‘My mother seemed to relish the meeting between us and lost no time pointing out to me that she had achieved for herself what she had always hoped for her daughter, and was now a countess in her own right.
‘She also took some delight in informing me that she had finally persuaded my father that I was dead and therefore he had left me no inheritance and, furthermore, that she was now so well accustomed to the idea of my permanent demise that she never wished to see me again.’
Tamara shrugs, ‘I remember how she concluded this last statement. “There is no more room in my life for a clown like your father or a cheap circus acrobat like his daughter,” she said as she took her leave. “Goodbye, Tamara, I doubt that we shall meet again, but if we do you will refer to me as Countess Ivanovitch and not as Mother.”’
Tamara Polyansky smiles. ‘So, that was that, the circus became my only family.’
‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me,’ Olga Zorbatov sniffs, ‘You are better off without her, my dear. An unfaithful mother is far worse than an unfaithful lover. The lover you can at least replace!’
It is the first joke we have ever heard from Olga, but I suspect she means it, because when we all laugh she says, ‘It’s true! I promise you, it’s true!’ as though she means it.
As for Miss Showbiz? Her slow-starting story has now changed from a trickle into a rushing torrent of interest and now none of us wants her to stop.
‘Is that all? Is that the end?’ I ask, plainly disappointed. ‘So, tell me, please, Tamara. What brings you amongst this group of millionaires and playboys?’ I gesture to our group, all of whom laugh except Olga, who, of course, misses the joke.
‘By no means the end, Mrs Moses, shall I continue?’ Tamara Polyansky says. I think she was delighted that we seemed to be enjoying her newfound talent for telling a story.
You will, of course, know that the Japanese attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in order to take Manchuria from us. Well, on the night of the terrible attack in which most of the Russian fleet was destroyed and with it a great many sailors and soldiers, my mother’s husband, the count and admiral, was among those who perished. It just so happened that the circus was also in Port Arthur on that night and by morning we found ourselves prisoners of the Imperial Japanese Forces.
I cannot say why the Imperial Japanese Army, who took over the port after the Russian fleet was destroyed, wanted a circus, but they did.
They made us pack up and we travelled together with a long line of prisoners of war into Manchuria. We were treated well enough at first, and the Japanese soldiers for whom we performed nightly shows seemed to enjoy us equally as much as our own countrymen.
Circus folk will do almost anything for applause and we soon practically forgot that we were consorting with the enemy. After all, any audience is good when it laughs and cries and loves the mime and the tricks and comes back for more. My ‘Angel versus the Devil’ highlight was soon transformed into a form the Japanese soldiers could understand and it worked just as well as ever. My final leap on the wire would leave the hard-bitten soldiers swooning and gasping and at every performance dozens would faint. I suppose they were only young peasant boys really and they would clap and cheer at the death of the Prince of Darkness who had been transformed in the Japanese version into a wicked demon or spirit.
But one night, a soldier became so emotionally carried away that he ran from his seat to where my partner lay in the centre of the ring with the sword through his body pretending to be dead, and fixing a bayonet to his rifle he repeatedly stabbed the so-called dead body through the heart before he could be pulled away.
But before I go on I have to make a terrible confession. I became the mistress of Colonel Tanaka, the Japanese commandant of the prisoner-of-war camp. I beg you to understand I had no choice, the circus owner was simply told that it was the circus or me. Naturally, I was forced to accept, the circus was my family, and one does not kill one’s own family, even though I would have gladly died rather than become the concubine for a Japanese officer.
I was also allowed to stay with the circus and perform and the people in the circus knew I was keeping them alive, so they never mentioned the liaison and were always kind to me. This had happened some time before my partner on the wire was killed by the over-excited soldier.
‘We accept it was not your fault, Tamara,’ I said.
‘Yes, I would have done the same,’ Anya said. ‘That is, if I had been brave enough. It was a noble and wonderful thing you did, Tamara Polyansky!’
