Riding the Iron Rooster

The simplest explanation of the circus's popularity is that most people like a spectacle—music, tumbling, noise, sex, patriotism and cheap thrills. They enjoy watching white dwarfs riding elephants or one of the more popular acts that Ringling Brothers presents: twenty-five black people playing basketball on unicycles. There is another side to this. "The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery," Elias Canetti wrote in the chapter entitled "Transformation" in Crowds and Power. "It is as difficult to overestimate its strength as that of its opposite desire: to turn animals into men ... popular amusements like the public exhibition of performing animals."

The spectacle of the Moscow Circus supported the truth of that statement. Nothing was more revealing of Soviet thought than a Russian lion tamer, and the process that lay behind that big brown bear's clumsy jig or the lobster quadrille said a great deal about the political system.

I also thought: What a stupid man I am to be sitting alone at a circus in Moscow. I could not imagine why I wasn't doing something vastly more enjoyable, like sailing off East Sandwich, Massachusetts. And then I remembered that I was on my way to Mongolia and China.

There was a message waiting for me when I got back to the Hotel Ukraine: Olga will call tomorrow at 12. She called on the stroke of noon the next day to say she would call again at two. At two she said she and Natasha would meet me at three-thirty. These phone calls had the effect of making our meeting seem necessary and inevitable. It was only when I was waiting on the hotel steps that it occurred to me that I had no idea why I was seeing them at all.

Natasha walked by but did not greet me. She was wearing old clothes and carrying a shopping basket. She winked at me; I followed her to a taxi in which Olga was already sitting and smoking. When I got in, Olga gave the driver an order and he drove off. After that they intermittently quarreled over whether this was the right direction or the quickest way.

After twenty minutes of this—we were now deep in the high-rise Moscow suburbs—I said, "Where are we going?"

"Not far."

There were people raking leaves and picking up trash from the streets. I had never seen so many street sweepers. I asked what was going on.

Olga said that this was the one day in the year when people worked for nothing, tidying up the city. The day was called subodnik and this work was given free to honor Lenin—his birthday was two days away.

"Don't you think you should be out there with a shovel, Olga?"

"I am too busy," she said, and her laugh said: Not on your life!

"Are we going to a house?"

"We are going to my girfriend's apartment."

Olga gave more directions to the driver. He turned right, entered a side street and then cut down a dirt road and cursed. That bad road connected one housing estate with another. He kept driving on these back roads among tall, bare apartment houses and then he stopped the car and babbled angrily.

"We can walk the rest of the way," Olga said. "You can pay him."

The driver snatched my rubles and drove off as we walked towards a sixteen-story building, through children playing and their parents sweeping the pavements in a good subodnik spirit.

No one took any notice of me. I was merely a man in a raincoat following two women down a muddy sidewalk, past walls that had been scribbled on, past broken windows and through a smashed door to a hallway where three baby carriages were parked and some of the floor tiles were missing. It could have been a housing estate in south London or the Bronx. The elevator had been vandalized but it still worked. It was varnished wood, with initials scratched onto it. We took it to the top floor.

"Excuse me," Olga said. "I couldn't get my friend on the phone. I must talk to her first."

But by now I had imagined that we had come to a place where I was going to be threatened and probably robbed. There were three huge Muscovites behind the door. They would seize me and empty my pockets, and then blindfold me and drop me somewhere in Moscow. They didn't go in for kidnapping. I asked myself whether I was worried, and answered: Kind of.

I was somewhat reassured when I saw a surprised and sluttish-looking woman answer the door. Her hair was tangled, she wore a bathrobe. It was late afternoon—she had just woken up. She whispered a little to Olga and then she let us in.

Her name was Tatyana and she was annoyed at having been disturbed—she had been watching television in bed. I asked to use the toilet and made a quick assessment of the apartment. It was large—four big rooms and a central hall with bookshelves. All the curtains were drawn. It smelled of vegetables and hair spray and that unmistakable odor that permeates places in which there are late-sleepers—the smell of bedclothes and bodies and feety aromas.

"You want tea?"