The Orphan's Tale

  Instead, I walk into the dressing room, staring at the spot where Astrid had hidden. What had it been like for her? I slip out the back door of the dressing room into the cold night air once more, then walk to the cellar door and pull at it. The latch sticks and I marvel that Astrid had been able to put herself in the tiny space so quickly. I cannot open it. My heart pounds. Suddenly it is as if I am running for my life from the Germans, about to get caught.

  The door swings open and I climb inside. Then I shut the door and I lie in the darkness. The space is long and shallow, with enough room for only one person to lie flat. And perhaps a child. Could we hide Theo here with Astrid if the police came again? He might cry out. A baby, though smaller, is not as easy to hide. I inhale the air, which is choked with the fetid smell of decay.

  My mind reels back to earlier when Astrid had asked me to stay with the circus. I had not answered right away. My burden seemed heavier for knowing her secret and I could not help but wonder whether Theo and I would be safer on our own.

  Then I saw it, the pleading look in her eyes, needing help but not wanting to ask. “I’ll stay,” I promised. I could not abandon her now.

  “Good,” she replied, with more relief in her voice than she surely intended. “We need you more than ever.” The words seemed to stick a bit in her throat. “We’ll begin again tomorrow.” She turned and walked away. Remembering now, I realize she had not thanked me.

  It does not matter, though. Astrid needs me, and in this moment lying in her place beneath the ground, I will do anything to save her.

  7

  Astrid

  Out of Germany. Finally.

  As the flat-roofed border station recedes in the darkness, my entire body slumps with relief. I lie back down beside Peter on the double-wide berth that takes up most of his quarters on the train. He snores lightly, mumbles something in his sleep.

  It has been more than a month since the SS officers had come to the training hall in Darmstadt, asking questions about a Jew performing with the circus. We had rehearsed for it of course, the possibility that I would have to hide, plotting the possible distractions, calculating how many steps it would take me to get to the cellar from various locations, the effort it would require for me to pull up the heavy wood trapdoor. We’d even had a code word planned: if Herr Neuhoff or Peter or one of the others told me to “go fishing,” I was to head for the cellar; “go camping” meant to flee the fairgrounds entirely. But we had been caught off guard when the SS came and I’d barely made it out the back door before they stormed into the training hall. It was just as well—there was nothing that could have prepared me for lying motionless underground in that cold, dark space. Suffocated beneath the ground was the furthest thing from the freedom I felt when I flew through the air. It was death.

  Remembering now, I press closer to Peter, soaking in his solidness and warmth. Who had told the police there was a Jew with the circus? I had scarcely gone beyond the winter quarters when we were not on the road, but perhaps a delivery person or other visitor had spied me and caught on. Or had it been one of our own? I eyed the other performers or workers differently after that day, wondering who might not want me around. No one could be trusted. Except Peter, of course. And Noa. She has as much to lose as I do—maybe more.

  The SS had not come to the winter quarters again in the weeks before we went on the road. But I’d nevertheless been on edge ever since. The days passed slowly before our departure, each with its own threat of detection. The danger became real after that in a way it hadn’t quite been before.

  Erich appears improbably in my mind. What would the obergruppenführer think of his wife, hiding from his colleagues beneath the earth like a hunted animal? I see his face more vividly than I had in months, and wonder how he had explained my departure to our friends and neighbors. Off to visit a sick family member, I could hear him say in the smooth voice I’d once so loved. Or maybe no one asked at all. Had he stayed in the apartment, still smelling my scent and using the things that once were ours, or worse yet, brought another woman there? He might have moved. Erich was not one to linger on the past.

  Beside me Peter stirs and I push away my thoughts of Erich guiltily. As Peter rolls toward me I feel his need for me through the fabric of our nightclothes. His hands reach for me, find the edge of my nightdress. It is often this way in the middle of the night. More than once I have awoken to find him already inside me, ready and primal. Once I might have minded; now I am grateful for the bluntness of his desire, which comes without the pretext of romance.

  I climb astride Peter, naked beneath my nightdress, and press my palms against the warmth of his chest, inhaling the air mixed with liquor and tobacco and sweat. Then I rock slowly and methodically with the rhythm of the train. Peter reaches up and cups my chin, drawing my gaze down to his. Usually he keeps his eyes closed, lost as if in another world. But he is staring deeply at me now in a way he has not before. It is as if he is trying to solve a mystery or unlock some sort of door. The intensity of his eyes releases something in me. I begin to move more quickly, needing more as the heat of our connection deep inside me grows. Peter’s hands are on my hips, guiding me. His eyes roll backward. As my passion crests in that silent, practiced way, I collapse forward and bite his shoulder to stifle my cries so they do not echo through the railcars.

  Then I roll onto the berth beside Peter. His fingers are knotted in my hair and he murmurs softly to himself in Russian. He clings to me tightly, kissing my forehead, cheeks, chin. His passion sated now, his touch is gentle and his gaze warm.

  Peter falls into an instant slumber, one arm flung over his head in a gesture replicating surrender, the other heavy across my chest. He sleeps fitfully, though, tossing and fighting a battle beneath eyelids that never quite still. I wonder what he sees, a chapter from a book I have never read. I run my hand soothingly over him until he quiets.

