From the author’s cover letter: The Circus and the Atom is the sequel to my debut novel, The Girl in the Water (Nummist Media, 2022), which has won the 2023 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction, the 2023 IAN Book of the Year Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction, and the 2023 IPPY Awards Bronze Medal for Best Regional Ebook (Fiction). These two novels are the start of a series called Next Year’s Snow—an Eastern European and North American multigenerational saga which examines innocence, experience, oppression, and choice in a fractured modern world.
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Kiev, USSR, December 1988: As the Soviet superpower approaches its anarchic collapse, Ida Ivanova is in command of a taxi cab. She witnesses the engagement vows of two passengers: a British businessman named Pascoe and his local translator, Lina (a Soviet citizen with ties to Yugoslavia). Inauspiciously, the new fiancée slips on an icy stair and injures herself. The next morning, Ida drives Pascoe to the Borispol Airport while Lina is left to reflect on the haphazardness of life.
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When Pascoe left, outside it was dark and far below freezing, yet Lina opened the curtains and the ventilation pane at the top of the window. She had never got used to the smell of semen, not even in the six years of her first marriage, and she did not count on any great change in that regard.
She went to switch on the bathroom light. By that lonely beam, she stripped the bed, ran a bath, put in a wash, and set the eyelike engagement ring and premature band in an empty dish where she could study them while she soaked. Now, beneath an incandescent bulb, the stone glowed reddish purple.
Her hip had not stopped hurting and, there too, she could discover new variations of purple to green in the coming days.
Pascoe probably had much better rings in his shop in London; he was probably humouring her; still, she liked the one with the alexandrite eye (“emerald by day, amethyst by night,” the jeweller had said) and she had not wanted to wait. A week earlier, when she had gone to help him on his latest trip to Moscow, she had felt he might soon peter out. Then, when he made this last-minute detour to Kiev and proposed, she wanted to get the rings without delay.
She liked Pascoe, cared about his hands, and was tired of life as it had been for several years before him. Theirs was a historic romance, the first between a West London antiques dealer and a Serbo-Russian instructor of Pedagogical Linguistics. Call it fate. Suddenly last spring, as rain leaked through a window on a double-decker bus in Shepherd’s Bush, his newspaper got wet, he had to take an unusual route in his reading, and he formed the idea to trawl impoverished Moscow for treasures going cheap. That same spring, Lina’s boss died of acute liver failure and, in his stead, Lina got picked for a Moscow trip to represent the Kiev Pedagogical College Named After Boris Grinchenko at a conference on the future evolution of linguistic curricula and foreign exchange partnerships to meet the geopolitical needs of the coming millennium. Lina (one reasoned) stood an excellent chance to be alive and under fifty at the dawn of that millennium. Anyway, while in Moscow, she decided to find something special for her mother’s fifty-fifth birthday, in appreciation of that woman’s long haul from summer-exchange pregnancy to retirement. Lina discovered Pascoe wandering the flea markets; twice in a day’s exploration, she saw him, heard him. The second time, she offered to translate and barter for him.
That day in Moscow, already, she proved her worth to him and he began to talk to her as if to an old friend. Wryly, he spoke of his joy at his ex-wife’s remarriage; he and his shop were free of the yoke at last. What of Lina? Yes, she had once been married. She preferred not to speak of it. No matter; he would have preferred to hear some happy memories anyway. Had anyone given her those? Seeing no real harm in his cheeky line of questioning, she assured him that of course her father, her Tata, had done just that.
Then, what of this father? What of Tata? Lina demurred, not wanting to set the precedent of satisfying absolutely everything Pascoe asked. She said only that circumstances had kept her parents apart but Tata, once he was able, sent regular requests for her to come visit.
Those circumstances had been another liaison and another daughter, not six months older than Lina. This half-sister lived to be five before she drowned and her parents split. Then, Tata started writing to ask for Lina.
Mama’s brother voiced strong objections but so what? A bargain was struck and, out of it, Lina got beautiful winters, far from her angry uncle.
Tata was important, his other girls had been important, and (intermittently) Lina became important too. She cried all month after the terrorists shot Tata. She only stopped crying to go to the trial. They had left him tied by the ankles to the crane on his boat, as if he were a tuna.
Anyway, Lina developed an ear for languages and an economy of words and Pascoe learnt only of the beautiful winters. They exchanged addresses but she doubted he would really write.
On his bus route in Shepherd’s Bush, he must have changed his reading again because, when he did write to Lina, his letter was full of facts and musings about Roman villas in Dalmatia. Artifacts would surface there, surely. He was planning to go. Would she come and be his guide, if he paid her way?
