Kolia Read online

  PART TWO

  PAVEL

  KOLIA MET PAVEL FOR THE first time in 1961, in a tavern with no name and no street number. It was located in the basement of a building in the Taganskaya quarter and functioned as a somewhat clandestine meeting place. But, on the first Friday of every month, it hosted the local amateur drama club, which had the official approval of the Workers’ Circle. Kolia was a member of the club.

  Dimitri, who was known to everyone as Mitya, tended bar. From time to time, he would bring Kolia first editions of books published in France, as well as French magazines that he had somehow managed to get his hands on. His most recent find was the April issue of Paris Match and a copy of Fahrenheit 451.

  “In exchange for what?”

  “A pair of shoes for my wife. But no heels, okay? Give her an extra ten centimetres and I look like a midget . . . Size thirty-nine.”

  “I’ll ask Tanya.”

  They toasted each other’s health. Kolia felt the warmth of the vodka working against the chill of October. He opened the Bradbury, which still smelled of printer’s ink and alcohol, and began to devour it. A Russian translation of a Dickens novel lay beside his glass; his club was rehearsing the play it was based on. At page sixteen, instead of a bookmark, Kolia had folded a sheet torn from one of Iosif’s notebooks, on which he had jotted down his essential reading list. Dickens was in good company. Hugo, Tolstoy, and Akhmatova topped the list; the Marquis de Sade and Laclos secured the bottom.

  Pavel Petrov was six feet, six inches tall. He was walleyed. His hair was a mottled confusion of blond and chesnut brown patches — the preponderance of brown hair was on the same side of his head as his one brown eye; on his blue-eyed side, his hair was primarily blond. No one messed with Pavel. He was, however, a gentle soul — unless, of course, an argument broke out after a night of the usual vodka and apple wine.

  Pavel, in collaboration with his mentor, Ilya Alexandrovich Bounine, had created a clown act known as The Bounines for the Moscow State Circus. He was the white clown and Bounine took the role of the auguste clown. Pavel had been juggling and breathing fire since his first year at the School of Circus Arts, which demanded versatility from all Soviet circus artists, but he had yet to acquire Bounine’s mastery of knife swallowing. As a revered teacher, Bounine was addressed formally by all his students, but Pavel called him Ilya Alexandrovich. They had both been members of the troupe that had recently toured with the circus outside the Soviet Union, and had certainly developed a fondness for the West, although not to the point of wanting to live there. Their art, they believed, was best practised in the USSR. It had only been a taste of Western freedom, a notion which remained as unfamiliar as the surface of the moon. Back in Moscow, when the gastronom on Tverskaya Street ran out of carrots or sausages or bread, they would simply turn to their trusted contacts to get the food and supplies they needed — often, it was Mitya.

  Pavel would usually drop by the tavern for a drink the night before the performance of a new sketch, and, his jawline would inevitably show traces of white makeup — a mixture of rice powder and talc. He tried not to overdo it, but his skin had to be white enough that the colours he applied to his nose, mouth, cheeks, eyes, and eyebrows would jump right out at the audience. His makeup wasn’t particularly elaborate, but his eyebrows, as a result of being brushed up and painted so often, had set into place with a permanent black tint that clashed with his natural hair colour.

  When Pavel entered the tavern that night, Kolia noticed him straight away and couldn’t take his eyes off the big man. Pavel found this slightly unnerving. He opened his briefcase, extracted a round pocket mirror, consulted it, and found nothing abnormal in his appearance. The rubbing alcohol always left his skin looking a little puffy and red, and there were always traces of white paint around his face. He didn’t look that unusual, and in any case, the room was dimly lit. He approached the bar, where Kolia was sitting in front of a couple of books and an open magazine.

  “French, huh?” Pavel queried, leaning on the bar next to Kolia and eyeing the magazine.

  “Paris Match.”

  “I’ve been there, you know. Parisian woman are . . .”

  “A bunch of whores, from what I understand.”

  “Not at all. They’re lovely creatures with no shortage of character. Sometimes a little standoffish . . . Do you speak French?”

