“But it could be so much more,” she argued.
He would have none of her protests, and even though she tried every trick at her disposal, crying, begging, arguing with cold logic, he refused to be moved. She even tried reminding him about her father and his missing thumb, and how devastated she would be if he had to eat the rest of his fingers. The beast told her this did not matter to him, for he did not know the man, and why should he care if others did not have what he toiled to gain? Really, it was she who was being unfair, asking this of him.
That night, when it was especially cold, she shivered in the bed, though the blankets were heavy and warm. The beast was waiting in the shadowed corner of the room, and at the sound of her teeth chattering, he crawled into bed at her backside, the great big, furred lot of him, and wrapped himself around her.
“I don’t want to,” she started, but did not know how to finish.
He only rumbled beside her, appearing content that she was there, if nothing more.
She fell asleep then, warm in his embrace, but she dreamed of her father gnawing on his limbs, and when she awoke her eyes burned from the salt collected there. The beast was still wrapped around her, snoring into her neck. She placed her hands on either side of his face and smoothed the fur around the horns atop his head. His eyes, when he was sleeping, did not repulse her. She wondered what a monster thought about his own kind, and if he too looked under the bed before he slept to search out his cousins and friends.
No, she thought. A monster does not look for its own kind. The monster of a monster is already in its own head. They were born there, take root and grow like corn.
She remembered that she was the daughter of a man who could eat his own thumb to stay alive: what other lesson could she possibly need to know how to defeat monsters? You do strange things to survive.
She would find out what his monster looked like.
She curled her lean fingers into claws and licked the edges of her nails. They were dull, but stronger now that she’d eaten onions. Carefully, she pressed the pad of her thumbs on his eyelids and pressed down with all of her strength.
Oh, how he thrashed, how he wailed under her! But she held on, grateful that she had all ten of her fingers still, and that her thumbs were the strongest of them all.
When he was silent under her, and his chest no longer rose with breath, she removed her fingers from those sockets and dropped his eyes to the ground. Before they even bounced, gold flew out of the new holes on his face, piles of it, coins and statues and jewels on delicate chains, so much wealth, it was enough to trade for generations, and everyone in town could have enough. But she did not stop there. With her teeth she tore open his large belly, and out poured chicken stock and flour and onions and pomegranates and potatoes and carrots and celery and beef hearts: so much food, she knew she would fatten up everyone enough to last this winter, and each after that.
With a cry of joy, she ran, blood on her hands and mouth, to the front doors of the tower. She opened them wide and shouted out to the town below her: there is food here, there is gold here, there are enough bones to make stock for months.
Slow, but sure, the townspeople climbed the hill to meet her. When they saw the body of the beast, and so much food, and so many precious stones, they began to dance. Whirling and twirling one another, they danced until their feet were sore, and then they began to prepare the heart of the monster: the first meal they would all be able to eat together.
She did not know when the hole appeared in the eastern corner of her daughter’s room. It started out small, and she thought they had mice. She told her husband to fix it, but when he did not and it grew larger, she assumed it was rats and called the exterminator. When they found nothing alive but filled it up with caulk to make her happy, she thought that was the end of it, but the hole was there the next morning, and bigger still. She tried to cover it with tape, then wood and nails, and finally stone, but it remained, almost the size of a dog. Once it was large enough, each night her daughter went inside and disappeared, only to arrive downstairs the next morning at the breakfast table, covering her smiling mouth as she yawned. Her mother told her not to go into strange holes and moved the bookshelf in front of it, thinking that was the end of the affair. Yet, three nights ago she went into her daughter’s room and found the bookshelf moved, her daughter’s small suitcase gone, and a note with lopsided hearts left on the bed. Her daughter was nowhere to be found.
A life left leaves objects in the days after it disappears. The mother packed up her daughter’s things and placed them, none too gently, into the large box that once stored their refrigerator. She threw in the trombone she had bought the girl when her interest had been music, following that with books when she thought the girl had been into stories, the ballet slippers when it had been dance, video games half played, sketchbooks half drawn in, cookies half baked, and a stuffed elephant half grimy, half clean.
“She was never good at anything,” the mother said aloud. “Not even simple things, like staying in place.”
Her husband, leaning in the doorway, said, “Yes, dear.”
“She gets this from your side of the family.”
“No one I knew ever went in a hole,” he said.
The mother ignored him and placed an armload of dresses into the box. The white ones on top of pink on top of the green and red Christmas dress that was worn for half a day and was still stained with punch.
The mother grumbled when she dropped the dollhouse and the little plastic people fell on her foot. “What’s so special about a hole in the wall, anyway?”
She packed school supplies, half used, and assignments half completed, which explained the C report cards. Then she tossed in a cheap Venetian mask with a crack near the eye. She packed the tea set and the rabbit made with real fur, now matted, then the poster of some group of teenage boys.
“What could possibly be in there that we haven’t given her?”
In went crayons and markers and molding clay. Then the compact mirror, nail polish and lip gloss, a scarf, mittens, and a handheld fan.
“Are you just going to stand there?” she asked her husband. He put his hands up and left.
