Authors: Catherine Bush
His amplified voice was the first thing that met Sara as she slipped into the back of the reception tent, late for the pre-show talk. Two tents, a smaller one and the big top, had been raised by the side of the lake in a west-end parking lot. He was standing at one end of an airy room, raised on a small platform, in front of a microphone and podium, the tent’s thick canvas soughing in a breeze, traffic distantly surging, the scree-scree of gulls ricocheting down from the sky. She made her way along the side of a crowd of men and women in fine suits and shiny dresses, hands clutching wineglasses, in order to see him better, and there, from the front of the room, above the heads of the crowd, rose the furry pelt of a sound boom: someone, presumably Juliet, was filming him.
You have to understand a phenomenon that people there call ferengi hysteria, Raymond Renaud was saying. In my time I have travelled a lot and I have been a foreigner in many places, but I never experienced anything like the level of street harassment I found in Addis. I was biking to the school where I taught and people not only shouted at me but threw things. Stones, orange peels. Okay, they are not used to seeing foreigners biking in the street, but this was so disturbing. The word for a local person is habeshat and for foreigner it is ferengi. When people shouted ferengi at me, I called back habeshat. This confused people, but still they threw things at me. It was a terrible time. I was in despair. All I wanted was to leave this place, the hostility was so intense, and my life felt so restricted.
Instead of the white T-shirt he’d sported in Copenhagen, he wore a loose-fitting, checked yellow jacket, brown trousers, and brown socks with sandals. It was hard to tell if this was his idea of dressing up, or all that he could afford in his attempt to dress up, or if there was defiance in his attire, a resistance to wearing anything more conventional. And there was Juliet, face pressed to a video camera, roving in front of him, and a young blond man holding up the sound boom. The musical quality of Raymond Renaud’s voice was as strong as Sara remembered, the charismatic ardour of its rise and fall, the hint of unplaceable accent. He gestured with his hands as he had in Copenhagen: his fingers pressed and squeezed the air. There had to be a waiter slipping somewhere through the crowd. Sara turned, needing a drink.
One day, he continued, I took my juggling pins and began to juggle in an empty lot. Whatever happened, it couldn’t be any worse than what I’d already experienced. And I drew a little crowd of people. Then, out of the crowd steps a boy, maybe ten, a bit shy, who comes close to me and asks if I will show him how to do what I am doing. And I allow myself to feel a leaf of hope. Maybe this will change the nature of our interaction in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with money. And the next day I brought along my pins and juggling balls and some plastic bottles and a bag of apples, and a few more children step forward and ask me if I can teach them. They spoke a little English and I spoke a little Amharic. They had never seen anyone juggle. Every day I went back and more and more children came and asked to join us and it was beautiful.
We found a garden where there was grass beneath our feet, which was better for practising acrobatics. We found some old mattresses and tied thick wire between two trees for a tightrope. I taught juggling and simple gymnastics and bought some wood to make a pair of stilts and taught them to balance mops on the ends of their chins. And one day the children came to me and said, Please, can we do a show, and I said, Yes, yes, why not. We had a boom box plugged into the cigarette lighter of my truck for music. We put up a sign, went back to the empty lot, and people came.
While all this was going on, you have to understand, the military dictatorship is falling. There are tanks in the street. The schools close. I lose my job. All foreigners are advised to leave. Before, because of the harassment, I wanted only to leave and now the children, they are begging me to stay with them. And I was beginning to understand what was possible, the true power of circus. And I was filled with the desire to be with them. So I stayed.
A waiter passed by, and when Sara reached out, a glass of white wine was placed in her hand and she swallowed the wine’s winsome tang and felt its percolation through her body.
Many of the children are poor, they have very little, but they have families, they go to school, and if they hang about in the street, it is because they have nothing else to do. So what I do is I create a prevention against streetism, by taking all children out of the street and giving them something to believe in. And more and more children found their way to us.