  Kolia downed his glass in one quick shot and then drew his bar stool closer to Pavel’s; he glanced at Mitya for reassurance. It was okay.

  “Yeah. I studied it at school.”

  “Good for you.”

  The white clown recited a few French phrases he had picked up in Paris, and then continued.

  “And the men wear silk neckties every day. Some still wear bow ties.”

  “And the women?”

  “Like I said, they’re gorgeous but, man, do they lay on the makeup . . . too much lipstick and rouge for my taste.”

  “Whores,” repeated Kolia with a wry smile.

  “No, no. Really nice and really open. In fact, I met a writer who had two wives — well, a wife and a mistress. And while the writer and I were discussing things in Russian, the two of them were sitting there having a great time.”

  Kolia burst out laughing. He gestured to Mitya for another drink, and then asked Pavel what had taken him to Paris.

  “I was with the circus. We did a tour in ’56.”

  Pavel showed him his hands, which were covered with spots of white makeup. There wasn’t the slightest sign of fawning admiration in the younger man, but rather a real curiosity that Pavel appreciated, a welcome change from the fan worship that his public persona had earned him. The Bounines were getting regular press coverage, and sometimes his face would appear in newspapers unadorned by makeup, so people could see that he was just a regular guy. He was often recognized in the street. Kolia had never heard of him.

  “On your hands, too?”

  “Yeah. The rice and talc powder helps prevent blisters during our little acrobatic manoeuvres.”

  “Why white?”

  “Why? . . . So the crowd can see every one of my facial expressions clear as day. But I don’t put on that much. Not in comparison with the clowns in Germany and Italy and France. They are grotesque! They slap it on, and their costumes make them look just like pregnant women in giant sacks with holes cut out for their head and their arms and legs.”

  Finally, they introduced themselves. Pavel. Kolia. The first name for one, the diminutive for the other.

  “You’ve never been to the circus?”

  “No, never. What does the other clown look like?”

  “The auguste? Do you know Charlie Chaplin, the movie star?”

  “I’ve never been inside a cinema.”

  “Ilya Alexandrovich is a brilliant clown and an extraordinary teacher.”

  They kept drinking and talking until Mitya closed the bar. Pavel asked him where he was from, and what he was doing in Moscow. Kolia answered each question plainly and simply. By the time they left the tavern, Pavel was roaring drunk, making a million promises that would be forgotten by the morning. They parted, and Kolia headed to Tanya’s because it was closer than the hostel. As he walked along in the direction of Tanya’s building, he stuck a finger in the hole in his pocket and slowly made it bigger.

  What he really wanted was for Tanya to get him a ticket to the circus, but she didn’t have any. She’d had some, but there weren’t any left.

  “I had no idea you’d be interested in the circus,” said Tanya, mending the hole in his pocket.

  He told her all about his evening with the clown from The Bounines. Tanya smiled, which she rarely did, and made him a strong pot of tea.

  TSIRK

  THAT AUTUMN, THE CIRCUS’S menagerie of animals was on tour in the Ukraine, accompanied by their trainers and big cat tamers, leaving the rest of the troupe — t
he obligatory contortionists, acrobats, tightrope walkers, high-wire acts, trapeze artists, and clowns — to entertain the crowds in Moscow. The various acts made their entrances and exits according to a carefully choreographed program. The Bounines, whose entrances were designed primarily to entertain the audience between acts, had begun to draw full houses and were quickly becoming the stars of the show.

  Bounine was also an acrobat. By nature, he was sullen and ill-tempered — but not in the ring. Born in Moscow before the Bolshevik Revolution to an aristocratic father and a mother who was an actress, he developed his penchant for play-acting at an early age. During his twenties, he had shared the affections of a woman with an aging Futurist poet. This went on for about six months, and the poet eventually won out. In an attempt to completely forget her, Bounine created a comic character which he transformed into an auguste clown. The circus hired him, and over the course of many years, he had trained all the great clowns. At the age of thirty-five, he picked up the guitar and discovered that he had absolutely no ear for music — it was in the words he crafted to make the crowd roar with laughter that Bounine truly found his voice.

