akonkka(at)mbnet.fi 

Anita Konkka

The Clown 

by Anita Konkka

An extract from the novel Halujen puutarha

translated form Finnish by A.G.Haun

It's been raining for a week. Nature seems to have decided on my behalf that I shall write my memoirs, because on a rainy day you can't do anything but write and drink wine. I remember that when I was a child, rainy days at the dacha were unpleasant, my brother had tantrums, Father complained, Grandmother clattered the dishes crossly in the kitchen, Mother cried and drew princesses, from underneath their hoop skirts a yellow trickle flowed, forming a puddle on the floor. The princesses stood stiffly like paper dolls, they had fans in their hands and golden curls. I had no talent for drawing and not for much of anything else either, but I was a great liar. I told stories which never happened, neither on the moon nor on earth, but I told them as though they were completely true and I believed them myself. I got thrashed for telling lies, even though without lies we couldn't manage in our country. My father told lies every day and was very successful. He became a Party member and a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Culture. But my grandmother, who considered lying a sin, landed in a concentration camp in Stalin's time. She managed to get out of there alive, thanks to her mean temper. It was she who taught that a person is already full of sin when he's born and that sin must be beaten out of a person, like dust out of a carpet. When she'd given me several sound beatings I stopped telling lies where she could hear them.

I just now went outside to see how it looks. The rain is sneaking slowly along the orange trees' leaves and the sky is dark gray, but there's hope of something better, because gaps have appeared in the cloud cover, where a yellowish light gleams through. The rain will stop by tomorrow, I'll manage till then, because I still have a couple of liters of wine and some bread. I drink wine and consider how I could begin my memoirs. In order to refresh my memory I've attached a picture to the book shelf. It was on the cover of Der Bild during my days of greatness. In the picture I'm looking toward the sky, appearing as though I'd committed some sin again and from up there a brick will soon fall on my head or Yahweh will thunder in an evil voice. There's a sad look in my eye, such as a dog has, when it's just been kicked by its unpredictable master. My face is pale and narrow, my lips are red, there are dark patches under my eyes, my nose is sharp, its pointed shadow falls on one cheek, the other cheek rests on my hand, I look worried, as though I were thinking of the world's natural resources which are being exhausted, the population explosion, the fate of the rain forest, or endangered animal species. Every morning the picture looks different. It's begun to live its own life. Sometimes there are more, sometimes fewer, wrinkles on my forehead, and one morning I could even see the trace of a smile in the corners of my mouth. On some mornings my face is really miserable, as though I were plagued by a severe toothache, and the shadow of my nose is also longer than usual. What can a person do about her nose, when Grandfather's name was Israel and Father's was Isak? They thought of making me into a Hannah, but they came to their senses in time.

In the picture I'm wearing blue work overalls, with an old, worn-out hat on my head. I remember those clothes well, because I was playing the part of a workman who's afraid of his boss, and that's why he does everything upside down. It was one of my best performances, because for it I had brought together my experiences from those 25 jobs that I'd had before my career as a clown started its international rise. The onlookers laughed until their sides ached, not only the children, but also the adults, when they saw that I committed all those blunders that they sometimes were afraid to commit at work. The onlookers also laughed a lot when I appeared as a woman. Perhaps that program number was so popular because in the arena I was my own self, Albertina Vinniyeva, but no one knew that I was a woman. They thought that I was a man playing the part of a woman. Probably that's why I was such a good clown; I didn't act, rather I was afraid of failure. The more afraid I was, the better I failed and the more the audience laughed. When I became world-famous, I stopped being afraid, but I lost myself and I was no longer a good jester, because I only acted out of fear and failure. I knew that my performances were poor. In spite of that, the theaters were full and everyone laughed at me because I was the famous Milopa and because in the newspapers it had been said that I was a good comic. People don't believe their own eyes and ears, they believe the newspapers, that's the reason it's so easy to swindle them.

I was amusing as long as I was honestly my own self. Fellini asked me to appear in one of his films, but he had to cut out my part, because I was boring and stiff like a wooden horse; the inferior quality showed up too clearly on the film. At that time my star was at its zenith, the critics praised me as being splendid and they didn't notice that my jesting wasn't genuine, they couldn't distinguish the good from the bad and they praised me when I had started to make an art of failure and my presentations were no longer based on real experiences.

My vanity grew in accordance with praise and I began to imagine that I'm the world's greatest artistic clown, some sort of Picasso of the world of clowns. I no longer listened to myself, rather I tried, in my desire to please, to satisfy the critics, who always just wanted something new. As a failure I succeeded, but as someone who succeeded, I was a failure. When I was no longer the familiar clown, every one of my performances was fresh and different, but as someone famous I was able only to imitate my former self, and the performances became so mechanical that I got tired of my own witticisms. Everything that I said and did seemed hollow and affected. Nowadays that's called burnout, superior people talk about burnout in English, but I say that spiritually I prostituted myself to the end. What I did was a spiritual whore-out. I did it both on and off the stage for various boards of directors and committees, which presented variety show arts and distributed grants in aid to magicians, trapeze artist, trick riders, lion and tiger tamers, and other people in the field who had demonstrated promising artistic ability. I had power, money, fame, and two competing circus directors as lovers. They loved my fame, not me as a woman, and there wasn't much in me as a woman that was lovable, since I didn't even have breasts.

