The Ringmaster's Daughter Part 18

Carsten loved Kristine, and from the moment he met her he never wanted anyone else. But where destiny blunders, no human prudence will avail: Carsten had always had a nasty birthmark on his neck, and when this suddenly began to bleed, Kristine insisted he went to a doctor and got it seen to. The local doctor removed the birthmark and sent it for routine a.n.a.lysis to the hospital at Arhus, but unfortunately the result of the tissue biopsy was never sent back to Carsten's doctor. When weeks and months pa.s.sed without any word from the doctor or the hospital, neither Carsten nor Kristine gave the birthmark another thought. The next spring, however, Carsten fell ill; he was diagnosed with a cancer that was spreading, and this was immediately linked to a tissue biopsy that had been sent to the hospital several months earlier.

Much later, the hospital admitted that the sample from Carsten had been received and a.n.a.lysed and also positively diagnosed as a malignant melanoma, but the mystery about why Carsten's doctor hadn't been informed still remained. The official responsibility lay with the consultant, Morten Kjaergaard, but apparently he hadn't had anything to do with the a.n.a.lysis itself, so it seemed likely that one of the pathology lab technicians had been careless. The local newspaper carried a short piece about 'the consultant who hadn't been told' and who therefore 'was robbed of the chance to save his own cousin'. But it was soon forgotten.

Carsten only lived a few weeks after he became ill. He spent most of the time at home, and Kristine and her parents nursed him as best they could, both physically and spiritually. In addition, a nurse - who was soon visiting daily - provided as much help and support as they needed. Her name was Lotte. When Lotte learnt just where the unsightly birthmark had been, she looked at Carsten's date of birth again. This was just a few days before he died, but from that moment on she sat continuously by his bedside tenderly holding his hand until it was all over. Carsten's last words when he opened his eyes and saw Lotte and Kristinefor the very last time, was: 'We'll say no more about it now!'

I sat cradling Beate in my arms and spent more than an hour over the story of Carsten. She didn't say a word, I could hardly hear her breathing. It was only when I'd finished that she looked up at me and said that the story was wonderful, but also terrible as well. She said it was both wonderful and terrible at the same time. She was a grateful listener. As I'd got a fully fledged synopsis to work from, it wasn't too difficult to fill in the story, especially when I was with Beate amongst the ruins of an old paper mill, constantly being charged by the power and drama of a huge thunderstorm.

Again she said that it was sure to be a brilliant book and that she was certain it would come out in Germany too. She said she was looking forward to reading it.

The thunder and lightning continued, and the rain fell just as heavily as before, but the story I'd told gave so much food for thought that I could hardly begin a new one.

Besides, it would have been stretching credulity a bit to be working on two novels at once.

We sat talking over certain details and aspects of the plot. I gave Beate the impression that she was offering me valuable advice and, had I really wanted to write that novel, I'd certainly have found the points she raised useful.

She nestled closer to me, put one of her hands in mine and kissed my throat a couple of times. It might have been me who began kissing more pa.s.sionately, but she reciprocated.

'Are we being naughty, now?' she whispered, and then she undressed. In the blue, stormy light she reminded me of a nude by Magritte. We laid down gently on the stone floor.

We had no choice. We were defenceless against the elements. It would have been an expression of moral degeneracy not to have made love in that thunder, in that storm. It would have been like not hearing nature's voice, not bowing to nature's will.

We lay in a close embrace until the thunder died down.

The scent of plums and cherries was about her, and no words were needed. Only when it had stopped raining did she half sit up and say: 'Let's take a shower!' It was a rather paradoxical thing to say just as the shower had stopped and all the water had been used up. But she rose and pulled me after her. We ran naked to the path, it wasn't cold. Beate led me in the direction of the waterfall and reminded me of my promise. A few moments later we were standing under the waterfall singing. Beate had begun it. She sang 'Tosca's Prayer', which I thought was a strange choice, so I answered with the much more apposite 'Tower aria'. But she went on with 'Tosca's Prayer': Perche, perche, Signore? I appreciated her familiarity with operatic literature. It didn't surprise me, but I appreciated it. I don't know why I suddenly began singing an old nursery rhyme, perhaps it was because I felt so happy. It hadn't entered my mind since I was a boy, but the words went: Little Petter Spider, he climbed on to my hat. Then down came the rain and Petter fell off splat. Then out came the sun and shone upon my hat. And woke up Petter Spider who climbed on to my hat.