On an August night in Dubrovnik, it was sweltering and she went to his room to softly complain that her window was stuck. Could she come in?
A slow, fishy breeze carried synth-pop and drunken voices from the pub on the square below. If anybody heard cries of passion, nobody much cared. She was glad it all started like that and not in secrecy and feigned sobriety back home.
Before they parted, in Belgrade, he bought her the coat.
The Yugoslav trip had been profitable, yes, he said when asked. Still, she was certain he had no real interest in pockmarked specimens of Roman coins, signet rings, or mosaic bits. He had planned it all just to please her. That was kind of him and kindness was something to be valued—yes, valued above the remains of Roman luxury. She was glad to be marrying somebody kind.
Still, more problems lay ahead than behind. She was confident of getting a new exit visa, perhaps even for a year on the pretext of working or studying in her paternal Yugoslavia, yet entry into the UK would be another matter. Supposing, by spring if she was lucky, she did get her papers and maybe part of her uncle’s savings as a dowry or kiss-off, then she would have to face the unfamiliar leap of living with a man on a trial basis—preferably for three months or so to make sure, to be fair to both him and herself—and all this in his world, before any wedding, before any permanent papers. She was most concerned about meeting his daughter, who was, in age, perhaps halfway between herself and that tomboy cabbie.
As she achingly climbed out of the bath, Lina smiled at the thought of Ida grabbing her arm and waist. She wondered who lived with Ida and how Ida would spend her windfall. Then, to the business in hand, she wondered where to put the rings. She had no intention of wearing them to work, yet suddenly she feared her apartment might be burgled.
Lina remembered that her bathroom mirror (a hefty one from a flea market) was hiding a fist-hole in the plaster. She took down the mirror, wrapped the rings in pink toilet paper from Pascoe’s hotel, and stuffed this wad between two exposed laths before covering it with the glass once more.
How disquieting it was to pack up one’s fiancé and his semen and rings in the wee hours of Monday morning. She washed her hands of the plaster flakes, any spores of mould, and anything left of Pascoe. Where was her cosmetic bag? Eventually, she found it in the kitchen, between the dish rack and fridge, behind an empty cake box and an even emptier bottle of baker’s moonshine. Yes, over his too-early breakfast, she had treated his hands one last time.
Well, he would be at the airport now, maybe slipping something to the customs officer to help him forget the ban on exporting old books.
She rubbed vaseline over and under her clean fingernails. She applied colours to her sleepless eyelids and her excessively kissed lower lip. She put on a long skirt and sweater and felt how long a time it would be, this next stretch as a fiancée all alone, an ersatz virgin preparing to leave the tribe.
For the time being, her job still nagged her. People (aspiring teachers) counted on her to show them how to speak to others who wanted to learn how to speak. They had no capacity to improvise (as she had done since five), so the whole arrangement forced her to learn tricks to teach them (tricks they could pass on to others), without ever shedding a spark from beneath her long clothes or her greased and chalky fingernails. Today, she would give a lesson on suggestopedia. Treat all language learners like overwrought toddlers; such was the suggestopedic way. Tell them to sit silently, read them a story, play-act it ever so slowly to a background of Baroque music.
Did Pascoe really want a baby—one named Vicky or Vic? How long would it take for this baby to talk if Lina practiced suggestopedia on it?
To brush up her knowledge of early phonetics, she went to her little study. The apartment’s designer had intended it as the bedroom but, being windowless and stuffy, it suited Lina best as a place to lay papers and books. She regretted not having asked Pascoe about study space in his flat. The bedroom (so he said) had a view of the Green and this view was framed by a rambling rose. The bus, the Tube, and the Overground were all just four minutes’ walk and she imagined she could go haunt any number of universities, libraries, and clubs where language learners might pay her for private lessons. Pascoe could have no objection, could he? She would do it when he was at work. She would come home in time to cook dinner and beautify herself and, just till she had a Vicky or a Vic or a work permit, she and he could live like this—an adequate honeymoon.
Well, if she were to carry a baby, let it be far from the sarcophagus of Chernobyl. Like everything bad, it filled conversations with her uncle.
She nodded off in her reading and then shivered awake once the warmth had seeped away from its last preserve, the study. Had Pascoe already boarded, already left the cold hollows of Borispol for a colder and hollower sky? Anyway, it was time for Lina to shut everything and go.
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Joseph Howse is a writer and computer scientist living in Nova Scotia. His debut novel, The Girl in the Water, has won the 2023 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and the 2023 IAN Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction. He is working on the sequel, The Circus and the Atom.
