Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  And so: a storm breaks. Meister Lukas again, raining down a barrel of peas onto a sheet of metal. Rain as loud and hard as hail. The large mirror turns window, shows a smear of cloud approaching in a moon-bright sky. It is a crude trick, a painted scroll that can be drawn across the screen, slowly changing the scenery, bringing the cloud closer along with its curtain of rain. Not just any rain: Smoke-rain, unmistakable now to those who have stood like these two, witnessing its first approach. Soon it fills the whole of the window and—a fine effect this, perfected after much trial—begins to patter as real water onto the stage at the bride’s and groom’s feet, then soaks their fronts, until that peasant shirt clings to his broad chest and her sodden dress discloses the woman underneath its virgin folds.

  Next, the Smoke starts, pumped from beneath the stage through a crack in the floorboards, near enough the mirror-window so as to seem to blow in from outside. It isn’t real Smoke but a chemical concoction. Harmless and scentless, it billows around bride and groom. They breathe it; she utters a moan; he turns to her, cradles her cheek in his palm, bends down to her in a kiss that is almost a bite (a touch too much perhaps, an actor getting in the way of the pure language of the gesture).

  And just like that their own Smoke—real Smoke—leaps out of bride and groom, thick and many-hued. It is caught on the draught of two hand-operated fans and carries out into the audience in rich tendrils of emotion. The lights die, are cut off all at once; the bed squeaks, as the bride slams the groom’s weight into its mattress.

  Then: nothing. Not the sound of their lovemaking, which would push the scene into farce; no whispers or giggles or sweetly struck strings. Rather, a blank silence falls to be filled by the audience members themselves. The drama is theirs now, played out in their heads; on their skin, and in the air that binds them. It is guided by two well-positioned Shapers and contained by Etta May, the troupe’s Soother who is also in charge of the bell. Ten seconds, Balthazar has instructed her, fifteen at most, and shorter if the Smoke starts to taste wrong.

  Balthazar counts sixteen. Then the bell rings and light floods the room, thick with Smoke, already dispersing in the draught created by the redirected fans and hastily thrown-open windows. Its taste is lovely, the Smoke’s, full of yearning and sadness and frisky, playful need. Ada and Victor—bride and groom—take their bows: his shirt is wide open and the hem of her skirt is in her hand, showing calf and knee. Balthazar snorts. It would be pointless to reprimand them. They are one now with the audience’s Smoke. When they kiss, the applause carries envy but no resentment.

  Victor’s hand makes smudges on Ada’s shapely bum.

  [ 2 ]

  They take a break. Not an intermission, just a few minutes for the last of the Smoke to disperse and the auditorium’s air to clear. Best to paint new emotion on a clean slate.

  While the stage set is being changed—the bed exchanged for the stylised prow of a ship; stool and dresser traded for a large, barnacle-studded tub filled with stinky brine—Etta May makes her way over to Balthazar. This irritates him. It is best if the Shapers and Soothers are not identified by the audience but merge with it. Balthazar does not look up as she steps behind the screen that shelters him; feels a stiffness come into his features. It turns his face into a stone, Etta May once told him. A brittle lump of flint: sheer and angular, barely troubled by a sculptor’s hand; not enough skin for too much cheekbone; the slip of the chisel for a nose. Tarred, then dry-aged in a kiln. She herself is fleshy, closer to fifty than forty, cheeks florid like a baker’s wife. In the heat of the room she had shed her cape, and her décolleté is heaving in her low-cut dress; her bosom Soot-flecked yet pale as yeasty uncooked dough.

  “Don’t scowl, Balthazar. Makes you look ugly. Scrunched like a hand puppet. A sour Negro Punch.”

  He flares his nostrils, already soothed, then makes a point of scowling more deeply. “You’re leaving your post, Em. What do you want? Get fired?”

  “Get a raise, more like.”