We ran back to the ruins and got dressed. And by the time we were back on the path, the sun was s.h.i.+ning. We felt no shame. The only thing that was a bit embarra.s.sing was that I'd sung the old rhyme about Little Petter Spider. Luckily, she didn't enquire about what I'd been singing, and perhaps she hadn't been listening properly, but I rued my thought- lessness. Once again I was back on the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna.

We crossed the river and began to climb a steep hillside where Beate's trainers really came into their own. An hour later we'd arrived at a viewpoint called Lucibello. From here we looked down on Amalfi and far across the Sorrento Peninsula. Beate stooped and picked a large bunch of birdsfoot-trefoil, which she offered to me. 'There you are,'

she said, 'some Easter flowers.' I told her that another name for these yellow pea flowers was babies' slippers, and I showed her why.

We began to descend towards Pogerola. I had the babies'

slippers in one hand and Beate in the other. At one point Beate said that we could get married and have children. She didn't mean it, but it was sweet of her to say it all the same.

She intended it no more literally than when she'd spoken about bathing together in the waterfall the previous day. I replied by telling her that I'd been thinking about inviting her to go to the Pacific with me. Beate just looked at me and laughed. But now I'd broached the subject.

At Pogerola we went to a bar and ordered a sandwich and a bottle of white wine. We sat outside enjoying the view, we had coffee, limoncello and brandy. I got a gla.s.s of water for the babies' slippers.

As we began to walk down the broad stone steps towards Amalfi, she said: 'You write novels, but didn't you also say you work for a publis.h.i.+ng company? Isn't that a difficult combination?'

She wasn't chatting now. She wanted to know who I was.

I decided to tell her just enough for her to be able to recognise me as The Spider if she'd ever heard of the phenomenon. I said I helped other authors to write. I mentioned that I sometimes gave them ideas for things to write about, I might even supply them with notes that they could build on. 'I've always had more imagination than I could use myself,' I said, 'it's a cheap commodity.' I said that. I said imagination was a cheap commodity.

Beate's reaction was obvious - she responded with silence and introspection. There could have been several reasons for this. She could finally have identified me as The Spider, or she might indeed be part of the conspiracy. At least it could be a.s.sumed she'd read the little article in the Corriere della Sera - she'd said herself it was important to read this particular newspaper to keep reasonably abreast of things - and she'd made special reference to its cultural section. But her reaction wasn't necessarily linked to anything she'd heard about a 'spider'. She'd had enough to react to anyway - I'd described a pretty bizarre occupation.

I talked a bit more about fantasy and helping authors.

Occasionally she'd shake her head, as if she were becoming more and more pensive. I made a radical decision. I said I wanted her to read something I'd spent the past few days writing at the hotel. I said I could translate it into German for her. I didn't want to keep any secrets from Beate, there had to be an end to all this pretence. I thought again about the two of us travelling and settling down on a different continent. Perhaps we were both running away from something - she'd already moved to southern Italy for the summer. I'd decided to try to live the rest of my life as a decent human being. I'd only got one life, and now I wanted to live out the remainder of that existence.

It was six o'clock. My legs were a bit weary after all the wine and walking, and we decided to sit out on a bluff and watch the sunset. Beate said little, but soon I launched out into a lengthy fairy tale. I didn't often look at her during the course of the story and maybe this was because it took shape as I spoke. I can't remember all the details, but these were the outlines of the story:

Once long ago, in the town of Ulm on the River Donau, there was a large circus. The ringmaster was a handsome man who soon became inordinately fond of the beautiful trapeze artiste, Terry. He proposed to her, and a year later she bore him a daughter, who was christened Panina Manina. The little family lived happily together in a pink caravan, but the idyll was to be short lived, for just a year after her daughter was born, Terry fell from the trapeze and was killed instantly. The ringmaster mourned his wife ever afterwards, but at the same time became more attached to his daughter as she grew up. He was glad, naturally, that Terry had managed to bear him a child before she was suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed away. He had been bequeathed a living image of his wife for, as the days and the weeks pa.s.sed, his daughter gradually grew more and more like her mother.

From the age of eighteen months she would occupy one of the best seats at the circus and watch the performance intently. During the intervals she would sometimes get a lick of candy-floss from one of the clowns, and before she was three she could find her way to and from her seat without help or a.s.sistance. Soon both audiences and artistes began to regard her as the circus mascot, and it wasn't unknown for people who'd already been to the circus to come back again just to see Panina Manina, because she was a completely new experience every night - you could never predict what she'd get up to. And so the audience always got two performances for the price of one: they watched the evening's show, but they also sat watching Panina Manina.

