Ada’s infatuation wasn’t reciprocated. The girls showed no interest in her; in fact they hardly said hello. Ada was aware there must be a hierarchy—it was one thing to risk your life flying on a trapeze or working with tigers—and clearly dancing with snakes didn’t impress anybody. But it wasn’t just that. The circus people had greeted her without enthusiasm. Nobody was hostile, not the clowns, not the magician, not the elephant trainer or the horse riders. But she was invisible to most of them, because in Romany culture she was a gadji, an outsider.
“It’ll take a little time. At the beginning I also had to win their trust, because I’m Hungarian,” Andor reassured her. “Although they’ve lived in Hungary for five centuries they still think of themselves as Romany. And they like to keep to themselves.”
* * *
It was nearly October. One could feel the fall in the change of light: the sky had taken on a hue of darker blue, and the early-morning sun projected starker shadows on the ground. There were a few more dates farther west for the circus to perform before it closed down for the winter. The towns they toured seemed desolate, the streets badly lit at night, weather-stained buildings covered in graffiti, cracked pavement, an air of abandonment and despair. The audiences were beginning to thin out as the days got shorter. By then Ada had taken full charge of the snakes. She cleaned their boxes every day, fed them live chicks when it was possible to find them or else bought small frozen rodents in the pet shops of the larger towns and watched them being swallowed. Nothing deterred her.
* * *
It didn’t take very long for Ada to move from the sofa to Andor’s bed. She did it without thinking, almost out of courtesy at first, or because at times she felt lonely, but soon it became natural and she never looked back.
Among the pictures stacked on the wall she studied a few that looked as though they were taken ten or twenty years earlier, now bleached by sunlight and curled at the corners. Apparently, Andor had been a trapeze artist himself before he switched to snakes. There he was, an attractive, bare-chested young man in sparkly leggings with a cascade of dark hair reaching his shoulders, showing off his abs. Ada could, with a slight effort, still recognize faint traces of that younger body showing beneath the shape of his calves, his biceps, his muscular thighs. But there were differences too: he had a belly now and his skin was sagging in funny places. Whenever they had sex Ada tried not to notice too much how he had aged compared to the photos. Sometimes she just closed her eyes and in his place she pictured the trapeze artist he once was. Because his lovemaking was kind and never selfish, she found a release that calmed her down and afterward she slept soundly next to him. This was the very first time she felt looked after. Sex seemed a way of giving something in return.
* * *
It was her birthday, she had been on the road for almost three months already and she felt the urge to hear a familiar voice.
Ada wanted to talk to Teresa, but she didn’t have her phone number now that her sister was married and living somewhere else with her husband. She called her parents from a public phone in Nola, a smaller town not far from Naples. Her mother answered. Ada could hear the television in the background and she immediately conjured up the kitchen, its smell of garlic and stale breath. She asked for her sister’s number.
“What do you need it for?” the mother asked with spite. “She’s not going to want to talk to you anyway. You have disgraced us all.”
“What now? What have I done?”
“You and that man. The whole town has seen you.”
Apparently, a small local TV channel had broadcast a short clip of the Weisser Circus. Everyone had recognized her, belly dancing half naked with snakes coiling around her, like a witch, her mother said, a pervert, a slut.
Ada hung up.
* * *
Each night Andor slid into his bed with a thumping heart.
He had known from the very first day that eventually she’d gain trust and would come to him. He just had to make sure she’d feel safe and comfortable every step of the way. It was a long process, and each day she got imperceptibly closer, but he knew the drill: he had tamed creatures far more suspicious or recalcitrant. Despite this certainty, when she’d opened up at last, he still couldn’t believe he had won her over. That he could so easily hold her, enter her, that she’d allow him to kiss every part of her body as if it now belonged to him. Sometimes he would’ve liked to rest his head on her breast, release the knot in his throat—maybe even cry a little—and tell her how much he loved her.
In the mornings, as soon as she woke up, Ada invariably put on the same mask and showed the same detached indifference as the girl he had met under the fig tree. Andor knew it wasn’t her fault and she couldn’t help it; he could sense there was loss inside her. It was a cold, hollow space nobody had ever attended to. Unloved children grew into emotional illiterates, he well knew that, and to a degree it was that emptiness that had attracted him in the first place. He had the power to replenish it, if only she’d allow him. With time, with patience, he kept repeating to himself.
Since he had brought Ada to the circus, he too had been mildly ostracized. He was no longer invited to visit the others at night, to drink or play cards in their caravan. Not that he cared. He was more well-read than most of them and had a degree in languages, and by now he had spent so many years in their company that he felt ready for a drastic change. But he did worry about Ada. He had promised her she’d find a family within the circus, but instead now he too had been shunned.
Ada didn’t seem to mind too much the lack of company. She could spend a big chunk of the day lying on the red couch, sometimes reading a book, drifting into and out of sleep, unwrapping the chocolates that he bought for her. She would crumple the golden foil into tiny balls and flick them away. Sometimes he’d find tiny specks of gold behind the cushions or under the bedsheets.
But every night, in the ring, no matter how small an audience, he saw how Ada was revived from her lethargy. She emerged from the trunk as if from the dead, the snakes curling around her arms like shiny bangles, her eyes glowing, her cheeks flushed with color. Andor looked at the same miracle take place every night, this transfiguration that he had orchestrated.
I gave her a new life, he said to himself. I’ve taken her by the hand and I’ve led her to her true nature. It’s a miracle of beauty, and she doesn’t even know it’s happening.
* * *
Ada had heard about the tarot reader.
Nadya, the mother of the Flying Hawks sisters, used to be a trapeze artist but she no longer performed because of a bad neck injury. These days she performed a solo dressage act, riding one of the Arabian horses, which danced to a music-box tune. She also appeared in the final parade, on top of the white horse, all dressed up in sequins and a bright-red feather headdress.