  There were no dwarfs in the troupe — with the possible exception of the little girl who kept wandering around babbling at everyone. She was three years old and had learned to walk on the red boards of the ring and in the rehearsal studios where most of the acts were conceived. Her mother had taken off with a second-rate actor when she was barely two, but that subject was to be avoided and her mother was rarely spoken about. It was Pavel, her father, who looked after her now, in a former palace that had been converted into kommunalka flats where circus performers lived communally. Her name was Maria, but her circus family called her Masha. She attended all of her father’s rehearsals, and went with him on all the tours within Russia. On the nights that Pavel performed in Moscow, Masha was cared for by a rather unexceptional but competent girl named Eva, the troupe’s seamstress and resident tarot card reader.

  Masha didn’t go to kindergarten, and spent very little time in the company of other children. Everyone assumed that one day, when she was fully trained, she would join a troupe and begin practising her chosen art — maybe as an equine acrobat and trick rider, or a high-wire artist like her mother. But certainly not a clown. Women who make people laugh don’t find husbands, Pavel would say. A woman shouldn’t clown around, and that was that. By watching Eva take care of Masha, Pavel had learned how to feed her and bathe her. During lunch one day, without any coaxing at all, Masha suddenly started talking.

  Pavel had two vices — women and vodka — which he attempted to hide from his daughter with varying degrees of success. He knew how to braid her hair, and would shape the braids into a crown on her head. But he also knew how to entertain women, and rarely slept alone in the salon. At the time, he was seeing three women — none of them aware of the others’ existence. Juggling was part of his job, and having to keep three women in the air was an occupational hazard.

  Every morning, he would have tea with Bounine in the communal kitchen. They would often have to put up with the racket coming from the next room. The lighting technician who lived there with his wife regularly slept in late and snored like a donkey — prompting his wife to launch dishes at the wall to prove she could make more noise than him. Pavel and Bounine sat at a huge round table. Masha had taken her first steps on it and now she sat beside them, eating her breakfast of puréed vegetables. She babbled away in her singsong voice, which they didn’t mind at all because it helped to mask the din of the neighbours.

  Their breakfasts together followed a strict ritual. Pavel prepared the tea, while Bounine scoured yesterday’s newspapers for anything that might be worked into their act. Together, they would agree on how a certain item in the news should be portrayed, and then write a few gags. Sometimes, when they weren’t able to come up with anything usable, they would seek out a writer who worked for the circus. After throwing a few words and phrases back and forth, they would invariably dismiss the writer’s ideas in favour of their own. They were both extremely proud men.

  On the morning of October 31, 1961, Pavel hesitated over a headline — STALIN’S REMAINS REMOVED FROM MAUSOLEUM.

  Like all masters, Bounine had the last word. There would be no mention of disturbing the corpse. They had to choose something else.

  “Tomorrow night we’ll be in Yaroslavl. You know those cheap dresses with the yellow flower pattern that women are sick of wearing and we’re sick of seeing? Well, I’m going to ask Eva to make us a couple of costumes with yellow flowers all over them.”

  The next night, they performed their short gag a total of ten times — frolicking around an Oka-3 refrigerator in yellow dresses, while the other acts got ready. Eva and Masha slept in the caravan.

  For five years, Eva had used the same deck of tarot cards. The backs of the cards were so worn that the elaborate design embossed on each card with her initials, EAB, was barely distinguishable. On the other side, the cards depicted the usual archetypical images of the Tarot, but they were set in everyday scenes from the nineteenth century. Bounine was not in favour of Eva doing tarot readings in Moscow. On tour, he would look the other way on the condition that she didn’t ask for money — bread, flowers, a sausage, or a book were okay. Regardless, Bounine would never let her do a reading for him. The darker tone of her skin and her distinct features betrayed her Roma heritage. She was attractive, but most importantly, she was reliable and took good care of Pavel’s daughter.

