The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six Page 8

  They put her onstage anyway. In the first town, they set her on a trapeze suspended from an oak tree. As the applause for Hodel and Hinde’s acrobatic tussle climaxed, Shimmel shoved Heyh from her perch. She passed over the crowd in a perfect arc of flight, but, when her hands released at the peak, she failed to catch the beam with her feet. The shame cast across her face as she hit the side of the barn made Shimmel shut his eyes in pain. The crowd, though, wasn’t the least bit upset by her act, loudly laughing at her as she crawled behind a rock and cried. People couldn’t take their eyes off the unfortunate girl. They scarcely noticed Teyvel when he took the stage and swallowed a five-foot-long rapier while standing in a ring of fire.

  In the next town, Shimmel hoisted Heyh onto the tightrope as Hodel and Hinde exited the stage, to loud cheers, with a double-headed backflip. The high wire was strung above a river. Heyh walked toe-to-heel like she’d been taught, smiling at her audience far below. As she got to the center, though, she felt the rope shivering in the breeze. Her knees started to tremble. The line began to shake. Her legs struggled to compensate. The wire wriggled faster, sending giggles through the crowd below her. She looked down. She remembered she couldn’t swim. She tried to back up, misjudged the length of her foot. Down she went. She hit the water belly-first, and sank.

  It was Shimmel who fetched her. As he pulled her to the surface, she heard folks’ jeers, even heartier than on the day before. She didn’t ever want to perform again. She wished that she had drowned.

  Teyvel wished that she’d died as well when, for the second day in a row, nobody paid attention to his act after her collapse, and Hodel and Hinde were getting impatient about how their routine was forgotten by the time Heyh’s was finished. But most of the troupe was starting to recognize her value: As much as folks enjoyed being elevated by feats they could never physically achieve, they also sought the affirmation of watching someone fail more dramatically than they’d ever done. They needed a buffoon, a slapstick scapegoat to comically relieve them of their own inadequacies. Heyh did it spectacularly.

  As the season went on, Shimmel and Iser and Schprintze choreographed increasingly elaborate routines for her. They’d have her juggle fire on the tightrope, which would ignite when she dropped a flare, inflaming her clothing as she tumbled into the lake beneath her. Teyvel, meanwhile, made every effort, short of murder, to kill her. He set out his knives under her trapeze, or loosed Shimmel’s horse while Heyh struggled to get out of a pond.

  She no longer smiled for the crowd as her act began. She paled. Her tear ducts swelled, and still they ran dry by the end of each day. Hodel and Hinde each budded breasts that summer, and were promptly deflowered by Teyvel. Glukel grew pregnant with Iser’s child. Shimmel and Schprintze had their annual fling. Koppel and Fishke started sharing the same bed. Everyone was wanted but Heyh. Everyone was loved and admired. She begged, day after day, to quit the circus, to be left on the side of the road.

  — You’re just getting good on the trapeze, Heyh. And think of your juggling.

  — I can’t do it. I can’t do anything.

  — The crowds love you.

  — They like to make fun.

  — You’re too humble. You’re imagining things. You’re deluded, selfish, egotistical. You don’t appreciate what we’ve done for you. You’re trying to embarrass us. You can’t understand how the audience needs you. You’re not smart enough. Don’t be a buffoon.

  Upstaged by their verbal gymnastics, Heyh got back on the trapeze and redoubled her acrobatic efforts.

  And, because of her, their circus swiftly became more popular. Stories of her foibles traveled farther and wider than the troupe ever had. Eager to see her high-wire humiliations, towns everywhere extended invitations to perform. Naturally they didn’t care about the sword-swallowing or the fire-walking or sleight-of-hand, which could easily be seen locally. The others’ routines gradually coalesced into a contrasting backdrop for Heyh’s act, an excuse to lay out all the scenery that tripped her up, and a means of making a good living at her expense. Even Hodel and Hinde stopped learning new tricks, preferring to compete for Teyvel’s waning interest. The troupe locked Heyh in a cage, lest she try to run away, and spent all day counting money.

