The Night Circus

THE NIGHT CIRCUS

and other stories

Uršuľa Kovalyk

Translated from the Slovak

by Julia and Peter Sherwood

Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council and the SLOLIA Committee, the Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava, Slovakia

Uršuľa Kovalyk is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and social worker. She was born in 1969 in Košice, eastern Slovakia, and currently lives in the capital, Bratislava. She has worked for a women’s non-profit focusing on women’s rights and currently works for the NGO Against the Current, which helps homeless people. She is the director of the Theatre With No Home, which works with homeless and disabled actors. She has published the short story collections, Neverné ženy neznášajú vajíčka (Unfaithful Women Lay No Eggs, 2002) and Travesty šou (Travesty Show, 2004), and two novels, Žena zo sekáča (The Second-hand Woman, 2008) and Krasojazdkyňa (The Equestrienne, originally published in Slovak in 2013 and in English by Parthian in 2016) which was shortlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera Award, and received the Bibliotéka Prize for 2013. Her most recent collection of short stories, Čisté zviera (A Pure Animal), appeared in 2018.

Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and worked for Amnesty International in London for over twenty years. Peter Sherwood taught Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They are based in London and work as freelance translators from and into English, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Their book-length translations include Peter Krištúfek’s House of the Deaf Man (2014) and Uršuľa Kovalyk’s The Equestrienne (2016) for Parthian, as well as works by Balla, Béla Hamvas, Hamid Ismailov, Daniela Kapitáňová, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, Petra Procházková, Noémi Szécsi, Antal Szerb, Miklós Vámos, and Pavel Vilikovský.

For more information, see juliaandpetersherwood.com

Predator

The air smells of melting plastic. The red of the traffic lights is shimmering in the sun. The car wheezes as if about to give up the ghost. It’s an old banger, says Paula, picking up on the thoughts in my head. The old banger emits a ferocious rattle, as if warning me not to insult it so brazenly. The temperature in the car keeps rising as Paula licks her ice cream languidly and her luminous red hair drives me to distraction, a red rag to a bull. I just can’t tear my eyes away from it.

That hair of yours is going to blind me one of these days, I say, winding the car window down. Paula tosses her red mane and bares her teeth at me flirtatiously. A predator, I think. Not even a corpse could resist Paula’s sex appeal. She isn’t all that young or beautiful, nor even particularly fit, but every time I see her I’m ensnared by her charm, like a fly falling into a pot of honey. I try to puzzle out what it is that makes her so attractive. It must be her velvety voice or perhaps those taut blue veins on her beautiful neck that put me in this wicked frame of mind. Whatever. Paula is a friend of mine and I’m not in the habit of sleeping with my friends… In fact, generally speaking, I’m not even attracted to women, except that Paula is not a woman, she’s the quintessence of sex and it makes no difference what gender you are; she would seduce a sexless fly. She’s a hunter, she has never let a man pick her up – she’s always been the one who chose her men and she would always get the one she wanted. A predator.

And still I’ve ended up with the wrong one, says Paula, interrupting my thoughts.

Are you a mind-reader now? I blush.

No, but I can read it in your eyes, they can’t lie.

The lights change and I manage to start up the old banger again. A fresh breeze streams in through the open windows, cheering us up. I turn off onto the road leading out of town. Really, Paula, how could you have got it so wrong? I smile and sing naah na-na-na-naah, out of tune.

But he’s not so bad, really, she intones. Or bad-looking, I respond.

But… I really don’t know why the word ‘but’ keeps cropping up in my life, I might as well have it carved on my gravestone, right after Rest In Peace: R.I.P. but… adds Paula, biting into her ice cream cone. Her teeth make a crunching noise, like a cat crushing the frail bones of a bird. Quite a predator! I steer the Skoda around a bend. The tyres screech. You ran over a corpse, jokes Paula and I make a gesture that suggests she should stick it up hers.

D’you know what a woman feels in bed after twenty years of marriage? she asks, shooting me the hottest glance ever. No, I say, swallowing hard. Nothing, Paula frowns, shaking the crumbs off her dress. And that’s the point – nothing. Sometimes when we’re having sex I’m aware of every single move and sigh my husband makes, I keep track of the fridge whirring, I hear my neighbour yelling at her kids. I watch the stains on the white wall – the other day I thought I saw a face there. I try to think of something sexy, like this young shop assistant or a film scene with two women making love to a man beneath an enormous silk scarf. Still nothing. Nothing at all. And this nothing is eating me up, the void is getting so colossal it feels like someone has blasted a huge hole in my stomach. With a machine gun. And if by some chance he asks how I’m feeling, I can’t find words to describe how I feel. Nothing. A perfect Nothing.

So you’ve discovered Nothing in lovemaking, I say, trying to make Paula laugh, while she is lost in thought and chews her lower lip, plump like an overripe raspberry.

There is a young hitchhiker standing by the roadside and Paula is so taken by his long blond curls that she tells me to stop.

He tries to explain in broken English where he’s headed. Only when he swears do I realise that he’s Hungarian. We discuss where we are headed and where he needs to go, and I torture my tongue with my kitchen Hungarian. Don’t worry, Paula, we’ll give him a lift, I reassure her as I notice the alarmed expression on her face. A little present for you, you’ll have half an hour to admire him, then he gets out.

Paula gives a laugh and her voice takes on the timbre of the darkest night; her entire body turns moist and supple so that I half expect her to melt on the passenger seat like ice cream. She’s just gorgeous. She licks her lips and her blazing eyes burn through the young man’s face. A predator. Ready to leap. I strain my kitchen Hungarian to get some small talk going but the old banger makes such a racket nobody can make out a word. Paula is in raptures, she gushes over his shirt, saying how nice it is, but it’s just a pretext to touch his shoulder.

Paula, control yourself, can’t you see he’s just a puppy. I’m trying to tame the tigress, ready to pounce. Should we get him laid? she shouts over the whirring of the car. Wouldn’t that be something? We could just turn off into the woods and seduce him.

No, Paula, that would kill him. I stop her in her tracks and she purses her lips like a little girl, winking at me and doing her best to stop me from being a spoilsport and to make me go off into the woods. I laugh and so does the young man. Perhaps he’s figured out what’s going on.

I put on some music to drown out the noise of the engine, some loud rock that makes Paula bounce about and almost sets her seat on fire. Go on, ask him if he fancies me. Paula gives me a prod with her elbow. So I use my broken Hungarian again to ask, but the young man is reticent. He says you’re extremely beautiful, like a goddess, but he’s got a girlfriend and is head over heels in love with her, you know, I translate for Paula.

Aaah, she says, disappointed. She calms down a bit. The music and the noise of the Skoda are about to burst our eardrums and Paula keeps mum, devouring the young man with her eyes. Look at his gorgeous skin, she says admiringly, and that cute little bum. I’m sure with him I wouldn’t need to play a film scene in my head or look for faces on the wall.

Oh I don’t know, Paula, maybe you need an affair, I reply.

You know the problem with affairs? After a while they start resembling marriage. Ten years ago I had an affair. It was brilliant for a year but then I was spending a weekend at this guy’s place and instead of flinging me on the kitchen table and making passionate love to me he asked if I was going to make something for dinner. So I said, Do I look like a cook to you? Like I’m your wife? Paula says, raising her eyebrows and lighting a cigarette. That pissed him off, she says, exhaling, "he said I was a nymphomaniac, can you believe it? If you want to screw you’re a nymphomaniac,