Bruin danced. He stepped forward and to the side. He shook his bottom. He had a luxuriant coat. The other bear, called Martin, was now introduced into the spectacle by the woman. “Ole, Martine!” she cried and everyone could see that it meant: Dance, Martin, and be quick about it! The bears, Joseph told her, amused the people of Huizen and commanded their respect, not only because of their tricks but because of the heathen patience with which they’d been rehearsed in a camp in the Balkan Mountains. And, in a deeper sense, because of that camp and the mountains themselves.
“Christ, Lucie, just catching those animals at the end of winter!”
In order to do it they’d gone to the Bulgarian Balkans, through the pass near Tárnovo, in the western section called the Old Mountains. At the time when the Cossacks fought here, a branch of Theodorovic’s family had settled in the area. Like Lazaro and his relatives, they belonged to the tribe of the Ursari. They observed Ramadan, but at the same time also celebrated the festival of St. Petja. All of them were very skilled with bears. After weeks of piercing cold, father Aasap Theodorovic arrived with his wife, children, and baggage donkeys at the high spot where the family camped in tents made from the skin of the black goat.
Hard, mysteriously indifferent, these people endured the torments of winter. They said that they knew of a couple of good bears, two years old, for Lazaro the son of Aasap Theodorovic and for Thuli the daughter, that they’d seen just before the onset of winter. They said they would catch them as soon as the mother came out to sniff the spring air. And so it happened. On the evening of one of the first spring days, there were in the camp of the Ursari two animals that, if the omens did not lie, would bring pleasure and money and health.
After their initial disconsolate behavior they soon settled down, with the whole tribe spoiling them and whispering sweet things into their ears. None of the Ursari were stupid enough to believe that the period of apprenticeship, which was now beginning, would affect the soul of the bears. Just as they themselves were enriched by the wildness of those two, the bears would learn to enjoy and understand the human signals that made them roll, turn, and raise their paws.
In the ground by the river where the earth is clay Lazaro and Thuli built a smoldering fire. They covered it with an iron sheet and made the bears walk in turn over the sheet toward them. When the animal, surprised by the mysterious heat, raised its leg in a reflex, they raided the tambourine. Soon Bruin and Martin knew the irrevocable link between the tambourine and their muscles.
“Bruin!” said Lucie suddenly, and I was glad she brought it up. “How could that bear be called Bruin?”
Joseph turned toward the countertop. As his father-in- law had fallen asleep in the armchair, he poured coffee only for Lucie and himself. Lucie half sat up with a cautious movement, her face empty, completely smoothed out by the story that she may have found especially beautiful because of the time of year. Tomorrow the whole orchard would be in blossom, but as far as Joseph and she were concerned, it was winter.
“Certainly,” said Joseph. “Brown. Ottoman could pronounce bruin properly, you know. He said that they had always known that name as a bear name, ever since the time of the Turkish war, when one of his great-great-grandfathers had gone through the Netherlands, yes, to that plain where so many cows moo, but where it didn’t go so well for his ancestor when his group was chased onto a ferryboat by the border police and hounded out of the province of Limburg with rifle shots along the river Maas. The bear that was hit was called Bruin.”
Joseph walked back and forth, a couple of steps toward the dividing door and a couple toward the windows through which rain was pouring. Lucie seemed to be watching and following her husband with her eyes, but I know that what affected her really was his talking with a soft, God-given intonation — heartbreaking — that seemed inconceivable in their everyday lives. Was he really letting her hear in all sincerity what she was so in love with? There are people who prefer to transpose what they have to say — and I’m now talking about the very personal things — to an area that is much clearer, much more revealing than their own psychology. What I mean is, when Joseph said, “Later that day, when they gave a second performance in Naarden, the girl was there again,” it made Lucie shudder for a second.
She had followed the troupe through a wood of birches and ferns. She had forgotten that it was Saturday. While her mother was plucking and roasting the chicken for Sunday, she had crossed Huizerstraatweg and, passing a couple of prosperous farmsteads, had arrived in Naarden. The town was like a star-shaped cell with its only view the church, the largest in the Netherlands, that stands smack in the middle and takes up the whole sky.