I was on a German tour, in Berlin, when I was paralyzed completely just before an appearance. I lost my voice and couldn't move anything except for my eyes, I couldn't even lift a finger. A doctor came to the place, who gave me an injection of a tranquilizer, but it didn't release the paralysis. My body was wiser than I was. It refused to continue the pretense. I was carried to the ambulance like a chunk of wood and taken to the hospital, where I lay in a catatonic state for a month. After I was released from the hospital, I was on sick leave and after that on a temporary pension, as physically unable to work. I didn't return to the arena again. I became an untalented clown, I'd never learned any other profession properly.

2

Gallimard has asked me to write a memoir about my life as a clown, because there are many people who want to read about what it was like. I still don't know how I should begin to write, even though I've thought over the matter for another week. Maybe I should go into psychoanalysis. They say there's a good analyst on the island named Pere Calsina. I really don't know what good analysis is, since I speak Spanish so badly that I can scarcely bare my soul in the language. Could Pere Calsina explain in Italian or French why it was that even as a child I wanted to be a clown? What is there amusing about the fact that a circus clown's trousers are constantly falling down and a brick falls on his head and a weight on his toes and a

pole knocks his nose off? My brother wanted to become a streetcar driver instead, but his wish didn't come true, he became a lawyer.

I asked Mother to sew a clown suit for me and she sewed a Harlequin suit out of varicolored scraps of cloth and made a hat with bells on it. I appeared as a clown at a class costume party, but nobody laughed at me. When I tried to be amusing, I failed. But when I spoke seriously, people laughed. When I was a child I thought it was so confusing that I told lies in preference to saying what I thought.

When I was 15, I still thought that I wanted to be a female clown in the circus. Mother didn't oppose it, but suggested that I learn some proper profession, because a clown's career is very uncertain, the competition is keen, and circus directors are suspicious of female clowns, since they're men and as men do, they think that a woman can't become a great clown., because she has a smaller brain that a man has. Besides that, I might fall in love, which is usually followed by children. Children, for their part, were the most important reason for my mother's opinion that it was worth my while to educate myself to be, say, a librarian, because a migratory life would disrupt the children's attendance at school. She knew that from experience, because she was the daughter of a flame-swallower.

"I'll never fall in love and I'll never get married. I'm not that stupid."

"I thought exactly the same thing when I was your age," she said.

She was a former trapeze acrobat who had given up her career when she married my father, who had begun his career as a lion tamer, advanced to being a teacher at the Moscow circus school and rose to the Ministry of Culture as the republic's coordinator of vaudeville arts. After Mother had stopped dancing on the trapeze, her legs hurt all the time. First she got varicose veins, then the bones began to break by themselves, as though her legs couldn't endure life on the surface of the earth. Most of the time she lay in bed, hummed wistful songs, and told fortunes from tea dregs, but she didn't consent to tell what sort of future awaited me. She just looked at me sadly with her hand on her cheek and sighed deeply. What could she do about the fact that blood still pulled her to the circus herself too, even 15 years later? She really wasn't suited to normal life but pined away and died before her time.

After school I applied, and was admitted, to the Moscow circus school. Father knew the principal and arranged for me to get in.

"You can't go anywhere else. You don't know how to prepare food and you can't get married, no man will care about you anyway, since you're so ugly," he explained.

He was right, because before I became famous, only one bear tamer had cared about me. He was so drunk that anybody would have been good enough for him. I happened his way and he clasped me in his arms and pressed me against his hairy chest. He smelled of vodka, onions, and bear piss. It wasn't a bad smell, once you got used to it. I went to bed with him because I wanted to know what the delight of marriage was like, which women murmured about, and why they were so eager and had such great enthusiasm about getting married. But in my opinion it wasn't worth the bother. It felt stupid to lie in bed with my legs spread out while a man was groaning on top of me. Maybe it would have felt different if I'd loved him. The rubbing began to bore me. A copy of Pravda was on the table, I thought that I could read it at the same time, so that the time wouldn't be completely wasted. I stretched out to take the paper but I couldn't reach it. The bear tamer flew into a rage, he almost knocked my head off, grabbed me by the shoulders, pounded me against the bed and threatened: "I'll show you Pravda."

