So much for the wonders of childhood. Now for the setting of this particular circus, Shanghai in those last days before the war.
Enormous wealth, enormous poverty. Thousands of entrepreneurs and tens of thousands of slaves. The opium rights to a province lost at a game of cards. Women given fortunes in exchange for an evening of pleasure, or thrown into the baggage train of a warlord as a different kind of payment. Peasant boys reigning as queens one day and tortured to death the next. Hundreds of people slaughtered because a Chinese or Japanese general wakes up in the morning with painful hemorrhoids.
In food the favored delicacy is shrimp fed on human flesh. In alcohol and drugs the preferred mixture is laudanum, which combines the two.
These are the simple facts and figures of Shanghai, a city crowded with White Russians and exiles and adventurers of every kind, the halfway point on the east coast of Asia, a terminal for victims of all breeds and races.
Facts and figures. Are they enough, or is it possible that Shanghai was more than this? Not just a city but a state of mind, or to be more precise, an actual part of the mind? A vision we all carry somewhere within us?
It is here that my father finds himself with his circus one winter late in the 1930s. He is the circus master and my mother, in order to be near him, has taught herself to be an aerialist. A group of wealthy degenerates approaches him for a special performance, a private showing, acts to match the times and mock them. He listens to them and agrees, implying a performance unlike any ever staged. He moves his circus to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city and goes to work alone rigging the high wires, preparing the props and costumes himself.
The night of the circus comes. It is to begin exactly at midnight. The spectators arrive in evening dress and take their places while the band plays ruffles and flourishes. It is cold in the gloomy warehouse, but the excitement is too great for anyone to bother with that.
Trumpets. A drooping clown holds a sign for silence.
The drum rolls. A juggler spins a shadowy web of balls in the air.
Now we see him stepping into the ring dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying a whip and megaphone, the shaman and arbiter of marvels. He raises the megaphone and we hear the acts he will present.
The one-eyed tomb of Semarang.
The sure-footed vine of Mindanao.
The prancing Brunei horse.
The untamed leopard of Irrawaddy.
The Malacca cane.
The one and only Johore jerkin in captivity.
The spectators refuse to acknowledge this list of preposterous acts. Some are stupefied, others angry, a few fearful. They have brought bags of shrimp with them to eat during the performance, and now they begin noisily cracking the tails of the shrimp, peeling them, stuffing the rich meat into their mouths. There is hissing and shouting, stamping, catcalls.
The snare drum rolls again, the juggler plays out his shadowy game. My father continues announcing acts that have never been acted, animals that have never lived. It’s nonsense, of course, yet all of it is serious as well as meaningless.
At last he lowers the megaphone. He walks across the sawdust to the side of the ring looking up at my mother who is poised on the highbar, waiting for her trapeze act, a hundred feet above the ground.
Does she understand at the moment what he is doing? What is about to happen?
Perhaps. But it is too late for her or anyone to stop a performance that began long ago. Long ago, yes, and now it is here.
Tuneless, masterless
Come the acts of memory,
A Shanghai circus.
Kikuchi-Lotmann untied his necktie. He took a black one from his pocket and knotted it in place.
Poetry is a sauce, he said, and like all good sauces it should be both sweet and sour. The performance he had prepared that night, you see, was for a very small audience. The wealthy patrons in the stands, the animals and acts and clowns, the band and the jugglers were all props for a private performance he was about to stage for one person and one person alone, the woman on the highbar. To each of us love is a different mixture. To him it meant a ring and a bed.
But before I complicate the tale, let me say that it is really very simple. A man is enamored with the dash and excitement of the circus. He gives his life to it and discovers too late that the love of one woman is more important. Now wasting one’s life is commonplace. This man’s madness came because he had knowingly refused the gift.
The ring? The circus ring of course, the circle where a confident dissembler struts in his clever costumes sowing shouts and laughter, thinking he will trick life with his acts and disguises by tricking the fools who have come to watch him, which indeed he will one evening after another since spectators are there for that very purpose. The spectators applaud vigorously but after every performance the hall is emptied, and thus at the end of every clever evening the circus master must remember and remove the disguises he has squandered before the trumpets. He is naked then, trapped in the tight silence of the ring that has become his cage, alone with the squeezed tubes of paint and the hollow, worn costumes, standing alone on sawdust strewn with dead footprints that are mere acts of memory. Others come to see and marvel, they leave, and when they are gone he no longer exists.
And the bed? The bed of my mother, all her beds in one. The bed where she was born and slept as a child, a girl, a young woman. Where she took her first lover and her first ten and twenty lovers and many more even after she married because her husband would not receive her love. Because he thought the circus was too important to him. Because he gave his life to become a ring master in the clamor and triumph of a sawdust circle.
Probably he even encouraged her in those transitory affairs in order to be more at ease with himself, in order to think she wasn’t lonely, in order to hide from himself the fact that ultimately he could neither accept her love nor return it. Surely they both must have been involved in those acts of life that became decisive through repetition, even though the two of them might never have openly admitted they were making decisions.
And so it went year after year. An ambitious costumed man cleverly performing in the ring. A lonely woman in a bed exchanging love for hope with one passerby after another, exchanging love for flowers, for dinner, for an evening with someone, anyone, so that at least for an evening time could pass finger by finger instead of minute by minute.
The circus had always been his passion. When did its magic begin to slip away? When did he begin to have doubts about the trumpets that sounded when he stepped into the ring night after night? When did he begin to loathe the costumes and disguises? To detest the audiences who cheered only when he followed one act quickly with another? Who hissed when he faltered, hissed when he stumbled, demanded more and more, and then left the moment the performance ended?
There is no way to know. It happened. The ring became a cage. He had to reinforce himself with heavier and heavier doses of alcohol before he could bring himself to put on his costumes, to fix a smile to his face, to step forward and pretend he was still pleased with himself, still in command of the animals, still trying to amuse the spectators, still striving for the applause that was now utterly meaningless to him. He was given to darker and darker moods. He became morose, even violent.
His wife tried to help him but she couldn’t. Her kindness infuriated him because it reminded him of what he had lost in life, what he had thrown away. Despite her efforts the only time he could be intimate with her was after he had been drinking for hours. When he thought he could forget.