by Yoko Tawada
“I talked with his dog Friedrich too much. Karl didn’t like that. Maybe that was the bone of contention.”
One day I contracted a high fever, it went to my head and swept away my thoughts. I was sent to bed, my mother filled a bag with ice cubes, I heard the glassy clicking sound of the ice, and then coldness surprised my burning forehead. I heard my mother speaking with a doctor, their voices withdrew. My consciousness wanted to travel to far-off lands. I stood in a flat landscape, a snowscape, the snow blinding me. Staring into it, I saw a snow hare leaping across the snowfield, and a moment later he vanished from sight. With every step I took, the shaft of light changed its angle, negating what it had shown me just before.
A snowy wind boxed my ears but it didn’t feel cold. The frozen ground was as milky as a pane of frosted glass. Through it, I saw the water and two seals swimming by, probably mother and child.
After a long journey I woke up and felt something wild, unripe, unpredictable inside me. I kicked off the wool blanket, quickly got dressed and slipped into my shoes. My mother tried to stop me — she wanted at least to know where I was going. I myself didn’t know. Walking made me dizzy and I lurched but didn’t fall because the wind was propping me up on both sides. Before me I saw an advertising pillar on which a poster bloomed like a bright tropical flower: Circus Busch! I studied the dates and saw that the final performance had taken place the day before. In front of the pillar stood a bicycle that wasn’t locked. I sat on the metal horse, pressing the pedals with all my strength. The city fell away, a field of rapeseed received me in its yellow arms, and far off in the distance, a circus caravan was crossing the horizon.
Left, right, left, right, I pushed down on the pedals as if possessed, terrified that the rickety old bicycle would collapse beneath this pressure. I panted, spinning the wheels of my dreams, trying to catch the images flashing past in my brain. Eventually I caught up with the procession of circus wagons and from atop my rolling bicycle asked a man sitting in the last trailer where they were going.
“To Berlin!” he replied.
“Do you have performances in Berlin?”
“Yes. Berlin is the greatest city in the world. Have you ever been?” At this moment it became clear to me in a flash that I wanted to go there too. Could I manage it with this bicycle? The sky suddenly grew black.
“You’d better ride home as quick as you can. It’s going to start pouring in a minute.”
I looked up, and a fat raindrop fell right into my eye. “Please take me with you to Berlin!”
“Not possible. Maybe the next time we’re in town. We’ll pick you up.”
“When?”
“Just be patient and wait for us.”
I woke up and saw that I was lying in my familiar bed. My mother said I’d been asleep for two days. I still had a high fever.
•
“You’d better go to the doctor. Your illness is coming back. You seem off somehow.” It wasn’t my mother saying this to me, it was my husband.
“Huh? What do you mean by off?”
“You don’t answer when I ask you a question, and your eyes have a strange gleam.”
There was something off about my husband. That’s probably why he was telling me I was off.
Was my fever dream the place where I caught up to the circus troupe on that old bicycle? One week later I happened to see a poster for Circus Busch plastered on an advertising pillar in town. Their engagement had ended just one day before I’d had the dream. I kept this discovery from my mother. You can’t reproach a child for never telling her parents what occupies and troubles her heart. It’s just a childish attempt to become an adult. Parents, on the other hand, would much rather lie to their children than reveal their weaknesses. If my mother had suddenly lost her nose, she would have covered her face with a handkerchief and told me she had a cold. What was great Nature thinking when she gave us these characteristics?
•
“You say I shouldn’t have conversations with your dog. It’s not an insect I’m talking to. A dog is as much a member of the class of mammals as we are. Why shouldn’t I exchange words with my fellow mammal?” This was the argument I used to defy Karl’s prohibition. When he started shouting, I could feel his body temperature rise: “A human being is fundamentally different from a dog. But what’s a dog, really? Just a metaphor.” Karl loved the word “metaphor” and used it to intimidate me. After I told him about my lifelong dream of working in a circus, he replied: “The circus is nothing more than a metaphor. Since you never read actual books, you believe that everything you see is real.” Lovelessly, he threw a volume of Isaac Babel in front of me. I haven’t seen Karl since then. For a long time, the book stood in a corner of my bookshelf, observing me resentfully. I didn’t expect Karl to ever come back to me, but I wanted the circus to come back.
•
“You can wait for him as long as you like, he’s never coming back.” I returned to my senses. Before me stood my husband. He grinned and went on: “I locked him in the bathroom.” Since I thought my husband perfectly capable of imprisoning Honigberg, I turned my attention to the bathroom door. But it was Pankov, not Honigberg, who now emerged with a self-satisfied expression and asked: “Something wrong? What’s the matter?”
“Where’s Honigberg?”
“Right over there!” Pankov’s finger indicated two people standing behind me immersed in conversation. The one with his back to me was unmistakably Honigberg.
