THE BLOODTHIRSTY SIBERIAN TIGER! DON’T MISS IT!
That night, the circus was packed. The Tamer wore leather bracers on his wrists, and the lights were dazzling.
‘Behold the Terror of the Taiga!’ shouted a man with a sparkling jacket.
Nobody laughed at her entrance; no one moved when she roared.
She performed all the tricks without a single glitch and, as soon as she finished the last trick, the tent erupted in applause.
As she returned to her cage, the Tiger found it hard to calm down, just as she had seen it was for her companions.
‘Don’t fool yourself,’ the oldest tiger told her. ‘The applause is not for you, but for the brave Tamer who managed to turn you into a puppet. Today they applaud you; tomorrow, sooner than you think, they’ll applaud another tiger.’
How much time had passed? Months? Years?
The wheels of the trailer on which they were transported were replaced several times, and one day the oldest tiger disappeared from the cage.
The Tiger was vaguely aware of the seasons, as she watched the changing landscapes speeding past her during the long journeys in their caravan. Did the trees have leaves, or did they not? At first, she would notice such things, but her attention span kept growing increasingly short. Nothing that was happening in the free world concerned her any more.
Every now and then, some fragments would emerge from her memory of her life with the Man of the hut. Something he had said, one of his expressions, or the way they had chased each other in the snow during a moment of carefree play. She never allowed that door to remain open for too long, though, because it caused her too much sadness.
That world no longer existed, and she would never be able to return to it. The mere memory would cause her to crouch at the bottom of the cage, with her tail curled around her body.
Seeing her like that, the circus guardians often thought she was sick. Her life was now a succession of repeated actions: waiting for her cage to be cleaned, training, eating, performing in the show and then returning to her cage again.
Whenever the circus remained in a city for a longer stay, the audience would come to see the animals in their cages, just like at the zoo.
The Tiger would see an endless procession of people parading past the bars. Some would flinch, intimidated by her might and her roars. Others, however, enjoyed mocking her, tossing coins at her, or litter or food she couldn’t eat, like peanuts.
At first, the Tiger would rage, thrashing against the bars and rattling the trailer with a loud crash of metal.
Later, as she realized these reactions only excited her tormentors more, she recoiled in the furthest corner of the cage, offering only a glimpse of her fur to those who taunted her.
In this parade of humans of all ages, she never made eye contact with anyone, nor did she hear a voice that was similar to the Man’s.
Except on one occasion.
‘Tiger…?’ she heard a little girl whisper softly, with a voice that came from her heart.
‘Yes?’ she replied, lifting her head in the hope of meeting the eyes of whoever had spoken, but the little girl had already been dragged away.
‘The tigers are boring – they don’t do anything. Come on, let’s go to see the apes.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Little Acrobat
How many times had the words of the Man echoed in the Tiger’s mind while the screaming audience walked past her?
‘Having eyes and looking are not the same thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Eyes are related to the hands, while looking is related to the heart. Looking knows no distances or obstacles. The eyes, meanwhile, measure everything. If they find an empty space, they build a wall right there and then.’
‘How can I tell them apart?’
‘The heart talks straight to the heart, without any need for lips’ had been the Man’s answer.
How many hearts had she met during those years?
None, apart from the fleeting glimpse of that little girl’s.
The Tiger felt worn out by the eyes that had lingered on her fur. On the days when there was no show, a deep weariness invaded every fibre of her being.
What had become of all her ambitions?
She had left her home and headed Eastwards, searching for a greater destiny, but her fate was now confined to the boundaries of the cage. At first, she had paced back and forth, day and night, never stopping, walking for hours without going anywhere. Four steps forward, turn around, four steps back.
‘We’ve all done that!’ the other tigers had told her. ‘You’ll calm down too, you’ll see. Oh yes, you will.’
They were right.
She had indeed calmed down, and now she spent all her time crouching in a corner of the cage. But it was a calm very different from that of an ocean, which, in its most secret depths, harbours the frightening power of a wave capable of destroying everything.
Where had she gone wrong?
Was it she who had made a mistake, or had Fate turned its back on her?
The Man’s sacrifice had been for nothing.
Either way, everything had gone wrong. She had been captured and he was dead. If only he’d accepted the money. Then he would still be alive and she wouldn’t be alone in this world once again.
But could she ever return to someone who had traded her life for a handful of coins? Wouldn’t she have felt even more desperately lonely if, in addition to captivity, she’d had to endure the terrible loneliness of betrayal?
Is there a more potent poison?
You give yourself to someone in complete innocence, and they seem to reciprocate, but they have other plans. There’s a secret motive in their actions and you never realize it until it’s too late.
The Tiger was engrossed in these thoughts when a voice echoed in her heart.
‘Are you a sad tiger?’
She stood up, looking around.
