Absolution

The tour has been cut short and rumours run that the money is gone. Some say the sword swallower cleaved off the promoter’s ear as collateral, that he is wearing it about his neck on a string. Down their shivering flanks the lions’ ribs are showing. The tamers know that soon the beasts will turn.

Pavel leaves the horse on the outskirts of the camp. All the way to the Big Top, the winter mire sucks at his boots. He asks the clowns. “I am looking for my brother, Pyotr, The Ringmaster.” The mime hocks and spits on the name.

He peels up a corner of canvas. Inside is like a sunken lung. In the amber din of kerosene lamps, they are bringing down the high wire and folding up the seats. In the middle of the pit sits The Tattooed Lady getting another. She is serene as the tattooist needles today’s date onto her throat- 6th of December 1905.

“I am looking for my brother, Pyotr, The Ringmaster.”

Not shifting his eyes from the work, the tattooist answers, “They’ve called for a priest. He told them not to bother, he knows where he is going next. He didn’t think you’d come”.

“Neither did I”.

“What changed your mind”.

“Another priest”.

He laughs and pricks a final curlicue into the number 6, wipes at the neck and admires for a moment. A light surfaces in The Tattooed Lady’s umber eyes. “He speaks of you often”.

*** 

A few loyalists have hidden Pyotr in a caravan away from the rest of the end-of-tour wreckage, a place where he cannot be found, at least for the moment, and made to pay his debts. The Tattooed Lady speaks with the Strong Man, who looks Pavel up and down and lifts him into the caravan. 

Inside is dense with acrid scents of sulphur and saltpetre, charcoal and wax, crates of fireworks lining the walls and spilling over the floor. Then a sourness, fever sweat and ferrous whiffs of old blood. It has been fifteen years. A great deal can happen to a man in fifteen years. In the wheatfields at dusk, Pavel could not help but wonder where his brother had gone, what he was up to, and in his most vengeful moods he would imagine a place not dissimilar to this- some sickly darkness, reeking of brimstone and death.

“How do I look?” says Pyotr, and Pavel considers this question as his eyes adjust. Only Pyotr’s face sits above the quilts, which do not make much of a mound over his sunken body. 

“You look tired, brother” 

“I had almost forgotten what you look like” 

As a boy his mother called Pyotr ‘The Dark Prince’. Pyotr had a jagged beauty that people felt compelled to contemplate and reconcile. Pavel’s face has no such gravity. 

Pavel pictures the wound that must be there under the quilts. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“We have a man who travels with us, but he is better with animals than men and he drinks all the laudanum” 

“Ah.”

“It’s alright. The pain will be my penance. This is what Vasily says.”

“Oh yes, Vasily. You know when he first came I was shocked that you’d won the favour of such a holy man, but a few days cured me of that impression. I’ve never met a more annoying man in all my life.”

“The circus brings all types.”  

“You set him on me like a plague.”

“I did no such thing. He insisted on helping me, you know how it is with these wanderers. There is nothing more dangerous than an idle man looking for something to do.”  

***

Vasily had arrived on foot, without shoes, several weeks ago. Pavel heard the stories about the Stranniki, the holy wanderers in search of God. He appeared like a wraith at the back door “Forgive me for sneaking up this way. These are dark times, sometimes I am mistaken for a vagrant and a farmer will shoot. I have travelled a long way at the request of your brother Pyotr, who understands he has no right to ask of you what I ask of you now. He has been mortally wounded in a fight with some gangster and will not see the spring. He wishes to see you before he dies, he will not reconcile himself with God until he reconciles with you, and so you must understand it is also my wish for you to see him. It is my duty to convince you.” 

“The problem” Pavel explained “is that he is no longer any brother of mine. I have been living under the assumption that he is dead. I do not feel any particular way about whether he lives or dies. This is the mutual agreement we have reached. This is a big and wide country. It is a comfort to me that we can be lost to one another. We were never much good in the same room”. Of course this was not wholly the truth. A tiny and fragile intrigue had been born when he learned Pyotr was still alive and looking for him. To Vasily this was a crack in the door just wide enough to be crowbarred open. 

Vasily sat silent and still. A cloud smudged over the light and dimmed the room. He came to a decision. He fixed his eyes on Pavel and said “We will see” then strode out the door. Pavel was relieved to watch him become smaller and smaller down the path and over the fields. 