She placed the porcelain doll, with the eyes that shut when it was horizontal, purchased for her daughter on a whim, into the box. She had been saving it up for a Christmas gift. Untouched, unsullied, unused. She pushed the doll down to the bottom and heard its face crack. She panted and struggled, but through sheer spite the mother pushed all the half-used things from her daughter’s half-life to the hole in the wall. One by one she lifted each object, spit on it, and threw it in. Hours later, there was nothing left but the box. That, too, she shoved in, punctuated with a curse on her daughter’s ungrateful little head.
There was nothing in the room now except wallpaper, the bookshelf, the bed, and the mother. She stared at the hole for a long while, tracing her hand on the perimeter. Looking behind to make sure her husband was not loitering at the door, she took a deep breath and squeezed her upper body in. Her head, neck, arms and stomach fit in easily enough. Her hips and behind, large, obtuse, padded with teacakes and other sticky-sweet things, caught on the plaster. She took a deep breath and flexed her muscles, attempting to make herself smaller, and wedged her thighs closer into the outline. Panicked, she attempted to crawl out backwards, but her body would not budge, and she wailed and yelled for her husband, though if he was home he was making a point of ignoring her.
Somewhere in the darkness ahead of her, she heard her daughter’s laughter, like a bright, ringing bell.
She was indigestible—this, a gift from her godmother, the one with bright eyes and brighter lips dancing around wine cups who blurted out her offering to the babe as she had no tangible offering in hand—this girl may be consumed but she will never pass.
It seemed like no true gift at all, until when she was older, past her bleeding, a bear all scru
ff and brown came upon her sleeping under an oak tree and gulped her whole. The swallowing was a quiet thing, and she did not awake until she was fully in its belly, tickled by the acids and disgusted by the stench. This is the end of me, she thought, and waited for her body to disintegrate in the juice. Yet, as time passed and the juices bubbled up against her skin, no part of her passed away. She remained snug and she remained warm and she remained.
Others came through: one, a grandmother whose hair fell out in clumps, gasping that she didn’t want to die like this, a whole life dissolved away; another, a young boy who cried for his mommy and whom she could not shush nor comfort, though she laid her hand on his cheek and whispered all kindness before his skin bled to his bone. Then, another girl, like her, who peered at her with dark eyes and smiled, who grasped her hand and said she was happy that she would not be alone at the end of all things she knew. They brought their lips together and kept them pressed tight until there was nothing left of the other girl but those two strips of flesh. She balled her hands and beat at the belly after the girl had passed, but all she heard was a muffled roar.
Eventually the body of the bear stopped moving, and she continued to beat her fists against its belly, but though he grumbled and though he roared he would not give her a short-lived companion. Time was loneliness in the dark.
It was not until she heard voices, muffled and masculine and coming closer, that she was renewed with her desire for a friend, and she punched the belly again to wake the bear so it would eat. When he did not move, she brought her teeth to the slippery lining of the stomach and bit down.
How the bear moved then! Yet no matter how much it jumped and scratched at its own stomach, the girl continued to rip through the blubbery wall, spilling the acidic juice over his organs, and then she took to his grease-fat and his skin, tearing it open from the inside.
She emerged, covered in blood and yellow bile and slime. It was cold outside, and colder still were the expressions of two hunters, staring at her wetness like they were seeing a creature they could barely comprehend. She moved towards them with her hand outstretched, but they shied from her and crossed themselves. When she opened her mouth to speak, she dribbled acid onto the ground, and it smoked up around her. The men howled and clutched their axes and hunting knives to their chests and ran from her, screaming, “Hail Mary!” the whole way.
Only for a moment did she consider running after them, but it was so cold and she had no shoes, and so she returned to her bear, and clamored back into his belly to wait out the winter. Then, she decided, she would find those men who ran from her, and she would bite them, too.
“When I signed my contract to dance,” Mme Maria Rasputin said to me in fluent French, “I had no idea that I should have to dance to the tragedy of my father’s life and death, and be brought face to face on the stage with actors who were impersonating him and his murderers. Every time I have to confront my father on stage a pang of poignant memory shoots through my heart, and I could break down and weep.”
—‘Mme Rasputin’s Circus Ordeal’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, Tuesday, February 19, 1929.
Six nights a week, Maria watched her father die under the hot, bright lights of the circus tent.
She knew of men who had seen too much bloodshed—those who investigated the murders of wives, the brothers who shot their cousins over nation states, and the kings who were beaten off their thrones and eaten by a starving populace—those men did not even blink at the bloody scenes, after a time. Yet, she always cried. Every night, except Sunday, which was a day for sleeping and drinking more than her regular allotment of water, she danced on her long legs in time with the thump of a small blade entering her father’s stomach, and then twirled around him as he ate and drank poison on small tea plates, and rose and fell to the ground in a heap of tulle and lace with each gunshot—one red burst in the front, one in the back, and one square in his forehead. The man who played her father, Wilhelm, chosen for his ability to grow a long, scraggly beard and his particular cleverness in holding raspberry jam in his mouth until the final blast, where he then let it spill out between his lips in a curdled cry, did not quite look like her father. His eyes were too dull, liked faded coins, and he was not nearly as tall. But memory is memory, and a false one was as painful as the real. As they dropped a tied-up Wilhelm into the ‘river’, which due to the limitations of the Busch Circus’ infrastructure, was only a small tub filled to the brim, Maria turned to face the audience so they could fully appreciate the salt running from her eyes.