I knew that my husband’s nerves were worn thin and vulnerable. If one more shred of nerve ripped, he might attack Honigberg, fatally even. This thought left me no peace. As a child, I repeatedly dreamed of a dog and cat trying to kill each other and would try to the best of my abilities to prevent this mutual murder. But the desire to kill danced about wildly in the air, provoking both of them and seducing them into this struggle to the death. It was my task to end their battle as quickly as possible. I was still an infant, and already my head was filled with worries. The one thing I don’t know is what my worries looked like without language.
I didn’t want my child to witness my husband causing harm to a human life. Perhaps it would be me he attacked, not Honigberg. Perhaps in the end he would be his own victim. Best for my daughter to go on living with my mother.
If I’d ever given serious thought to how my husband would die, it would have been clear to me what his end would look like. But from where I stood in the middle of life, I was incapable of seeing anything in sharp focus. Otherwise I’d have been able to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall and its effect on my life. The GDR perished, and so did my husband.
•
When I raised my head, Pankov placed a notebook with white paper on the table and said: “This is a gift for you. I don’t want you using our important documents for your manuscripts.” Ever since the Soviet Union had given us the polar bears, Pankov had avoided the word “gift.” So it was all the more remarkable that he used this word now, giving me permission to write. I thanked him but went on writing on gray recycled paper.
•
For me, a girl who dreamed of circus life, the wait proved worthwhile. In 1951, Circus Busch posters went up all over town. In those days, our daily life was low on color: tabloids with full-color photographs didn’t yet exist. The bright circus posters looked flowery against our drab backdrop. Every time I caught a glimpse of them, the curtain rose in my mental theater. Drums and trumpets announced the prologue, the cylindrical light embodied a promise, and creatures from distant planets with luminous dragon scales made their entrance. Some could fly without wings, others spoke with animals. All the excitement, applause, and cries of delight were too much even for the circus tent — the air began to split it open.
Three days still remained before the first performance, then it was only two days, then only one, now it’s today, in two hours, in an hour — now the curtain opens. A clown with an apple no
se stumbles onto the stage, tripping and turning a somersault. The circus has developed its own natural laws: A person who looks clumsy just walking is an athlete. A person who can make the audience laugh is someone to take seriously. I thought that maybe there was something I too could contribute, maybe I could fly. A woman dressed in a shimmering silver costume climbed ever higher up a rope until she almost disappeared from sight. A muscle-bound man strode into the middle of the stage. My eyes slid from his close-fitting white costume to the black chest hair that the costume didn’t quite manage to cover. I began to feel strange as the flying trapeze performance commenced. As if hypnotized, I rose swaying to my feet. The man behind me hissed: “I can’t see. Sit down!” With effort I forced my bottom to return to the seat.
After the trapeze act, the band playing the music switched from the tango to an oozy melody. Iron railings slid into place like a long folding screen, separating the audience from the stage. I saw a lion and at once felt dizzy again. I got up, walked down to the stage, gripped the bars of the railing and pressed my face to them. Lion eyes stared at me. Behind my back, unrest was stirring, but that did not concern me. A circus employee who was responsible for audience security that evening hurried over. But the lion was faster. He leapt toward me and lovingly pressed his cold snout against my nose.
My mother, picking me up at the police station, asked what in the world had made me get up to such a stunt. My answer was almost too simple to be understood: “Because I want to work in the circus.” She stared at me, horrified, and then went the rest of the day without saying another word to me. I thought her anger would last a long time. But the next day she surprised me, saying that she had finally understood that I really wanted to work in the circus.
I owe it to my mother that I was soon accepted into the circus.
“Thank you.”
“What for?” My mother’s hands were terrifyingly large.
“Why are your hands so big?”
“Because I’m Tosca.”
At the time, a huge number of people wanted to work for the circus. Even a highly skilled acrobat had to fight for a position. My mother thought up a strategy. She asked Circus Busch to take me on as an unpaid worker responsible for cleaning and taking care of the animals. Her parting gift to me was this bit of advice: “It doesn’t matter how you got in. Everyone who gets inside has the chance to rise all the way to the top.”
I had to go for an official interview even though I’d already been informally accepted. Into the cigar fumes separating the boss from his future employee, I explained how as a small child I’d volunteered at the circus, performing menial tasks. And hoping to spruce up my paltry circus résumé, I confessed that during my employment at the Telegraph Office I’d taught myself acrobatic bicycle tricks. The director of the circus asked my age, and I gave the honest answer: “Twenty-four.” With the instruction “Wait here,” he left the office trailer.
A man soon appeared who looked like a clown even without makeup. He showed me the stables and the barn. That was Jan. “If you want to spend the night here, you’ll have to sleep in the children’s trailer and look after them. Is that all right?” I nodded. In the so-called children’s trailer, blankets and clothing lay scattered everywhere. Supposedly seven children lived there.
I got up at six in the morning, tended to the animals, tended to the humans, cleaned, mopped, and scrubbed. I washed clothes, brought each child to perform its task, ran errands, put the children to bed, and another day would be over. During the night I was often woken by small, crying children.
Children are born in the circus just like anywhere else. Many members of the circus community love children, but none of them are able to parent their children full-time. At the moment when I arrived, three of the seven children were going to school, but there were also times when school was impossible because of the touring schedule.