  With each performance, she grew more reckless. At first the troupe thought that Shimmel was getting sloppy about the heights from which he pushed her trapeze or the vigor with which he shook her high wire. Then they thought it was Teyvel, still out to hurt her. At last they decided that it might be the effect of imprisonment in a cage day and night. Instead they tied her up in a potato sack.

  The change had no perceptible effect. They gave up trying to understand Heyh, to figure out what would have been hideously clear had any of them bothered to look her in the face: Whether by rope or fire or knife, the girl wished to be dead. Of course she couldn’t commit suicide, the buffoon. She was no more capable of killing herself than of doing anything else.

  One day, word of Heyh’s ill-fated stunts reached the big city. A small delegation went out into the country to watch her perform. Her hands and feet weren’t as large as reported, and, to these strangers, she seemed neither comically ugly nor deformed. Yet they were not disappointed by her clumsiness. Indeed, these connoisseurs of human foibles and vice were positively elated to find in her a completely self-made failure, unsophisticated by liquor, unadulterated by sexual misadventure: Her buffoonery cast no aspersions on others’ foolishness. Her comedy was universal. Everybody, even drunkards and perverts, could scorn her.

  The alderman heading the delegation knew a smash hit when he saw one. He presented Shimmel with a contract, which the acrobat signed with a spatter of ink. Five nights in a theater chartered by the king, with box-office returns determined by equations too elaborate for the troupe to fathom, the complexity of which figured incalculable success. Folding the contract into his pocket and the delegation into his carriage, the alderman left to prepare for the circus’s grand entrance.

  The troupe passed through the city gate a couple of days later. When they asked people where they should go, folks answered, Who are you? When they said they were the circus, folks responded, Which one? They weren’t sure what to reply, for they’d never thought to take a name, so they rode around looking for a theater chartered by the king.

  Apparently the king of this country had chartered many things, and the troupe found his coat of arms painted on pubs and baths, brothels and gambling dens. Half a dozen times, they approached a theater, only to be told that circuses were passé, and sent to a competitor.

  At last somebody they met had heard that an unknown country circus was coming to town. He helped them to find a broadside, and read it aloud. The poster announced the arrival, by special arrangement, of Heyh the Clown. Iser asked if his famous juggling act was advertised. The man shook his head. Teyvel’s sword-swallowing? Schprintze’s contortions? Fishke’s sleight-of-hand? None of them. Then Heyh asked what clown meant. The man just laughed, as if she were fooling, and pointed the company toward a theater down an unmarked alley of stockyards and slaughterhouses.

  The alderman was not there. The manager, a bruiser called Yankel, whose face looked to have been butchered, explained that those in the delegation were investors, quality folks hardly to be seen in a burlesque hall on that side of town.

  So they guessed that the king wasn’t going to be attending their performances, either, especially after Yankel took them inside the hall, which had a dirt floor and not a single chair. Nor was there a stage per se, just a chalk line at the center. There was no roof, only a stone wall enclosing a space the size and shape of a stable.

  Yankel was anxious to set up: Their first performance would be that night, under limelight. He’d no time to discuss why Hodel and Hinde weren’t named on the broadside, and he merely guffawed when Heyh asked him what a clown did.

  He did, however, have a costume for her, brightly patterned. None of the troupe had ever seen a costume before, much less thought to wear one, and, for
a short while after she put it on, they stood around, admiring. Then they remembered who she was, and their admiration distilled into envy, which could be dispelled only by providing outfits to everyone.

  Folks lined up outside while the ropes went up. Since there was no barn for Heyh to hit when she flew off the trapeze, Yankel had some boards thrown against the wall. Since there was no lake in which to have her fall, he threw a bucket of water on the floor. Then he sold tickets for a penny apiece until he couldn’t shove another body through the door.

