In these, truth had blended with fiction so long ago that he himself no longer remembered what was embellishment. Seeing the exceptional gifts of his new pupil, he was already considering the possibility of eventually incorporating him into the troupe of aerial gymnasts in which his own son, nephew, and twelve-year-old granddaughter Nina flew from trapeze to trapeze.
By the end of his second year of training Butonov had matured greatly in knowledge, skill, and good looks. He was approximating ever more closely to the archetypal image of the builder of Communism familiar from red and white posters drawn with straight, uncomplicated horizontal and vertical lines, and with a deep transverse mark on the chin. His image needed a certain amount of further work, as was evident from the unimpressive ducklike end of his nose, but this was compensated for by the line of his shoulder, the quite un-Slavic long legs, and the refinement of his hands (heaven knows where that came from). And to cap it all, his quite incredible immunity to the female sex.
The circus girls, as in earlier days the girls at school, hung on him. Here everything was so exposed, so near at hand—the shaven armpits, and the contours of the groin, the muscular buttocks, the small, firm breasts. The other young circus artists of his age enjoyed the fruits of the sexual revolution and the artistic license flourishing in the backyards of Socialism, in an oasis on Fifth Street in Yamskoye Polye, but he viewed the girls with distaste and irony, as if Brigitte Bardot herself were waiting for him on a crumpled sofa back there in Rastorguevo.
Valentina Fyodorovna couldn’t believe her luck: her son didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t chase after women, had a good maintenance grant, and treated her well. She boasted to her neighbors: “Your Slavka is a right thug, but in all my born days I’ve never had a cross word from my Valerii.”
At the end of his second year Butonov was awarded an apprenticeship: he was one of a number of privileged students excused the standard curriculum, attached to a master and allowed to work in an act. Anton Ivanovich put him into his son’s program. Giovanni, or Ivan, although not endowed with his father’s talents, had nevertheless been schooled by him. From his earliest days he had been flying beneath the big top, turning his somersaults; but his real passion was for cars. He was one of the first circus people to import a foreign car into Russia: a red Volkswagen. It might have been old hat for Germany, but it was thirty years ahead of the sluggish progress of the Soviet car industry.
Having carefully placed an old blanket under his extremely valuable back, he spent hours lying under the car. His ill-tempered, sluttish wife Lyalya remarked caustically, “If I got to lie under him as much as he lies under that car, he would be worth his weight in gold.”
The younger Muzzetoni’s relations with his father were less than straightforward. Although the son was already past thirty and, in Butonov’s eyes, getting on a bit (indeed by circus standards this was almost pensionable age for an “aerial”), he was as scared of his father as a little kid. They had been working together for many years now: Anton Ivanovich had broken all records for longevity under the big top. He had always, since he was a boy, been the first to master the riskiest stunts. In the 1920s he was the only person who could perform a triple screw somersault, and it was eight years before another gymnast appeared who could duplicate the feat. Of his son Anton Ivanovich would say with carefully contained exasperation, “The one thing Ivan is perfect at is falling.”
This aspect of the profession really was very important. They were working right up under the big top, and although they had the double reassurance of the lunges fastened to their belts and the safety net, serious injury was still possible. The younger Muzzetoni was considered a virtuoso at falling; the elder was a trailblazer by nature and had grown mightily tired of waiting for his son to deliver something he simply did not have in him.
That year, however, all the performers were preparing for a major circus festival in Prague, and Anton Ivanovich set to work on his son, brooking no contradiction. He was to revive the trick which had spread old Muzzetoni’s fame the length and breadth of the country before the war.
Giovanni submitted reluctantly to his father. The old man always forced him to work with total dedication. Valerii, who was invariably present at rehearsals, felt his muscles quivering. He wanted desperately to try himself in the long and complex flight, but Anton Ivanovich was having none of it: he kept him paired with his nephew Anatolii. They performed their meeting flights with synchronized precision, but this was not going to set anyone back on their heels: all trapeze artists began that way.