  In time, he relented and allowed the gypsy to give him advice about his health. Be careful in the ring tonight. You could injure your right hand. And about women. Stay away from the brunette — she’s got diseases. Advice which, once again, he was too proud to follow.

  ONE HOT NIGHT

  TWO LONG MUDDY TRACKS trailed out of the cloakroom and pointed the way through the empty foyer, past Mitya’s office, and down a hallway to the small smoke-filled theatre. It was packed. The house lights had been dimmed and on the stage, at the far end of the room, Kolia and a handful of other actors.

  Pavel squeezed into a chair between a rather unattractive girl with long legs and a guy wearing a singlet with the word Mir printed on it in red, who smelled vaguely of rotting apples. Everyone was already in their seats, and the room felt as hot as a Turkish bathhouse. Girls were quietly fanning themselves with whatever was at hand, while the young men mopped their brows, necks, and underarms with handkerchiefs. Pavel’s arrival had gone unnoticed, and he quickly removed his shoes and sat cross-legged on the straight-backed chair.

  Most of the actors overplayed their roles, which Pavel found unbearable. The absence of subtlety and nuance showed an ignorance of the text that was almost criminal. They were ripping the play apart limb from limb — something any professional artist, circus clowns included, would find painful. Exerting as much self-control as he could, Pavel followed the performance attentively, closing his eyes or staring at the floor during the worst moments. Kolia had very few lines and hence little opportunity to overact. Alongside the characters of Oliver Twist and Fagin’s pickpockets, who were all adolescents in this production, he had been given the role of the Artful Dodger. But the face that had intrigued Pavel when they first met in the tavern — an ageless face that was marked with a personal history that could be understood without him saying a word — was completely transformed. Kolia fully inhabited the character, he became someone other than himself. At least, he made the audience believe that. On stage, he moved with a fluid precision which his few lines in no way diminished, and it gave Pavel an idea.

  The troupe took its final bow. After the audience’s applause for their friends had been dispensed, and their cigarettes disposed of on the muddy floor, Pavel remained seated. He didn’t want to be noticed. “Quite a performance for a kid from Kamchatka,” the man in the singlet said to the tall girl beside Pavel. “Mitya likes him a lot,” replied the girl, shrugging. Their conversation was drowned
out by the noise of chairs and tables being moved and stacked.

  Pavel stood up and headed directly backstage. He passed Mitya in the corridor, who gave him a discreet salute.

  The narrow dressing room was already awash in the smell of alcohol. When Kolia spotted Pavel, he immediately excused himself from the celebration and walked up to him, placing his hand on Pavel’s shoulder. He hadn’t worn a speck of makeup for the performance.

  “I gave it my best shot,” Kolia said, offering Pavel a drink.

  “I always give it my best shot. You’ll see.”

  Kolia liked that about Pavel. His concise remarks were unambiguous and to the point. He invited him to join the others in a celebratory toast.

  Kolia’s new friendship with a bona fide star of the circus made quite an impression on his fellow actors. Pavel was suddenly bombarded with questions and invitations to dinner — he was even asked if he would be the surprise present at Vyacheslav and Oksana’s wedding. He politely declined, using the pretext of a previous engagement to save himself from the pointless expenditure of energy such outings entailed. Spending time in the company of ordinary people exhausted him.

  Word of Kolia’s association with Pavel spread back to the mole at the hostel. The following evening, Alexei invited Kolia to join him in the reading room to sample some red wine from Spain. Other than partaking of the occasional toast, Kolia drank very little, and if he did drink, he would always cut himself off before reaching the limit imposed by the pain in his stomach. He detested losing control of his body and, even more so, his mouth — talking too much and saying nothing intelligible. But that night, both fatigued and still pleased with his performance the previous evening, he allowed himself to get drunk. Just this once. But Alexei was unable to pry anything out of Kolia that the others hadn’t already mentioned regarding his association with Pavel. Even when drunk, Kolia could hold his tongue. Alexei changed the subject.