So after a year, when I came back to Montreal for a visit, I decided to go into the office of the Cirque and explain my project to them. I knew no one. I was doing this thing I believed in with my whole heart, but I began to see that to grow I really needed some support. I walked in the door and started speaking to people, telling them about the circus, and the children, and how we are using our shows to communicate social messages to communities, how a circus can be a new way to do this, and people started going, Wow, we really get what you’re up to. And the next instant, they said, Tell us how we can help. That afternoon, I walked out with a cheque and a duffle bag full of equipment and costumes. All along, it has been like this. People are so generous. The Cirque is so generous. Tonight you are so generous. And in five years, we have grown like a miracle.
Yes, I am the director, but the true root of all this comes from the children. They led me to it. There is a Cirkus Mirak because of their work, their dreams, their passion. I gave them a beautiful idea, and I train them, but at heart, I am directed by them. They discover what is possible. The circus, it’s theirs.
Two glasses of wine on an empty stomach might not have been the best idea, even if it was her birthday, and as Sara took her seat in one of the tiers atop a metal scaffold, the whole structure seemed to wobble. Juliet and her assistant, the young blond man who’d been holding up the sound boom, were on the far side of the ranks of seats, in another row perched high, while Raymond Renaud was down near the front, with a cadre in suits apart from one gesticulating man. A woman in a black dress seemed to be working as his handler. He glanced about, as if trapped between these people. Then again, he was on show at every moment, which no doubt took effort, every gesture a performance.
David had not called. Sara had stopped briefly at home after work to change her clothes, and there had been no message from him; nor had he called her at work during the day. There were birthday messages from friends, but none from her parents. Her mother had sent a card from Moscow, which had arrived two days before. Their contact was sporadic and had been for years, since the turbulence of her adolescence, although the origins of her sense of estrangement from them lay further in the past. All of it had been exacerbated in the wake of the charges against her, and the trial: she’d felt that her parents had decided this was simply more trouble she’d got herself into. Still, it was odd to have no birthday call, and since it was already late in the evening in Moscow, it was unlikely that they would call now.
Once, David and Greta might have come to an event like this. Greta, also a lawyer, small and dark and vivacious to judge from the few pre-illness photographs of her that Sara had seen, had sat on the board of a small arts foundation. Lawyer
and
altruist. She’d had to stop working because of the cancer and the neurological impediments left in its wake, which, after months of therapy, were retreating. Greta should have died from her cancer. She hadn’t. Everything now pointed toward — stability, this was the word that David used. He said Greta was preparing to return to work. The fact that Sara hadn’t heard from him was impossible to read. They would not have results from the scan but possibly an intimation of how things had gone. A sudden image of David appeared: standing in one of the tent’s entranceways, in a tux, casting about. Pure fantasy. Sometimes, especially in recent months, she found herself, when out, searching for a chance sighting of David with Greta. And if, or when, Greta began to reclaim her whole life, what would alter in Sara’s own relationship with David?
She had met David at a benefit. One night, three years ago in June, Matt Johansen, one of the city reporters, had stopped by her desk and asked if she happened to be free because he was on his way to a charity boat cruise in support of lupus research or maybe it was diabetes and his wife had just called to say she’d come down with a fever. I think she’s genuinely sick, but listen, I’m sure it will be awful and the worst part is if you hate it you’re absolutely stuck because you’re on a boat out in the harbour and there’s no way off.
She went because Matt was good company, and she had no plans other than work for the evening, and there they were on the upper deck of a converted ferry, a jangly Dixieland band warming up below, neither particularly dressed for dining and dancing, Matt in a windbreaker, Sara in jeans and T-shirt and boots and leather jacket, when Matt ran into an old friend of his, Siobhan something, accompanied by a man in a tuxedo. A friend of hers, Siobhan said, making the introductions. David Ross.
Sara’s first thought: a tuxedo! And: he has a large head! The man held out his hand. In her black boots she was taller than he was. Sara Wheeler, she said.