After school they had to participate in training sessions, and after that they did their homework. I would help them. Some had trouble with math, others were learning Schiller’s ballads by heart and wanted me to listen patiently to their attempted recitations. Once, I asked the children in jest: “You kids are seriously diligent even though no grown-up is forcing you — do you like studying?”
“Of course! We want to show the workers’ children that we’re better than them.”
These children used textbooks especially prepared for the children of itinerant performers. With this clever system of study, it didn’t matter in which order you studied the material. The subjects were not kept separate from one another. In every workbook, you could learn reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. In one of them, I found an afterword written by the editor, a circus historian who lived in Dresden. He believed that in the future, all professions would take on the highly mobile nature of traveling circuses. And then, if not before, the true value of his textbooks would be recognized.
The circus children couldn’t carry around many thick books. They also didn’t have time to pursue several different subjects at the same time. For them there was only a single subject, which they called “studying.” It would also have seemed strange to them to separate studying from working. There were no physical education classes at the circus, but as soon as children could walk, they were introduced to acrobatics as part of everyday life. There were no music classes, but every member of the circus had to be able to play at least one instrument. Virtually all the useful skills I possess today are things I learned along with the children. The children were still children all the same. When I sprayed them with cold water, they were as happy as little bears. I washed their clothes in an old tin washtub and hung them out to dry on a clothesline I’d stretched between two trees. When the wind was rough, the wash on the line would flap self-destructively. Some of the laundry flew away on gusts of wind, never to return.
I was just hanging out the wash when the circus director happened to pass through the laundry area. “You are wise. Young people today always want to become a star right away. But I need someone to take care of the animals, run errands, and look after the children. You’re not just seeing your own needs, you see the circus as a whole. You understand what we need. Bravo! You should probably be running the place.” With this last sentence, he burst into unrestrained laughter. Yes, he was praising me, but in truth he was just happy to have found a worker he didn’t have to pay, one who’d arrived out of the blue and volunteered. Knowing this didn’t prevent me from continuing to put all I had into my labors.
When I felt like sitting down with someone for a cup of tea and a chat, I would instead go and tidy the children’s rooms. If I had a craving for something sweet, I ate nothing and did the laundry. I was disciplined. The thing I’d most looked forward to was taking care of the animals. At first I was only in charge of a horse, but later on, the big cat trainer — the one all the others called “the Master” — entrusted me with his lions.
There were various sorts of dung. Horse dung looked dignified. I could have brought it to church as an offering like the sheaves of wheat placed on an altar during the harvest festival. Horse dung took on the form of an artwork when it fell to the ground — I wanted to learn to fall as skillfully as it did. The lions’ poop was like the poop of housecats but monstrous in size. I practically suffocated when I inhaled its odor. I tried to breathe only through my mouth, but this made me sick to my stomach.
It wasn’t easy to get by on the amount of food allocated to us. We secretly stockpiled the flesh of mice we’d caught with mousetraps in a special hut. Often I had to mix groats into a lion’s food to make it go further. The lion would become impatient and aggressive when he was dissatisfied with his food. Chills ran down my spine when the Master said: “It’s your fault if the lion is forced to eat you. That’s not his preference.”
Occasionally I had to resort to visiting a meat-processing facility to ask for the half-rotten scraps. While I was chopping hay, the qu
estion came to me: How can horses run like the wind if all they ever eat is dry grass? If hay provided sufficient nourishment, why were there animals who went to such extreme lengths to eat meat? Once, I was caught pondering this question as I worked. “What are you thinking?” It was Jan who asked.
“Why are there carnivores? To me it seems normal to be a vegetarian.”
“In Nature, it’s hard to find enough edible grass. Then you have to eat all day long until the meadow is bare and right away move on to the next one,” Jan replied.
“Were the carnivores once vegetarians?”
“Bears, for example, used to be vegetarians, but some of them had to change their diets. Think of polar bears! There’s no grass at the North Pole. You won’t find nuts there, or berries. Polar bears have to withstand extreme cold, their females even give birth during hibernation and nurse their young without eating anything themselves. They have to store fat in their bodies, and this is only possible if they eat fatty meat: I think that’s why they developed from vegetarians into carnivores. Seals aren’t easy to catch, and they probably taste disgusting. But that doesn’t matter. Every living creature has to try to find out how to maximize its chances for survival. Generally it’s possible to just squeak by. I find it lamentable that we have to keep eating all the time so as not to just die on the spot. I detest ‘gourmets.’ They act as if food were an ornament that increases the aesthetic value of their lives. Which only works if they suppress all thought of how miserable it is that they have to eat at all.”
Sometimes I had the feeling we circus folk existed outside society, that we were even independent of civilization itself. Sometimes when I couldn’t manage to dispose of the animal dung during the day, I would secretly dig a hole at night on the circus grounds to make the overproduction disappear. Dead mice had to be dried in secret before they could go into storage as backup provisions for the big cats. I went hunting for medicinal herbs to help the sick children recover. There were many things we improvised instead of buying.