Kolia Read online

  In the beginning, he attempted to adapt the sketches he had performed with the Bounines to their new duo, but it wasn’t working. Little Bell’s character didn’t lend itself to the role played by Pavel, and even less so to that of Bounine’s auguste. Kolia spent the entire summer of 1983 with the circus’s staff writer, developing a dozen original sketches for the duo to take on tour. By the end of their first few weeks of working together with the new material, they had found their voice, in a manner of speaking, and the duo caught fire — quite literally. To the delight of the crowd, one of most popular skits involved the immolation of a small mountain of books.

  There was something about Yulia that fascinated him. In her eyes, he could see a childish innocence that he had never witnessed before in another adult. For the most part, people seemed to carry around a dark shadow that always kept him at a distance. Kolia wondered if this guileless generosity was a part of the persona she had created for the ring, or if it was actually her that he saw in those eyes. When they weren’t in costume, she avoided him. Not, as Kolia imagined, because she didn’t like him, but because she found him intimidating. Kolia, on the other hand, found her attractive, but didn’t risk the slightest advance in her direction. Since witnessing Pavel’s death and the absolute ugliness that death leaves on the body, he had become convinced that women would forever be repelled by the sight of him. He decided to concentrate on being Yulia’s colleague in the ring, and to give up any vague notions of meaning something else to her outside it.

  COMBUSTION

  KOLIA TRAINED IN FRONT OF A mirror for weeks on end until he finally found the grimace he had been searching for. It employed every muscle of his face and neck, and it was indescribably grotesque. He contorted his lips into a sinister smile, and closed his eyes until they were only slits, raising his eyebrows into two perfect arches which reached the middle of his forehead. His scalp was freshly shaved, and rogue hairs, indistinguishable to the audience, sprouted from his ears. This was the face from which the grimace took shape. He revealed it to the crowd for the first time during an innocuous sketch about tea drinking, and two young boys seated right at the edge of the ring burst into tears and started crying uncontrollably. Kolia could hear them. The boys’ distress caused Yulia to lose her timing, and the instant she stepped out of character, Kolia felt a shiver run up his spine. He spun around and winked at her with all the confidence of a master improviser, and Little Bell stepped back into the ring without missing a beat. The goal was always the same — make the audience laugh so hard they forgot that, only moments ago, they were afraid. And when the house lights went up and Yulia could see the two boys smiling and applauding enthusiastically, she finally understood the essence of her art. It was something which couldn’t be taught at any circus school. It had to be lived. It had to be experienced in the ring when the act was on. And if it had to be given a name, as if it were the most banal phenomenon in the world, it would probably be called magic.

  Before Kolia could mount the sketch in which he and Yulia would set fire to an oil drum full of books, he needed permission. The circus management wanted to know what type of books would be burned and why. Kolia had commissioned a set designer from the theatre to create books with colourful hardback covers, containing blank pages that would feed the fire and make it last. Employing the taciturn style he had learned from Pavel, he explained that the books would be “blanks” and that the two clowns would warm themselves around the drum as they burned. As usual, management demanded to see the sketch before they would authorize it. The director decided that he could burn exercise books, but not books. They suggested that a bucket of water be poured on the fire from a great height, not only to extinguish it rapidly, but to leave the two clowns soaking wet, thereby providing the requisite comic element. Kolia flatly refused. The idea was an unforgiveable cliché used by clowns in American circuses. He was reminded that burning books was morally and politically questionable, and Kolia replied that the books he would burn hadn’t been written yet. When asked why he wanted to do this, Kolia answered simply, “Because.” He turned on his heels, convinced of the power he now held, and walked out of the office, his costume under his arm, and his makeup kit in hand.

  That year, images of Gorbachev, with his birthmark stealthily erased, began to appear in official photographs released to the media, and in propaganda. Walls plastered with posters of Madonna and New Order would soon be giving him a run for his money.

  PART THREE

  THE STATUE

  KOLIA’S LIFE CAME TO A CROSSROADS at the intersection of two worlds that had nothing to do with each other. As the country began to collapse in on itself, his personal life exploded. The act with Yulia had been born under Andropov. They had fine-tuned it under Gorbachev. And it came apart in 1987.

  During the four years of the duo, Masha’s marriage slowly disintegrated and Kolia watched as she lost weight, like someone who had contracted AIDS. Her bones began to jut out from beneath her skin, and dark circles formed under her eyes. Her emaciated body was frightening to look at. At the beginning of this illness in her head, as she liked to call it, she was outraged to see that her thighs touched, whenever she stood in front of the mirror and she studied herself. She saw herself as fat, even though her skin clung to her bones like a bedsheet. There was still too much flesh on her body, still too much of her. She had a job as an elementary school teacher, but her fatigue kept her at home for a good part of the year. Her thin frame prevented her from becoming pregnant, and couples without children paid higher taxes. She was as infertile as a mule, and her husband treated her like one.

  One Friday night, Kolia was having dinner with Masha and her husband. Aleksandr had contacts in Moscow. He was someone Kolia didn’t want to say too much to; it was better to keep a polite distance. He mentioned that he had a friend named Igor, someone who got a hard-on every time he heard the national anthem, but who was wasting away in his bureaucrat’s chair, decorated but disabled. Apparently, Igor knew Kolia.

