will be so pleased! It is actually tonight, at seven thirty p.m., at the Palace of Youth.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes!’
‘At the Palace of Youth?’
‘You know where it is? Just past the circus, and then the bus station, but before you get to the brick factory. It’s opposite Bookshop No. 3.’
‘No. 3? Where they sell stationery and records?’
‘That’s the one.’ Sveta took a breath. ‘You’re not busy, no?’
Gor looked at the cats, the piles of music, his lunch tray still lying beside his armchair.
‘No, I’m not busy. But I can’t promise to be good company.’
‘Your presence is company enough! We shall not burden you with conversation if it’s not welcome, dear Gor! Albina will be so pleased. She is not so confident in dance, and it will be nice for her to have the extra support!’
Gor nodded and said his goodbyes and, looking up in the hallway mirror, noticed the vague shadow of a smile playing across his face. The calendar on the wall behind him winked. The smile faded, his face became set, and he stalked off to the bedroom, avoiding gambolling kittens as best he could, to select a clean shirt for the evening.
He didn’t feel like driving, so took a trolleybus as far as the centre of town, and then walked.
Long strides brought him quickly from the central crossroads to the wide boulevard named after Mayakovsky, where milk-bars and furniture shops turned wide, hungry eyes on trudging shoppers and workers. He averted his gaze from the windows and the price tags. He hurried on, away from town, heading past the circus, which shone like paste jewellery half-way up the hill. Round, almost majestic, its curved concrete walls were bathed in jagged, multi-coloured reflections thrown by the glass of its windows. It looked like a space-age Colosseum with a giant Frisbee for a roof. Gor took in its curves and its permanence as he hurried on. He had heard that, years before, circuses had been travelling affairs, housed in huge tents borne by troupes of gypsies from town to town. They entertained the masses, taking stories and characters from place to place, fertilising minds and more with ideas and characters picked up and scattered across the continent from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk. For generations, travelling circuses had roamed like this, tossing ideas like seeds on the wind. But Stalin didn’t like it. The travelling circus meant danger. He ordered permanent circuses to take their place in all major towns, staffed by troupes trained in state circus schools. So circuses were tamed: tethered in one place, telling one, state story, and doing one show … the one that Stalin liked. They were cleansed of magic and mystery, and made safe for the masses. No more tents and ideas blowing in the wind; no more transience. The circus was castrated, to become a harmless eunuch, no danger to anyone.
Gor had no love of the circus. He could not abide a white-faced clown or a leering, drug-addled lion. It was all fake, all manufactured, with a predictability that bored him rigid.
He snorted as he passed the queue snaking out of the door. He shook his head and tutted, but despite himself, remembered a night more than twenty years before, when he’d been there, to this very building, and laughed. How he’d laughed. Not at the miserable animals and their antics, nor at the lackey clowns, but at his own daughter as she sat beside him, her face a delight as each act had unfolded. Such a young life: such a happy child. He had loved the circus that night, because she had loved it; little Olga. A smiling face in the queue caught his eye and he glowered, turning away sharply. He huddled his shoulders further into his coat, and quickened his steps. The circus was rot.
He came to a halt outside what he surmised was the Palace of Youth. It was not a place he had been before. Great columns rose from the crumbling wash of the pavement to hold a canopy of dark grey concrete above windows that shone with a fizzing orange glow on Azov’s youth. An abundance of small girls with buns and huge pom-poms flocked in and out of the lights in front of the building, their anxious mamas in tow, blocking the doorway and holding up the traffic as they alighted from buses and communal taxis. They were a myriad fluff-encrusted fledgling birds, shrieking and dashing, peppering words with pi-pi-pi noises as they came and went through the warped double-doors. Gor stood very still, towering above the faeries and their mothers, silent, grey, dark. He held his arms stiffly by his sides and every so often made a little hopping movement to one side or the other, attempting to avoid a collision. Still they flocked, an occasional mama looking up at him with startled concern as she steered her charge away from his shins and elbows. They seethed and rolled around him, a throng of girls in pink and white, chattering like sea-gulls. Gor’s brow began to sweat.
‘Gor! Coo-eee! There you are!’ Sveta came breaking through the crowd like a steam tug, dragging an unwilling and extraordinarily gangly Albina in her wake. The girl bumped off every available surface, tangling limbs with her ballet-dancing colleagues, the tiny speckled waifs crumpling to the floor as Albina bobbed past in her grubby moon-boots, walrus grey. Her hair was piled into an elaborate bun, much like a nest. Gor smiled to the ladies and held out his hands in greeting. They drew together in the sea of fluff.
‘Good evening, Sveta. Good evening, Albina. I am glad to see you! But whatever is the matter?’
‘I don’t want to do it! Don’t make me! Please!’
Together they ploughed through the dancers, heading for the clogged doors. They pushed their way through with elbows held high and struck out for the cloakroom.
‘But I’ve come specially to see you, Albina,’ said Gor with some concern, as they took off their coats and handed them to the stout woman behind the counter. ‘I am sure you will be … spectacular.’ His goatee twitched as he attempted a kindly smile.
‘But I hate it, and I don’t feel well.’ She gripped her stomach under her bright blue jumper.
‘Now, now, petuchka, we’ve had all this at home. Gor has come here specially to see you dance, so don’t disappoint him. No one is going to laugh at you. I promise!’
‘But I can’t even see properly! My hair is in my eyes!’ said the girl, screwing up her face to squint around her.
‘Look, Albin-chik, there is your teacher, waving – see?’
The girl pretended she was unable to see and crashed heavily into yet another dancing nymph.
‘Now Albina, that is enough! Go over to Madam immediately, or I shall get cross. She needs you in the dressing room.’ Sveta’s brows were drawn into a tight furrow, and her eyes bulged. She was wearing blue eye-shadow and large amounts of mascara, Gor noticed with concern.
‘I hate you,’ Albina hissed.
Sveta blinked, sniffed, smiled brightly, and pushed the girl sharply between the shoulder-blades in the direction of her dance mistress.
‘She’s so glad you’ve come, Gor. And so am I. It is difficult, when we have no man around the house.’ She smiled up at him, eyes wide, and wiped imaginary lipstick marks from the corners of her raspberry red mouth. ‘Shall we take our seats? We’re in the balcony. I can’t wait!’
Gor stared after her receding form as she made her way up the glistening concrete steps. He frowned. He was not sure he should have come at all.
Row B2 was very full. The short battle to claim their seats combined with the damp heat of the auditorium brought a glow to Sveta’s cheeks and nose. Once roosted in her rightful