  Nobody paid much attention to the warm-up acts: They ignored Shimmel’s hackneyed horseback acrobatics, shouted out the secrets to Fishke’s slapdash magic, jeered Iser’s slipshod knife-throwing for failing once to penetrate pregnant Glukel, and heckled Hodel and Hinde for stumbling through their girl-on-girl gymnastics without stripping off each other’s clothing. Finally, from a limelit platform, Yankel announced through his megaphone the world-renowned Heyh the Clown.

  Something unfathomable happened that night, from the moment Shimmel pushed her out on the trapeze: Her recklessness metastasized into confidence. She didn’t miss the beam with her feet when she let go, and her hands were there for her as she swung full-circle. She got it that night, and the tightrope as well, from which she juggled fire without once letting her knees buckle.

  That was not what folks wanted. After all, they lived in a city where you could see meaner feats for half a penny any day of the week. They’d paid good money to see Heyh stagger and trip, maybe even break her neck. But aside from the costume, there was nothing clownish about her. She was merely mediocre.

  They called her a fraud, and pelted her with rotten potatoes. They cut the tightrope and broke the trapeze. Someone got hold of the limelight, spilling it onto the floor. The fire flared. Yankel fled with the money chest. Iser and Koppel scaled the wall. The rest of the troupe followed.

  They ran through unfamiliar streets in their colored costumes, pursued by men and women wielding weapons fleeced from Teyvel’s chest. Urchins abandoned their empty-handed gambling to join in the pursuit. If they couldn’t afford a stage show, at least they could see this troupe of buffoons, stupid country clowns, chased down and beaten.

  By midnight, the troupe was miles outside the city. By daylight, they were safe in the forest. All except pregnant Glukel. She was gone. Naturally they couldn’t turn around and fetch her. All that could be done was to blame Heyh and move on.

  — Why is it my fault?

  — You got us chased out of town.

  — I only did what I was supposed to do. I even did it right this time.

  — Don’t you understand, you ass? If you’re a clown, right is wrong.

  The troupe looked for work. But wherever they went, they were preceded by word of their big-city bust. Of their debacle, every detail was known, and suitably embellished for swift travel. Some folks claimed that Heyh was a charlatan, whose accidents were simulated, and that her big-city flop was a failure of nerve. Others, better-educated, said that she’d been planning her metropolitan debut since the beginning, that all along she’d been playing her audience for the fool, and not crashing that evening was her ultimate act of ridicule. Where Heyh the Clown was not mocked, she was loathed.

  The circus ran out of money. They’d no equipment, no props, and, aside from Yankel’s harlequin attire, no clothes. Another winter was coming. Cold and snow. And their whole company was no longer worth a sack of potatoes.

  Now it happened that Schprintze’s family was from a country at war. The trouble had begun there, several years before, through no human fault, but rather on account of an earthquake that had split the land. The schism was neither deep nor wide, and could easily have been filled, had people been able to agree on where the requisite stone should be quarried. But folks on the eastern side of the kingdom claimed that the gap lay to the west, while those on the western countered, following the same line of logic, that it lay to the east: In short, each side believed that responsibility fell to the other, and accused the other of divisiveness.

  It was a matter that the king could have settled with a word. But the skirmish got no response from him, as if the quake had struck him dumb. For weeks and months, advisers tried to talk their young monarch out of his fugue, all the while secretly shuttling him between east and west lest either side lay claim to him, yet his silence was increasingly irrelevant as the scrimmage hardened into war.

  Regional differences were found in every commonplace. Folks discovered idioms and accents. More ambitious militants raised armies on arguments of larger consequence: Who owned the water in the rivers or the rain clouds in the sky? Did the east withhold the sun in the morning, or was the west embezzling it at night? Such philosophical matters, usually minded by the crown, were abdicated to the generals, who agreed to disagree, and to blow each other’s soldiers to smithereens.

  This, then, is where the circus traveled in search of work. Schprintze was right in her prediction that the troupe’s high-wire acrobatics would be a welcome distraction to troops who passed their lives hunkered down on the front line. Eager to boost battalion morale, generals were pleased to exchange provisions for entertainment, and soldiers simply needed something to lighten the mood while they killed.