At the same time he let loose some liquid between my thighs, slumped down to lie on my stomach, wheezing so oddly that I thought he'd had a heart attack and was about to die, he was so fat. Fortunately he pulled through without dying. Afterward he asked whether he'd been good and wanted to kiss me on the mouth, but I didn't want that. I couldn't answer his question, because I had no experience that I could compare it to.

I was the only woman in the clown course and probably the worst student in the history of the school, but because of my father's position, I wasn't kicked out of the school. For my graduate thesis, I scarcely managed to throw together the required Marxist study about the class-line element in the art of clowning. The subject in and of itself didn't cause the problem, because clowning has always been an art of the lower classes and the oppressed, but I didn't care at all about seeking out suitable quotations on the subject in the works of Marx and Lenin and without them the thesis wouldn't have been accepted. Whenever I opened their collected works, I began to feel terribly drowsy. Already in school, hearing the name of either one brought about a yawning reflex and my ears automatically closed up. I yawned constantly in school and nothing of the teaching remained in my brain.

3

With Father's help I got through my thesis and graduated with my degree in the art of clowning, after which I was sent to the Murmansk area as a third-class circus clown. I had to represent a red-nosed, stupid, fat clown, which wasn't suitable to my style, because I was a small, thin, and sad Pierrot type. The director of the circus said that the people don't understand the elitist French comic art.

At that time I was a great idealist and believed that the public's taste could be developed, but the director was a realist and didn't let me represent my own self. When I performed as a fat clown, only the sympathetic young girls laughed at me out of pity, not wanting to offend me. What could I do about the fact that the people didn't think it was amusing when I dropped my trousers, banged my head, and stumbled over my own feet? I didn't find it amusing either.

After half a year the director said that I had no talent for the clowning profession and offered me a post as a ticket and candy seller at the circus, but I took offense, packed my things, and went back home. After that I had many jobs. I was an assistant in a mental hospital, an export chocolate quality controller in a candy factory, a guard for paintings in the Pushkin Museum, a janitor in an institution for the care of intoxicant abusers, a nursing assistant in a children's day care center, a ticket seller at the ballet, an assistant in the Lenin Library, a food server in Cafeteria Number 3, and a floor assistant at the Peking Hotel. I was skilled in languages. I knew English, German, and a little French, but got fired from the hotel because I didn't understand how to report on the guests and my workmates.

Through his connections Father got me a job as a rabbit keeper at the Moscow Grand Circus and then as an assistant in clown numbers. As his last good deed he organized a foreign tour for me. He fell ill with liver cancer and knew that he was dying. He wanted me to go abroad and stay there, even though he didn't say aloud that he wished me to defect, because he was a cautious man. I decided to do as he wished, because after his death I had no other close relatives in the Soviet Union except my brother, and as a lawyer, he knew how to worm himself out of difficulties which my defection might possibly cause for him.

I defected in Milan. I said to my roommate late one night that I was going out to buy cigarettes around the corner. In a bad temper, she crawled out of bed in order to accompany me, because we weren't allowed to go around town by ourselves. We had to report to the circus political instructor everything that our workmates did, except for going to the toilet. In addition, in personal conversations, we'd given assurances to the official who had given us our passports that we wouldn't indulge in conversations with foreigners and we'd be especially careful about representatives of the opposite sex. I said to my roommate, who was a magician's assistant, that she didn't need to trouble herself on my account, because I'd be back in a minute or two. When I left, she was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hair tousled, yawning with her mouth wide open, like a hippopotamus. My last image of her was her pink tonsils.

When I stood behind the corner of the hotel, waiting for a bus, and looked at the Cafe Dante's green flashing neon light, I had a powerful feeling that I'd stood in the same place and lived the same moment before. I was strangely calm as though I'd known that there was no reason for nervousness or fear. I can't explain what it derived from. Perhaps I was calm because I did only what was proper for me or I fulfilled my destiny, as they say. When the bus came, I rode to the train station and bought a ticket for Bologna,where some old acquaintance of my father lived. Clearly fate was on my side, because I got to Bologna without mishaps, no one paid any attention to me and the train wasn't even late, as they usually are in Italy.

I consider Italy the country of my spiritual birth because that's where I became the clown Milopa, after Milan, where I parted from my former homeland and my circus comrades. For the first time in my life, I was able to breathe freely and be my own self. The Italians liked my humor and received me well and for that, they got to see my best performances. I was understood in Spain and France too, whereas the Germans favor the red-nosed, drunk types of clowns. In Germany I noticed that people tell lies in the West, too. I was very surprised at that, because what reason do they have to lie? They don't get into difficulties if they speak the truth, as they do in my country.

I can't tell any more about lying than this, since my red wine has come to an end. Besides, the typewriter platen moves slowly, like a louse in tar, and the letters stick to each other. The batteries have run out, I have to go to the store to buy red wine and new batteries before I can start writing my memoirs in earnest.

� A. G. Haun, Anita Konkka