This moment was what the managers called the show-stealer, and the only reason they kept her around long after the thrill of putting The Mad Monk Rasputin’s Dancing Daughter! on posters lost its initial surge of curiosity and cash. The musicians swelled their sounds to a high pitched climax and a spotlight centered on her face as Maria stood still as stone, the only movement was the water on her cheeks, and the splash of Wilhelm surreptitiously being pulled out of the tub and a fake body being lowered in, face down. Wilhelm was, much to the managers dismay, not quite as clever at holding his breath, or climbing out of the tub with his hands tied to his body.
People did not flock to circuses to cry—no, they came for the laughter of clowns and the thrill of small, lithe bodies flipping in the air without a net to catch them—but all around Germany, men, women and their hiccuping children came primarily to see a daughter weep night after night for her lost father. They too, invariably, would tear up. Some audience members were quite proud and only wept a little at the corners of their eyes and dabbed away the water with handkerchiefs or sleeves. Others fully wept into their hands as if they could not bear to look at her for one more moment. Some never looked away from her, and growled with sorrow like a bear with its paw caught in a trap.
All of them, when asked on the way out if they enjoyed the show, breathed a little easier, a little more clearly, as if their sympathetic sorrow was what they had been yearning for, even if they did not know they yearned at all.
“You never fake it?” Wilhelm once asked her after a show as he gingerly wrung the bathwater out of his hair. He passed her a small towel for her face; her makeup always ran. “Not even once?”
“I am a dancer,” she told him. “Not an actress.”
He smiled at her in a way that showed all of his teeth, even the black, rotting one in the back of his mouth, and she did not know if she had given him the answer he was looking for, or even if it was the truth.
* * *
Maria was not the greatest dancer in the company; that title was held by Gerda, a small woman with blond hair and pointed toes who made the mistake of aging out of a rather reputable ballet company. Gerda never quite made principal, though she did understudy for the lead once or twice. But the circus was a place of exaggeration, and on her placard she was toasted as the finest little ballerina across the Atlantic, even though she had never traveled overseas. Even so, Gerda’s ability to stretch her legs into a perfect line in the air was no match for the power of Maria’s tears to move a crowd.
“Who you are is what brings them into the seats,” the tall manager with a mustache told her. “It is because you cry that they stay for the show.”
“Have you considered being his widow?” the short, stocky, bare-faced manager asked her with the same casualness one uses to ask a stranger if they are waiting in a queue at a bakery. “The mad monk’s weeping widow. Now that’s a hot ticket.”
She refused them, much to their obvious dismay, but as she was the star there was little they could do to change her mind. Instead they asked Gerda, who was three years younger than her, to play the role of Rasputin’s wife. Their logic was, if one woman could bring a tent that sat two hundred to tears with her face alone, what could the power of two women do?
They sold out the show before noon the next day.
* * *
That first night, Maria almost refused to dance, but the managers waved the
contract she’d signed in front of her like it had power over each pointed step she took, and it did.
“It’s harder than I imagined,” she begged them. “I thought I could do this.”
“Fraulein,” they told her, “even those who do not believe in themselves need to eat.”
It helped to see Wilhelm up close, because no one with two eyes could mistake him for her real father. The way his eyes did not crease when he smiled, his blue eyes, the way his nose was far too small, even with the help of the costume department, who tried to fill it out with clay; this was not the man who would take her outside to look at the bright lights above them on cool nights. Surely, a paying audience would see through the ruse and leave disgusted.
But that audience, and subsequent ones, did not leave. The first few laughed at Wilhelm’s poor acting; his mimicking being poisoned left much to be desired. It was as if he thought poisoning was akin to eating bad fish, the way he hunched over and tried to gag. The audience watched Maria dancing with the politeness of men held at gunpoint. When she faced them after Wilhelm was submerged, she felt how hot her face was and the wet slime of snot running from her nose. As she reached up to wipe it away—completely outside the choreography—she heard the first sniffle. Then another. Someone yelled, “My God!” and started to wail, and then they were all wailing.
It was enough to almost make her stop crying, though not quite. It felt good, that first show. They were crying with her. They were feeling the loss of her father for who he was, not what the papers and the politicians had made him out to be. They saw, through her, a man who was not some magician, but a common man in strange times. A man who loved her, and whose loss she would always feel.
She was content to walk out of the ring that night feeling, for the first time since she could remember, how wonderful it was to be among people.
Wilhelm visited her that night to congratulate her. The edges of his nose were an angry red where the clay hardened. “Were they crying for you?” he asked her. “Or were they crying for themselves?”
Strange Folk You'll Never Meet Page 2