  We became lovers the previous summer on the road. At first we would spend evenings sitting by the fire in the backyard behind the big top long after the others had gone to bed. Only later came the nights together like this one, finding warmth and company with each other. There is sadness in him, a tragedy about which I do not dare ask. Sometimes it is as if in his feverish movements he is trying to reclaim the past. I have not told him details about my years away from the circus with Erich either. Life with Peter is about the here and now. We are with each other just to be—a relationship based neither on a shared past nor future promises that we might not be able to keep. The part of me that might have wished for more from a man died the day I left Berlin.

  I stare up at the ceiling beams that rock back and forth with the movement of the train. The previous morning we’d arisen before dawn. The load-in had begun hours earlier, an endless array of boxcars emblazoned with the circus logo, filled with boxes and tent poles. The workers had been up all night and their cigarette smoke and sweat seemed to encircle the train in great rings. The animals went last just before us, blanket-covered elephants urged inch by inch up ramps, big-cat cages painstakingly rolled onto the cars. “Eee!” Theo cried as he spied the last of the elephants being shoved in, four workers pushing against its massive backside. I had to smile. To us circus folk, even the children, the exotic beasts had become commonplace. When was the last time anyone here had marveled at an elephant?

  Peter has a private compartment, half a railcar, cordoned off with a makeshift wall. It is nothing compared with the luxury in which my family had traveled: we’d had two carriages, our own beds, private bath and dining table, almost a miniature house on rails. Of course, that had been the heyday of the circus, the golden era.

  I touch my right ear reflexively, feeling for the gold earring that had been my mother’s, running my fingertip over the small, uneven ruby. There has been no sign of my family since my return to Darmstadt. My hope of hearing word of them when I went on the road with the Circus Neuhoff the
previous year had failed. I could not ask anyone directly lest they make the connection between me and my true identity. And when I made casual references in the cities where we had once performed, people just said that the Klemt circus had not come that year. I’d even sent a letter to Herr Fein, the booking agent in Frankfurt who had arranged the tour for my family’s circus in the larger cities, hoping that perhaps he would know where my family had gone. But it had returned with a scrawl across the front: Unzestellbar. Undeliverable.

  Shadows race past along the wall of the carriage. We’ve been on the train for thirty hours, longer than we should have been but for the detours around where stretches of track have been damaged or destroyed. The train sat motionless for hours somewhere close to the border while British warplanes roared overhead and bombs fell so close that they shook our bags from the racks. But now we amble easily across the rolling countryside.

  My eyes start to grow heavy, lulled by the rocking of the train and the warmth of passion Peter and I had just shared. I draw his blanket around me as cold air seeps through the cracked window. It’s too cold to be on the road. The railcars are poorly heated, the cabins at the fairgrounds meant for summer.

  The program had been set, though. We had started out on the first Thursday in April as we had the previous year. Once the circus would have gone where the money was plentiful, the wine-soaked valleys of the Loire and wealthy villages of Rhône-Alpes. Now we perform where we are permitted, a schedule the Germans set. That the Reich has agreed the circus may continue still all these years is no small thing. They trot us through occupied France as if to say, “See, life is still normal. How bad can it all be if such fun still exists?” But we represent everything Hitler hates: the freaks and oddities in a regime that is all about conformity. They will not permit us to go on forever.

  The train slows, screeches to a halt. I sit upright, disentangling myself from Peter’s arm. Though we had crossed the border into France hours earlier, checkpoints might come at any time. I jump up, fumbling for my ausweis and other documents. We begin to move again, the slowdown temporary. I sit on the edge of the bed, my heart still pounding. We are close to the line that once divided Vichy from Occupied France. Though both are now controlled by the Reich, there will surely still be an inspection of the train. When—not if—the guards come, I want to be one among a dozen girls in the sleeper car, not in Peter’s cabin, risking more scrutiny of my identity and papers than if I simply blend in with the others.

  I climb from the bed, dressing quickly in the icy air. Tiptoeing quietly so as not to wake Peter, I slip into the next car, secondhand and frayed and stale-smelling, where the girls sleep, berths stacked atop each other three high. Despite the cramped quarters, there are real linens, not bedrolls. Beneath the bunks small steamer trunks are lined up neatly, one for each of us.

  Noa sleeps on one of the low bunks, clutching the baby to her chest like a stuffed animal. Her face seems even younger in slumber, unlike the night she had come to us. She is backfisch, my mother would have said, on the verge of womanhood. Watching her embrace Theo, something tugs inside me. We had both been abandoned, exiled in our own way from the lives we had known.

  But this is no time for sentimentality. Whether she will be able to perform as we need her to—that is the only thing that matters. As an aerialist, it is not enough to be technically good. It is personality, flair, the ability to make the audience hold its breath, as if fearing for their own lives right along with ours. Similarly, mere appearance and personality would not suffice—even the most beautiful woman would not survive a season on the circuit without the pure physical grace, agility and strength to back it up.