When she sat on the ground at the front of the audience in the square, which was no more than a widening of the path around the church, she again felt the terrible charm of the bears.
“Careful,” said a boy sitting next to her. “Those creatures are capable of anything.”
She looked at him with a pitying smile.
Let me once again tell you what Bruin did for her, because the training, the conspiracy of Bruin and the Ursari, was part of the obsession that was to determine her fate.
He waved one paw and got Theodorovic to fetch him a comb. He waved again and was given a scarf. He danced for a few minutes and then lay down on his side right in front of the first row of spectators, put a paw against his cheek and held his head cocked seductively to one side, much to the amusement of the audience. She wanted so much to touch him. The girl, who Ottoman knew worked in her father’s fish-salting factory, put out a hand, and nothing would have prevented her from grabbing one of the monstrous claws if the tambourine had not jingled and made Bruin scramble up as quick as lightning.
“He wasn’t used to strange hands, anyway.”
It wasn’t Bruin but Martin who could be touched. Ottoman said that the show acquired a different, deeper character when Martin took part. Because he, trained through the power of a woman, had learned how to bring healing. This bear could cure gout and tumors by laying on one of its paws, which had been declawed, and without any discomfort to the person concerned could banish migraines, epilepsy, ruptured blood vessels, and pains in the groin and sometimes, under certain circumstances, could cure male impotence.
That afternoon, in the square in front of the Grote Kerk in Naarden, Thuli Theodorovic was able to create a special moment by persuading a fisherman’s wife from the audience to come forward and lie on top of the bear stretched out on the ground. The rebec played a lingering Transylvanian dance, the bear lay there calmly, and the fisherman’s wife closed her eyes and everyone who had ever begged for a miracle to happen understood that she was praying with complete faith for the cure of something.
“Thank you, boy,” she muttered as she scrambled to her feet in disarray. “Thank you, my dear.”
The girl had watched with curiosity, unmoved. With a stubbornness bordering on incipient madness, she kept her thoughts focused on Bruin.
In the days that followed, things began to assume an air of abnormality, and it’s difficult to decide whether they carried the germ of it with them, or whether this was all ignited prematurely by the tragedy that was about to happen. Ottoman said that the bear trainers remained in the area for two weeks, that they were welcome everywhere in the villages that were walking distance away from each other, and that the girl was always present.
“Rich villages,” said Joseph, “on the coast of a small stretch of sea, no more than an inlet of the North Sea, really, but fabled for its dangers.”
Savoring the moment, he lowered his voice even further. He shifted his chair to the middle of the room, close to Lucie who, in her plaster cast, literally didn’t move a muscle when she heard that in Dutch villages the houses are all made of beechwood, with tiles painted bright red, and that through the windowpanes you can see coffeepots, smoker’s sets, birdcages, and mirrors. The windows in the back reveal small gardens with dovecotes and chicken runs and lines full of washing that is whiter and stiff
er than a granny’s bones.
Joseph smiled in the dusk. I understood him better than anyone.
“Brass bellpulls on the doors, brass lamps, brass flaps with springs on the mail slots ...”
Here, in the kitchen, his restlessness has completely gone. Suddenly he has no need to go anywhere, because he can see everything perfectly well as it is. Details come to the fore. Ready-made stories slide from the murky past into the shining future. Friends! His eyes glide magnanimously along the paneling, the statuettes of the Virgin, the rubber plant, and the bookshelf. He doubtless knows how right it is to give people who are used to traveling and hoping for the best an idea of what they will encounter. “lowers and windmills, funnel-shaped harbors far into the center of the country. Chilling rains that, even before you’ve seen them, appear in your dreams and provoke homesickness. Because the wind is always from the west, the houses are built leaning forward. All the trees are at an angle. The rivers are diked in. The roads bricked. From every tower there is music every quarter hour all day and all night and every child can read and write as well as the monks of the monastery of Sam Trapista near Zvigezda. Remember that the farmers’ wives, like all farmers’ wives, want children, health, and happiness in love, but there, in that country, books as well. There are prophecies that they will have bookcases full of them, leather bindings, gold spines. And as far as generosity is concerned, the people are tough, they amass their riches step by step, but sometimes, all of a sudden, they are seized with a fit of generosity, no one knows why, and they give strong black horses in the north. Flower plantations on the sea. They say that in the northeast they still keep slaves. Stay away from Limburg, and make sure you stay away from the southern borders.
