Carol Birch - Orphans of the Carnival

The door was open. Prauscher rapped on it and Theo’s eyes opened at once.

‘You’ve got a countess come a-calling,’ he said.

‘What?’ He stood awkwardly. The chair didn’t want him to go.

Prauscher was a florid man with a look of bursting about him. ‘A countess, no less,’ he said with the hint of a sneer. ‘The Countess Prokesch-Osten.’

‘A countess,’ said Theo. That was good. ‘Well, show her in, I suppose. Or is there somewhere more—’

But she appeared in the doorway. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said.

‘Friederike.’ He nodded.

She came in, Prauscher hovered, Theo closed the door on him. ‘I’m sorry,’ Theo said, ‘there’s only this thing here to sit on, but if you—’

‘How can you?’ she said.

Theo sighed, smiling his mild smile, a man wronged. ‘You too,’ he said softly. ‘I’m sorry, Countess, but I no longer feel the need to explain myself. I’ve already done that, many, many times.’

‘I know you have,’ she said.

The years had been kinder to her than to him. She had light crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and her lips were thinner, but her hair and eyes shone and she was still in her prime and elegant. Theo still looked younger than his age, but these days he was beginning to notice an ageing look when he glanced at a mirror, the skin of his throat looser, his hair turning grey and receding. In a few weeks he’d be forty-five. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I never will.’

‘Then I can’t make you.’

‘How can you smile? How can you stand there completely unmoved? I knew her for only a few weeks, and I hate to see her like that. And the baby! The poor baby!’ Her eyes filled with tears.

‘Friederike,’ he said, ‘please. If I may still call you Friederike. Or is it Countess Prokesch-Osten now?’

‘Call me whatever you like,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. You have taken away every last shred of dignity she had.’

‘No.’ A flicker of anger, which he tried to hide. ‘Any dignity a person has exists while they’re alive. Once you’re dead it can’t be touched.’

‘Rubbish,’ she said, ‘you know that’s not true.’

‘Friederike! That is not Julia. That is an image of Julia.’

But she shook her head. ‘If you can’t see how grotesque this is, I’m sorry for you.’

‘Grotesque? Grotesque?’ Now he really was angry. ‘No. I will not have that. She got enough of that when she was alive.’

She listened, said nothing, just looked at him seriously for a long moment.

‘Why did you come, Friederike? You must have known it would upset you, and yet you came anyway. Of course you did, you had to. Because you can’t help yourself. No one can. She was unique, born for looking at. What’s so terrible about that?’

She blinked rapidly, licked her lips and shook her shoulders. ‘She should have had a decent burial, like everyone else,’ she said, turning to leave.

Theo smiled. ‘It’s only the body, Friederike,’ he said. ‘It’s not her .’

Countess Prokesch-Osten took a small handkerchief out of her glove and swiped it briskly over the end of her nose, then sniffed loudly. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘it produces the most — profound — sadness.’ She folded the handkerchief and put it back inside her glove. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s been many years. My memories of her are very fond.’

‘As are mine,’ said Theo quietly, then smiled brightly. ‘So!’ he said, ‘a countess!’

He knew she’d not appeared on a stage for years, but he’d had no idea she’d married so grandly.

She smiled coldly. ‘Yes,’ was all she said, then turned and walked out of the room without saying goodbye.

The road wound on for seven more years.

Sometimes, fresh from the dim room of a whore with its sad trappings of drapes and shades, he’d stumble along the midway into the wagon where he’d placed her in her case next to his bunk, and he’d lie in bed and talk to her.

‘You know,’ he’d say, ‘you’ll never believe what they said in the Figaro . Been talking to Buckland, I bet. You don’t think I’m a monster, do you? Of course you don’t.’

He never had truck with all these idiots who said he was mad. What were they moaning about? For God’s sake what are they, pagans who worship graven images? Insane. Whatever came after death, and he had no idea what that might be, though he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of there being some thing, it had nothing to do with that mummy. Julia was gone, fully and finally. What remained was no more than a portrait. Call it a keepsake. About the boy, he scarcely thought.

Sometimes the night would close in, become nothing less than the sum of everything. In the stillness, the pounding of his blood was an approaching army. Silence vibrated behind it. Her glass eyes looked away, past him. It had been a long time since that face had lived, but still, on nights like these, he would fall into a reverie of communication with it.

‘ You know, don’t you,’ he’d say. ‘ You understand.’

And the years marched on around him, hustling him along by the shoulders like a man in a crowd.

He was in Bremen when he got word of a hairy girl in Karlsbad. His pulse jumped. It reminded him of the first time he’d heard about Julia, and known, just known that this was something of importance in his life. Here was another, clearly signposted by circumstance. Things conspired. He was in certain places, certain times, to hear by chance a conversation, a mention, until one night he met a man in a sideshow who was running three pinheads and a skeleton woman who looked as if she was on death’s doorstep. ‘Heard about that girl in Karlsbad?’ the man said, a small weaselly Cockney who spoke as if he was offering stolen goods.

‘Yes,’ said Theo, ‘I have.’

‘Hairy as this one. Easy.’ He’d been hanging around Julia’s case all day, couldn’t get enough of her and her boy. Stood gazing and gazing. If he’d had the money he’d have offered, Theo could tell, but he knew she was way beyond him.

‘This girl,’ said Theo. ‘You seen her?’

‘You kiddin’?’ The man snorted. ‘Guards her like the crown jewels, the old man.’

‘So,’ Theo offered him a smoke, ‘how do you know what she’s like?’

‘I was down there.’ The man accepted a light. ‘Everyone knows about her. I was talking to this fella knows the family. Covered head to foot, he said. Old man’s filthy rich and keeps her in.’

‘Hm,’ said Theo. They stood smoking quietly for a while, looking at Julia and the boy. ‘Did you try?’

‘Oh yeah! Tried all right. Couldn’t get near.’

You couldn’t, Theo thought. I bet I could.

A couple of months later he made a nice deal with Prauscher, and left Julia and the boy with the museum while he went off to Bohemia. Strangely freeing to be away from her glass eyes, the boy’s vacant stare. He spent a few days hanging round getting the lie of the land, talking to people in taverns, discovering that the girl’s name was Marie, her father a linen merchant with a big house near the cathedral. He laughed when he saw it. The garden wall was ten foot high. ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,’ he said, ‘let down your hair.’

First he left his card. When that didn’t work, he sent round a crate of first-class port wine and two dozen red roses. Let them just think about how much that cost, he thought. Two days later, receiving a note of thanks and a brusque invitation to call at four o’clock on Friday, he celebrated by getting drunk. By Friday he’d recovered from the hangover and got himself shaved and spruced up by a barber, and by the time he stood on the steps of the big white house, on the dot of four, he’d persuaded himself to feel fettlesome and fine. The old man received him in a slightly shabby sitting room filled with things that looked costly but used: bowls, dishes, a glass-fronted bookcase and several tables bearing the scratch marks and stains of generations. The sound of children running through the house penetrated the walls, the voice of a woman; French, it sounded.