The Russians - Part One: Bérengere (rough draft.)

August 21, Newark, California.

[For details on the family see "The Russians" in the Glossary entry.]
It is a long way from the wine countries of France to the dusty roads of circus life in America. Not so for Bérengere Naidenkine, a native of Bordeaux, in southwest France, and a hula hoop performer married to Genia Naidenkine, Circus Chimera's clown.
Bérengere enjoyed sheltered days growing up as an only child in a relatively well-off family. Then when she was 12 her father sent her to Africa, two weeks without running water, toilets or steady food, out in Pygmy territory (the cost was relatively low for he owned a traveling agency.) "Coming out of my little bourgeois upbringing, it was a shock," she recalled with a smile. He thought she needed to see how the other half of the world lived. She thought she rather liked it, and has not stopped traveling since. "From that moment on I always wanted to travel," she said, "and I wanted to be free."
Bérengere, who is 36, has been a circus performer for a little more than ten years and was goaded into her hula hoop act by a Russian woman performer who told her spitefully she could never do it, no matter how much she tried. Bérengere's act, culminating in a fiery hoop stunt, regularly draws wild applause from the audience at Circus Chimera.
It's the classic story. Go to the circus, meet performer, run away with the circus (and performer.) It's an ageless story; it was Ekaterina's mother's, it was Fridman's mother's (somehow I realize as I write this that it is always the women who join the circus, and I wonder why: are men less adventurous, contrary to what the common fare would have us believe?)
Bérengere is not tall but seems so because of her acutely lean figure, enhanced by her bikers-inspired costume, all black, spikes and leather. She wears her hair short and dyes it a orange-reddish tone, accentuating her boyish appearance. She's garrulous, and doesn't wear her opinions under her sleeve. She'll talk about her passions for hours, her hands fluttering. When she was younger she suffered severe kidney problems, which are still an issue. She and Genia do not have children together; she talks affectionately about Vilen and Sasha, her step-sons, as "the children."
Bérengere met Genia in 1994 while visiting Cirque Amar, one of France's most established circuses, to do some decorative painting. She had been making a living as an artist, having attended art school after giving up the idea of being a wild animal veterinarian - when she wasn't traveling the world with a backpack. At Amar she was to paint the artists' quarters on a theme of Walt Disney.
She did, and then some. Some members of Genia's troupe were blocked at the border in Russia and the director was adamant about having a woman in the show, so she stepped in. Together with Genia and the rest of the troupe she did a jumping rope act that involved a human tower. "I'm afraid of heights - I was scared witless," she laughed. Over the next ten years she and Genia worked in France for Amar then for Cirque Bouglione, another one of France's most famous circuses, then in Ireland, England, and the U.S., where they arrived in 2000. Over the years she's worked a jumping ropes act, a badminton/juggling act with Genia, the Russian bars, also with Genia and two other people, a chiffon act, and the hula hoop, which she originally developed at Bouglione's.
Maybe there were signs. Both her grandfather and her father were fascinated with the circus, and her Dad once wanted to be a lion tamer. "It was the impossible dream," she said. Somehow she fulfilled it, on her own terms. And now it's almost time to move on. "This but a period in my life which is about to end," she reflects. She gives herself until she's 40, and then hopes to start her own business in tourism.
There are the passing friendships, friends who don't stay friends because everybody is on to something else, the sometimes infuriatingly closed-off quality of circus people who, for all their moving about, more often than not remain oblivious to the world around them, locally as well as internationally, moving in a sort of bubble. There are no retirement funds either, no safety net, in the circus. Working in a traveling circus takes its toll on even the toughest, and the financial future of a circus family is less than assured.
Yet "when you are in the ring and hear people applauding you, when you know they appreciated what you're ve done, there is a good feeling, not of pride exactly, but that all this was not for nothing," Bérengere said. Until the next turn in her life appears, then, she'll go on rushing in, spinning, feeling the sting of the fire as it dances around her body, the exhilaration of that moment, the roads wide open before her, still.