There was no question of competition here; each person was worth exactly what his profession was worth. The aerial gymnast could not be incompetent: his life was on the line. No telephone call could halt the bear when it reared up with its immobile muzzle completely incapable of expression and went to savage its trainer. Being related to the director, enjoying the support of someone higher up, was not going to help you turn a backward somersault.
“This is not like sport,” a sadder but wiser Butonov reflected. “Sport is corrupt. This isn’t.”
Although he would have been hard-pressed to articulate the thought fully himself, he was profoundly aware that at the very peak of artistry in the Soviet Union, in the zone where you are totally master of your profession, there is a tiny platform of independence. Up there, on the summit of Mount Olympus, were the stars of the circus, who freely crossed frontiers into other countries, and wore unimaginably beautiful clothes, and were rich and independent.
The boy had intuited something crucial, although in many respects the circus was exactly the same as other Soviet institutions—the warehouse, the bathhouse, or academe. It had its Party committee, its local committee, its official subordination to superior institutions—and its unofficial subordination to any telephone call from the mystical heights. Envy, intrigue, and fear were the powerful levers of circus life, but this was something he had yet to learn. And in the meantime he lived that half-monastic life which sport had taught him. Although no formal vows had been taken, ascesis was observed, the rules of prayer were replaced by morning exercises and evening training, fasting was replaced by dieting, and the code of obedience by total subordination to the discipline of the trainer. The Master, as he was called here. As for chastity, which was not by any means esteemed in itself, a true sportsman’s life was organized in such a way that the ferocious physical demands and the harsh regime made terrible inroads into the free and easy party mood which draws two young people to pool their energies for the giving and taking of mutual pleasure.
The school remembers Butonov to this day. He acquired all the arts of the circus effortlessly: acrobatics, juggling, tightropewalking, and each of these arts laid claim to him. Butonov had no equal in gymnastics.
From the first months of his studies he was invited to take part in existing routines. He refused, because he knew exactly what he wanted to be: a trapeze artist. To work the air . . . Butonov’s teacher, replacing the discredited Nikolai Vasilievich, was an aging circus artist of indefinite nationality but from a circus dynasty, who looked like a Russian peddler but had the Italian name of Antonio Muzzetoni, and was popularly known as Anton Ivanovich.
Muzzetoni the Elder was born in a three-axled caravan on a faded red and blue circus horse blanket, on the road from Galicia to Odessa, to a lady horse rider and an acrobat. His face was etched with many deep vertical and horizontal wrinkles which were as intricate as the innumerable stories he told about himself.
In these, truth had blended with fiction so long ago that he himself no longer remembered what was embellishment. Seeing the exceptional gifts of his new pupil, he was already considering the possibility of eventually incorporating him into the troupe of aerial gymnasts in which his own son, nephew, and twelve-year-old granddaughter Nina flew from trapeze to trapeze.
By the end of his second year of training Butonov had matured greatly in knowledge, skill, and good looks. He was approximating ever more closely to the archetypal image of the builder of Communism familiar from red and white posters drawn with straight, uncomplicated horizontal and vertical lines, and with a deep transverse mark on the chin. His image needed a certain amount of further work, as was evident from the unimpressive ducklike end of his nose, but this was compensated for by the line of his shoulder, the quite un-Slavic long legs, and the refinement of his hands (heaven knows where that came from). And to cap it all, his quite incredible immunity to the female sex.
The circus girls, as in earlier days the girls at school, hung on him. Here everything was so exposed, so near at hand—the shaven armpits, and the contours of the groin, the muscular buttocks, the small, firm breasts. The other young circus artists of his age enjoyed the fruits of the sexual revolution and the artistic license flourishing in the backyards of Socialism, in an oasis on Fifth Street in Yamskoye Polye, but he viewed the girls with distaste and irony, as if Brigitte Bardot herself were waiting for him on a crumpled sofa back there in Rastorguevo.
Valentina Fyodorovna couldn’t believe her luck: her son didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t chase after women, had a good maintenance grant, and treated her well. She boasted to her neighbors: “Your Slavka is a right thug, but in all my born days I’ve never had a cross word from my Valerii.”
At the end of his second year Butonov was awarded an apprenticeship: he was one of a number of privileged students excused the standard curriculum, attached to a master and allowed to work in an act. Anton Ivanovich put him into his son’s program. Giovanni, or Ivan, although not endowed with his father’s talents, had nevertheless been schooled by him. From his earliest days he had been flying beneath the big top, turning his somersaults; but his real passion was for cars. He was one of the first circus people to import a foreign car into Russia: a red Volkswagen. It might have been old hat for Germany, but it was thirty years ahead of the sluggish progress of the Soviet car industry.
Having carefully placed an old blanket under his extremely valuable back, he spent hours lying under the car. His ill-tempered, sluttish wife Lyalya remarked caustically, “If I got to lie under him as much as he lies under that car, he would be worth his weight in gold.”
The younger Muzzetoni’s relations with his father were less than straightforward. Although the son was already past thirty and, in Butonov’s eyes, getting on a bit (indeed by circus standards this was almost pensionable age for an “aerial”), he was as scared of his father as a little kid. They had been working together for many years now: Anton Ivanovich had broken all records for longevity under the big top. He had always, since he was a boy, been the first to master the riskiest stunts. In the 1920s he was the only person who could perform a triple screw somersault, and it was eight years before another gymnast appeared who could duplicate the feat. Of his son Anton Ivanovich would say with carefully contained exasperation, “The one thing Ivan is perfect at is falling.”
This aspect of the profession really was very important. They were working right up under the big top, and although they had the double reassurance of the lunges fastened to their belts and the safety net, serious injury was still possible. The younger Muzzetoni was considered a virtuoso at falling; the elder was a trailblazer by nature and had grown mightily tired of waiting for his son to deliver something he simply did not have in him.
That year, however, all the performers were preparing for a major circus festival in Prague, and Anton Ivanovich set to work on his son, brooking no contradiction. He was to revive the trick which had spread old Muzzetoni’s fame the length and breadth of the country before the war.
Giovanni submitted reluctantly to his father. The old man always forced him to work with total dedication. Valerii, who was invariably present at rehearsals, felt his muscles quivering. He wanted desperately to try himself in the long and complex flight, but Anton Ivanovich was having none of it: he kept him paired with his nephew Anatolii. They performed their meeting flights with synchronized precision, but this was not going to set anyone back on their heels: all trapeze artists began that way.