Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer Page B

of a cardboard Ca’ d’Oro, under a rickety Rialto, until, as a
pièce de résistance
just before the conclusion of this dreamlike tour on the other side of a canvas flap, the Piazetta, with the noble domes of San Marco and an admittedly foreshortened Campanile, floated into view. The enchantment of gliding down those black waters, surrounded by the magic of the Venetian night, was almost unbearable. My grandmother always sat impassively beside me, wearing her heavy topcoat, into the lining of which our golden wealth had been carefully sewn.
    The other attraction, the Midget Theatre, could have stepped straight out of one of Fellini’s improbable fantasies. We sat on folding chairs under a striped tent in front of a makeshift stage on which a company of midgets performed a repertoire of sketches and short plays. I can remember nothing about their plots or subject matter, or any of the dialogue which, I suspect, may have been quite obscene. All that remains with me is a handful of images. I remember one of the players in an elaborate wedding gown, so made as to exaggerate the shortness of her stature and the disproportionate size of her head. She clutched a wilted bouquet almost as large as herself. She was weeping disconsolately while recounting an endless tale of woe—no doubt about the lover who had jilted her at the altar. Another image has even less context: two personages in morning dress—grey toppers and silver-knobbed canes—probably drunk, arguing about something. I remember several musical numbers including two policemen singing ‘The Gendarmes’ Duet’. But best of all was the grand finale of many of these shows, a group of midgets in full habit marching onto the stage to the accompaniment of the angelus bell singing something vaguely religious, probably ‘The Nuns’ Chorus’.
    Those days spent at the funfair seem in retrospect emblematic of the folly and pathos of that strange time. Many of us lived in a world of illusions, a world where the shabby imitation—whether a cut-out Venice or those unfortunate stunted creatures aping the lives of ‘big’ people—was preferable and considered superior to the real and the substantial. Our sensibilities had, somehow, been thrown out of kilter. We turned our back on the world of everyday reality in favour of a carefully stage-managed dream in which the cheaply romantic rubbed shoulders with the grotesque. When, amidst the paspalum of Epping, I, like my parents, began to yearn for Europe, I did not dream of my father’s solidly bourgeois world, nor about the cosiness of my mother’s home town, nor even about my few memories of golden summers in our villa, but of the ecstasy and enchantment generated by paint, canvas and paste. The past had become indistinguishable from the wonders of another astonishing theatrical illusion, one for which Venice and the Midget Theatre were no more than a preparation. My memories of the romance of Europe, cherished and worshipped under the harsh Australian sunshine, amidst the anguish and discontents of adolescence in a strange land, came to focus on the most curious and memorable of my experiences of the last months of our life in the old world, something far excelling the many enchantments of the funfair.

A N IGHT AT THE O PERA
    During that year in which I spent many of my daylight hours in Venice or at the Midget Theatre, when the smell of death still hung over the city, as bodies continued to be extracted from the rubble, and as the occasional blast of a buried bomb shook the few windowpanes that remained, the Budapest Opera House opened its doors. The building was a blaze of light in a darkened city. Whole districts had their uncertain supply of low-voltage electricity cut off to illuminate the marble foyers, gilt auditorium and spacious stage of an elaborately over-embellished theatre. The treacherous allure of Venice and of the Midget Theatre was enacted on a