GEORGE KONRAD
541
on the shoulders of the circus strong man; we tickle their mouths
with a red poppy. A female acrobat leaps down from the high wire
and lands gracefully on the crocodiles. The tattooed pirate on the
strong man's chest gives a discreet shudder.
A beet-nosed policeman turns up; for a modest sum he is will–
ing to forgo justice, and in trying to do this as frequently as possible,
he sniffs around for violations until late at night. "You mustn't play
the violin," he tells a tiny man with high cheekbones who is wearing
a loose-fitting checked jacket. The artist's face lights up , and he goes
on rasping on his violin. "Take it away," he encourages the beer–
bellied officer. The violin is gone, but another materializes from the
ample folds of his jacket , and then a clarinet, a panpipe, a flute pops
out of his sleeves. There are strings even on the soles of his shoes. "1
told you to stop your caterwauling, you're breaking the law." The
authority figure, clearly an enemy of art, is loaded down with confis–
cated instruments, and he stamps his feet in rage. But the little man
in the checked coat is himself an instrument. His slight, sardonic
tune can be heard , now through his teeth , now from his nostrils.
"Teach me your tricks ," 1 say to him; " 1 want to be a clown like
you." He puts his hand on my shoulder. "1 can't teach you," he
says. "This is my act, and to make it really mine I've been practic–
ing it for decades. Every decent clown has his act.
If
you are patient,
by the time you are an old ma.n you'll perfect your own."
In the evening this same man is a whiteface clown, and stands
in an arena stirred up by roaming columns of light, in front of mis–
shapen spectators, whose lips are greasy from barbecued meat and
who themselves flit about like shafts of light amid the machinery of
the circus. From under the wig of a moonstruck clown, a face
drained of blood stares stonily ahead. Around his nose, pointy as a
corpse's, there is neither a frown nor a smile. Confined in a pillory,
he apes the movements of a tightrope walker and pretends to swim
in the air. His vigorous strokes are repressed knifethrusts in the
stomach. With awkward, wriggling motions, he tries to slip out of
his coarsely woven shirt-he would escape even from the autopsist's
table. With the cracked voice of a newsvendor, he guffaws at a digni–
fied face and sizes up the rest of the man, examining, in turn, each
of his organs. The inventory evokes pain and horror in the spectator.
Let 's stone to death the Christ-mocking sorcerer who pretends
to be a yokel: he spreads the word that upsets my dreams . A master
illusionist, he laughs at himself though you are the one who ends up
