Nights at the Circus

The convict, who the circus members refer to as the Escapee, is a radical who wants to make a Utopia and is entirely focused on the ideal future. Lizzie is not impressed, particularly as she thinks it’s stupid to always be concerned about the future when the present is all you can count on. The clowns put on a show for the brigands with the intention of putting them in good humor, which would allow the circus group to negotiate their release. During the act, the clowns literally summon the forces of chaos and blow themselves and the brigand gang away. This allows the other circus members to escape, and the Escapee leads them all through the taiga. They find an old man living alone in a cabin. Fortuitously, he has a piano that helps Mignon and the Princess regain their sanity. The shaman and all his people emerge from the woods with Walser in tow. Fevvers forgets herself and flies straight for Walser in her elation.

Walser has completely lost his rationality and his memory, but the Shaman is certain that this means that Walser is communing with his ancestors and will have his spiritual awakening as a shaman in his own right soon. The Shaman takes Walser back to his village, which is completely isolated from the outside world and from the advances of technology. Walser shares the Shaman’s home along with a tame bear that is to be sacrificed as part of an annual ritual. Walser teaches the bear to waltz, sparked by some deep memory of dancing with a tiger. This prompts Walser to recall his own name. The Shaman teaches Walser the power of illusion and that people need some help to believe in the impossible, and sometimes some fraudulency must be used to get them to believe in a truth that lacks concrete evidence.

As the day of Walser’s shamanizing approaches, Walser is inspired by a memory of a man wearing a garment of stripes and stars carrying a pig. Because the tribespeople have no concept or word for “pig,” the Shaman interprets the vision as Walser holding a bear cub, signaling that the time of Walser’s shaminization is high. The Shaman commissions his cousin to create a shaman outfit for Walser like stars and stripes costume Walser saw in his vision. She agrees to do this with the time she has left over from preparing for the birth of her eldest daughter’s first child, preparations which include hiding the pregnant woman deep in the woods so that the evil spirits will not take her child away when it’s born. On the day of Walser’s shamanizing, the Shaman and Walser ride out on elk with the other tribespeople, leading to the confrontation at the end of the previous chapter. The Shaman and his people scatter, terrified of the outsiders and assuming Fevvers is an evil spirit; Walser, though, is ecstatic, proclaiming, “I know her! Woman, bird, star—her name is—” (278).

The circus members call the man in the cabin the Maestro. The Maestro was lured into the Siberian wilderness with promises that there was untapped musical talent there, so he moved there to set up a music academy. No students enrolled, and he has been living in isolation there since. The Maestro is thrilled to have the Princess and Mignon—at last he has students—and the two plan to stay with him along with Samson. Fevvers is miserable, as the dye she uses to color both her hair and her feathers as part of her stage persona is fading, leaving her “looking more like the London sparrow as [she] had started out in life” (271). The Escapee agrees to be Colonel Kearney’s business manager, and the two leave together to revitalize the circus. The Colonel parts on bad terms with Fevvers and Lizzie when they do not agree to go back with him; he threatens to withhold Fevvers’s earnings from the circus, as her not continuing with him is a breach of contract. Lizzie threatens him with solicitors, and they end on that note.

Lizzie and Fevvers set off from the Maestro’s cabin to re-locate Walser. They come upon a woman with a newborn child in an isolated lean-to in the woods; unbeknownst to them, it is the eldest daughter of the Shaman’s cousin. Lizzie and Fevvers rescue both mother and child and find their way to the tribespeople’s village. They accidentally take the woman and her baby into the hut reserved for the bear sacrificing ceremony, and the tribespeople mistake them for evil spirits, come to use the woman and newborn child as substitute sacrifices for the bear cub. The tribespeople attack Fevvers and Lizzie, and the fighting pauses when Fevvers recognizes Walser amidst the fray. The Shaman begins a ritual chanting meant to dematerialize the evil spirits, and Fevvers “feels herself turning from a woman into an idea” (289). At Lizzie’s urging, Fevvers reveals her feathers to the tribespeople, and the chanting stops; they look at her in awe. At last, Walser recognizes Fevvers and remembers himself. Fevvers, delighted, tells Walser “That’s the way to start an interview! Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!” (291)

Fevers lies in bed with Walser later that night. It is midnight on the eve before the new century—as it dawns, Walser reconstructs his identity to himself and establishes a new sense of self. Fevvers explains that she and Lizzie were helping the comrades in the US and that’s what the letters were for. She admits that she and Lizzie played a trick on Walser with the clock back in Part 1, but other than that, nearly everything else Fevvers told Walser was true—all but one thing. Fevvers laughs when Walser finds out that the one thing she did lie about was being a virgin. Her laughter infects the rest of the village, and they all laugh as the new century dawns; Fevvers ends with a final exclamation of, “To think I really fooled you! It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence” (295).