The rehearsals lasted for a good six months, but the day finally came for them to go to the Central Directorate at Izmailovo to present their program to the Artistic Council. At stake was the trip to Prague: for Butonov, his first trip abroad.
There was turmoil at the directorate, a coming together of the star performers and the administrative bosses of the circus. Everybody was on edge. The time for the displays was approaching. Anton Ivanovich climbed up to check the mountings, which were partly outside the top of the marquee, and scrupulously went over every nut and every bolt, running his hands along the cables. The safety inspector of the arena was his old rival Dutov, and although the conditions of Dutov’s job were such that any failure of the safety equipment would land him in jail, Anton Ivanovich was taking no chances.
Ivan was allocated a dressing room to himself, and Anatolii and Valerii shared another. The girls were put in a third. There were three of them, two young gymnasts and twelve-year-old Nina, Ivan’s daughter and an undoubted future star.
The artists were already putting on their maroon costumes with the gold stars when Valerii heard swearing in the corridor: some access was being obstructed by Ivan’s car and a circus wagon could not get through. Ivan gave a reply, the voice made some demand. Anatolii went over to the door and listened.
“Why are they going on at him? He’s parked it fine.”
Valerii didn’t believe in interfering in other people’s business and didn’t even bother to look out. Everything quieted down.
A few minutes later there came a knock at the door of their dressing room, and Nina stuck her head in. “Valerii, Toma wants you to come.”
Toma, one of the young gymnasts, had been coming on to him for a long time, and Butonov was both flattered and irritated.
He went to look in on her.
“Well, what do you think of my makeup, Valerii?” she asked, turning her little round face to Butonov as if to the sun.
Her makeup was the usual: a pinkish-yellow base with two delicate maroon wings of blusher, and the eyes heavily outlined in blue and drawn up to her temples.
“It’s fine, Toma. The Cobra Look.”
“Oh, you are beastly, Valerii.” Toma skittishly tossed her head, which was drenched with lacquer like a doll’s. “You only ever say horrid things.”
Valerii turned and went out into the corridor. A grey-haired man in overalls and wearing a tartan shirt was emerging from the door of Ivan’s dressing room. It was the shirt that caught Butonov’s attention, and that was why he remembered the encounter later. They were on in ten minutes.
Everything went like clockwork, worked out second by second: blackout, a leap, lights, a push, a trapeze, a drumroll, a pause, music, blackout again. The score even indicated when to breathe in and out. Everything was going splendidly.
Giovanni saved his strength during this number, standing with his chest thrust out there in the heights immediately under the big top, godlike, holding the light on himself while the juniors went through their paces. Their work was clear-cut and competent but nothing out of the ordinary. The jewel in the crown, the triple screw somersault, was all Giovanni’s. Not all the members of the Artistic Council had seen the trick, which was very rarely performed.
Old Muzzetoni was a shrewd director and had everything in place for maximum effect: the light flexible, floating; the music building up. Then suddenly a complete break: all the light on Giovanni up there under the roof, the
arena in darkness, the music fortissimo and then cut.
Giovanni was sparkling, his head in gold, and wearing greaves devised by a clever designer to disguise his bowlegs. A hushed drumroll. Giovanni throws up his golden head. He is a demon incarnate. A momentary touch to his belt to check the carabiner.
Butonov had noticed nothing, but Anton Ivanovich’s heart had almost stopped. Giovanni was taking too long checking it, something was wrong. Everything was still on course; he wasn’t behind yet. The drumroll stopped. One, two, three, one second too many, the trapeze was going back, the push, the leap, Giovanni was still in flight and nobody knew, but already Anton Ivanovich could see that the formation was flawed and he could never complete that final pirouette. He was right.
Anatolii sent him the trapeze at the right moment, but Ivan missed it by twenty centimeters. He wasn’t in the right place at the right moment; he stretched out in mid-flight for the trapeze, attempting the impossible feat of following it back, and hurtled out of the geometry he had perfected, plunging down to the outer edge of the net where it was most dangerous to land, where the tension was greatest, where he was most likely to be jarred and thrown out … He hit the edge, as his father knew he must.