  Etta May smiles, fishes a cigarette from one rolled-up dress sleeve and lights it with a book of matches produced from out the other. Her movements are deliberate, exaggerated. Is she nervous? No: excited. Wishing to disclose her excitement and at the same time defer its explanation; build suspense. Balthazar makes a mental note of the gesture, of the pause it imposes. It will do well in a future play.

  “There is someone here,” Etta May says at last, blowing cigarette smoke past his face, then watching it curl and break up, so different in its movements from real Smoke it is like comparing water to quicksilver. “Someone unusual. In the audience.”

  “Who?”

  “Can’t tell, hon. Towards the back.”

  “A Spoiler?”

  “No. More like the opposite.” She hesitates. “Though that’s not quite right either. Someone unusual. Potent. You may want to have a sniff around.”

  She takes another puff, passes over the cigarette, and smiles up at him in that way she has, at once sassy and maternal. Then she navigates her hips around the edge of the screen and back into the crowd. The cigarette she has left behind tastes of her lipstick and powder. Balthazar smokes it down to a stub. His eyes are on a crack in the screen and, beyond it, on the crowd.

  There are perhaps sixty people in the hall. It could accommodate five times that number, but in a space like this, a market hall rich in brick and tile but poor in doors and windows, where the Smoke can rise but not disperse unless chased out by the action of some well-aimed fans, more would be dangerous, and greedy. Besides, there is no need. They can always put on more shows, raise the price of tickets. No matter how expensive they get, the performance is always sold out. Farmers paying in grain, in chickens, in pails of milk; trappers offering furs; shipping agents bringing silver, fabrics and spices, imported trinkets made of gold. The troupes that can do this, and do it safely, are few and far between. It is a question of material, and of personnel. All of it: his doing. Balthazar has written every gesture, scripted every burp of Smoke; has done the hiring, hand-picked every talent, from the actors to the stagehands and set painter, to those with whom he seeds the audience, orchestrating their response. You could say that he invented it. Smoke Theatre.

  It is the art form of the age.

  There are other companies, but his is the best: not just in the colonies, but anywhere Balthazar has been.

  Anywhere it is allowed.

  Shaper, Soother, Spoiler: these are theatre terms, specific to a practice not a decade old. Shapers are men and women one places in the crowd to guide its Smoke-response; actors whose disposition and training allow them to receive the stage emotion and magnify it. Soothers are sinkholes of a sort, slow and placid in their Smoke, and uncommonly kind in disposition. They walk the crowd looking for Spoilers: audience members whose Smoke is powerful and dangerous to the performance; who will take the love offered up by the play, or its grief, or its frustration, and have it feed their rage. It is a dangerous game, bringing scores of people together in an auditorium, dangerous, and rewarding.

  It is a mystery to Balthazar how Aristotle could have written on catharsis, in an age long before Smoke.

  [ 3 ]

  The lights are dimmed, the stage made ready for the second piece. Fishermen at Sea. There will be words this time, and the emotional palette will centre on a forlorn sort of wonder. Four men, blown off-course in the dangerous waters between Norway and the English North, cod heavy in their holds; cold-chapped fingers and wind-blown faces; clutching tin cups of hot tea. Land is in sight. It starts in camaraderie, then; in the love workingmen bear for each other when business is good and they have survived another day.

  Then there comes a smear, staining the horizon, a sight familiar to many of the audience but new to the men: a strange, tinted fog that rises out of the cold of the land—out of the hills and rocks and sand-blown beaches of Northumbria—and slips into the So
ot-thickened sea, igniting it until each swell rolls with a hazy halo and each trough fills crest-deep with a viscous mist. The sun rises, throws the fishermen’s shadows towards the darkened water; a nice effect, crudely symbolic and pleasing to the eye. One after the other, the fishermen turn and show the audience their faces. Behind them, sunwards, the way to Norway lies clear. They consider it, unsettled by the blanket of Smoke that swaddles England; then turn their backs on sun and light and sail towards it all the same, for beyond the Smoke there lie their homes. As they enter the fog, one amongst the crew, the youngest, a Welshman, starts into song, singing shyly in his native tongue. The song’s melody—thin, brittle, true—fills the room with trepidation and thin silvery Smoke. Out in the auditorium it turns a lighter shade yet, and is passed from row to row like a chalice of sugared wine. People weep in the full awareness that they are enjoying their tears.