Over the next few days, Pavel felt a subtle but persistent unease. His routine remained unchanged, the same hours at the plough, the same pattern of toil and rest. Sometimes he caught sight of a distant figure, or what appeared to be a figure, but could just as easily have been a trick of the light. One evening, he spent some time in the front garden with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, feeling its reassuring weight against his neck. At night, he heard stones ticking against his windows. In the morning, he found a message at his doorstep but could not read the scrawl of Cyryllic letters. 

Winter had begun to set in. Snow spiralled down and caught like wedding confetti on the black pines. He stoked the fire and drank til the light sank out of the world and the warmth became sickly.  He observed the sensation of his face becoming too full of blood and his neck going slick with sweat. He let it get worse till he couldn’t take it.  It was in this state that he saw Vasily’s face in the window.

He looked half frozen, icicles gathering in his beard. Pavel scrambled out of his chair and swung the door open. Gusts of powdery snow spilled over the floorboards as Vasily stood in the doorway trembling. “I will not come in,” he said.

“Are you stupid? What are you playing at?”

“I will not come inside till you agree to see your brother”

“Vasily I am not going anywhere but you must come in, you will die out there”

“The Lord will keep me warm. But he will not forgive you if you do not forgive Pyotr”

Indignation rose like bile in his throat and, against the hard wind, Pavel shouldered the door closed. He was quite sure that if a man will not help himself and is intent on dying, it would not be his duty to stop him. Pavel went about tidying the kitchen, placed another log in the hearth, washed his face with water he had warmed by the fire and slipped into bed.  

Sleep wouldn’t come. He couldn’t bypass the image of Vasily’s body, slumped against his door, frozen solid. In the morning the body would begin to thaw and Pavel would have to make some unpleasant decisions. Too much time had passed and he was sure it was too late to let him inside. Courses of action formed and dissipated somewhere far above him. He closed his eyes. Given time, one way or another, the situation would solve itself.  

He woke to screaming. In the living room, Vasily was writhing on the floor and partially on fire. His robes were black with soot and it was clear, from the spilled embers and general chaos of the scene, that Vasily had come down the chimney. “You mad fucker!” screamed Pavel, fumbling for a blanket to beat the flames. 

“Do not extinguish the fire Pavel, not unless you mean to see Pyotr.” Pavel was astounded by the sudden gentle clarity of Vasily’s voice. As though he were giving a child directions and not immolating before Pavel’s eyes. He tore a sheepskin from his bed and leapt on Vasily, suffocating what was left of the fire. 

For a time the two lay winded on the floor as the wind howled outside and the smoke settled. “It’s been you out there hasn’t it? Watching me?”

“I have been waiting for the right moment to approach you again with my mission”

“Vasily I don’t care if my brother dies, you cannot be doing this. I will be forced to summon the police” The holy man stared with his amber eyes, with the desperate innocence of an animal right before slaughter.

“What is it, Pavel, that has so torn you from your brother?”

***

“What did you tell him?” says Pyotr, stuffing a pipe with tobacco. 

“I will thank you not to smoke in a room full of explosives”.

“Of course, if it offends you, I will wait till you are gone.”

“I told him the truth” 

“And what is that to you?”

He thinks, for a moment, about killing Pyotr. It would be easy now. But he remembers the Strong Man outside, the sheer size of his neck. “How is it that you still have friends? From what I gather you have gambled away these people’s money. How long did you think you could go on bleeding people before someone would bleed you?”

“You won’t believe it, but it is not all my fault. We have not been a full troupe for some time now, we lost the better parts of our act months ago. The magician disappeared, as he was often threatening to do. Several monkeys escaped in Odessa. And yes, brother, if it makes you feel better, I gambled some of the revenue away. But it was the gambling that won me everything I had to lose.” Outside the silence is broken by a rising unrest, distant shouting and gathering voices.  

“Mother didn’t last long after you left.”

“I have been to her grave and paid respects”

“Big of you”

Something heavy thuds against the hull of the caravan, then the chime of shattering glass and muffled shouts gathering, coming closer. The door opens and the strong man stands in silhouette. He bolts the door behind him and lowers himself to Pyotr’s bedside. 

“The audience are close, Pyotr, I will keep them as long as I can” He lays his fleshy paw of a hand on Pyotr’s brow and strokes away the sweat soaked hair. “I will remember the tour in Samara, summer ‘86. Hot nights by the river and the lights in the water. And you must remember too Pyotr, the good times” 

“I’m sorry Giorgi”

“For what? With you I bent an iron bar for the Tsar!” He stands and strikes a pose in the half light, takes a deep bow and leaves. 