The net stretched and threw Ivan up. But not out. Farther inside the net. He really was good at falling. It was a disaster, of course it was, but at least the boy hadn’t been hurt.
But he had been. They lowered the net. The first to get to him was Anton Ivanovich; he grabbed the carabiner: the link was loose. He cursed under his breath. Ivan was alive but unconscious. He had taken a hard knock. Was it his skull? His spine? He was laid on a board. The ambulance arrived seven minutes later. He was taken to the best place of its kind, the Burdenko Institute. Anton Ivanovich accompanied his son.
Butonov saw his master only two weeks later. He had heard that Ivan was alive but unable to move. The doctors were working their magic on him but could give no assurance they would get him back on his feet.
Anton Ivanovich had lost so much weight he looked like an Italian borzoi. A dark suspicion was haunting him: he could not imagine how Ivan could have noticed the loose carabiner only immediately before the leap. Privately he knew that an upset of that kind would not have put him off; he would just have kept his cool. Indeed, something very much the same had happened to him once, and he had taken the belt off, unfastened himself completely, and just gone ahead. But Ivan had panicked, lost his cool, gone to pieces. Something else that didn’t fit was why, immediately before he was due on, he had been ordered to move his car although it was perfectly well parked. Anton Ivanovich checked afterward himself: the wagon had had room to get through.
When Anton Ivanovich mentioned his misgivings to Butonov, he blurted out, “That workman from the estates office wasn’t the only person who paid Ivan a visit.”
Anton Ivanovich caught him by the sleeve. “Tell me about it.”
“While he was away moving his car, Dutov went into his dressing room. I saw from the corridor, he came out in a tartan shirt.”
By this time Valerii knew that Dutov himself was the safety inspector for the arena.
“Damnation! I’m a bright one. What a silly old fool I am,” Anton Ivanovich said, clutching at his sagging face. “So that’s what it was all about. That fits.”
Butonov visited Ivan in the hospital. He was encased in plaster from his chin to his sacrum and looked like a mummy. His hair had thinned, with two deep bald patches encroaching from his brow. He blinked to say hello and could hardly speak. Valerii, swearing to himself for having gone in, sat there for ten minutes or so on a white visitors’ stool trying to think of things to say. “Um, er,” was followed by silence. He had had no idea until then just how fragile a human being is, and he was profoundly shocked.
The autumn was dull and wet. The pear tree in Rastorguevo had lost its leaves and stood there black, looking as if it had been burnt, so Butonov wasn’t able to lie beneath it to see whether some new revelation might come to him.
There was half a year left before he would graduate from the circus college. The visit to Prague, of which he had had such high hopes, had gone down the tubes. The circus college too was in the process of going down the tubes. Butonov couldn’t stop picturing Ivan’s lackluster eyes. One minute there had been Ivan, Giovanni Muzzetoni, the famous circus performer, everything Butonov wanted to be: independent, rich, able to travel abroad, and driving around in the best car Butonov had ever seen. (He had got rid of the humpbacked red Volkswagen long ago, and now had a spanking new white Fiat.) And in a single instant it was all gone. Butonov had been wrong, there was no independence, it was all a sham. And now Ivan was going to be paralyzed until the day he died.
Butonov did not turn up to take his final winter exams. In the circus college, in addition to the special subjects, you were taught the usual school subjects and couldn’t get a leaving certificate without passing in those despised disciplines too. Butonov never went back to the college again. He lay about on the divan for six months waiting for his military draft papers. He turned eighteen in February, and had his hair cropped by the army in early spring. He was first invited to enroll in the Central Army Sports Club, his top-grade certificate in gymnastics having made a suitable impression, but to the amazement of the enlistment office he turned the offer down. Butonov didn’t care about anything anymore, but he didn’t want to go back into sport. He had joined the army, and that was that.
