"If he dreamed it, you would know it!" cried the man on his hands.
"I am afraid of the bear," Herr Theobald said. "It does everything she tells it to do."
"Say 'he,' not 'it,'" said the man on his hands. "He is a fine bear, and he never hurt anybody. He has no claws, you know perfectly well--and very few teeth, either."
"The poor thing has a terribly hard time eating," Herr Theobald admitted. "He is quite old, and he's messy."
Over my father's shoulder, I saw him write in the giant pad: "A depressed bear and an unemployed circus. This family is centered on the sister."
At that moment, out on the sidewalk, we could see her tending to the bear. It was early morning and the street was not especially busy. By law, of course, she had the bear on a leash, but it was a token control. In her startling red turban the woman walked up and down the sidewalk, following the lazy movements of the bear on his unicycle. The animal pedaled easily from parking meter to parking meter, sometimes leaning a paw on the meter as he turned. He was very talented on the unicycle, you could tell, but you could also tell that the unicycle was a dead end for him. You could see that the bear felt he could go no further with unicycling.
"She should bring him off the street now," Herr Theobald fretted. "The people in the pastry shop next door complain to me," he told us. "They say the bear drives their customers away."
"That bear makes the customers come!" said the man on his hands.
"It makes some people come, it turns some away," said the dream man. He was suddenly somber, as if his profundity had depressed him.
But we had been so taken up with the antics of the Circus Szolnok that we had neglected old Johanna. When my mother saw that Grandmother was quietly crying, she told me to bring the car around.
"It's been too much for her," my father whispered to Theobald. The Circus Szolnok looked ashamed of themselves.
Outside on the sidewalk the bear pedaled up to me and handed me the keys; the car was parked at the curb. "Not everyone likes to be given the keys in that fashion," Herr Theobald told his sister.
"Oh, I thought he'd rather like it," she said, rumpling my hair. She was as appealing as a barmaid, which is to say that she was more appealing at night; in the daylight I could see that she was older than her brother, and older than her husbands too--and in time, I imagined, she would cease being lover and sister to them, respectively, and become a mother to them all. She was already a mother to the bear.
"Come over here," she said to him. He pedaled listlessly in place on his unicycle, holding on to a parking meter for support. He licked the little glass face of the meter. She tugged his leash. He stared at her. She tugged again. Insolently, the bear began to pedal--first one way, then the next. It was as if he took interest, seeing that he had an audience. He began to show off.
"Don't try anything," the sister said to him, but the bear pedaled faster and faster, going forward, going backward, angling sharply and veering among the parking meters; the sister had to let go of the leash. "Duna, stop it!" she cried, but the bear was out of control. He let the wheel roll too close to the curb and the unicycle pitched him hard into the fender of a parked car. He sat on the sidewalk with the unicycle beside him; you could tell that he hadn't injured himself, but he looked very embarrassed and nobody laughed. "Oh, Duna," the sister said, scoldingly, but she went over and crouched beside him at the curb. "Duna, Duna," she reproved him, gently. He shook his big head; he would not look at her. There was some saliva strung on the fur near his mouth and she wiped this away with her hand. He pushed her hand away with his paw.
"Come back again!" cried Herr Theobald, miserably, as we got into our car.
Mother sat in the car with her eyes closed and her fingers massaging her temples; this way she seemed to hear nothing we said. She claimed it was her only defense against traveling with such a contentious family.
I did not want to report on the usual business concerning the care of the car, but I saw that Father was trying to maintain order and calm; he had the giant pad spread on his lap as if we'd just completed a routine investigation. "What does the gauge tell us?" he asked.
"Someone put thirty-five kilometers on it," I said.
"That terrible bear has been in here," Grandmother said. "There are hairs from the beast on the back seat, and I can smell him."
"I don't smell anything," Father said.
"And the perfume of that gypsy in the turban," Grandmother said. "It is hovering near the ceiling of the car." Father and I sniffed. Mother continued to massage her temples.
On the floor by the brake and clutch pedals I saw several of the mint-green toothpicks that the Hungarian singer was in the habit of wearing like a scar at the corner of his mouth. I didn't mention them. It was enough to imagine them all--out on the town, in our car. The singing driver, the man on his hands beside him--waving out the window with his feet. And in back, separating the dream man from his former wife--his great head brushing the upholstered roo
f, his mauling paws relaxed in his large lap--the old bear slouched like a benign drunk.
"Those poor people," Mother said, her eyes still closed.
"Liars and criminals," Grandmother said. "Mystics and refugees and broken-down animals."
"They were trying hard," Father said, "but they weren't coming up with the prizes."
"Better off in a zoo," said Grandmother.
"I had a good time," Robo said.
"It's hard to break out of Class C," I said.