Almost as long as I could remember, my relationship with my mother had been a difficult one, but my father had always indulged me. I would miss him dearly for he had never been unkind to me. Businessmen have little time over for their children, but he liked to have his family with him when he travelled and so I had perhaps seen more of my father than most children of my age. Over the three years that had elapsed since the day of my birthday wish, I had saved all the money my father had given me on various trips abroad and I now had sufficient to pay for my entrance to a circus. All I needed to find was a circus master who wouldn’t ask too many questions and agree to take me on.
For a few coins spent at a flea market in Omsk the previous afternoon I had purchased an outfit of secondhand clothes as well as a motley collection of spare bits and pieces to make a change of clothes, which I stored in a battered suitcase.
Dressed in these clothes a casual observer would think I was a cut above a peasant, perhaps the daughter of a minor government official. In fact, I had decided to say that my mother had died of tuberculosis when I was very young and that my father had worked on the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway as an engineer until he had been killed in a cutting explosion. The money I was offering for my tuition was his life savings plus a small accident payment from the Trans-Siberian Railway Company.
Leaving our hotel was simple enough. I had observed the location of the servants’ entrance and had quietly slipped out just after midnight dressed in my secondhand clothes and a white pinafore and cap I had removed from a hotel laundry basket. I was only thirteen, but I had travelled extensively and was well versed in the ways of a grand hotel.
Fate was on my side. I arrived at the circus site at six o’clock on the morning of the day of their departure by river steamer to the small city of Pavlodar in Kazakhstan, about two hundred kilometres away.
It took me two hours before I could persuade any of the circus folk to regard me seriously enough to take me to the circus owner. When eventually I stood before him I seemed to quickly convince him that my story was genuine. He agreed almost the moment he discovered how much money I possessed. Life is cheap in a circus, on the other hand money is everything, so with all of my money in his pocket I instantly became a member of the circus. And, as the professor has so eloquently put it, the first upheaval in my small life began.
Circus life is hard for anyone, and for a little girl who had scarcely tied her own hair ribbons it came as an awful shock. If I had imagined that I would be actually trained by the acrobats in my new life I was quite mistaken. I had to fend for myself from the first day and I was treated as a nuisance and the dogsbody. I cleaned out the animal cages, filled the barrels with sawdust, spread it, swept up, washed the dishes after the acrobats had eaten and, in return, I was allowed a few crusts from their leftovers.
Circus people all work hard and are constantly hungry, and living off leftovers was a very precarious business. In a circus you only eat well when you become useful and useful means being a part of an act. I was taught nothing but learned a lot just by watching and emulating my betters. For the first year while we travelled throughout Kazakhstan I cried myself to sleep every night on my bed of straw under the tiger’s cage.
‘You slept under the tiger’s cage?’ Olga Zorbatov exclaimed, clearly astonished. ‘The tiger’s cage?’ she repeated.
Tamara laughed. ‘It was safe, smelly but safe,’ she looked mischievously around, ‘Tiger’s piss stinks twenty times worse than a cat’s and, besides, the tiger looked after me, she was my friend.’
‘You became a tiger trainer?’ Olga asked, astonished.
‘No, no, I had to clean out its cage and often I would help to feed it, and it got used to me being around.’
‘But to sleep under a tiger’s cage? In a circus this is normal?’ I asked, amazed.
Tamara sighed. ‘The only thing that is normal in a circus for a thirteen-year-old is that she is definitely not a virgin. I was pretty and my bumps in front were developing and I had a narrow waist and good legs and…’
She stopped, then continued. ‘As you know I slept under the tiger’s cage. Tigers are nocturnal animals, they prowl all night, up and down the cage. If any person approached, the tiger would snarl long before any of the men could crawl under the cage to get at me. I would always have a timely warning and be able to run off or scream,’ Miss Showbiz grinned, ‘usually both, and the tiger would get very excited and between me screaming and the tiger snarling and bumping against the bars of its cage the whole circus would be roused. The men who worked in the circus soon gave up and it was two years before I lost my virtue.’
Tamara gave her little laugh again, and I must say I was beginning to respect her. ‘In a circus, a fifteen-year-old virgin is practically an old spinster!’ she added ruefully.
We were obviously too polite to ask how she did lose her virtue, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who would have liked to know a juicy bit of information like that. To my surprise she simply told us.
After I had overcome the terrible culture shock, or, as the professor puts it, the upheaval in my life, and believe me, if I could have run away I would have done so every day of the first year in the circus.
But where could I go? We were in the middle of Siberia. I had no money, I had no means of contacting my father, I didn’t even have paper and pencil and, besides, I could never have afforded the cost of the postage.
When you occasionally meet someone who has been to prison in Siberia, you will understand how impossible it is to escape. I had sent myself to Siberia and I was a prisoner just as much as if I had been locked up every night. I worked twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day. But somehow I managed to do the acrobatic exercises and practised a little and soon, after my first year and well into my second year, I began to understand the ways of the circus. I started to know what it means to be one of the circus people, how you are different, a separate tribe, a different language, a unique life and, most of all, that there is a price to pay for every skill in the circus, for every chance you are given.
