The October Circle Page 7

Suddenly a cloud passes over the Mime’s face: his brow furrows, his eyes listen. He leaps upright and darts a few steps to the right — to come up against a glass wall there. He recoils, then approaches the wall again and begins to slap his palms onto it to see how far it extends. His eyes grow panicky. His hand motions become quicker. The wall is everywhere around him. He feels wildly for an opening, a door, a window, a crack, but there is nothing, nothing but solid wall. Now it is pressing in on him — no room to reach out — his elbows pinned to his sides — his fingers describe the wall — his nails scratch at it. He thrusts one arm straight up as if to climb out the top and discovers a ceiling. He can’t get his arm back down again — no room — the wall squeezing him. His eyes bulging in terror, one arm over his head, the other pinned to his side, he opens his mouth and screams a silent scream that makes the three people watching him wince.

  Then it is over and the Mime is bowing and holding out his top hat and the Racer is rummaging in his pockets for some change. The Mime slips the money into a small leather pouch that hangs from his belt, climbs onto his unicycle and, tipping his hat, pedals off into what is left of the night.

  “Who is he?” the girl asks when she can no longer hear the spokes.

  But the Racer stares into the accumulating light without replying.

  3

  THEIR YELLOW JERSEYS whipping around their waists, their wheels almost touching, the four riders lean into the turn, soar high on the curved bank and swoop down again for the pull along the straightaway. The chain on the last bicycle jumps into the sprocket a fraction of a second late. Instantly the Racer’s voice comes crackling over the battery-powered megaphone that the bicycle club bought from the customs inspector who stole it from a foreign yacht at Varna.

  “You muffed the gear changes again, Sacho — close it up. Tony, keep your elbows in. You look like a pigeon flapping its wings. Goddamn it, Evan, how many times do I have to tell you, don’t look back. Let the Greeks do the looking. You pull. And hold the goddamn wheel down on the turns. Lean on it. That’s right, that’s better. Now attack the flat, bite into it. Go. Go. Go.”

  The Racer stands on an old wooden table in the center of the bicycle stadium, turning round and round like a circus master putting his horses through their paces. Once each lap his eyes flit over the girl high up in the empty bleachers. Somewhere in the back of his mind it occurs to him that she doesn’t sit like an American. Angel, in a rare burst of humor, once said they had invented the chair, the Americans, but Mister Dancho credited it to the Russians, claiming it came “just after the rectal thermometer and just before the flush toilet, which they are still perfecting.” But even Dancho had to admit that the Americans knew how to sit better than anyone in the world. “They have a way of folding themselves into chairs,” he said, “as if they are going back to the womb. My god, I’ve even seen them put their feet up on coffee tables!” But not the girl in the bleachers, the Racer thinks, lapping her again with his eyes; she appears to be sitting at attention, her feet flat on the floor, her palms flat on the bench at her sides, following the four riders with small jerks of her head.

  The Racer whips the megaphone up to his lips. “Jesus, Sacho, anybody with big lungs can ride a bicycle, but you’ve got to use your brains to win.” Normally Tacho would have let it drop there. But something is irritating him, something he can’t put his finger on. And so he steps out of character and flings after the retreating riders:

  “If you have any, that is.”

  “You ride them too hard,” the Flag Holder warned earlier in the day. As usual a Rodopi hung from his lower lip and great clouds of stale smoke swirled around his head.

  “You don’t ride them hard enough,” Poleon maintained.

  “They still make a lot of mistakes,” the Racer explained, “and the race is three weeks off.”

  “They make mistakes because you make them nervous,” the Flag Holder argued. “The big one, what’s his name?”

  “Sacho.”

  “Sacho. He shifts perfectly when you’re not around. I saw him heading up to Visoša last week. He moved through nine gears without losing a centimeter. Then you turn up and he starts fluffing the changes.”

  “If you don’t ride them, you won’t get any work out of them,” Poleon interjected. He arranged the thin strands of hair so that they fell over his bald scalp.

  The Flag Holder was annoyed. “You should concentrate on getting your films past the censor, Poleon.”

  “I was only trying to be helpful,” Poleon sulked.