There didn’t seem to be anyone in sight.
It was only when she leaned over the bars of her trailer that she saw a child, staring up at her from down below.
‘Are you the one talking?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ the child replied.
‘I’ve never seen you before.’
‘I arrived yesterday.’
The Tiger felt a rush of words erupting from her heart.
‘Where do you come from? Are you alone?’
‘I’m here with my family,’ said the boy. ‘We’re acrobats and we come from a town beyond the taiga.’
The taiga!
Just hearing that word, the Tiger felt her heart pound. How long had it been since her paws had rested in the snow, on ice, on the moss drenched with water? Cement and sawdust, sawdust and cement; for too many years this had ruled her life. How long had it been since she had really seen the stars and breathed snow from her nostrils? How long had it been since she had felt her whiskers freeze?
‘I come from there too!’ she cried with a new energy.
‘I know,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s written here below – that’s why I told you.’
Then, with a light step, he headed towards the circus tent and disappeared inside.
That night, the Tiger dreamed of the Man for the first time in a long while. He wasn’t saying or doing anything in particular. He was just sitting next to the stove, as he often had during the winter. The light that emanated from his body lingered in the eyes of the Tiger for a long time. She was now awake and she could still see it – or, better yet, feel it deep within her heart.
Where did that light come from?
It looked like the light of dawn, but it was brighter than the brightest sunrise.
As she awoke the next morning, the Tiger realized she wasn’t sad any more. She stood up and stretched, shaking her body several times as if it were covered with snow.
She was no longer alone.
There was a child, and that child had looked at her.
Not only that, but
he even came from a world not far from her own. If she said ‘snow’, he would understand – as he would if she added, ‘I can run for days without encountering anything.’
A week later, she discovered that the acrobats and tigers practised at the same time. They were down below and the athletes were up above, suspended in the air. There was only an elastic net between them.
So often she would get distracted during her routines’ jumps and roars. The child’s parents would dangle from the trapezes and then, suddenly, they’d let go and their bodies would slice through the air as if the ground weren’t dragging them down, as if they were weightless. There was always someone on the other side who would grab them by the wrists or ankles. Even the child, one day, would jump like that – light as a feather, blissfully confident in the grip of his parents.
It takes trust to jump into the void, the Tiger thought, leaping into the flaming circle. I simply hop from stool to stool, just like I once leaped upon the backs of the deer. In all these years I have learned nothing. I allowed the bars to enter my heart, blocking any way out.
‘We are the first jailers of ourselves.’
Weren’t these the words of the Man?
Her fate had changed abruptly, but she had almost immediately surrendered to her new situation.
The routine, the anger, the cage.
The circus had been her only horizon up until that moment. Her days divided equally between boredom and resentment; her soul transformed into a scarecrow made of tiger fur. A fur that was worn out now, listless, frayed.
This was not how she’d imagined her life when she began her journey to the East. The captivity in the circus had turned her dreams into wet sawdust.
Since the arrival of the acrobats, however, something had changed. She no longer slept so dreadfully at night, and a light had begun to creep into her daytime rest too. Not the cold light of the neon, but the warm light of the oil lamp inside the hut.
Once, the Man had created some wonderful images simply by playing with the shadows of his hands on the wall.
The Tiger was left breathless just looking at them. She had never thought it were possible to see something that did not visibly exist.
‘The gift of vision,’ the Man had told her, ‘is the greatest of gifts.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I Want to Learn to Fly
The journeys weren’t journeys any more; the shows weren’t shows. The long hours spent travelling in the caravan along the roads increased, and somehow she was no longer affected by the anticipation she usually felt before entering the circus ring, or by the voice of the Presenter shouting, ‘The fearsome Siberian tiger!’ as all her muscles sprang into action to run the short distance between the tunnel and the stool.
The Tiger was there, but at the same time she wasn’t.
She had experienced that before: her mind would function, while her heart remained elsewhere. But, until then, that elsewhere was a world she had lost. The den, her mother, her brother, the taiga, the Man, the hut. It was an elsewhere that made her sad. Ahead of the Tiger lay the opaqueness of a wall, and behind her was a world that faded a little more from her memory each day.
But now, suddenly, the connection had been reversed. The wall had dissolved, just like fog disperses as the sun grows stronger, and through the few remaining droplets she was able to glimpse a brand-new world that was hers to conquer.
The child’s voice had shattered her inner prison, allowing her to imagine a reality that was ahead of her rather than behind.
It had taken so little – a question, a glance – for everything to turn upside down.
The Tiger was caught by surprise.
You had to be conflicted, perhaps, in order to change things.
Now she could see the shadows on the wall, and she was certain that, sooner or later, those shadows would have the power to turn into something more tangible.
‘Vision brings hope,’ the Man had said once, as they walked in the taiga.
