The Orphan's Tale

His eyebrows rise. “Wasn’t that your husband’s surname?”

For a second, I falter, surprised that he had known. Then I nod. Erich had taken everything from me but that. He would never know.

“Plus, I could use your good sense about the business,” he adds. “It’s only me and Emmet.” Herr Neuhoff had been dealt a cruel blow. In the circus, large families are the norm; ours had four brothers, each more handsome and talented than the next. But Herr Neuhoff’s wife had died birthing Emmet and he had not remarried, leaving him alone with just one shiftless heir who had neither the talent to perform nor the head to run the business. Instead, Emmet spent his time gambling in the cities on tour and ogling the dancing girls. I shudder to think what might become of this circus when his father is gone.

“So you’ll stay?” Herr Neuhoff asks. I consider the question. Our two families had not always gotten along. My coming here today had been a change. We were rivals, more so than allies—until now.

I want to say no, to get on a train and keep searching for my family. I’ve had enough of depending on others. But Herr Neuhoff’s eyes are soft; he takes no joy in the misfortune that has befallen my family and is only trying to help. I can already hear the music of the orchestra, and the ache to perform, buried so deep I’d almost forgotten, rises sharply within me. A second chance.

“All right then,” I say finally. I cannot refuse him—and I have nowhere else to go. “We’ll try it. Perhaps on the road, we might hear word of where my family has gone.” He presses his lips together, not wanting to give me false hope.

“You can stay at the house,” he offers. He does not expect me to live in the women’s lodge like a common performer. “It would be good to have the company.”

But I cannot stay up here and hope to have the girls accept me as one of them. “That’s very kind, but I should stay with the others.” As a child, I had always felt more comfortable down in the cabins with the performers. I had yearned to sleep in the women’s quarters, which, despite the too many bodies, smells and noises, had a kind of solidarity.

He nods, acquiescing to the truth in my words. “We’ll pay you thirty a week.” In our circus, money had not been discussed. Wages were paid fairly, with increases over the years. He pulls a paper from the desk drawer and scribbles on it. “Your contract,” he explains. I look at him, confused. With us there had been no contracts—people made verbal agreements and kept them over decades of working together. He continues, “It just says that if you want to leave before the season is over, you will pay us back.” I feel owned in a way I never have before and I hate it.

“Come, I’ll help you get settled.” He leads me out of the house and down the hill in the direction of the cabins. I keep my eyes straight forward, not looking back in the direction of my former home. We near an old gymnasium and my throat tightens. Once my family had practiced here. “They weren’t using it anymore,” he offers, his voice apologetic. But it had been ours. In that moment, I regret the bargain I have made. Working for another circus family feels like treason.

Herr Neuhoff continues on, but I stop in front of the gymnasium door. “I should practice,” I say.

“There’s no need to start today. Surely you will want to get settled.”

“I should practice,” I repeat. If I don’t start now, I never will.

He nods. “Very well. I’ll leave you to it.” As he starts away, I look up from the base of the hill across the valley toward my family home. How can I stay here, so unbearably close to the shadows of the past? I see my brothers’ faces. I will perform where they cannot.

The door to the gymnasium creaks as I pull it open. I set down my valise, twisting my wedding band around my finger. There are a few other performers scattered through the practice hall. Some faces are vaguely familiar, as if from another lifetime; others I do not know at all. At the back of the practice hall by the piano, there is a tall man with a long somber face. Our eyes meet and though I do not recognize him from my circus years, it seems we have met somewhere before. He holds my gaze for several seconds before finally turning away.

I inhale the familiar smell of hay and manure and cigarette smoke and perfume, not so very different. The thick rosin coats the insides of my nostrils and it is as if I had never left.

I take off the wedding band and put it in my pocket, then go to change for rehearsal.

3

Noa

Of course I did not leave him.

I started away from the child, imagining my life just as it had been a few short minutes earlier. The milk truck would go and I could return to my work and pretend none of it ever happened. Then I stopped again. I couldn’t abandon a helpless infant and leave him alone there to die, just as surely as he would have on the train. Quickly I raced to the sour-smelling milk can and pulled him out. A moment later, the engine roared and the truck lurched forward. I clutched the child tighter and he nestled against me forgivingly. His warmth filled my arms. In that second, everything was all right.

The policeman near the train yelled something I couldn’t make out. A second guard appeared on the station platform, holding a snarling Alsatian on a leash. In my panic, I jumped, and the child nearly slipped from my arms. Tightening my hold on him, I ducked around the corner as they raced past me to the train. They couldn’t have possibly noticed one baby missing amid so many. They were pointing, though, from the boxcar door I left open in my haste to my telltale footprints in the snow.