  It was noon — the siren atop the Central Committee building had just sounded the hour — and they were waiting for the others to join them in the Milk Bar, their midday hangout. They stood next to a chest-high table drinking black coffee. The others would go on to the Journalists’ Club for lunch, but Tacho would be doing some laps and preferred to ride on an empty stomach. In the street outside, trolleys and trucks and automobiles poured past the large window of the Milk Bar in a stream that let up only when the Tomato (Dancho’s nickname for the ripe cop on the traffic beat outside) let the cars on the side street have a turn.

  The Milk Bar is run by an ex-soccer star named Gogo Musko, who is still living off the winning point he scored against the Russians in the world cup quarterfinals five years before. Because of Gogo, the bar is something of a hangout for soccer players. The long wall that runs at right angles to the bar is lined with pegs, and hanging from each one is a jockstrap, put there, with appropriate fanfare, by well-known players as they retire. (Gogo’s jock — manufactured in America, a gift from Dancho — hangs from peg number one.) The only other things on the walls are two travel posters from Scandinavia and a photograph of Tacho crossing the finish line in the Milan - San Remo race in 1952. Again his right hand is thrust high in triumph.

  Mister Dancho squeezes through the crowd at the door and salutes Gogo with a wave. He stops in the corner to weigh himself on the pay scale. (It was broken when Gogo took over the Milk Bar and therefore not listed on the books as “income producing.” With a sure instinct for private enterprise, Gogo jury-rigged a spring and started pocketing the ten stodinki pieces that accumulated in the coin box. In a good week they add up to twenty leva, half again as much as his salary.) The needle on the scale quivers and settles, and Dancho groans.

  “I put on two kilos in London, England,” he complains, shouldering in next to the Flag Holder. “Hello, Poleon. Greetings, Tacho my boy. God, you can really eat there. What’s this I hear about Dreschko? Octobrina woke me at the crack of dawn” — Mister Dancho smirks — “well, at ten, to tell me you saw him last night? It’s not possible; he’s supposed to have bought it in Siberia.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” the Flag Holder agrees. They both look at Tacho.

  “I’m telling you, I saw him last night. There aren’t two men in the world who look like that. Wasn’t Dreschko in the circus before the war?”

  “Hey, Angel” — Mister Dancho has just spotted the Dwarf coming through the door, along with his dog and half a dozen of his Hungarians — “Angel, you remember someone named Dreschko who worked in the circus before the war?”

  Bazdéev waves the Hungarians over to the counter, where they start pointing out the eclairs they want. “Dreschko? Dreschko? Sure thing, there was someone Dreschko who rode the unicycle —”

  “You see!” the Racer exclaims.

  “Put together good act for himself,” the Dwarf recalls. “How come you asking?”

  “Tacho here thinks he saw him last night doing a mime’s act in Place Lenin!”

  “No, no, not possible,” the Dwarf says flatly. “He turned political. Was in Spain. You remember, Lev? Then with Dimitrov in Moscow. Then disappeared. Dead, sure thing.”

  “He’s not dead,” the Racer insists. “I tell you I saw him last night. He must have been in the camps all these years” — the Racer is piecing the story together in his mind — “maybe in a cell, maybe solitary. That’s what it was, and he was telling us about
it.” And he describes the Mime’s act with the wall.

  “Jesus,” whistles Dancho. “If it’s really him—”

  “I asking around,” the Dwarf is still dubious. “I find us this Mime, then we seeing.”

  “Jesus,” Dancho says again. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Anything is possible,” observes the Flag Holder. In his lifetime, more than one person has disappeared into nowhere, or turned up out of nowhere. “If it is Dreschko, I’ll have to revise his entry in my book.”

  Two well-known soccer players stroll in and start flirting with Bazdéev’s Hungarians, whose mouths are all chocolaty from the eclairs. The Dwarf’s eyes narrow as he watches to see how the girls will react. At first they pay no attention. Then a thin arm reaches out and a single finger hooks itself over the belt of one of the athletes. Bazdéev roars a word in Hungarian — so suddenly that the dog, Dog, sprawling at his feet, heaves himself slowly off the ground in fear. The thin arm shoots back and the two soccer players, looking around nonchalantly in every direction except Bazdéev’s, go their way.

