Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part II.)

 

II.

Yakov’s career in the circus left plenty to be desired, but years passed peacefully in the capacity of clowning and managing the clean-up crew. He was one of the last to leave the evening performances, but, the deal was, he could arrive later than the other clowns, especially as his face paint was sparse: an exaggerated teardrop from each eye over a rudimentary daisy. His shaggy hair required no wig, and his costume was simple: anything not too loose to allow him to go from stilts to high wire to unicycle, as if he were less a contracted performer and more a ‘common’ man running his way through the other acts. Every evening had its predictable features, but Yakov’s role was to create some improvisation—sort of like that bear had, he occasionally reflected.

            What was left to be desired was companionship. Who would imagine a central figure in the entertainment industry to be utterly lonely? “Lots of us are,” said Nadia, who tumbled atop the trotting horses. Yakov talked with her sometimes after her performance, which he watched intently, in the darkest shadow. Nadia’s jealous husband grabbed the bridles as soon as she made her final dismount, and, taking her bow, she backed gracefully into the same shadow. “I’d rather live with the horses than with him,” she mumbled, but maybe that was the result of an afternoon tiff. Yakov saw sometimes there was passion in their body language and conjectured that a jealous husband was more desirable than an indifferent one.

            “How do you unwind after the show?” Yakov asked her.

            She winced but sniffed out a smile. “I read, he watches television, I cook, he drinks, we eat…we…you know.”

            “What do you read?”

            “Really?”

            “Sure. I’m always in for recommendations.”

            Nadia looked more directly at him. It was dark, but with such light from the ring she could see his eyes glisten. “Mostly last century sort of stuff…. Romances, published diaries, sad creatures lolling about the countryside. Boring, maybe?”

            “No.”

            “Kuprin is good to read. Leskov. Tolstoy, of course.”

            “Of course.”

            “I’m reading Resurrection now.”

            “That’s nice.”

            “And you?”

            “Me what?”

            “are reading?”

            Yakov didn’t want to lie, and she’d heard his voice enough to tell. “I don’t read too much—that’s why I need recommendations! Kuprin?”

            “Alexander. Start with ‘Garnet Bracelet’—I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

            “Yakov!” a voice hissed, “you’re on, you ham!”

            He instantly had to be a jester and stumble into the final act.

            Nadia brought a volume of Kuprin’s short stories the following evening. “I said to start with ‘Garnet Bracelet’, but actually that’s the last story here.” She handed it over and looked down at a rip in her stocking—she had mislanded on a leap from horse to horse tonight and, instinctively, tumbled as best she could to the circus floor, catching a hoof on her thigh but nothing more. Yakov witnessed it in fright and was set to dash to her rescue, but then she popped up and even remounted the inside horse as they ringed around her.  “In fact,” she mumbled, “start with ‘Emerald’, for my sake.”

            “What’s that about?” Yakov tried to lure her eyes.

            “A horse. A racing horse that,... well, you’ll see.” She smiled tightly and decided not to look up to him. “Sergey!” she instead let out to her husband, approaching with a bridled horse, “train her to trot closely! She almost killed me by broadening the gap.”

            Sergey jerked his head at Yakov, whose sad eyes betrayed nothing he could figure out, and then back to Nadia. “You fell. That’s too bad, but don’t level it to my training of these stupid animals. For that matter, discipline the beasts yourself!” He threw the bridle lead to Nadia and glared once more at Yakov, who looked down at a non-existent tear in his costume. He slipped away before he knew he’d crumble; his experience as a clown and hustler never felt more inchoate than in the face of true relational dynamics. He could always fool a fool; he only felt a fool himself when an intimate and knowing pair was involved.