It wasn't unusual for the little girl to clamber over the wall of the ring and take part in the performance itself. She was allowed to do this because the ringmaster felt so sorry for his poor little daughter, who'd lost her mummy, that he wished her all the happiness she could find. These special contributions were always totally spontan- eous. Suddenly the roly-poly little child would get caught up in one of the clowns' routines, or she might run into the ring between acts and do her own little piece, perhaps with a ball she'd borrowed from the sea-lion, a couple of bowling pins she'd wheedled from the jugglers, a hula-hoop, a small trampoline or a spoof water-pistol she'd found in the props store. Panina Manina always got a great round of applause for these ad lib performances and, as time pa.s.sed, the feeling of excitement before a show had more to do with what the ringmaster's daughter might get up to, than with the long list of acts in the circus programme.

Only the Russian clown, Piotr Ilyich, was unhappy with the state of things. He disliked Panina Manina breaking into his routines, and it annoyed him that she almost always got the loudest applause. He made up his mind to put an end to this nonsense, and one day in the interval he had her abducted. As usual Panina Manina had approached the clown as he stood selling candy-floss outside the big top, but this time he had an accomplice in the shape of a Russian woman who was visiting the town. Her name was Marjuska, and she'd been paid by Piotr Ilyich to take Panina Manina back to Russia with her. And so it came about that the unfortunate girl grew up on a poor farm near a small village deep in the Russian tundra. The woman was never nasty to Panina Manina because she'd always yearned for a daughter, but the girl missed both her daddy and the circus so much that she cried herself to sleep every night for a year. Until one night she forgot why she was crying. But still she went on crying, for Panina Manina was still just as sad, the only difference now was that she didn't know why.

She no longer had the faintest memory of the circus she'd come from, forgotten was the smell of sawdust, and forgotten, too, the notion that she had a father in afar distant country.

Panina Manina grew up to be more and more beautiful until at last she was the loveliest woman east of the Urals. This was at the time Stalin ruled Russia, but her foster-mother was a trusted member of the Communist Party and one day Panina Manina moved to Moscow where for a couple of years she earned her living as a model for some of the Soviet state's greatest artists. Coincidence - and life's coincidences is what this story's all about - coincidence dictated that one summer's day she arrived in Munich, not far from Ulm. Now, her father's circus had come to Munich, and as Panina Manina went about taking in the Bavarian capital, it happened that she caught sight of the big top. She walked towards it, indeed it was almost as if something drew her towards it, but still she couldn't remember that she'd once been a true circus girl herself, for the tent was now in a different town. But deep down inside her there must have been something that recalled the ring with all its clowns and processions, the wild rides and the trained sea-lions. A large crowd had gathered outside the tent as it wasn't long to the start of the evening performance. Panina Manina went to the ticket window and bought the best seat she could get, for she'd travelled far, and in those days it was a great treat for a Russian girl to watch a modern circus in Munich. In the covered way leading to the big top she bought a stick of candy-floss, and though it was a bit odd for an elegant woman to be seen sitting in the front row licking a stick of pink candy-floss, Panina Manina had been determined to try the sweet confection - it wasn't exactly everyday fare where she came from. The performance began: first the great procession with all the animals in the ring, followed by the most daring of trapeze acts, then clowns and jugglers, bareback riders and trained elephants.

Suddenly, during a short break between two acts something extraordinary happens. All at once, Panina Manina loses control of herself, climbs over the barrier and runs out into the circus ring with candy-floss in one hand and a wide-brimmed woman's hat in the other. She begins to dance and jump about, but she isn't dancing as you'd expect a grown woman to dance. Panina Manina gallops uncontrollably around the ring the way a small child might run about a large floor. At first the audience breaks out into peals of laughter, thinking that this is the start of another funny act, but when the good citizens of Munich - who are renowned for their prudishness - realise that the woman with the hat and candy-floss is just mad or drunk or perhaps even high, they begin to hiss. For a few seconds more Panina Manina is in ecstasy, then she catches sight of an imposing man standing before the large orchestra holding a riding whip. It's the ringmaster. Panina Manina sinks down into the sawdust, she begins to sob and then to weep miserably, because now she's beginning to understand what a fool she's made of herself.

In that same instant the ringmaster realises that the hysterical woman is his daughter. He strides across the ring towards her, she looks up at him, and now Panina Manina also remembers that she's the ringmaster's daughter, for blood is thicker than water. The ringmaster decides to cancel the rest of the performance. He looks up at the conductor and tells the orchestra to play the melody 'Smile' from the Chaplin film Modern Times. And so he sends the audience home. He thinks he's probably finished as a ringmaster because Munich's populace seldom overlooks a faux pas, but the ringmaster is happy all the same. He has found his own dear daughter once again, the greatest of all circus tricks, and now he will spend the rest of his life with her.