  Noa has surprised me so far. I had thought she would give up after the first day, that she would never fly. I had not counted on her gymnastics training, though, or her tenacity. She has worked hard and she is smart and capable. And brave—her rescuing Theo from the Nazi car had more than proved that. She’s as good as she can possibly be, though it will all hang on whether she can perform under the lights in front of hundreds of people two and three times per day.

  Another girl has taken the berth where I was meant to have slept, so I squeeze into the narrow strip of berth beside Noa. But I cannot sleep. Instead I rehearse our opening performance that evening, marking the movements in my mind.

  Beside me Noa stirs and shifts in a slow, practiced way so as not to wake Theo. “Are we there yet?”

  “Soon. A few more hours.” We lie beside each other, our sides bumping gently as the train sways.

  “Talk to me,” she says, her voice hollow with loneliness.

  I hesitate, not sure what she wants to hear. “I was born in a railcar just like this one,” I offer. I feel her surprise through the darkness. “My mother stepped from the stage and had me.” Only my father’s protest, the story went, had kept her from returning to the show immediately after.

  “What was it like growing up in the circus?” With Noa, questions seem to endlessly beget more questions. She is so curious to know and learn it all.

  I contemplate my answer. I hated circus life when I was younger. I longed for a normal childhood, the permanency of staying in one place and having a real home. To be able to own more things than could fit in a single steamer trunk. Even at our winter quarters during the months when I was allowed to go to school, I was different from the other girls, an outsider and an oddity.

  When Erich appeared, it was the escape I’d been looking for my whole life. I tried to dress the part, mold my accent so I sounded like the other officers’ wives. But long after we settled down in Berlin, something was still missing. The apartment was empty, without the sounds and smells of the winter quarters. I missed the noise and excitement of performing on the road. How could people live in one place all of the time and not get bored? I loved Erich and after a while my longing began to fade like a not-quite-healed scar. But I remained haunted by the world I had always wanted to escape. My life with Erich, I see now, had been temporary, like another act in one of our shows. When it ended, I had not shed a tear. Rather, I simply changed costumes and moved on.

  I do not tell Noa any of this, though; it is not what she wants to hear. “Once when I was a girl we performed for a princess,” I say instead. “In Austria-Hungary. The entire tent was filled with her court.”

  “Really?” Her voice is awe-filled. I nod. Empresses are gone now, replaced by parliaments and votes. Better for the people, perhaps, but somehow less magical. Would the circus fade into history, as well? Though no one speaks of it, I sometimes wonder if we are marching toward extinction with each performance, too busy dancing and flying through the air to see it.

  I open the locket around my neck, revealing in the moonlight a tiny photo of my family, the only one I have. “My mother,” I say. She was a great beauty—at least before Isadore had been killed and she had taken to the bottle—magnificent where I am plain, her features Romanesque. “Once, before I was born, the circus traveled to Saint Petersburg and she performed for Czar Nicholas. He was enchanted by her and they said the czarina actually wept. I’m only a fraction of what she was in the air.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone better,” Noa declares too loudly and the girl sleeping on the berth above us snorts in her sleep. Theo stirs and threatens to wake. As I pat his back to soothe him, I wonder if Noa is trying to curry favor with me, but the admiration in her voice sounds sincere.

  “It’s true. She was a legend.” The only two women in a family of males, I would have thought my mother and I would have been closer. She loved me completely but there was a part of her that I could never reach.

  “You and Erich,” Noa asks, and I bristle at the familiarity with which she uses his name. “You never had children?” I am surprised, then annoyed by the unexpected change of topic. She has a way of finding the weak spot, going for the question I can least bear to answer.

  I shake my head. “
We couldn’t.” I’ve wondered so often whether Erich would have fought harder to keep me if there had been a baby. But our child would have been Jewish in the eyes of the Reich—would he have disowned us both? He might have children now—and a new wife, for although I had not signed the divorce papers, the Reich did not acknowledge that our marriage ever existed.

  “And then when you returned to the circus, you fell in love with Peter?” Noa asks.

  “No,” I reply quickly. “It isn’t like that at all. Peter and I are together. Don’t make it more than it is.”

  I feel the train begin to slow. I sit up, wondering if it is my imagination. But the wheels screech as the train stops with a groan. Another checkpoint. Herr Neuhoff procured papers for everyone, even Theo. But they are still not the real thing and at each stop, I am filled with dread. Will they be good enough? Surely Herr Neuhoff had spared no expense in making sure they looked authentic. It would take only one border guard with a sharp eye, though, to notice some detail that was not right. A rock forms on my chest, making it impossible to breathe.

  There is a knock outside the railcar. The door flings open and a border guard steps into the carriage, not waiting for a response. He shines a light around the car, holding it longer than is necessary on the bodies of the girls stirring from sleep. He works his way down the berths, checking each identity card in a perfunctory manner before moving on to the next. I exhale slightly. Perhaps this will be straightforward after all.

  Then he reaches us. “Kennkarte. Ausweis.” I pass him my documents, along with those that Noa hands me. I hold my breath and count, waiting for him to hand them back. One, two...

  Then he takes them and walks from the train.

  I bite my lip so I don’t cry out in protest. “What just happened?” Noa asks, her voice panicked and confused.