  “He obviously likes the circus. That’s always good to hear,” said Kolia.

  Aleksandr smiled as he exhaled smoke from his cigarette, balancing his chair on two legs with his back against the wall.

  “No, he’s not particularly fond of it. He thinks the circus is for kids. He came across your name in a file recently. It appears you were looking for someone during the ’50s or ’60s?”

  “Iosif.”

  “A friend from the camp?”

  Masha told her husband to shut up. Aleksandr poured himself a glass of wine. He smiled at her smugly and didn’t say another word. But when she got up from the table to fetch the soup, he began to berate her openly, as if he’d suddenly decided that it was time to make this little pastime of his public.

  Kolia waited until Masha was in the kitchen, and then he quietly got up from his chair, reached across the table, and grabbed Aleksandr by the collar.

  “If you talk to her like that one more time, if you continue to treat her like a dog, I will cut you up in little pieces and make soup out of you.”

  He let him go and sat down, but got right back up again and reached across the table one more time. This time, he jammed his index finger into Aleksandr’s chest, right between two ribs, with enough force to guarantee that the man would be in pain all night long, and he repeated, word for word, what he had just told him. Kolia sat down just as Masha returned from the kitchen. He looked at her with his best smile.

  Once a month, he took the long train ride from Moscow to Rostov. He stayed at Bounine’s rather hastily constructed dacha, which the master had had renovated before he arrived. It was pretty cold during the winter, but it was habitable on the condition that he got dressed as soon as he stepped out of the bathtub. The outhouse was a real shit hole, but during the summer, apart from the foul stink, it was a tolerable arrangement. Winter was a little more complicated, he would have to think twice before heading out to empty the chamber pot in the
prescribed spot. Kolia had stayed away from Masha’s house since the incident with Aleksandr. He preferred to meet her at the train station. It was a neutral location that he was fond of. He could while away his time watching people to his heart’s content, especially on Sundays.

  In December of 1986, Yulia quit the act to go out on her own. It was something that Kolia had expected. Since the summer, she had taken more and more liberties in the ring, and one day she announced that she felt fenced in. They performed together for the last time on a cold damp night. François Mitterrand was in the country on a state visit.

  Kolia began to think that a change of scenery might not be such a bad idea. He decided to quit the circus and leave the city that had given him employment for thirty years. Since the day the troupe had welcomed into the family, the only real attachments he had formed were with Bounine and Pavel— and, of course, Masha.

  One Sunday morning in June, he sat down and composed a dry, formal letter requesting a reassignment. There was no farewell party. No one just up and left the circus. It wasn’t done. Members of the troupe were members for life. He emptied the apartment — most of the furniture went to Eva, the old tarot card reader — and one night when it had stopped raining, he jumped into Masha’s car and left Moscow without a single regret.

  A small travelling circus based in Rostov welcomed him with open arms and awaited his arrival gleefully. Kolia moved into the old master’s place and bought himself a Slavutich TS-202 so he could watch old movies and keep up with what was happening. A comrade had to stay up late if he wanted to outwit the Party’s efforts to educate him.

  As soon as he arrived, he removed all the mirrors he could find inside Bounine’s house, including the one in the bathroom. The old man, who cursed at the world with the regularity of a cuckoo clock, didn’t seem to be bothered in the least by this new decor. In fact, it suited him just fine not to run into his face as he made his way from one room to another. Bounine did, however, keep the large round mirror in his bedroom.

  It was in this mirror that he could watch the ass belonging to the young woman who came to the house every week, in exchange for food (sausage, milk, bread, chocolate, fresh fruit), or products that women were always trying to get their hands on (bath towels, tampons, toothpaste), and sometimes luxury items (face cream, Fidji by Guy Laroche, designer clothing by Zaïtsev). He called her his “mistress” because “whore” excluded the notion of mutual attraction, and Bounine liked to imagine that she enjoyed it, too. During their “lovemaking,” she had to be on top, not only because of his general frailty, but also because he could only manage half an erection at the best of times. While she sat astride him without making so much as a whimper, he would bawl and pant like a charging bull, right up to the pinnacle of his pleasure, which resounded in the solemn and redemptive silence of his bedroom as if it were an empty church.

  He wasn’t rough with her and he didn’t insult her. He even managed to caress a thigh or grab the cheek of one of her buttocks, now and then. But touching her breasts meant lifting his shoulders up off the bed, and that was just too much of an effort. He existed only in his sperm. Secretly, Bounine hoped that one of the condoms he’d brought back from Germany would rupture and the young woman would become pregnant. But he didn’t have the strength to sustain a sexual exchange that would be vigorous enough to perpetuate the race.