  Tacho walks over to the corner table, where the American girl is being quizzed by Octobrina’s brother, Velin, a translator who is in the midst of preparing Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men for publication in Bulgaria. Melanie is wearing blue jeans with flowers embroidered down the legs like vines, Indian sandals, a white T-shirt and a man’s felt fedora with a rose stuck in the band.

  “This is fun,” Melanie says in Russian, looking up as the Racer approaches. “I like your friend,” she whispers, indicating the Flag Holder with her chin.

  The Racer accepts the statement as if it is a gift.

  “She’s a big help,” Velin interjects in Bulgarian. He turns back to Melanie and they continue in English. “Here’s another one that confuses me. George undid his ‘bindle.’ “ Velin taps the point of his pencil on the word in the book open between them. “What means bindle?”

  “Bindle is bundle. It’s probably his sleeping sack. I had an uncle who used to pack his bindle to go camping.”

  Velin scribbles something in the margin and draws an arrow from what he has written to the word, which is circled. “How about this one. The grain team is short two ‘bunkers.’ “

  Melanie screws up her face. “I can’t help you with that one — no.”

  “How about: George says, ‘What the hell’s he got on his shoulder?’ But he doesn’t have anything on his shoulder. I don’t understand.”

  Melanie leans over and reads the paragraph. The Racer sees Velin steal a look at her breasts, which are visible through her shirt. “Ah, that one’s easy,” Melanie declares, looking up. Velin’s eyes flash back to hers. “We have an expression in English, ‘To have a chip on your shoulder,’ meaning to be hostile. When he says, ‘What does he have on his shoulder?’ he’s really asking, does he have a chip on his shoulder? D’ya see?”

  “Chip?” inquires the translator, thoroughly confused now. “What is this chip?”

  Tacho saunters back and helps Popov carry his cake and coffee to the table.

  “How was your morning, Atanas?” the Flag Holder asks. Popov reaches into his pocket to turn up his hearing aid. “What did you say?”

  “I said, how was your morning?”

  “Ah, my morning. Sssssssss. Mediocre. Yes, yes, mediocre. Wait” —he pulls his ledger from his pocket—”I’ll show you. Sssssssss. One Maxwell House coffee tin, empty, without a lid. One Russian iron without electrical cord.” Popov shakes his head to emphasize the poor quality of his list. “One Polish mousetrap without a spring. A model of a zygodactyl; actually, that isn’t too awful. An empty can of East German hair spray. I suppose my best is a crumpled portrait of Jaurès haranguing a crowd in France — you can tell it’s in France because there is a ‘Cafe’ sign in the background.” Popov perks up. “They say Jaurès always spoke in the future tense. Did you know that? Sssssssss.”

  “I prefer the past imperfect,” remarks the Racer.

  “I only feel at home in the present ridiculous,” snaps Mister Dancho.

  “Not to worry,” the Racer murmurs cynically, “these days everything is conjugated in the present ridiculous.”

  “Let me see,” Popov continues, “hardly anything else worth mentioning. A petrified peach pit. A buckle for a woman’s bathrobe. Bits and pieces. Bits and pieces. Sssssssss.”

  “Do you remember last night Dreschko’s name came up in conversation,” the Flag Holder reminds Popov. “Tacho thinks he saw him at — “ The rest is lost in a fit of coughing.

  “The poet Dreschko? But he killed himself— “

  “No, no, not the one who was the poet; his older brother, the one who was in Spain.”

  “I thought you said he died in Siberia.”

  “Tacho thinks he saw him last night,” Mister Dancho explains patiently.

  “Oh.” Popov’s interest runs out like the string on a kite. He nods and turns down his battery. “Coffee,” he mutters, shaking his head. He stirs some sugar into his cup absent-mindedly. “Maxwell House coffee. Sssssssss.”

  Mister Dancho leans closer to the Racer. “That American bird’s pretty enough to make my watch stop. On the thin side, maybe, but” —he sizes her up with his hands and nods appreciatively. “Did you get any last night?”

  “Quit it, Dancho.”

  “Touchy bastard, aren’t you. Come on, you can tell Uncle Dancho. My lips are sealed. It won’t go any further.” He lowers his voice to a whisper. “Take it from someone who knows, the best part about the kissing is the telling.”

  “I told you to knock it off.”

  Dancho shrugs and sips his coffee. After a while he thinks to ask the Racer who Krasov was.

