The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

William Corbin: A Meritorious Life

CORBIN, WILLIAM (1570–1660). Clown. Place of birth: Manchester, England. After he died, William Corbin’s body was taken, in secret and at great peril to his acolytes, back into the heart of the Klounkova Territories, where, on a modern map, one might now find Moldova, though at one point, the Klounkova Territories ranged from the edge of the Black Sea and westward into the European continent, cutting large swaths through the Ukraine and Romania and parts of Bulgaria. Corbin was interred in the southern flatlands of Moldova, though it had been his wish to be buried deeper in, nearer the center of the Klounkovan encampments. In the end, his friends and followers dared not risk discovery by the nomadic and restless Klouns.

Corbin owed his fascination with Klouns to his father, a village constable, who often took his three sons (of which William was the youngest) to variety acts and lowbrow, death-defying street shows, carnivals performed by traveling circuses hailing from Eastern European regions near or bordering the Black Sea. Inevitably, performing as part of one troupe or another, would be a Kloun, who, big-footed, of pale complexion, and with an over-expressive face, would often steal the show through popular movement skits and drama tumbles and the performance of ineffable sleights of hand. Although Corbin’s father detested the antics and the appearance of Klouns, William was enthralled by the graceful movements achieved by their curious and oblong shapes. Time and again, William would sneak past his father and watch with fascination, as “even their emboldened eyebrows danced along the contours of their paper-white faces.”

One day, a young William broke from his family, found his way to a small congregation of Klouns, separate from the amassing crowd, and offered himself to them as an apprentice:

Only after meeting them face-to-face, standing not two feet away, did I realize the truth of their size, speed & strength. Clearly, they stood a head taller than my own father, if not taller still, and were fit with powerful legs & exaggerated forearms. Silent they were as three stood & before I knew they had yet moved, surrounded me & lifted me above their heads. One supported my legs, the second my neck & shoulders, while the third walked alongside & beneath me, & they turned me over & over again, as if I were a spit hog, cooking over an open flame.

The Klouns stripped the boy of his shoes, replaced them with a pair of their own, large and ridiculous, and then smeared a chalky substance across his face in uneven clumps before setting him back down and roughly pushing him back toward the crowd, whose attention had turned from the puppet show to the performance of the Klouns and Corbin.

“Yet the whole time, not once did they speak, nor never did one even so much as smile.”

At the age of sixteen and disillusioned but not swayed by this encounter, William Corbin began in secret to learn the actions, attitudes, and performances of Klouns. Spending long hours watching carnival sideshows where Klouns most frequently performed, William put to memory many of the more well-known Kloun acrobatics, such as Bênchï’s Ten Facial Forms and Coefçneuçi’s Six Corporal Attitudes, which he then practiced at night in an abandoned shed some miles outside of town. When not practicing the foot steps and body rolls of Klouns, William occupied himself with the design and construction of authentic feet—“overlarge and made of flesh-colored sap, fired and molded to a shape that, when placed flush to my own foot, fits so that one cannot tell that my feet are, in relation to most Klouns, abbreviated, and made of such materials, and with accurate texture and design, so as to act not as simple props, but to act as feet act.” He also spent his time mixing face powders with plant resins to produce makeup to pale the color of his face and redden the surface of skin around his cheeks, the recipes of which have long since been lost or forgotten. He worked for over three years to develop a mixture that would not fade or smear despite “sweat, the heat of a noonday sun, the salt waters of the Atlantic, nor the simple, casual touch of a child’s finger, drawn along my cheek to see if I am real, to see if I am in fact a Kloun.”

At nineteen, confident in his appearance and the craft of his movements, confident, too, in his ability to pass as a Kloun, William Corbin began performing in the town’s main square, never once recognized by his neighbors or friends or even his father. He continued performing for six months before he joined a small traveling show that was headed back to mainland Europe with plans to return to Romania and hopes of performing along the way. He traveled for two years without incident or discovery, further honing his skills as a Kloun and learning the now extinct language of that people. Once in Romania, Corbin left the troupe and traveled into the Klounkova Territories, which had begun to shrink little by little, year after year. To his surprise, he was easily accepted by a highland tribe, with whom he traveled for two years, and where he married and he lived peacefully, and soon he began to feel not that he was disguised as but was in fact a Kloun.

Although he kept a journal of his life from the time he left England, his entries are written almost exclusively in Klounkovan, a singular and indecipherable language, and so it is that no one knows how his charade was discovered, only that it was. In 1640, William Corbin was violently expelled from his tribe and was forced to leave the Territories. He was separated from his wife, who, it is believed, was pregnant, and he was often forced to hide even after crossing the border separating Klounkovan lands from the rest of Europe, even as he traveled back to England, shadowed as he was by a small, independent band of Klouns who believed exile too lax a punishment for Corbin’s crime and betrayal.

Once he returned to England, Corbin continued to perform under different names and bearing different guises, and in time developed a system of training others in the movement arts of Klouns. Every week until his death, a small group of men (no more than ten at any given time) would gather at night and in secret in the chill and damp fields on the outskirts of town to learn Corbin’s craft. While these men’s movements paled in comparison to those of the original Klouns, and could not compete even with the inestimable power and abilities of Corbin himself, they continued to practice his craft nonetheless, and passed on his knowledge to others, and their descendants continue to perform even today, having, over time, outnumbered and then replaced the race of Klouns, which disappeared some few years after Corbin’s death and whose storied past has long since been forgotten.