“They must know they won’t get their money back” says Pavel “what is it that they want?”  

“They are bored. There is nothing more vicious. We have told them there would be a circus and if they can’t have a circus they will at least have a hanging”

“I think you underestimate the decency of ordinary people”

 “You know, it is curious brother, I never remember you being bored. It’s a gift to be so simple and content.” something catches in his throat and he convulses into a retching, rattling cough. 

“I don’t know what I expected in coming here but I see now it is time that I leave” Pavel rises to collect his coat, a feeble hand catches his sleeve.

“I tried many times to find you and to pay you back. I looked in every city we performed in. I took the tour to places that made no sense, just to find you! You try getting an Elephant to a railway town in Siberia for a three night run, try convincing the tamer that is a good idea!” Pyotr’s neck is a river map of veins. Pavel motions for him to calm down. He moves to the side of his bed and finds a box of strike- anywhere matches and picks up Pyotr’s pipe from his trembling chest. 

“I told Vasily that you made off with all our money” He strikes the match on an empty crate and dips the flame into the packed tobacco. He hands it to Pyotr. “That you joined the circus and we were left with nothing and that we never recovered. I told him that I was never smarter or stronger or better looking than you, but Mother loved me because I was easy to keep safe. I told Vasily too much really, but he had worn me down by that point.

I told him that one night I saw you perform, in some field outside Omsk. You didn’t see me, I made sure. I didn’t know what I wanted by going to see you. I drank too much and packed some old pistol in my coat. I remember it was so heavy on my chest and I was dizzy. And then you appeared. You came through these fire breathers and you were holding the hand of this beautiful woman covered in tropical birds instead of clothes. Everyone was cheering and gasping and hanging on every word you said. I emptied out the bullets in my hand and dropped them through the seats and walked to a train station in the rain. You always had something you were born to do and everyone could see it. I never had something I was born to do, I had the rubles I earned in a box under the bed”. 

Pyotr stares at the ceiling, eyes glassy and breath shallow, “What did Vasily say?”

“He raised his hand like this and said ‘If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.’ I could not bear to imagine how he would react if I told him I didn’t love God either, so I promised I would come see you” 

They laugh and sit for a time in the dark, listening to the violence in the field. A familiar pressure fills the air, like the tension of a held breath. Pavel remembers this air was in the room with his mother on her final morning, dying quietly as the dew dried off the leaves outside. With a quivering hand, Pyotr retrieves a letter from under his pillow and sets it in Pavel’s palm.  “Read it now” he says, only just above a whisper. 

Dearest Brother,

Though I have never had any trouble talking, I have always struggled to say what I mean. There is also a good chance I may die before you arrive, if you arrive at all. 

Some will tell you that I am a degenerate gambler and a dismal manager of circus finances, but I always made sure my Trapezists had a net. We never thanked the man who weaved them, but he ought to have had his own bow every night. It took me a long time to learn that the net makes you an artist, without it you are merely a madman flaunting suicide.

 I left home and took the money because I knew I could. Because you were a good man and I knew you would stay.

I have enclosed the only money I have left in this world. I hope Vasily is right and I will see you again, one way or another. 

Yours,

Pyotr

Pavel looks down at Pyotr’s hand as it lays on his, cold and light, clammy with sweat, a drowned hand.

  Pyotr’s breath shallows to a sigh, his eyes smooth and black as river stones. The pipe falls from his lips and spills its smouldering tobacco on the sheets which singe and catch with a tiny but widening flame. 

Outside the crowd is circling like carrion dogs, Giorgi is panting and blood caked. Bottles sail through the air, but Pavel is calm, floating outside himself. No matter how angry he had been at Pyotr, Pavel was always more afraid that he would forgive him. He feared the yawning black space it would leave in his body when that organ of his hatred was gone. What would it mean to let it go? 

 He had always so resented the audiences that Pyotr could gather, not only for the attention they showered on him, but for the way they allowed themselves to be fooled and impressed. He could always see the sleight of hand. It drove him wild that, in exchange for the cheap thrill, they made themselves sitting ducks. But perhaps that was a worthy exchange for a moment of wonder. Perhaps it was a kind of forgiveness. Pavel approaches the savage blur of faces. He catches their eyes. He directs their gaze with a grand and sweeping gesture he once saw at a circus show. 

 It begins as a few pops, like distant rifle shots, then a great candy red flare, roman candles scything across a seething cascade of green fire, ice blue comets and a crackling hail of golden sparks. The air all around smells like gunfire and the snow falls in a thousand colours.