at it—and as the wind continued to blow, his feet lifted off in the gale until his body flew straight out sideways, a black pennant waving in the wind.
At his farthest extent the wind dropped, the lights changed, music rippled through a discordant change into an old minuet, and Victor leaped into a story, which he told while tuning a battered violin (where had it appeared from?), rosining his bow, and finally playing it. In a very few words he sketched an ancient Polish music-master teaching him to play. The violin slid from dominating virtuoso to hopeless student, and back again: shimmering from the violent, impatient commands of the master to the trust and willingness to learn of the boy, Victor seemed to waver from seven feet tall to three. The pupil’s music grew from squawks to mastery, and then the master died, and Victor assumed his greatcoat.
Clover found her eyes aching for her father, for how he as much as Mama had set their feet on this path from her earliest memory.
Then the violin vanished into thin air, and lighter music began from the orchestra.
‘My next trick!’ Victor announced. He swept the black frockcoat into a wheeling circle and from it retrieved an egg, a feather fan, a bowler hat and a bamboo walking stick. He juggled first the egg, then the egg and the fan, then hat-egg-fan while twirling the bamboo cane in a windmill. The cane landed on his nose, the hat flipped up onto the cane, and he juggled the egg while fanning himself. While he was so occupied, with understandable concentration, his feet began a clattering dance, the boot-ends clacking a gay percussion.
His absurdity, thought Clover, is not of the idiot variety, but of someone wanting too much, reaching for the moon. Every motion was comic, every flex of foot and straight-edge of elevated leg.
‘Yes, for some time I made my living rationally, as a juggler. But too much influenced by the moon, I became—if not an out-and-out lunatic—an eccentric. I shiver to see the moon each night, preposterous and separate. Why should we be so far from what we long for? But how to reach it?’
He pulled from his coat a large brass compass. ‘My only inheritance,’ he said, showing it off. ‘From my father, a moral compass … My great treasure!’ Flourishing it, he dropped it—oh no!—but caught it, dropped it, batted it forward, ran fast enough to be below it when it fell; he sighed with relief and shook it, and it all fell to pieces in his hand.
Clover was as horrified as Victor seemed. In a fumbling jumble he reassembled the pieces, making the compass into a birdcage, a lantern (lit!), and a drinking goblet before managing to shuffle it once more into a compass—although larger, and wilder. There was one piece left over: the glass cover, which he could not get to fix. Instead, abandoning the attempt, he stuck it into his eye as a monocle. It shone in the light and showed that eye magnificently magnified.
As Victor goggled at the audience, seeming to see everything new, the second drop rose and the stage was revealed in three: a dark forest of bare trees. Behind them a huge full moon and the night sky peppered with salty stars. Clover thought perhaps it would be a lady-moon, but saw no face—a faint suggestion of a rabbit was only shadows of pits and craters. Or was that a face, yellowy-green, hanging upside down?
Victor checked his compass to see how he should proceed, and showed the audience its needle wildly spinning. As the light increased, seeming to shine from the moon (but from the wings Clover could see the Klieg light), a path appeared in the darkness behind Victor, shining upwards, like a moonbeam. She took a breath, as the audience did—as Victor did, when he spun and saw the road shining before him.
‘My destination!’ he cried, looking back over his shoulder to bring the audience along with him. He tried to walk up it: fell through, of course, because it was only beams of light. He backed up and ran, and somersaulted through as if it were a cobweb, seeming to stick … and fell.
Victor picked himself up and hobbled back to teeter on the edge of the stage, between two silver footlights. He raised himself on his long toes and leaped, dove forward into a handspring and a cartwheel and a fan of arms and legs and somehow—how? even in the