  It is a short play, good-natured and pleasing, connecting past and present, old and new. Saint John: a town of immigrants, hailing from England eight times out of ten. There isn’t a tale as sweet as one of home. Balthazar has used it to open and close shows in the past. They have a repertoire of more than fifty now, all one-act pieces, not really plays so much as single scenes, situations, moments in time. Emotions given life; Smoke summoned and disseminated. But really they are all the one play, the only story the audience wants to see and hear. Their own story: Smoke’s Second Coming. To England, to the colonies: everywhere it has reached.

  The troupe has tried other stories. They have revived plays Balthazar found mouldering in private libraries and converted to the theatre of Smoke. People can be made to care about doomed, lovelorn Romeo, or about Vittoria Corombona, White Devil of Padua—but it is hard work. The time of kings and dukes; power struggles amongst princes; words written before the First Smoke: they all seem distant now, unconnected to the mystery that is the present. And then, too, when staging these old plays, one has to manage their crass violence. You cut out Lavinia’s tongue onstage and the auditorium turns to tar. Anger and passion, secreted as outrage on four dozen skins. On a good night. On a bad night—the wrong audience, a Spoiler in the front row, angry with his lot—it turns to hunger and lust.

  No, Smoke Theatre is at its best when it works quieter moments, and smaller emotions; when it captures doubt and tenderness, surprise and yearning, and leaves hatred to real life, where it breeds readily enough without Art’s midwifery.

  [ 4 ]

  While the applause still lingers, and the sailors remain linked, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, a weeping scrum of men; while the buzzing ventilators stand inverted, bringing the audience’s Smoke from spectators to actors rather than the other way around, thus forging a fresh link between stalls and stage; while the room is thick with memories and fellowship, and Sashinka, the players’ cat, leaps to much hilarity onto the wooden rim of the brine-filled tub, sticking its arse in the air as it takes a deep sniff; while the room is thus self-occupied and happy, Balthazar does what he rarely thinks to do. He leaves the shelter of his screen and inserts his old, gaunt figure into the crowd. Flimsy though a barrier the screen may be, it is tall enough to encourage Smoke to pass around it, creating a pocket of almost clear air. In the crowd, Balthazar is exposed. The experience is immediate, like submerging in the sea. A loss of self; some inner fish waking, fanning its gills, like an atavism of the blood. Balthazar slips into the press, feeling his own Smoke leap in greeting, add its flavours to the mix. It is not aimless, this drifting and sharing of the self: Balthazar is looking for something, with his skin more than his eyes, an irregularity in the pulse of the crowd.

  At first the only such irregularity he senses is Etta May, a quiet eddy in the current of emotion, offering repose. The two Shapers, Kolya and Pavla, are invisible to him, have blended seamlessly into the tide. Balthazar searches on, distracted now, temporarily relieved of the burden of being alone. He slows, tempted to linger in particular patches, constellations where his neighbours’ Smoke is most in sympathy with his own wants. But enough is left of him—enough curiosity and self-regard; enough of his artist’s sense of mission; enough discipline and force of will—to push on, ever deeper, towards the back of the room. Here: a man ripe with self-hate, temporarily at peace, disarmed by the festive goodwill of the room. There: a bent old grandmother of eighty receiving, in thin mauve billows, the raging appetites of adolescent flesh from a pink-cheeked schoolboy three steps to her left and trading them for memories of libidinal adventures half a century past (they both giggle where they stand). And then, his eyes closed now, reading the room only through his skin, Balthazar senses someone else, someone strange. Self-contained yet not a blank, shaping the Smoke in ways that are hard to make sense of. Like a whale, it comes to him. Displacing half the ocean, yet trying not to move. Lest it crush the other fish.

  A talent, Etta May said.

  Unusual.

  Balthazar stops and opens his eyes, trying to identify who it is.