I ran desperately into the station toward the closet where I slept. At the back of the closet there was a rickety ladder leading to the attic. As I reached for it, my foot tangled around a threadbare blanket on the floor. Shaking it off, I started to climb the ladder. But I had only one arm to hold on and I slipped from the second rung, nearly dropping the baby, whose wail rang out, threatening to expose us.

Recovering, I started upward again. The voices grew louder, broken by a sharp bark. I reached the attic, a space with a low ceiling smelling of dead rodents and mold. I hurried through the tangle of empty boxes toward the lone window. My nails ripped as I pried it open. A blast of icy air smacked my face. I leaned forward and put my head through the window, but it was too small. I could not make it past my shoulders.

Below I heard the guards, inside the building now. I pushed the baby quickly through the window and placed him on the sloping, snow-covered roof that overhung the station platform. I steadied him there, praying he did not roll downward or cry out from the iciness against his skin.

I closed the window and hurried down the attic steps, grabbing my broom. As I walked out of the closet, I nearly slammed into one of the guards.

“Guten abend...” I stammered, forcing myself to meet his eyes. He did not respond, but stared at me piercingly.

“Entschuldigen Sie, bitte.” Excusing myself, I walked around the guard, feeling his eyes on me, bracing for his command to stop. I slipped outside and pretended to sweep the coal-tinged snow from the platform until I was sure he wasn’t watching me. Then I raced around the side of the station, staying close to the shadow of the building. I looked up at the low roof, searching for a foothold to reach it. Finding none, I climbed the drainpipe, iciness soaking through my torn tights. As I neared the top, my arms burned. I reached up, praying that the infant was still there. But my fingers closed around emptiness.

My stomach dropped. Had the Germans found the baby? I stretched again, arms straining farther and finding a bit of cloth. I pulled on it, trying to draw the child toward me. But he rolled past my fingertips. I reached for him frantically, grabbing the edge of the cloth diaper just before he fell.

I drew him close to me and scampered down, nearly slipping myself as I struggled to hold on with one hand. At last I reached the ground and tucked the baby securely in my coat. But the Germans were just around the corner, their voices close and angry. Not daring to linger another second, I ran, footsteps breaking the smoothness of snow.

* * *

Hours have passed since I fled the station. I don’t know how many, only that it is deepest night and snowing again, the sky a muted gray. Or it would have been, if I could look up. The storm has grown heavier, though, sharp bits of ice cutting at my eyes and forcing me to tuck my chin once more. I’d gone in the direction away from the hills and toward the shelter of the woods, but the ground that appeared flat in the distance rolls and dips, straining my legs. I cling instead to a smoother path that runs too close to the edge of the forest. I glance nervously at the narrow road that runs parallel to the trees. So far it has thankfully remained deserted.

In the endless blanket of white I imagine our tiny farm, close to the Dutch coast, the air thick with salt and chilled by the North Sea, where I lived with only my parents. Though we had been spared from the air raids that had brought Rotterdam to rubble, occupation had come down hard. The Germans had focused on defending the coastal towns, mining the beaches so we could no longer walk them and billeting soldiers everywhere—which is how I met the one who fathered my child.

He hadn’t forced me. If he had, or if I had pretended it, my parents might have been more forgiving. He had not even tried during the fortnight he stayed at our farm, though I could tell from the long looks across the table that he wanted to. His tall, broad-shouldered presence had been too large in the close cottage space, a piece of furniture that did not fit. We all breathed a sigh of relief once he had been moved to new quarters. But he returned, bringing a half-dozen fresh eggs like we hadn’t seen since before the war, and later chocolate to thank us. I was weary—the war had been raging since I was twelve, taking all of the dances and normal things I might have known as a teenager with it. For the first time with the soldier, not much more than a boy himself, it seemed like I stood out.

So when he came to me in the night, slipping through the back door and into my cold, narrow bed, I’d felt chosen, and excited by his touch—a man so much more certain than the fumbling boys I’d known at school. I didn’t see the uniform, with the same insignia that the SS marching Steffi Klein away had worn. He was just a soldier who had been conscripted into the army. Not one of them. My memories of our one night together are hazy, like a half-forgotten dream of desire and then pain that caused me to cover my own mouth so my parents wouldn’t hear my cry. It was over just as quickly, leaving me with a longing not quite fulfilled and a sense that there should have been more to it.