Tamara wiped her tears with the sleeve of her pretty blue dress, sniffed and acknowledged Anya and myself with a grateful smile, then continued.
When my partner was killed I devised a solo act, but it was not the same. The Japanese soldiers far and wide had heard of ‘The Good Spirit Angel wrestling in the air with the Bad Spirit Demon’. There was hardly a soldier in the Emperor’s Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Manchuria who would not have given a week’s wages to see the act. I was famous and, I suppose, for an occidental, much admired. The Japanese have a great capacity for theatre and make-believe and have an intense love of fantasy and are all very superstitious and believe implicitly in good and evil spirits.
How this next chapter in my story came about I can’t say, but one morning Colonel Tanaka rose from the tatami mat where he had made love to me and said that I would have a new partner. I had one month to train him to perform my signature act.
As I laced up his boots he announced, ‘You will be perfect in one month! If not, we stop circus and you all die!’ He pointed a stubby finger at me. ‘Not you, you mine! All others die! Understand?’ He spoke to me in French which was the language we used. He had learned it while studying to be an engineer in France.
‘Master, your humble servant cannot take just anyone and train him to be an acrobat and walk the highwire,’ I said. ‘Not in a month, not even in a year!’ I pleaded.
‘He is already trained. One month, no more!’ he shouted. ‘He is Russian!’ He said this as though, in his mind, all it took to restore the act was to recruit another Russian to be my partner.
‘But is he really an acrobat? Does he know the highwire?’ I begged to know.
‘Of course!’ With this he walked out of the tiny bedchamber. ‘One month!’ he bellowed as he retreated into his office.
Later that morning I was summoned to the tent of the circus owner who, since subsisting on a meagre rice diet, had lost considerable weight. I entered his tent to find that a Russian prisoner of war stood nearby. The man had his back to me, but I could see that what remained of his uniform was in rags. He wore no boots on his feet, though the insignia on his tattered coat sleeve denoted that he was a captain in the Imperial Horse Brigade.
‘Colonel Tanaka has informed me that you know of this plan to give you a new partner, Tamara?’ The circus owner spread his hands and sighed as if to indicate that while he knew the task was impossible it was up to me and that I must attempt to achieve the impossible.
‘But it is not possible! I tell you, it can’t be done! This is an act that took two years to perfect! It simply couldn’t be done in one month by God’s only son Himself!’ I said, releasing my anger and frustration in front of the owner.
‘I don’t know about that. He could walk on water, Tamara Polyansky,’ came the voice from the man in rags. He turned and I found myself staring into the emaciated face of Eugene Wilenski! He reached out and with the back of his index finger lightly brushed my cheek. ‘Keep practising, little nanotchka, and one day we will meet on the highwire, and then go to the trapeze where we will fly into each other’s arms.’
Of the next month, what can I say? I have never worked so hard in my life. Eugene was a natural but he was rusty and his muscles unaccustomed to doing acrobatic work, and besides he was half starved. At least I was able to get the colonel to put him on a good diet and he ate voraciously to gain the strength he needed for the work at hand.
The first performance a
month later was nothing to shout about, but we muddled through it and the Japanese soldiers seemed not to see the many glaring imperfections in the act. In six months we were nearly perfect. Eugene was a marvel and as I flew nightly into his arms high above the screaming soldiers I fell more and more deeply in love. I had always loved only him but now my whole body and soul ached to have him. At night when I lay with the colonel I imagined it was Eugene and fantasised that we had escaped and were passionate lovers and would eventually die in each other’s arms.
Once Eugene Wilenski no longer saw me as a child he too began to love me, although slowly at first. There was so little time to be kind and he had so much to learn and I was often forced to be stern, even to shout at him. Russian men, especially men from the Crimea, do not like their women to be assertive. But in the end I do not believe he could help himself and he declared his love for me.
We could never consummate our love, for if it was discovered I felt sure we would both be executed. I also learned that Colonel Tanaka had found Eugene by promising that if any Russian prisoner of war was by chance a trapeze artist who could walk the highwire and would agree to come forward, for every act he completed in the circus, the life of a Russian prisoner of war would be spared.
