b c1918 in the Central Highlands of Bassanda
At the age of 14, seeking—as she later described it—“wider horizons”, she ran away from her village to join a small mjekësia trego (“medicine show”), the pony-drawn carnivals which toured the mountain and steppe provinces. The trego was a well-loved folk art form which provided multiple generations of singers, players, dancers, acrobats, magicians, and comic actors their first performance training—and inspiration for the first tableau in Stravinsky’s 1911 Petrushka.
She was inveigled into the troupe by an unscrupulous “manager,” Dzhozef Ceaușescu, who persuaded her that her “future lay elsewhere,” and by whom she shortly became pregnant. In the first months of their travel together, she learned circus skills from aerial stunts to novelty dance to knife juggling.
As time went on, however, during her pregnancy and after the delivery of her infant son, she found herself isolated from the outside world: poorly housed, doing hard physical labor for very long hours, and on occasion physically mistreated by Ceaușescu. The manager also exploited the trego’s quasi-stateless status to engage in smuggling, a time-honored Bassandan tradition at which local legal customs often blinked. However, he trafficked primarily in opium: it was in precisely this same era that unscrupulous traders and smugglers realized the fortunes to be made by shipping poppy outside the nation’s borders for refinement into opium, in Turkey and Southeast Asia. Members of the troupe, in thrall to the manager’s brutality, were reluctant participants in this trade. Madame Nijinska told a story of Kristina attempting escape, in the dead of winter, over the mountain passes into the south, carrying her child in her arms, only to be recaptured and beaten again by the show’s guards.
The cycle of abuse only ended after the troupe was joined, around 1937, by the wandering American singer and banjo-player A. P. “Pappy” Lilt (b1871; see elsewhere in the Correspondence). Members of the troupe, interviewed years later, said:
“The man with the shaved head and white beard—the big man who came from the east, with the banza—he saved her. One night after our performance, Ceaușescu tried to beat her again, and then her child, but the big man stopped him and then fought with the show’s guards with his hands” (A.P. Lilt had learned Appalachian “cotch as kin” wrestling—a particularly brutal, no-holds-barred unarmed fighting technique—on the Cincinnati waterfront in the 1880s, and even into his old age was a formidable opponent).
“And after the guards lay unconscious, or moaning with broken heads and limbs, or missing teeth or ears, the big man said to Kariss, ‘Now do what you have to do to finish this—to be free.’ And Kariss for the first time struck back at Ceaușescu, and then again, and knocked him down, and stood over him, and drew her knife, and held it to his throat, and said ‘You will never hurt others again.’”
The troupe disbanded, with several of its members returning to their families and the animals adopted among them—even as late as the 1950s, there were tame elephants and tigers to be found in the high mountain villages. Ceaușescu disappears from the historical record but unconfirmed rumors suggest that he might have been killed in a back alley during a failed drug deal in Piraeus in 1941.
Olenev appeared in Ballyizget late in that same year.