            He glanced at the bewildered horse as he slunk off, wondering if she read any of his feelings. Who cared if there were power in numbers; there was, theoretically, solace in pairs, and this mare was supposed to figure out her synchronized trot to make Nadia’s flips land right, so that Sergey’s fragile ego would hold on to whatever he conceived it to be.  How complicated the world is, to perform an honest act with another, on behalf of another, despite the suspicions of another, to accommodate for that other, to placate the other, to… never, or not… give up trying…

            It was a chess game, on this day-off from the circus, on Trukhaniv island in the middle of the Dnieper River. Yakov came here every so often to survey the action and walk hours on end in the unlikely wilds of the urban mesh. Kiev was a city surrounded by forests—there were thousands of miles of paths, paved and otherwise, to walk within what could reasonably be called the city limits. There were better chess venues, to be sure: logically, in front of the university, or the greens in the Oblomov region in the north of the city. Yakov loved venturing south and west of the hustle and bustle, where families would spontaneously light up their portable grills for shashlik and seasoned eggplant. He remembered nostalgically the first time he walked these outer parks, seeing unclaimed dogs curl their brows at such family delights and hoping—as he indeed saw one such scenario played out—a scrap of discarded shashlik fat would turn into the hem and haw of whether to take this young mutt beyond the park—“Papa, please, we’ll take care of him!”—“but who will walk him in the deep freeze of winter?”—“oh, Papa, we will, and anyway he’ll be trained by then”—“by whom?”—“by us”—“by me,” says Mama, who is always last to weigh in on such primary questions—“by us!” says the unison voice of children—“by us,” says the Papa siding with his wife, not at all convinced that they’ve won.

            Yakov dreamed of a wife. He couldn’t identify exactly with such a papa, rotating bits of meat on a shashlik skewer while fending off the sweater tugs of his fickle children. They’d forgotten the stray dog by this point and were now pressing papa for coins for the stand-up swings. Mama seemed happy not to have coins, not to tend to the grill. She accepted the quiet puppy into her lap and began checking it for fleas, at the same time stroking its still short beige fur. The co-existence—let alone love—would have to happen here, in her approval, a veritable leap of faith.

            The adage he loved most in such reflections was the timeless and semi-logical “live a century, learn a century.” He walked many days seeing tableaux like this and envied their learning through living. I’m just a quarter-century so far—there’s more life to live. Yet shall I wait for the bona fide learning ‘til I’m pushing up daisies? Of course not,.. of course not. The ratio didn’t prescribe so much. It was a chess game. And by ‘game’, it was, of course, the sum total of how you made due with your and your opponent’s king’s gambit or bishop’s prerogative…

            These were honest, expected moves. Occasionally, especially in speed rounds, Yakov would set his queen off her color and open with more moves to the left-hand side—he realized most players didn’t love that bank for offense anyway—and by the time he could castle (and not be caught out for the shyster start), he had his rival in unfamiliar territory. It was never a question of how the queen could get where she was, rather how…unforeseen, as the bishop is clearly here and my pawns are doing what they should, and usually the knight’s in a good position to bust things up… Of course the next game would have to be different—clearly set, with an alternate gambit, but since Yakov had won the first move, he would more likely-than-not win the afternoon.

            He didn’t need to do this, he knew: a circus salary and an assigned apartment sufficed, especially since he had no expensive habits. But maybe now he’d start buying some books, fill the huge wall unit that even the most mendacious flat already had, pre-installed. He had never driven a car, but wondered about the countryside. It would be nice to have a car. Everything he had ever seen had been from train windows. To have a little car, to meander, or to have a little garden spot—why not a dacha, even here, on Trukhaniv island…

            Pow! the sucker punch came from across the board. “you shitty yid, you think I didn’t see you juke the last guy with your misplaced queen? Now what’ya got, huh? Here’s your fuckin’ double-or-nothin’ on my cheatin’ queen”—and the angry man jumped his key piece over a fence of pawns for a sudden checkmate. There was little Yakov could do here. He calculated, knowing two hundred rubles in two bills were in one pocket and a more fluid hundred in another, so, pleading nothing—rather saying he never came here to cause trouble—he pulled out a hundred from the richer pocket and dropped it squarely in the center of the board. It satisfied the angry man, and Yakov slinked away feeling neutral: not happy about his swelling cheek, not richer for his unequivocal gains, but free to walk without pursuit, and dream.