“Good God, yes!” stammered Lucie after a silence. And then, “Give me a cigarette, darling.” He obeyed, but first took a deep drag on it himself.
“After three days, Theodorovic began to imagine how much money he could make in those villages.”
“How much, then?” Her tone was just as cozy as when she looked up from her account books.
Joseph actually answered. “At least the price of a horse.”
They went from Naarden to Muiden, and then along a blue river with a cement bridge to Weesp, a big town, where they gave three performances, after which, at the turnoff to ‘s Graveland, they had to promise everyone they met that they’d be back within a week. Lazaro Theodorovic and his people will always remember that this ill-fated journey was bathed in an autumn sun and the festive sound of church bells.
When they entered one of the larger localities, their first port of call was always the town hall. The mayors who received Theodorovic in their chambers were, without exception, impressed by the distinction of the stranger dressed in rags and by the sum in cash he carried on him. Moreover, they knew about the cures, the popular entertainment, and the teachers who had invited Theodorovic and his sister to bring the bears into their classrooms for a fee. There wasn’t the slightest reason to refuse them a work permit.
The journey proceeded in this way in a peaceful atmosphere. The citizens of the area, hereditary farmers who were really not the most temperamental of people, were genuinely enchanted by the bears. They watched in amazement at the begging children of rich fathers. They showed their hands to the brazen wife of Theodorovic to have the lines of their illusions explained and have the craziest things promised to them. You can’t help but conclude that they sensed something in the whole exotic troupe, something, it’s hard to tell what, that linked with their own nature.
“If those poxy dogs hadn’t stuck their noses in, nothing would have happened,” said Joseph.
The most loyal of the spectators was always the girl. She followed the group through the villages. Ginger, pale, her hair washed with honey soap, she stood without fail in the front row. It hadn’t been difficult for her to induce her favorite, Bruin, to make closer contact. He twisted his head when she called him, and padded over to her. The bystanders waxed lyrical about it. Oh, the things the girl, proud of her good fortune, dares to do, and look at that huge bear taking that white loaf of bread from her! She talked to him, and the fact that he understood her, that something obscure, something essentially and eternally different, was nevertheless becoming part of her, was clear to her from the beating of her heart. One evening in bed she conjured up the image of the bear so powerfully that she couldn’t get to sleep. Thinking of the ears and the paws, she had the feeling that she must console him at once. She slipped out of the silent house to the bicycle shed. When fifteen minutes later she arrived at a farmhouse on the coast near Valkeveen, she saw the Ursari sitting and eating in the curling smoke of the fire, and she found the barn she was looking for. She wasn’t able to peer into the sweltering darkness for more than a few seconds before the Ursari gave her a slug of raki and a cigarette and sent her back to her father.
Joseph rubbed his face.
“What comes next, I’m reluctant to tell you.”
He got up to pour himself some of the coffee that had gone cold. I looked at his back and knew that he meant the arrival of the gendarmes. I could feel that his mood was darkening. Damn it, the gendarmes arrived! And a rage seeped into his words, black as gall, that pervaded me too. The damn police. This was the confirmation of a premonition. Right from the start the wanderings had been accompanied by something evil in which the people of the Gooi, who had found the bears so delightful, so refined and wild, had absolutely no part. The Ursari hadn’t really expected problems either. A pity for both of them that the gendarmes came to check up on them. Why, why on earth? Theodorovic again showed his money. And his brother-in-law came up with the bottle of liquor. They pointed to the granny, who was really ancient, they smiled, everything about her was old, her bones, her tar-colored skin, and her eyes that still shone coal-black with the full measure of what she’d seen and forgotten again in her life. So why? Then came the eternal answer.