  “Krasov,” Tacho says, “was one of the six poor sons of bitches who’ve been killed trying to break my record.”

  “Ah, now I see— “ Dancho looks at the girl, who is engrossed in conversation with the translator.

  “It was nineteen fifty-two or -three. He rode behind a Cadillac across a salt flat in America. It was never established whether his wheel hit a pebble, or the rim just collapsed. The front wheel went out from under him at one hundred eighty-six kilometers an hour.”

  Mister Dancho grimaces. ‘I’ll never understand how you brought yourself to do it. What was in your head?”

  The Racer smiles mysteriously. “I was trying to combine motion with movement — “

  “Don’t give me that motion-movement crap again. What really made you climb on a bicycle and try to ride two hundred kilometers an hour? Christ, I wouldn’t go that fast in a car!”

  “Tell you what, Dancho, I’d rather talk about the kissing and the telling.”

  “Slippery bastard,” Dancho laughs.

  “Here comes Octobrina and the Rabbit,” the Flag Holder announces.

  Octobrina goes off to the counter for a coffee, but the Rabbit comes straight over. She looks drawn. “Oh, Lev.” She puts a hand on the Flag Holder’s arm. “Lev, one of our paratrooper brigades has been flown into the Ukraine near the Czech border. Georgi’s with them, Lev.”

  There is a long silence.

  “You’re sure of this?” the Flag Holder asks finally.

  The Rabbit nods grimly. “I heard it from a major who was complaining about not being allowed to go with them. He says the lucky ones who get to go would find promotions waiting for them when they return.”

  “Georgi’s a smart boy,” Mister Dancho assures the Flag Holder. “He’ll stay out of trouble.”

  “He’s entitled to some action,” Poleon puts in. “Like father, like son.”

  The Flag Holder turns on Poleon coldly. “I didn’t put down revolutions. I made them.”

  “It can’t be happening,” Tacho murmurs. “It’s a contradiction of everything we believe in.”

  Popov, who has tuned into the conversation, intones:

  “ ‘The dialectic is the science of creative contradictions.’ Sssssssss.”

  “That’s easy,” Mister Dancho says
glumly. “Lenin.”

  Disappointed, Popov turns down his battery again.

  Elisabeta says, “I saw a transcript of what went on in Moscow yesterday. It is being prepared for Central Committee distribution. Our leaders were met by Suslov. Brezhnev didn’t even bother to show up. The Minister was there, by the way. He asked if our side was being consulted or informed. Suslov said: ‘You are being consulted about decisions that have already been taken.’ “

  The expression on the Flag Holder’s face doesn’t change and Elisabeta turns on him angrily. “You know what I can’t stand about you? What I can’t stand is that every time I tell you some juicy item, you act as if you’ve heard it already.”

  “You will begin to understand me when you realize that I have heard it already.”

  The Rabbit presses her forehead against his shoulder. “Oh, Lev, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m — I’m jumpy. The Ministry is wild with rumors. They say that Soviet tank columns are on the Czech frontier ready to link up with Russian paratroopers already inside the country. They say the Czechs are secretly mobilizing, that they have caches of Western arms which are being distributed to the workers. They say roadblocks and barricades are going up all over Prague. Oh, Lev, there’s going to be a war.”

  “Maybe the Schweiks will fight after all,” ventures Mister Dancho.

  “Schweiks don’t fight,” Octobrina declares, placing her coffee on the table. “They survive.”

  “If you’re so sure they won’t fight, why are you all worried about Georgi?” Poleon demands stubbornly. He smirks and looks around, thinking he has scored on the Flag Holder.

  For an instant — just an instant — the Flag Holder’s bitterest enemy, spontaneity, gets the upper hand. Words spill from his lips. “It’s a bluff. The Russians won’t dare … I tell you, it’s got to be a bluff.” Then the moment passes and he is in full control again. “No man can accept being on the side, even through force of circumstances, of the oppressor.”

  “I agree with Lev,” Tacho argues. “The Russian will never—”

  A middle-aged man carrying a violin case under one arm limps into the Milk Bar, and all conversation fades away. Nobody looks at the man, but the silence wraps itself around him like an accusation. His step slackens; he would turn and run if he could, but having started, he has to continue as if nothing has happened.