            And read. ‘Emerald’ was indeed an excellent story, and terribly sad, thinking mostly about Nadia. Such a majestic creature, so strong and sentient and… star-crossed—Yakov liked that term, even if he couldn’t name the most common constellations. Somehow the movement of celestial spheres made sense to him, and inevitably their trajectories would cross, and maybe even clash with whatever gravitational expectations that might have been charted out. That’s sort of what Yakov liked. Heaven also played its shell games—luring in the assurance of predictability, that Venus, for instance, spins backwards and Pluto disparages the uncanny plane of other orbits. Then throw in the comets, the black holes, the stray Melancholias (what he wouldn’t yet know)—he’d see that before his live-a-century would be up—and Yakov’s universe was pleasantly incomplete.

            More visceral than ‘Emerald’ was the story ‘Gambrinus’, about an Odessa pub that housed Sashka and his little dog Snowdrop, until the latter was smashed against the pavement by a badly drunken patron. Sashka played violin and whistle pipe for the constant turnover of sailors, gypsies, sojourners and local tramps, then shuffled off to an amorphous war (defining, with his lack of contact, its obsolescence), then returned to a valiant, weathered, vivacious if withered redoubt at the pub with his violin. Mme Ivanova, ageless between all realities, reflected all measures of hope for his return. One would suggest they were better off than a married couple: daily interactive, in love with what the other brought to an otherwise sweltering and friendless place.

            “He was a Jew,” Yakov told Nadia, right before she was to go on to the next night’s act.

            “What?”

            “He was a weirdly, wandering (but not really) Jew.”

            “That’s a story by Leskov, but..,” she hissed, “get out of my way!”

            The horses were trotting towards them, with Sergey behind, swatting and swearing. As Nadia strode with them into the center ring, Sergey grabbed Yakov by the arm. “You keep out of her way—and don’t think I don’t see you two talk.”

            “We have to talk—our acts transition—”

            “I’ll break this arm. Nobody will notice or care. You’d be just clowning around. And I don’t. Stay the fuck away.”

            So he had to. And since he guessed that she would in time reread ‘Gambrinus’, he penciled in a note on the spine margin of part III, near Mme Ivanova’s request to
                        “Play something, Sashka, will you?”

                        “What would you like me to play, Mme Ivanova?” Sashka

                     asked obligingly. He was always exquisitely polite to her.

                        “Something of your own.”

His note was merely: “afternoons chess at Taras S.”

            That park was across from the university renamed after Taras Shevchenko, by Stalin’s grace. The terracotta façade of the main building defined this part of Kiev—not strictly Soviet red or Decembrist crimson, rather stoic in hardened russet clay. Here Yakov didn’t play for bets. There were moneyless students who’d play between classes, and largely this wasn’t an atmosphere to make a spectacle of oneself and run off. Yakov’s ulterior motive, besides the prospect of meeting Nadia off-hours, was to soak in the culture, to get used to browsing at book tables at the nearby Besarabska market.

            His evenings at the circus were miserable. He had left Nadia’s book in her changing area, but avoided her as deliberately as she did him. Sergey was always scanning, and in his frustration to catch and punish, he collared Yakov and seethed: “You think it’s a cat-and-mouse game, huh? Well I’ll pound her tonight to see how you’ll stay in your shadows!” And he did. Nadia almost couldn’t perform the following evening and she stayed home the next two. Sergey had told the manager (who believed him) that she had fallen off a horse training for a new stunt, and that she was too embarrassed to speak about it. Yakov cried bitterly alone, and thought hard about quitting this evil place. Instead, he replaced the trademark teardrop on his facepaint with an emerald star. He couldn’t know if Nadia noticed when she returned, because she didn’t look at him. He arrived as late as he could and she and Sergey left before the finale, which through the manager’s consent she was now exempt.