It was of course a long shot on the colonel’s part but it worked. Every day five Russian prisoners were executed as a matter of routine. It was called the Lottery of the Dead, the five prisoners were selected by the colonel simply at random as he inspected the ranks each morning. Now there was this seemingly miraculous chance to save one lottery winner each day, and so Eugene had come forward. Our act had literally become a matter of life or death. And, if we were discovered to be lovers, a great many Russians would die as a consequence.
We worked together for one year and three days. Despite the circumstances, I must tell you I am not ashamed to say they were the happiest days of my life. To have been so loved that every nerve end in your body responded was like being in the presence of angels.
I would fly gleefully through the air and we would do more and more impossible figurations until, I do believe, Eugene and I were possibly the finest aerial act in the world. And always as we performed and my body twisted with his own in the air we were consciously making love, fantastic love. Frequently at the end of a breathless movement I felt myself grasped in his strong arms, and no consummation between two lovers could ever have been better wrought nor satisfied more. We were making glorious and beautiful love in the air and below us the soldiers were entranced with what they regarded as the eternal battle between good and evil.
When, in the end, I leapt over Eugene’s lunging body and flaming sword and stood high on the wire to look down at him spotlighted in the ring lying in the pool of fake blood with the fake sword through his back, all I saw was a beautiful lover, exhausted from making love to me in the air and on the heavenly wire.
And then on the evening of the fourth day of the second year Eugene and I were together, on a night seemingly no different to any other, Colonel Tanaka attended our performance.
The show opened in the usual way, and as always our act was the grand finale. The only difference was that instead of dedicating our performance to a colonel, general or captain of whatever regiment was attending the performance that night, I dedicated it to Colonel Tanaka. I stood high up on the trapeze and in Japanese, for I now had a reasonable grasp of the language, I made the dedication.
My enemy lover stood up where he sat with the other officers and formally saluted. He was in his dress uniform with shining knee boots and he wore a dress sword as well as his service revolver. He seemed very pleased as he bowed towards me and I bowed in return from the trapeze high above his head. The troops all cheered their heads off and we were off to a grand start.
I knew that the dedication had been a popular success and that Colonel Tanaka had gained great face and that I had greatly honoured his presence in a most appropriate manner. I could sense Eugene’s amusement as he stood in the dark on the trapeze platform at the other side of the tent, no doubt grinning to himself and hopeful that my gesture of respect might save all five of tomorrow’s lottery winners. I had promised him that if the colonel was pleased with the show I would attempt to persuade him to save all the next morning’s lottery winners as a gesture of goodwill.
If anything our performance that night was more brilliant than it had ever been. We had reached the finale on the wire after our technique on the swings had been faultless. Now Eugene, with the flaming sword in hand, advanced towards me and I, with feigned uncertainty, attempted to walk backward on the wire to escape my determined assailant. Eugene, for his part, stalked me with a panther-like ease, the spotlight bringing us closer and closer together, the tension building. Then, at the precise moment the music stopped and only the flames from the moving sword lit the scene, a single shot rang out.
The bullet caught Eugene in the chest halfway through the movement of the sword thrust. I saw a brilliant scarlet spray of blood as the vicious bullet ripped open Eugene’s chest and he fell backwards away from me and plunged wildly downwards, missing the small net positioned in the darkness which was intended to break his fall. I instinctively jumped over him as he fell from the wire and the circus tent went into total darkness as the sword extinguished. I landed back on the wire in the dark and held my balance. There had been two thuds in the three seconds it took him to fall. Moments later the spotlight came back on, but Eugene did not lie in his accustomed spot in the centre of the circus ring, though I could clearly see the pool of fake blood prepared for his body. The spotlight swayed, then moved left and then right and forward again across the ring until it found his broken body and held still.