  He is too late. Backstage, someone (Lukas? Edie?) has decided that it is time to open once more the market hall’s ring of narrow windows, set high upon its tiled walls, and angle the fans so as to clear out the room. As the Smoke disperses, Ada’s voice, surprisingly deep for her girlish looks, announces an intermission. It is too early for this: there were to be three little plays before the break. Balthazar realises it is his doing: he has abandoned his post, leaving the actors stranded without instructions. He turns, torn between the desire to reclaim control and to pinpoint the talent before all trace is gone. He has chased her to the far end of the hall, has formed an impression of who it might be. But now that the audience is in motion—heading outdoors, each taking the memory of their communion out into the street, where they will stand alone, divided by space and icy sea breeze, their hands thrust into pockets—now, caught in this steady flow of bodies, it is hard for Balthazar to make sure of his impression and harder yet to give chase. He is left with a guess, a glimpse. A girl not yet twenty. Straight auburn hair, touched by rust. A plump curve of cheek; a back held very straight.

  Then she is swallowed by the crowd.

  [ 5 ]

  Eight plays in total; two intermissions. Two and a half hours of intense emotion. The room is painted by the time they leave, with patches of Soot like shadows cast and then discarded, stuck to tiles and dirty brick.

  They finish with a traditional piece, one of many belonging to a cycle Balthazar has been working on, what he has come to think of as his life’s work. The cycle is far from finished. One day he will perform all its plays in sequence, or perhaps in reverse. He has chosen a title and wants to publish the manuscript; has worked out a system of Smoke notation based around the symbols used in the choreography of dance. The Rebels. A running time of seven or eight hours, perhaps more. They will have to build a theatre especially, to handle the accumulation of Smoke: in North America, or on the Continent, or perhaps even in England, if politics and Gales permit. Tonight, though, the players will present the merest fragment. Act one, scene three. Balthazar wrote it many years ago, after his visit to the school. A pilgrimage, really, disappointing in its details. Few of the teachers remained; fewer yet deigned to talk to him. He had walked the grounds but received no access to the buildings.

  It’s a quiet scene, simple and clean. The stage set shows a dormitory, a little generic perhaps, a reflection of other schools visited, to which access was easier. A row of narrow beds and dressers. Some grass-stained rugby socks wilting on the floor. A stack of dog-eared schoolbooks, a blazer and tie tossed across the back of a chair. Daylight falls sickly through a window upstage left.

  Two schoolboys run in, seventeen or thereabouts, one dressed in travelling clothes and holding a suitcase, the other in school uniform and cap. The casting was difficult. Most of the actors simply look too old and it was important to get the physical types right, familiar as they are from images and songs. In the end Balthazar se
ttled on Ada and Geoffrey, their set painter. Ada has taken off the blond wig she wore earlier, as virgin bride, and her short hair has been hennaed until it shines in copper tones. Geoffrey looks much as he always does, intense and sullen. Two schoolboys, one a gentle redhead, the other dark and looking more like a butcher’s apprentice than the son of the old nobility.

  A murmur goes through the hall. The boys have been recognised. Here they are, in Saint John, New Brunswick, a town still halfway between civilisation and frontier. Shopkeepers, sea captains, the town doctor and his wife. Cowpokes, two or three natives, a gentleman dressed in his servant’s clothes, worried for his reputation (or his laundry bill). One thousand miles and a revolution from the verdant fields of Oxfordshire. And yet: the boys have been recognised. Of course they have. In Britain, on the Continent, up and down the North American coasts: there is not a story more widely told than theirs. Balthazar has long puzzled over who took such care to spread it, put such colour in its details. He is a connoisseur of story, and this one, it has been shaped.

  There is a sudden press as the audience rushes closer to the stage, as though for one mad moment they have come to believe the players have conjured the actual persons, enticed them to return. Thomas Argyle and Charlie Cooper. Balthazar knows some songs about them that, well sung, never fail to move him to tears; others that would make a madam blush. He would bet good money that the audience knows some songs, too.