He had the air, she thought, of an alien; he did not seem ill at ease in his skin but radically perplexed to find himself where he was.
When she asked him what he did, as they leaned against the railing, Matt and Siobhan having moved off elsewhere, he said he had taken a leave from his job as a lawyer to look after his wife who was ill. He said he was out on his own for the first time in six months. He did not know what he was doing there. He had made a terrible mistake in allowing himself to be brought along. This was impersonal, she decided; it had nothing to do with her. She asked him the nature of his wife’s illness and he told her: the diagnosis six months before, the surgery, the neurological problems, the radiation and chemotherapy. When he asked her how she came to be on the boat, Sara explained her connection to Matt and told David Ross how strange it felt to be floating around the harbour, two weeks after returning from Iraq.
That caught his attention. Where exactly? David Ross asked her.
I went with a group of reporters into southern Iraq. Najaf, around Najaf, looking at some of the post-war reconstruction. We visited an orphanage, a hospital. We did a lot of things.
Your first trip?
First to the south, second to the country, I was up in the north, near Kurdistan, last year.
Inky water roiled about below, the city beyond them transformed into a wall of scintillating lights both flattened and dense. What struck Sara, beyond the selfless commitment required to take care of his sick wife, was that to do it well David Ross would need to be very good at looking after himself. Bombed buildings in Najaf floated in front of her. She tried to make them float away. Perhaps he sensed some similar quality of self-care in her.
She had not been looking to meet anyone. She had given her heart once, wholly, and having been betrayed by Graham Finnessey, having lost the life she’d thought would be hers, she did not want to go through that pain ever again. There had been other men since Graham, as there had been boys before him, but nothing that lasted, and if anyone came too close, she cut them loose, for how else were you to protect the tender self? Whatever frisson of attraction she felt for this man, he was safe, bound by the ropes of his marriage and his wife’s illness.
A week later, he called her up and asked her out for a drink. They ended up back at the apartment where she was living. It was clear what she was to him: a release, an escape, and for one night she thought, I can do this, I can offer him this compassion. The next week, he called her again. He told her not then but sometime soon thereafter that he and Greta had met at university and been together since they were twenty-one. They had been through some difficult times, but they had a life together. They’d had a very long disagreement about children; she wanted them; he didn’t; they’d talked of parting; then she got sick. He had no desire to leave this life. He couldn’t leave her and he wouldn’t; these were two separate things and both were true. He was such a lawyer, Sara thought, in his need to spell things out, in his insistence on certain kinds of clarity. About his life, his wife. And if he’d left Greta, at least while she was ill, she wouldn’t have wanted him. But she wanted him, his body at least, in her bed, what their bodies did together. One night, she reared up, pulled herself free of the tangled sheets, and said, I can’t do this if it’s going to hurt Greta. For whoever and whatever else Greta was, Greta needed him. From the bed came his voice. Sara. There was nothing peremptory or demanding in his call. I told her there’s a friend I see sometimes. I needed to tell her that much. What Greta said in return, he didn’t mention. Friend, Sara thought, and the word repelled her — pawn in some practical accommodation between them. She did not want to be having an affair and was repelled by herself. He did not talk then, only later, about the neurological symptoms, and how Greta was altered by them. Nor could she believe that she was in bed with a lawyer. Though what she felt by then had moved beyond compassion.
From the beginning, there was a force of something between them. Of taut connection. The calm field of his body in the bed. The way he called her name in the dark. He had an ability to be present and available to the possibility of a given moment, and this drew her, a form of generosity that she wanted fiercely to be in the presence of. He did not want all of her; nor did she wish to give all of herself to him. He was such a mixture of impulsiveness and restraint. Early on, he told her he would not be able to use the word
l
---. They would not be able to, should not make such declarations to each other. But tenderness, he said, let that be our word. I feel very tender toward you.
Yes, there were moral contortions in being with him. And I feel very tender toward you, she said.