An artist has only his life to give.
At the borderlands, they knew: some of them could slip through, others could not. The strongman, for instance, even after years inactive, much diminished, could not pass for another man. So they shook hands with their circus mates, silently bid them good luck and watched as they crossed into other uncertainties, other hopes.
Standing together, those who remained looked like the playbill of the circus’ signature acts: the tall woman, the thin man, the strongman, two diminutive acrobats.
So they idled in refugee camps, baked loaves of makeshift pan bread, stared at each other and, like scrap artists, reassembled from found, broken objects of themselves the story of their bodies: odd, out of sync. By degrees, they lifted from each other some sadness, some grief, a gravity that had been added to their things at the last minute, making their bag too heavy to carry for long. They stacked and tied themselves together, learned to balance and how to hold on, and they survived in this way: a refugee circus act.
When the war ended and borders opened tentatively, their old circus mates returned. They had survived at whatever trades they could: stable hand, teacher, metal worker. They had lost their skills from the old days. The wirewalker had turned to drink and grown unsteady, and so he balanced himself with drink.
They came to see the circus of their old friends and witnessed a strange magic—old faded costumes, no light, no strings, no net—and felt the grief at the center of joy watching them again for the first time many years later, like watching silent super 8 films from childhood, the younger self waving at the camera, then laughing out of shyness. The performers could not have said such things and made themselves understood. So, with silent gestures, they assembled like crystals, infinite variations on the same basic shapes, the same basic principles, the strongman at the base, then rolling, kaleidoscopic, to reform with the thin man or the two acrobats at the center, fitted seamlessly. It was more silent opera than circus, and some audience members cried, their old circus mates among them.
A man tells this story at a dinner party one night, and when the meal is over and guests whisper in the kitchen cleaning plates and others mix drinks or smoke on the patio, a man sits next to him at the table and asks in a low voice:
“Is this true?”
“It’s always true,” he says. “Look around you.”
Stephen Frech has published a mixed genre chapbook A Palace of Strangers Is No City (2011) and three volumes of poetry, most recently the chapbook The Dark Villages of Childhood (2009). He is also the translator of Menno Wigman’s Zwart als kaviaar/Black as Caviar (2012).
–Background (2) & Foreground Photography by Ed Wojtaszek