At fifteen, though, I worked hard and never complained, I had nothing to give, nothing to barter, well, that is until the circus owner called me into his caravan one afternoon. We were in Samarkand in Uzbekistan where the people have dark almond-shaped eyes and olive skin and after we had erected the tents and everything was ready for the evening show I was summonsed to appear in front of the great man.
I was quite terrified, the owner was a huge man, a Georgian, with an enormous belly and waxed moustaches like my old dancing master and he was totally bald. Despite his fatness, his power was awesome and he would still occasionally appear in leopard-skin tights as the circus strong man. It was also claimed that he could eat half a goat on his own.
I stood in front of him as he peeled an orange slowly with his grubby thumbnail. His thumbnail was at least six centimetres long and I had heard that it was as sharp as a razor. All the acrobats and the clowns or anyone who he thought was not performing properly knew what it felt like to have his thumbnail jabbed into their backsides until the blood ran.
So there I stood, barefoot and in rags. I was shivering mostly with fear but also from the chill in the air and watched him slowly peel an orange, keeping the skin in one piece. His nail stayed motionless as he slowly rotated the brilliant orange-coloured peel off the luscious fruit.
This process seemed to take a long time and when it was complete and the twist of peel lay like a brightly coloured snake on the table in front of him he looked up. He had blue eyes, icy eyes, hooded like a reptile, so that they never seemed to open entirely, and the blue slits were so sharp and so cold that you felt goosebumps when he looked at you. I had not spoken to him since he had taken all my money nearly two years previously. ‘What is your name, child?’ he asked.
‘Tamara Polyansky, sir,’ I stammered, not in the least surprised that he had forgotten all about me. By this time I was so demoralised that I would have been very surprised if he h
ad even remembered me.
‘Oh, yes, the child from Omsk.’ His eyes seemed to travel all over my body, then back to me. ‘You want to be an acrobat, and work on the trapeze?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I could hardly breathe and my heart started to pound in my breast but I dared not look at him.
‘Are you one of us, now?’
I knew what he meant, was I circus folk? I nodded, my head still bowed.
‘For your entire life, Tamara Polyansky?’
‘I want nothing else, sir,’ I managed to whisper.
‘Good’ he said. ‘You may join the acrobatic troupe. Mitya Pimenov will look after you, she will be your mother.’
‘Mother’ is a term used in the circus which bears no relationship to the true meaning of the word. There is no mother love involved and no mothering. It means that, in return for being trained, I would virtually be a slave to Mitya Pimenov. There was nothing she couldn’t ask me to do and I had not the least right of refusal.
But Mitya Pimenov was the best, she could tumble and fly like an angel and her courage on the trapeze knew no limits. I worshipped her from afar, because she was also very beautiful. But I knew enough about the training to know that she would be remorseless with me and never show me the least hint of kindness.
Female acrobats are bred to be hard. Most know they will die young and that to feel for someone else and then lose them is a cause of an inconsolable grief, bringing with it a fear of flying. High flyers believe that the ghost of the loved one rides the wire. There is even a name given for this departed loved one, male or female, the Witch on the Wire. The superstition is that the loved one will bring about the demise of the one left behind.
‘Thank you, sir, I am most grateful,’ I stammered again.
There was now a brittle silence between us, mine because I dared not say anything more and his for reasons I couldn’t for a moment guess at. Besides, I did not have the courage to glance up at him. Finally the huge man said, ‘Look up, child! A trapeze artist is proud, unafraid, even of the circus owner. Look up, Tamara Polyansky, and watch and listen and you will learn something.’
I looked up into those terrible, cold eyes. He was holding the orange and had his thumb pushed into the top of the peeled orb. ‘There is an entrance fee,’ he said and the thumb rose, then pushed back into the top of the orange and then rose again and was once more pushed down so that some of the juice from within poured up out and over the sides of the orange and onto the surface of the table. The owner reached down and dabbed the pudgy forefinger of his free hand into the liquid and brought it to his mouth. ‘The circus owner always gets first taste, Tamara Polyansky. It is a tradition, a circus tradition.’ His thumb bore down into the orange a little deeper and suddenly the fruit broke open into two halves. ‘What was closed must be opened. If you wish to fly like a bird, little Tamara, then first we must open the cage.’ He put his thumb with the sharp nail into his mouth and sucked the juice from it. ‘And that is my job. I am the cage opener and I also own the bird within it.’
Tamara shrugs. ‘At fifteen I became an acrobat and…’ She pauses for a moment and whispers, ‘also not a virgin any more.’
As Tamara has been speaking she has been systematically unbraiding her hair. I do not think she is conscious of doing this, it is simply a nervous gesture. But now it hangs in a shower of gold on either side of her pretty face.
She brings both her hands up and sweeps the hair back and shakes her head.
I didn’t care, I was an acrobat. In my mind I had always been an acrobat and had tumbled and jumped, so that when the time came there was nothing to open, the blood so treasured on the wedding night was long ago lost in some child’s acrobatic movement. If there was nothing to open, then there was something to close. The fat circus owner closed the door to my innocence forever.