Beate hadn't uttered a word while I'd been speaking. She seemed all but paralysed, and when I'd finished and looked in her direction, she appeared dejected. I tried to cheer her up by saying that the story had a happy ending, but she remained glum. Before I'd begun to narrate she'd been holding my hand, but soon after she'd dropped it. I was surprised that a fairy tale could have such an affect on her.

She was taciturn and sat there almost tight-lipped.

Eventually she asked me how old I was. I said I was forty- eight. 'Exactly forty-eight?' she asked, and her tone was frigid. I couldn't see why the extra months made much difference, but perhaps she was keen on astrology. I said I was a Leo and had turned forty-eight at the end of July.

We began walking down towards the town. She wore a resigned, almost injured, look. 'Perhaps you'd hoped I was a little younger?' I asked. She just snorted and shook her head.

She said she was twenty-nine, and I realised she was exactly the same age as Maria had been in the summer of'71. Time had stood still, I thought, and now Maria had returned. It was Easter Sunday, and Maria had risen from the dead. It was an alluring thought.

Beate's mood had changed totally. She didn't need to be part of any conspiracy to have heard of The Spider, I reasoned. She had one foot in the book industry herself, and down in the valley she'd confided to me that she'd begun to write, and it might well be that what she'd heard of The Spider wasn't particularly flattering. For all I knew she might be the daughter of one of the authors I'd helped. I recol- lected that at least one of them lived in Munich, a man in his mid-fifties whose family I knew nothing about.

It was a tense and difficult situation, but I felt sure we could get over whatever was troubling her if only I could discover what it was. I'd managed to surmount unpleasant situations before. Beate had told me that her mother had died suddenly only a few months earlier and that she'd been very attached to her. It was hardly surprising that she suffered from mood swings. I'd once lost a mother myself.

We walked past a farm where a couple of dogs snarled, and some fussing geese waddled about a dirty coop. Just before we took the last steps down to the main road, Beate stopped and looked up at me. 'You shouldn't have told me that story!' she exclaimed. Then she burst into tears. I tried to comfort her but she just pushed me away.

'Was it really that sad?' I asked.

'You shouldn't have told me that story,' she repeated. 'It was stupid, terribly stupid!'

She looked at me, lowered her gaze, then peered up at me once more. It was as if I was a ghost. She was frightened and I was the one who'd unsettled her.

I was completely at a loss. I enjoyed being with women I couldn't fathom, but this was no fun at all. I must have touched a raw nerve. Perhaps she'd identified with the ringmaster's daughter - after all, I knew nothing about Beate's past. It wasn't often a story had such a powerful effect, but it had been a long day, a day of many strong impressions.

Suddenly she looked up at me again and there was fire in her eyes as she said: 'We must forget we ever met. We can't tell anyone about this, ever!'

I didn't understand this violent attack. I'd had previous experience of s.e.xual escapades being superseded by a kind of contrition - it was something I'd discovered to be a peculiarly feminine characteristic - but this was quite different. Beate wasn't the sort to take being lulled by a thunderstorm to heart. And if she had felt remorse, she'd surely have kept it to herself, or at least not pushed the blame on to me. It wasn't Mary Ann MacKenzie I'd met in Amalfi.

'We must forget everything, don't you see?' she repeated tearfully, then continued: 'We must promise never to meet again!'

When I didn't respond, she said: 'Don't you understand anything? Don't you see that you're a monster?'

Her anxiety was infectious. Perhaps I was an ogre - the thought had struck me. There had been the vague notion that all my synopses and family narratives were perhaps nothing more than my own macabre tango with a terrified soul.

There was something I couldn't recall, something big and painful that I'd forgotten ...

She'd stopped crying. Beate was brave, she wasn't a person who wept for show. Now only hardness and coldness remained. I didn't recognise her, I had no idea what sort of cross she had to bear, and now her armour was impenetrable.

'I'm scared, I'm scared for us both,' she said.

Perhaps it was a clue. Perhaps she knew about the plans to kill me, she just hadn't realised that I was The Spider, not until now, not until I'd revealed how I helped authors. It hadn't sunk in properly until I'd told the long tale of the ringmaster's daughter, and still she hadn't been quite certain until I'd divulged my age. She had looked into The Spider's eyes and they weren't just one pair of eyes, but many.

They'd frightened her. She'd known The Spider was a monster, but she had allowed the monster to seduce her before she'd managed to identify him. She knew about the plans to kill me, and now she was scared for us both.