The soldiers were yelling and screaming their heads off, thinking it all a part of the act. Suddenly Colonel Tanaka walked into the spotlight and stood beside Eugene’s broken body. Slowly he drew his sword and with a fierce, sharp shout he raised the samurai sword above his head and, using a double-handed grip on its haft, he swiftly brought it down, the blade whipping in the air before separating Eugene’s head from his torso.
There is a gasp and then a soft moan to my left and Olga Zorbatov slumps beside me into a dead faint. Anya and Mitya Shebaldin both have their hands up to their faces and Mr Mendelsohn breaks down and weeps. For my part, while deeply shocked, I’ve seen the Cossacks do the same thing in my village and am probably the first to compose myself.
Tamara is now weeping loudly and I rise, taking her into my arms, ‘Sshhh! We will help you, we are your friends, Tamara,’ I say, rocking her like a baby in my arms. It is not much, but soon her tears and gulps quieten and after some time she draws herself away from me and needlessly apologises to us all.
In the meantime we’ve all forgotten about poor Olga Zorbatov, but like a true Taurus, she gives a sudden bellow and promptly recovers from her faint. To be born under the sign of the bull is not easy, nobody seems in the least concerned for her.
‘It is enough for one night,’ I say.
But Tamara’s hand rises to still me. ‘Please, Mrs Moses, I do not possess the strength to go through this again another night.’ She looks around, her eyes taking us all in. ‘With your kind permission I would like to complete my story.’
Then Tamara Polyansky tells us how Colonel Tanaka has discovered her love for Eugene.
One night, the circus owner had become uproariously drunk on sake, Japanese rice wine, during a reception after a particular circus performance. Hoping to ingratiate himself, he had whispered into the ear of a visiting infantry captain that the two high-flying trapeze artists were lovers. The infantry captain, thinking little of this information, had mentioned it in passing to another officer and eventually it had been told to Colonel Tanaka.
Colonel Tanaka now waited for me to come down from the highwire and dragged me by the hair towards the owner’s tent.
‘You have been unfaithful!’ he screamed in Japanese. ‘You must pay with your life, whore!’
‘Kill me!
I beg you to kill me!’ I shouted back. ‘Do it now, shoot me now!’I sobbed.
Instead he threw me inside the tent where the circus owner cowered in the corner on his knees. He crawled, whimpering, on his knees towards Colonel Tanaka and commenced to beg for mercy, sobbing and then kissing the toes of his shiny dress boots.
Tanaka released his grip on my hair and I too fell to the ground but then leapt up again. ‘Kill me, you bastard!’ I screamed, attacking him with my nails.
Tanaka knocked me down with the back of his hand, but I rose again just as he drew his revolver and shot the circus owner through the back of the head.
‘You!’ he screamed in French at me. ‘For you, something worse than death!’
I was sent to northern Japan where I became a comfort woman in a brothel for soldiers. There I would often be used a hundred times a day. If I had not been constantly watched I would have taken my own life a dozen times. In 1910, during the course of a small earthquake when the brothel was totally disrupted and the guards were running for their lives, I escaped. Eventually I crossed the La Perouse Strait to the Russian island of Sakhalin and told my story to the military authorities.
But I found that I was no heroine. Instead I was wanted by the Tsar’s secret police as well as the military authorities. The military wanted me for consorting with the enemy, and the secret police for being a spy against Imperial Russia.
Because the secret police had precedence over the military and were besides a huge and somewhat befuddled bureaucracy, it was somehow necessary for me to be interrogated in Moscow several thousand kilometres away. The military declared that they would have saved the Tsar the expense and simply taken me out and shot me while, at the same time, resenting the cost of a bullet for the little yellow man’s whore.
I will spare you a description of the journey by boat and then by train across Russia. There are few miseries as great. But after several weeks, when it became apparent that I had no interest in escaping and didn’t seem to much care whether I lived or died, my guards removed the shackles from my wrists and ankles so that I could prepare their food and do other duties, including the one I had been doing for the Japanese soldiers. The uniforms may change but what’s below the belt of a man who has power over a woman remains constant.
The Family Frying Pan Page 13