“Papers!”
It was two inspectors of the gendarmerie who disturbed that afternoon in Eemnes. Imagine the scene. There were a number of farm cottages, low and white. A square with a pump. A throng of people and animals in the still pleasant September sun. Then two men came forward who’d been standing at the back for a while. They were wearing long coats, kepis, and truncheons on their belts.
Theodorovic showed his papers. His courtesies weren’t reciprocated in any way. He then showed the papers on which he himself, his brother-in-law, and all the people and animals in his group were listed. They were completely in order.
On with the show, you’d think, no trouble at all, and indeed the performance was resumed. The bears danced, but Bruin especially was upset, and while the rebec spouted fire he just shuffled a bit. Some people decided they might as well go home.
A day later the police came from the neighboring town of Laren to interrogate the wanderers about the legality of their nocturnal camp. It happened during a heavily attended performance. And in the center of Blaricum the following Tuesday, two policemen declared the ground at the foot of a magnificent chestnut tree a forbidden area for shows, and referred the strangers to a site that was suitable, but ugly — the ugliest site imaginable. Fewer and fewer spectators felt comfortable in the increasingly criminal atmosphere. That same week Theodorovic decided to leave the area. And the girl, with a cold and the beginning of a fever, realized that that Sunday afternoon in Weesp would be the last.
I’ll say goodbye, she must have thought on Sunday morning. What shall I wear? My party dress with a striped pattern? My earrings? My starched cap with gold pins? She opened a window of her bedroom and looked with a lighthearted feeling, not heavy at all, at the courtyard of her parents’ home where the dogs were lying asleep. All of this will soon look colder and emptier. I’m going to wear my red corals.
I should mention that she had a temperature, and had slept badly that night. Toward one o’clock she gets her bike, I’m going to say goodbye, and pedals down an endless road lined with already yellowing poplars
to what awaits her. Weesp. Again police. And Theodorovic is standing shouting at a couple of pedestrians who find that this is really unsuitable for the Sabbath. What’s happening here? she thinks, and puts her bike away as quickly as possible when she sees Bruin there, tethered to a post with a chain, waiting for her, supernaturally serene. I see that she immediately puts her arm around his neck, prods him gently. I don’t even know the name of this girl who’s about to die. What’s wrong? she thinks. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, why are you growling, you’re in a bad mood, but can’t you see it’s me?
She leans far forward, oh, what can I say, he’s just standing there on all fours. She pushes her head against his head, she strokes the ears, smells the breath, and then by the Immaculate Virgin, by all the blistering powers of hell, the image of the world blurs. The bear bites her, in a reflex, when she accidentally pushes one of her gold pins into his eye and a maddening moment from his early youth returns. He bites. Her astonishment changes to terror, her terror into concentration, her concentration into an awesome moment of assent. I’m appalled. A throat is bitten through with a short, hard crunch of the jaw.
There was a police investigation. It was established that Theodorovic bore no responsibility for the drama in terms of the criminal law. After six days he was released, promising that he would take the bears to the zoo in Amsterdam. In reality he and his group left in a wide arc for the southeast, where together with the French animal tamer Chari Ismael Dollé they performed in Arnhem and later in the year crossed the border near Babberich.
2
I’ll tell you about Parasja was what flashed through her mind one August morning. She’d heard about it from him years ago, when it was winter, but of course the story had never completely disappeared. Wheat and corn were high as she walked to the straw barn, there were poppies growing along the bank. Stories are like rivers. They draw water and air toward them, and they are constantly changing, but through everything they still remain themselves. She slid open the barn door with both hands. The cat shot out. The sunlight on the bales of straw was inviting. She sat down obediently, her eyes darkened.
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