  She refused to kiss him. She had nothing against the act of kissing itself, but she found his mouth repulsive. His lips were dry and chapped, and there were scabs in both corners which kept breaking open into sores that refused to fully heal. Bounine could no longer eat apples or even munch on a pickle. At the beginning, she always had to say “no” to his attempts to kiss her. Eventually, Bounine stopped asking. At night, when he was alone in bed, he would kiss the crook of his arm, knowing that if anyone could see him, he would die of shame or they would crush him like an ignoble insect for the same reason. As far as Bounine was concerned, being caught in flagrante delicto showing tenderness to oneself was worse than being caught masturbating. He always locked the door to his room at night. He was going to die soon. He was sleeping with a young woman. A man could catch his death from sleeping with an old whore.

  The old man’s aching bones made it impossible for him to leave his bed for most of the day. None of the medications his doctor prescribed ever managed to “freeze his pieces into place” and “kill the beast,” as he liked to put it. Along with his condoms, he had stronger pills brought back for him from Germany, which he hoarded at the cost of being almost permanently in pain. The moments when the pills did bring relief were a taste of heaven.

  Bounine had a cat. Every day, it would deposit a selection of dying birds and huge rats at the foot of his bed. Neither he nor Kolia was exactly sure what to do about this growing collection of carcasses, which would undoubtedly attract other predators in the neighbourhood. But they clearly had to be buried. Kolia dug a hole in the backyard that summer and presided over their interment. Bounine’s cat was called Monocle. He had lost an eye and his markings made him look like a pirate. His hunting instinct was almost completely gone, but his mere appearance was enough to scare off field mice for miles around. And Bounine loved him for that. In fact, without his mistress’s visits, the German pills, and the obligation to feed his beaten-up, swashbuckling cat every day, Bounine would have made a very sullen roommate.

  The night before he was to meet his new troupe, Kolia tossed fretfully in his bed at the old man’s house, unsure of how he would be received. He prepared a few words of introduction and rehearsed them with the voice that they had likely never heard.

  He had nothing to worry about; his arrival among their ranks was quite the event. There was one or two who attempted to bad-mouth him, saying that his presence was a disgrace, but their opinions were not widely shared. Kolia had never really taken stock of the impact his act had had on the Soviet circus in general, nor of the scale of his popularity, in spite of the full houses and the stacks of fan mail he received each week. He also didn’t realize that the authorization to leave Moscow and join the Rostov troupe had been an official favour.

  It was well known that Kolia was deeply attached to his master. And, moreover, it was thought that the presence of a friend would — in the words of the bureaucrat who was making the case for the authorization — “brighten up” the old man. They knew more about Bounine’s health than Bounine did. They knew that his condition was destroying him slowly but surely. They would tell him, but not right now; they didn’t want to ruin the two or three years he had left. Plans were already in the works to erect a statue in his honour, close to the old circus, and updates on his failing health filtered back to Moscow through walls and over telephones — even those whose receivers never left their cradles — and via the lips of ample young women who refused to kiss.

  Bounine and Kolia established a comfortable routine. Kolia would get up early for rehearsals and matinée performances; Bounine would sleep all morning long, and would receive his indiscreet mistress twice a week at noon, and the rest of the time he would write letters, listen to the radio, or watch television, while petting his one-eyed cat. The nights when Kolia was free, the two of them would work on the book of gags that Bounine hoped to publish one day. From the 558 skits and sketches that he had dutifully noted down over his years of performing with Pavel (to whom the book would be dedicated), they would choose 200.

  The book was published in 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the silly title Bounine the Clown Is Talking to You! The title was the publisher’s choice and Bounine simply didn’t have the strength to argue against it. It was as big a hit as Bounine himself. Copies were known to be found in odd places, stuffed into holes in the Wall, forgotten by someone, or placed there intentionally as some sort of message. It didn’t really matter. A journalist who was doing a piece on the subject paid Bounine and Kolia a visit just before the onset of winter. He was amazed to see that the
old man responded personally to every letter he received, and that he wrote at least a dozen replies a day.

  “Your letters are delivered directly to your house?”

  “No. Once a month, the circus in Moscow forwards all the mail that is addressed to me, and I reply to those that aren’t completely stupid. I’ve got nothing but spare time before I die, but I don’t need any headaches from imbeciles.”

  “But that’s just the point, comrade, I’ve been told that your health has improved, and that you’ve received excellent care here. You know that you’re going to be glorified in granite very soon, don’t you? All of Moscow is ecstatic at the news.”

  “My bones hurt all the time. I have no idea who told you I was doing well. So, a statue. So what? Do I know you?”

  “Not personally,” the journalist sputtered. “Why do you ask?”

  “My name is Ilya Alexandrovich Bounine. Not Bounine. You will address me politely, since we do not know each other.”

  After putting up with the reporter’s impropriety for half an hour, Bounine sent him packing. Kolia returned to the kitchen, after seeing the reporter to the door, and spent a full hour trying to calm the old man down.

  “Who does he think he is? He talks like we went through the war together. What the hell does he know about my health? And Moscow will soon see me gussied up in granite! If he ever comes back, I will hang him by his balls in the town square!”

  The following week, the newspaper announced that Bounine the clown was doing well, that he had been treated by the best Soviet doctors, and that he would be attending the unveiling of the statue in his honour close to the old circus in Moscow. Readers were assured that the clown replied personally to all his mail. The date of the unveiling was printed at the end of the article. It would be Bounine’s final performance.