal while he, although the same size, was not. (Bazdéev bought and burned the entire press run as soon as he got wind of the letter.) And another clown, in a fit of professional jealousy, stood up at a meeting of circus Communists and asked Bazdéev to his face whether it was true he surrounded himself with Hungarian nymphets upon whom he performed unspeakable acts in public as well as in private. There was an embarrassed silence. Bazdéev waddled up to the stage, climbed up on a stool so he could reach the microphone and said with great dignity that the accusation was an out and out lie — he never touched them in public!

  By that time Bazdéev’s sexual appetites were already a matter of legend. And except for a crank or two, the general tendency was to see in him what the Flag Holder saw in him: a nobility of spirit that was in constant state of rebellion against the role the world wanted him to play — that of a freak.

  The Dwarf comes right to the point. Now, as always, there is no shaking
of hands; Angel doesn’t like to be touched except by his Hungarians. “I heard the Witch of Melnik said twenty August is the end and the beginning — of what, she was not sure,” the Dwarf rasps, his voice pitched high. “I organize to celebrate this end, this beginning with a wedding, and I invite all you to it.” His eyes flit over the American girl — over her knees and thighs — and come to rest on the girl with the garlands in her hair. “I have intention to make honest child out of this petal of Hungarian flowerhood.” Bazdéev smiles his mocking smile.

  Bazdéev’s “marriages” are spur-of-the-moment bacchanals that he organizes when the spirit moves him: sometimes to coincide with one of the solstices, sometimes with a national holiday, sometimes with a political event he wishes to mark and mock. Among the cognoscenti, invitations are as valuable as exit visas.

  “When is the wedding?” Mister Dancho inquires, rubbing his hands together happily.

  “Tomorrow night … sundown … Paradise Lost.” Paradise Lost is the name Popov has given to Bazdéev’s mansion on Vitoša, the mountain that slopes up like the sides of an amphitheater south of Sofia.

  The Dwarf produces a cigar and sticks it between his lips. Mister Dancho extends his empty hand and offers him a light. The Hungarian girls squeal in delight. As Angel puffs the cigar into life, clouds of blue smoke obscure his head. Poleon says:

  “Some day I mean to get you roaring drunk and find out what you’re trying to prove with these weddings of yours.”

  Angel, whose face comes up to Poleon’s even though one is standing and the other is sitting, waves his hand to disperse the smoke. “But I can be telling you now. You have noticed, no, how in dreams, bizarre things are taken as normal everyday occurrences? It is my contention to demonstrate the same holds true for events who are taking place during waking hours!” Again the mocking smile.