Again, I gave this no thought. The little rich girl I had been was long dead and innocence in a circus is not a commodity to be treasured. Besides, I now cared only about three things, to walk the wire, to become a trapeze artist and to find Eugene Wilenski. I had convinced myself that he had returned to the circus and was somewhere in Russia.
In fact, the Wilenski family were well known among circus folk. The first flying trapeze to start in Russia in 1864 had a Wilenski as a tumbler and contortionist. Fathers, uncles and cousins were circus folk and it was unthinkable, I told myself, that Eugene would go into the military when he could so easily return to the circus where he was born. I would find him and, when I did, I would fly into his arms and walk the wire of heaven with him.
There is not much more to tell of my circus career in the years that followed. The broken bones, the disappointment, the grinding routines, the constant striving for perfection were simply accepted. Trapeze artists grow old young in a circus. But I became, in circus terms, ‘A Master of the Art’, a flying trapeze artist and wire walker who would claim top billing on the circus posters.
Tamara Polyansky
The Queen of Heaven
challenges
the Prince of Darkness
to a contest in which
one of them must die!
is what the posters proclaimed. I was dressed as an angel in a brilliant white and blue costume ablaze with silver spangles which showed my figure to perfection, whereas my male counterpart wore jetblack tights and a top with a close-fitting cap around his head with red horns protruding from it and a fiery red arrow-pointed tip on the end of his long tail.
We would fly through the air as though in mortal combat, twisting and tumbling and catching each other. And then when it looked certain that the Prince of Darkness would triumph, I would climb down the trapeze pole to where the highwire stretched and start to walk across it as though escaping. The Prince of Darkness, to a dramatic drum roll, would swing across the circus tent to the opposite side, and then he too would come down onto the wire at the opposite end, clutching a fiery sword. He would move towards me with the music building the tension higher and the lights would dim to a single spotlight which transfixed us on the wire.
The spotlight would gradually diminish as he drew closer and closer, sometimes widening a little as I attempted to walk backwards to escape the flaming sword. I’d pretend that it was hardly possible, giving the audience the impression that I was not good on the wire and was in imminent danger of plummeting to my death.
The audience could see that no net was strung beneath us to catch me and at this stage of the act they were almost hysterically afraid. The dark demon with the flaming sword, so adept on the wire, came nearer and nearer until we reached the centre of the wire, thirty metres above the ring, and the spotlight went out.
Now only the flames from the sword lit the scene and the remainder of the circus was in complete darkness. The Prince of Darkness, with his body crouched low, lunged forward, intending to run me through with the fiery blade.
Whereupon I leapt high and catapulted over his body. The sword thrust, meeting only air, threw the devil completely off balance and he plunged, sword in hand, screaming into the pitch-darkness below. The orchestra stopped in mid-note, seemingly in surprise, and the thud of the devil’s body was plainly heard as it hit the ground.
The sword had extinguished itself on the way down and now the audience waited in total darkness. Only a matter of moments later a spotlight came on to reveal the devil dead and lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the ring impaled on his own sword, the bright glint of its blade covered with blood.
Then, to the haunting strains of a lone violin, the spotlight lifted to show me balanced on the wire high above. The Queen of Heaven victorious over the Prince of Darkness. The music swelled to a triumphant climax and the spotlight widened, the orchestra died down until there was only the sound of muffled drums as the clowns, dressed in black, carried the devil’s lifeless body from the ring, the sword still skewered through his stomach.
We all begin to spontaneously applaud, that is except the professor.
‘Trick lighting,
smoke and mirrors!’ he says gruffly.
Tamara Polyansky grins and looks over at the professor. ‘Most of it, yes. But not the leap over the devil’s back. This part of the act required me to jump in the dark and land back on the wire. Though the acrobatics and wire work in the act were truly marvellously done, it was this daredevil ability alone which gave me the coveted title, Master of the Art, and also, by the way, cost me thousands of hours to perfect.’
Tamara now has us completely in her thrall and even Mr Mendelsohn is once again awake and listening, so we are, well I know I am, disappointed when she says, ‘Enough of circus. I was at the top of my profession and we played all over Russia.
‘It was in St Petersburg, where the usual poster with my face on it was pasted everywhere, that I finally caught up with my mother. She visited me one afternoon at the circus dressed to the nines and wearing a sable fur. She coldly informed me that my father had died of the English influenza and that she had taken over his business.
‘“No more silly furs, we now deal exclusively in wool, and supply both the Russian Imperial army and the navy with overcoats,” she said and then went on to tell me that she was now married to a count, who was also an admiral in the Tsar’s navy. They were, she said, in St Petersburg because her husband was to receive his commissioning patents from Tsar Nicholas to be the admiral responsible for the fleet at Port Arthur. This was where a good part of the Russian fleet stood ready to defend the Tsar’s dominion over Manchuria, the vast territory Russia had recently confiscated, stolen would be a better word, from China.
The Family Frying Pan Page 12