The rehearsals lasted for a good six months, but the day finally came for them to go to the Central Directorate at Izmailovo to present their program to the Artistic Council. At stake was the trip to Prague: for Butonov, his first trip abroad.
There was turmoil at the directorate, a coming together of the star performers and the administrative bosses of the circus. Everybody was on edge. The time for the displays was approaching. Anton Ivanovich climbed up to check the mountings, which were partly outside the top of the marquee, and scrupulously went over every nut and every bolt, running his hands along the cables. The safety inspector of the arena was his old rival Dutov, and although the conditions of Dutov’s job were such that any failure of the safety equipment would land him in jail, Anton Ivanovich was taking no chances.
Ivan was allocated a dressing room to himself, and Anatolii and Valerii shared another. The girls were put in a third. There were three of them, two young gymnasts and twelve-year-old Nina, Ivan’s daughter and an undoubted future star.
The artists were already putting on their maroon costumes with the gold stars when Valerii heard swearing in the corridor: some access was being obstructed by Ivan’s car and a circus wagon could not get through. Ivan gave a reply, the voice made some demand. Anatolii went over to the door and listened.
“Why are they going on at him? He’s parked it fine.”
Valerii didn’t believe in interfering in other people’s business and didn’t even bother to look out. Everything quieted down.
A few minutes later there came a knock at the door of their dressing room, and Nina stuck her head in. “Valerii, Toma wants you to come.”
Toma, one of the young gymnasts, had been coming on to him for a long time, and Butonov was both flattered and irritated.
He went to look in on her.
“Well, what do you think of my makeup, Valerii?” she asked, turning her little round face to Butonov as if to the sun.
Her makeup was the usuaclass="underline" a pinkish-yellow base with two delicate maroon wings of blusher, and the eyes heavily outlined in blue and drawn up to her temples.
“It’s fine, Toma. The Cobra Look.”
“Oh, you are beastly, Valerii.” Toma skittishly tossed her head, which was drenched with lacquer like a doll’s. “You only ever say horrid things.”
Valerii turned and went out into the corridor. A grey-haired man in overalls and wearing a tartan shirt was emerging from the door of Ivan’s dressing room. It was the shirt that caught Butonov’s attention, and that was why he remembered the encounter later. They were on in ten minutes.
Everything went like clockwork, worked out second by second: blackout, a leap, lights, a push, a trapeze, a drumroll, a pause, music, blackout again. The score even indicated when to breathe in and out. Everything was going splendidly.
Giovanni saved his strength during this number, standing with his chest thrust out there in the heights immediately under the big top, godlike, holding the light on himself while the juniors went through their paces. Their work was clear-cut and competent but nothing out of the ordinary. The jewel in the crown, the triple screw somersault, was all Giovanni’s. Not all the members of the Artistic Council had seen the trick, which was very rarely performed.
Old Muzzetoni was a shrewd director and had everything in place for maximum effect: the light flexible, floating; the music building up. Then suddenly a complete break: all the light on Giovanni up there under the roof, the arena in darkness, the music fortissimo and then cut.
Giovanni was sparkling, his head in gold, and wearing greaves devised by a clever designer to disguise his bowlegs. A hushed drumroll. Giovanni throws up his golden head. He is a demon incarnate. A momentary touch to his belt to check the carabiner.
Butonov had noticed nothing, but Anton Ivanovich’s heart had almost stopped. Giovanni was taking too long checking it, something was wrong. Everything was still on course; he wasn’t behind yet. The drumroll stopped. One, two, three, one second too many, the trapeze was going back, the push, the leap, Giovanni was still in flight and nobody knew, but already Anton Ivanovich could see that the formation was flawed and he could never complete that final pirouette. He was right.
Anatolii sent him the trapeze at the right moment, but Ivan missed it by twenty centimeters. He wasn’t in the right place at the right moment; he stretched out in mid-flight for the trapeze, attempting the impossible feat of following it back, and hurtled out of the geometry he had perfected, plunging down to the outer edge of the net where it was most dangerous to land, where the tension was greatest, where he was most likely to be jarred and thrown out . . . He hit the edge, as his father knew he must.
The net stretched and threw Ivan up. But not out. Farther inside the net. He really was good at falling. It was a disaster, of course it was, but at least the boy hadn’t been hurt.
But he had been. They lowered the net. The first to get to him was Anton Ivanovich; he grabbed the carabiner: the link was loose. He cursed under his breath. Ivan was alive but unconscious. He had taken a hard knock. Was it his skull? His spine? He was laid on a board. The ambulance arrived seven minutes later. He was taken to the best place of its kind, the Burdenko Institute. Anton Ivanovich accompanied his son.
Butonov saw his master only two weeks later. He had heard that Ivan was alive but unable to move. The doctors were working their magic on him but could give no assurance they would get him back on his feet.
Anton Ivanovich had lost so much weight he looked like an Italian borzoi. A dark suspicion was haunting him: he could not imagine how Ivan could have noticed the loose carabiner only immediately before the leap. Privately he knew that an upset of that kind would not have put him off; he would just have kept his cool. Indeed, something very much the same had happened to him once, and he had taken the belt off, unfastened himself completely, and just gone ahead. But Ivan had panicked, lost his cool, gone to pieces. Something else that didn’t fit was why, immediately before he was due on, he had been ordered to move his car although it was perfectly well parked. Anton Ivanovich checked afterward himself: the wagon had had room to get through.
When Anton Ivanovich mentioned his misgivings to Butonov, he blurted out, “That workman from the estates office wasn’t the only person who paid Ivan a visit.”
Anton Ivanovich caught him by the sleeve. “Tell me about it.”
“While he was away moving his car, Dutov went into his dressing room. I saw from the corridor, he came out in a tartan shirt.”
By this time Valerii knew that Dutov himself was the safety inspector for the arena.
“Damnation! I’m a bright one. What a silly old fool I am,” Anton Ivanovich said, clutching at his sagging face. “So that’s what it was all about. That fits.”
Butonov visited Ivan in the hospital. He was encased in plaster from his chin to his sacrum and looked like a mummy. His hair had thinned, with two deep bald patches encroaching from his brow. He blinked to say hello and could hardly speak. Valerii, swearing to himself for having gone in, sat there for ten minutes or so on a white visitors’ stool trying to think of things to say. “Um, er,” was followed by silence. He had had no idea until then just how fragile a human being is, and he was profoundly shocked.
The autumn was dull and wet. The pear tree in Rastorguevo had lost its leaves and stood there black, looking as if it had been burnt, so Butonov wasn’t able to lie beneath it to see whether some new revelation might come to him.
There was half a year left before he would graduate from the circus college. The visit to Prague, of which he had had such high hopes, had gone down the tubes. The circus college too was in the process of going down the tubes. Butonov couldn’t stop picturing Ivan’s lackluster eyes. One minute there had been Ivan, Giovanni Muzzetoni, the famous circus performer, everything Butonov wanted to be: independent, rich, able to travel abroad, and driving around in the best car Butonov had ever seen. (He had got rid of the humpbacked red Volkswagen long ago, and now had a spanking new white Fiat.) And in a single instant it was all gone. Butonov had been wrong, there was no independence, it was all a sham. And now Ivan was going to be paralyzed until the day he died.