  Shrewdly taking neither side, the circus moved freely around the country, dazzling everybody. Armies provided the equipment—ropes to walk, clubs to juggle, swords to swallow—from their own arsenals. And, as for costumes, Teyvel cleverly had everyone in the troupe perform their superhuman feats in the uniform of the hosting battalion. All except for Heyh: She was pinned with the insignia of the opposing military.

  Since the big-city calamity, she’d also been assigned a new role. No longer trusted on trapeze or tightrope, she was assigned to replace Glukel as Iser’s human target.

  She was awful at it. Unlike sweet Glukel, she couldn’t keep still. Each time Iser hurled a knife, her whole body would convulse. With folks focused on her torment, Iser couldn’t show off his talent. More to the point, the act was propagandistically ambiguous: Soldiers were made to feel sympathy for the enemy, while officers wondered why Iser, dressed like them, wasn’t able to slaughter his victim.

  So the shtick was nixed. Iser added daggers to his juggling gig. And Heyh? Useless for performance, she was left to clean up after the troupe.

  Every night, they played for a different audience, always to a packed house. While they didn’t earn the money they had in their own country, they were as popular as entertainers can be only in a state of war. Eventually, after several weeks of success, they got an invitation to play for the monarch.

  Of course, His mute Majesty hadn’t made the overture. The idea had come from one of his most senior advisers, formerly courtier to the king’s father, who recalled that the future sovereign had been amused by acrobatics as an infant. Medically speaking, that kind of psychological twaddle lacked the reputation of a good leeching, but no authority is as strong as desperation, and, if the fighting went on much longer, there’d be no country for the ailing king to cure. A tent was propped. Ropes were tied. Shimmel rode in, standing on a horse. The show began.

  The performance was spectacular that afternoon. Since the king stood on the side of neither army, commanding everybody and nobody, the troupe performed in sleek red costumes formerly used as undergarments by the disbanded palace guard. Iser juggled fire on the trapeze while Hinde and Hodel performed gymnastic somersaults on the high wire. Even the most dour advisers were enraptured, standing on their feet to see Koppel lie down on his bed of flame, and Fishke vanish him in a quilt of fire. Who could be bothered to look after the king, slumped on his throne, hands held over his ears, eyes shut, head dropped? Who was there to notice his despair?

  He’d been a handsome man before the war, a natural athlete who wore his crown as lightly as a hero’s laurels. Most folks had assumed that he ruled with equivalent ease, as if an unerring instinct for justice were the fulcrum of his balance, the origin of his poise. Having never seen hi
m in his private rooms, brooding on the effects of his decisions, his subjects couldn’t have fathomed what their confidence cost him in doubt. He’d taken all the blame, as if the world were his consequence. After the quake, shaken silent, he’d set aside all the old regalia. The throne he preferred was a wooden chair. His advisers, wary of adverse publicity, kept him close and enjoyed his luxuries on his behalf: the rich foods, the fancy dress, and, on this particular afternoon, the circus.

  Teyvel swallowed his last sword. Schprintze disentangled herself from Hodel and Hinde, who were holding her while she juggled with Iser. Shimmel took a final gallop around the ring, bringing the show to a rousing close. A standing ovation. A royal reception. All the king’s men joined the troupe in a toast. As the liquor flowed, the festivities spilled out of the tent.

  Quietly, Heyh emerged from a box in the corner, dragging a tattered broom behind her. She wore pieces of the different uniforms, given to her when she still had a place on the stage as Iser’s human target, a pied patchwork salvaged from the last scraps of her ruptured career. She started to sweep up horse manure—and slipped in it. As she righted herself, she thought she heard a familiar sound. A laugh.

  She looked up. The room was empty, except for a man in a wooden chair, regarding her in a way she’d never seen before, laughing, yet, it seemed, not quite at her. She tested this strange idea by pretending to check whether the floor was sturdy, and then, too confidently stepping forward, feigning falling through. The man laughed again, a little louder. Then she saw what was unusual about him, for it had stretched out into the fullness of his face. Even through her blurry blue eyes, she could see that he was not sneering, but smiling.