But it didn’t work out that way, as it never does. There was no escaping a talent which marked him out, and some extraordinary opportunity invariably came his way. Butonov could shoot better than anyone else, with a semiautomatic, a carbine, or a pistol as soon as he got it in his hands. Even the lads from Siberia who had been hunting since they were children couldn’t match his keen eye and steady hand.
At the training review Butonov was spotted by the colonel, who was a great shooting enthusiast. Within a year he was in the Central Army Sports Club team, but now in marksmanship. It was back to training, trials, back to working out. His military service passed in a thoroughly agreeable manner, at least in the second half of his term.
He returned to Rastorguevo, having put on seven kilograms in weight and three centimeters in height, and his demobilization papers were issued on time, without the usual delays, almost to the day. Most importantly, however, he again knew precisely what he wanted to do. He rapidly obtained a high school diploma without difficulty as an extension student and that same summer enrolled at a physical education institute, but again surprised the world by registering for the faculty of sports medicine.
The diagram which Butonov remembered from his school days of the man with his skin removed and his muscles exposed was now the focus of his interest. He studied anatomy, the bane of freshmen, with immense enthusiasm and great respect. Butonov, whose memory wasn’t good enough, who forgot books without a trace as soon as he had read them, now grasped everything, remembered everything in what everyone else found the dreariest activity imaginable.
Butonov had one other peculiarity which, along with his physical giftedness, made him the man he was: an ability to accept instruction. His trainer Nikolai Vasilievich, who betrayed him, and poor Muzzetoni both appreciated his capacity for gladly subordinating himself, for getting to the heart of a new technique and somehow assimilating it from the inside.
Butonov met his third and final teacher in his third year at the institute. He was a small, nondescript-looking fellow, a China-Eastern Railroad man with the cover name of Ivanov, and he had a dark and tortuous past. He was born, or so he said, in Shanghai, knew Chinese to perfection, had lived many years in India, had been to Tibet, and in semi-European Russia was an ambassador of the mysterious Orient. He knew his way around in the martial arts, which were just coming into fashion, and he taught Chinese massage.
The Deutero-Ivanov was delighted by Butonov’s unusual flair for the physical: there was independence and cleverness in his fingers. Butonov could instantly locate a slipped disk,
or a ridge of deposited salts, or where there was simply a muscular spasm, and his hands assimilated the arcane science of pressure points by themselves, without the need of involving his head. If Butonov had had the words and a certain versing in the humanities, he could have talked about a back in good heart, of joyful legs, clever fingers, and also about lassitude in the shoulders, lethargic hips, or drowsy arms, all of which peculiarities of the life of the body he could diagnose at any given moment in the person lying before him on the massage table.
The Deutero-Ivanov invited him around to his half-empty one-room flat hung with Tibetan icons. A fine connoisseur of the Orient, he tried to interest his exceptional pupil in the nobility of yoga, the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, the elegant Chinese divination method of Ba-Goa; but Butonov proved totally immune to the domain of the spirit.
“That’s all a bit too up in the air,” he would say, making a slight movement with the abducent muscles of his right hand.
His teacher was disappointed, but at least Butonov mastered the practicalities of yoga and pressure-point massage very rapidly and with all their subtleties.
Ivanov himself was enjoying major success in those years not only as a brilliant masseur whose services were enjoyed by a variety of stratospheric celebrities: a world champion weightlifter, a ballerina of genius, a notorious author. He took part in various seminars in people’s homes, sophisticated entertainments of those years; he conducted specialized courses on yoga. He involved Butonov too in his activities, at least in the part visible on the surface. Butonov had no intimation of the other side of Ivanov’s activity—informing for the secret police—and it was not until many years later that he understood that his teacher had been wearing invisible epaulettes.
His teacher promoted Butonov to be his assistant. He led his audience of yoga enthusiasts straight along the exalted path of liberation to moksha, while Butonov contorted himself on the mat, teaching them the lotus position, the lion, the snake, and other inhuman configurations.
Medea and Her Children Page 11