The Tiger couldn’t understand back then, but now she suddenly knew what he meant. What else is hope, if not a pack of hounds constantly chasing you? They close in on your heels, they hunt you down, forcing you to do one thing only: to run to meet what lies before you.
She had often longed for this.
Clawing, shoving, shredding someone – and reconquering her freedom in this way? For many years this had been her first instinct – and the clearest, the strongest. But it was an instinct that would have led her to a dead end – she knew that.
In fact, there were many stories about escape attempts, passed on among the members of the circus. An elephant, a giraffe, a hippo who couldn’t resist the lure of freedom. Their bids for freedom didn’t have a particularly glorious conclusion. What sort of freedom could an elephant find among the desolate city outskirts? The freedom to stretch its legs, at most. Taking such a big risk for such a miserable outcome definitely was not worth it.
That’s why the Tiger had done nothing – until then.
But everything was different now.
Now she knew where to go, and why.
She wanted to be an acrobat; she wanted to possess grace and lightness. She was tired of leaping from stool to stool as if these stools were the back of some prey. She wanted to learn something different; she wanted to dominate the air instead of the ground. When you have a dream, you can overturn even the tallest mountain. No obstacle feels like an obstacle; no limit a true limit.
During the training sessions, she saw the Little Acrobat jump on a platform and leap upwards, tracing breathtaking trajectories with his body.
‘Do you have wings hidden somewhere?’ the Tiger asked him one day.
‘No, why?’
‘When you fly you seem weightless, like a feather.’
‘If I were as light as a feather, the air would lead me wherever it wants. It is because I do have a weight that I can land where I want.’
‘But how can you fly?’
The Little Acrobat burst out laughing.
‘I don’t fly – I only move from one spot to the other. You jump from one stool to the next; I jump from one trapeze to another.’
The Tiger remained silent, puzzled. What she had seen happen above her head seemed infinitely more harmonious than what she did every day: brush against the sawdust with her belly. There was a lightness in the Little Acrobat that she had never had. One moment he was standing on the ring, and the next he was vaulting above everyone’s head as if it were the most effortless thing in the world.
‘What happens if you make a mistake?’ the Tiger asked him once.
The Little Acrobat shrugged.
‘I fall.’
‘And you’re not afraid?’
‘That’s something you learn too. If you want to go high, you have to learn how to fall down first. We’ve been acrobats for generations. My parents would throw me in the air when I was just a baby.’
‘So, you can learn?’
‘Of course! You just have to be patient and never give up if a jump goes wrong.’
She would have liked to also ask him whether he was happy doing what he did, but she knew she didn’t need to. His eyes gleamed with the sheer joy that he experienced through flying.
‘If you have a dream, you have to learn to keep at it,’ said the Little Acrobat before leaving. ‘Otherwise it remains just a dream.’
The Tiger didn’t get a chance to talk to him again for the next few weeks, only encountering him around the circus tent.
Then, on a sweltering summer night that was keeping everyone awake, the Little Acrobat reappeared in front of the trailer.
The Tiger mustered her courage and told him:
‘I have a dream too. But I don’t know if I can tell you.’
‘To eat me?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘My dream is to become an acrobat.’
‘But you jump already. You leap through fire hoops and the flames never even singe your tail.??
?
‘Yes, but only from one side to the other – the ground is always at the same distance from my belly. I want to learn to do what you do instead. Lifting all my paws from the ground and rising up, as though I were weightless.’
The Little Acrobat remained silent and very still, staring at the Tiger. He had just realized how mangy the Tiger was; how much sadness welled in those eyes that hadn’t seen the taiga for so long. He remembered hearing about winged horses, but never about a tiger who could fly.
‘So?’ urged the Tiger impatiently.
The Little Acrobat saw a new light sparkle in his friend’s eyes.
‘So, I think you should go somewhere high and try a few jumps. Small jumps at first, and then bigger and bigger.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But how do I do that? The roof of the cage is so low.’
The Little Acrobat pondered in silence. ‘You’re right: you can’t fly if there’s no room above you.’
‘Can you help me?’ asked the Tiger in a small voice.
The Little Acrobat thought some more, then smiled and said, ‘I can let you out if you want.’
‘But there’s a chain.’
‘Every chain has its key,’ he answered.
It all happened incredibly fast, like in a dream.
Two nights later, while everyone was asleep, the Little Acrobat came back with a large set of keys, finding the right one after a few attempts. Then he removed the thick chain with his tiny hands and just said, ‘There!’ as he stood by her side.
For a moment, the Tiger was astounded.
The freedom she had craved for so many years was now in front of her, within a paw’s reach.
All around her it was dark and still.
She poked her head tentatively out of the cage. Then, looking up, she saw a shooting star streak across the summer sky.