            The main thing, for Yakov, was that she wasn’t hurt; as much as he could tell, from the even deeper shadows where he watched, she was strong and agile as ever on the animals. It was silly, he conceded, that he would have meant much to her in the first place.

            “I was wrong,” came a quiet voice behind him. Yakov closed his eyes on the words he had been only half-reading in the bustle of Taras Shevchenko square, and Nadia brushed his arm as she sat down. She smelled beautiful, like always, and though he tightened his eyes shut, he grinned and shook his head.

            “Wrong?” Bashfully he looked to her.

            “About the wandering Jew. Here, it’s actually about a monk named Ivan—the ‘Enchanted Wanderer’ of the title.” She handed him the book she drew from her bag, filled to the top with groceries. “I re-read it last night and only one little part has a mystical rabbi who exiles himself to the deserts of…well, your Samarkand, I imagine. And he buries himself to the neck in the sand…for seventeen years.”

            “Why?”

            “God provides. Sort of a spiritual test in reverse.”

            They sat silently for a moment, then Yakov asked, “when did you re-read ‘Gambrinus’?”

            “Maybe last night also.” She looked at him intently and didn’t return his warm smile. “Maybe three weeks ago—what difference does it make?”

            “None. You’ve made my life happy either way.”

            “Don’t, it’s…dumb.”

            “I’ve been able to read situations on a street since I was really little. I’m pretty natural at a chessboard. But I’ve never cared for reading pages before. I’m still not very fast—I have to read certain sentences a lot of times…”

            She reached for what he had set down. “What’s this? Envy—where on earth did you get this?”

            “Here, or at Besarabska actually. I traded Kuprin’s Yama for it—”

            “These have been banned for years. I’ve only heard about Olesha, in a tiny article when he died a couple years ago—they called this novel a trick.”

            “I’m only half-way through. The trick for me is keeping up with it. They keep on talking about a machine named ‘Ophelia’, but not what it’s supposed to do…”

            “And what was Yama like?”

            “Like it says—the pit of Odessa’s sex trade. There wasn’t anyone like Sashka in it, or Emerald… I guess it succeeds in the point that it’s hard to get out of something. Or you shouldn’t get into what you can’t… or shouldn’t—” He stopped short—he didn’t want to belabor anything, or rush. Still, he sputtered foolishly when he tried to transition, “what about you?”

            “What about me?”

            “Um, you look fine at the show, but…”

            “But what?”

            “…but I can’t imagine what your husband does when.. I see him scowl at me and would rather he get that rage out in my, um,..”

            “I told you—he watches television.”

            Yakov nodded his head. “It’s just that when he said he’d—“

            “Mulchat! Stop thinking about him.”

            “I’m thinking about you.”

            “Look, this isn’t why I came here. I found your note and another sappy story for you to read—though I see you don’t need anything from my old shelves—“

            “Not the case—on the contrary: look,” Yakov paged to a place in Envy he had dog-eared: “listen to this guy Ivan Petrovich who ruins the Ophelia machine and—where is it?—‘avenges my era’—he means the olden days, not the modern world—that’s when I’m thinking of you—‘They’re eating us alive,’ Ivan says, ‘they’re swallowing the nineteenth century the way a boa constrictor swallows a rabbit.’ See?”

            “See what?”

            “I barely understand this century, but how could I know anything of the past without reading?”

            “Why do you need to know about the past?”

            “Well, why do you? Why do you read Leskov?”

            “He writes about horses, and that’s my present life.” She stood up to go.

            “Here, Nadia, please take Olesha—it would be good to swap centuries.”

            She put the worn book in the middle of her bag and arranged a loaf of bread and vegetables to cover. She snatched a frond of grapes and gave them to Yakov, who shrugged as if he had no need. “You’re skinny. Davai.”

[more parts to follow]