Then he was gone. The German did not come around again and two days later I learned that his unit had moved on. I knew then I had made a mistake. It wasn’t until about a month later that I realized how serious my mistake had been.

The end came without warning on a spring day warmer than most. Morning sun bathed our seaside village of Scheveningen and gulls called to one another above the inlet. Lying in my bed, it had almost been possible to forget about the war for a few minutes.

Then my bedroom door swung open and the knowledge of the truth raged in my father’s bulging eyes. “Out!”

I stared at him in disbelief. How could he possibly have known? I had told no one. I had not expected to be able to keep it a secret forever, but surely for another month or so, long enough to figure out what to do. Mama, who had walked in while I was dressing a few days earlier, must have seen the slight curve of my stomach. The rest, the timing of when the German had been with us, would not have been so very hard to figure out.

Papa was proud and staunchly Dutch, with a limp from the Great War to prove it. My affair with the German was the greatest betrayal. Surely, though, he did not mean for me, his only daughter and just sixteen, to leave. But the same man who had once laced my boots and carried me on his shoulders now unrelentingly held the door open for me to walk through a final time.

I braced for him to strike me or berate me further, but he simply pointed to the door. “Go.” His eyes did not meet mine.

“No!” Mama cried as I went. There was no strength behind her voice, though. As she ran after me, my heart lifted. Perhaps just this once she would stand up to him and fight for me. Instead she just pressed the money she had tucked away into my palm. I waited for her to embrace me.

She did not.

A horn whistles long and low in the distance. I duck behind a tree as a train appears from the same direction we’d come, snaking a path through the field of white. Though I can’t be sure, from a far distance there is a train car that looks exactly like the one from which I pulled the baby. Headed east, like the other trains of Jews. Babies taken, as my own had been, but from families with two parents who loved, wanted them. Stifling a cry, I step from the trees, wanting to run after it and take other children as I had this one. But the baby’s body sinks warm and heavy in my arms, the lone life I have saved.

Saved—at least for now. Behind the receding train, the sky is lightening to gray in the east. It will be dawn soon and we are still too close to the station. The police could come at any moment. Snow falls heavy, soaking my thin coat and reaching the child beneath it. We must keep going. I push deeper into the woods, out of sight. The air is still with that silence that only snow can bring. My feet are icy bricks now, legs weary. I am weak from the little I’ve eaten in my months at the station and my mouth is dry with thirst. There is nothing beyond the trees but endless white. I try to remember from my journey to the girls’ home months earlier how far it is to the next village. But even if we make it there, no one will risk his own life to shelter us.

I switch the baby to my other hip, brushing the snow from his forehead. How long has it been since he last ate? He has not moved or cried since we left the station and I wonder if he is still breathing. Hurriedly I pull aside into a thick cluster of trees and unwrap him a bit more, keeping him close for warmth. His eyes are closed and he is sleeping—or so I hope. His lips are cracked and bleeding from dehydration, but his chest rises and falls evenly. His bare feet are like tiny bricks of ice.

I scan the forest desperately, remembering the other babies on the train, most already gone. I should have taken some of their clothes for the child. I am repulsed at the thought. I unbutton my coat and blouse, grimacing at the blast of ice and snow against my skin. I hold the baby to my breast, willing some of the thin gray liquid that I’d squeezed out to relieve my discomfort nearly four months earlier to appear in tiny dots. But my movements are clumsy—no one had taught me how to nurse, and the child is too weak to latch on. My breasts ache with longing but nothing comes. My milk is gone, dried up. After I’d given birth, the nurse had told me there were women who would pay for my milk. I’d shaken my head, unwilling no matter how much I needed the money to have that taken from me, too. With my child gone, I was desperate to be done with the whole thing as quickly as possible.

My child. Part of me wishes I had not held my baby that once, that my arms had not memorized the shape of his body and head. Maybe then my arms would not ache every second. Once I had considered what I would have called him. But as names appeared in my mind, a knife of pain shot through me and I had clamped down on the thought. I wonder what he is called now, praying he had reached people who cared enough to give him a really good, strong name.

Pushing thoughts of my own child aside, I study the baby in my arms. His face is squared off a bit around the full cheeks and perfectly pointed at the chin. The shape is distinct and I just know there is a whole family out there—please let them still be out there—with faces exactly that same shape.

Something crackles behind me in the distance beyond the trees. I turn back, squinting to see through the falling snow, but the way we’ve come is obscured by the tangle of branches and brush. My heartbeat quickens. It might be a car engine. Though we are well-hidden by the trees now, there is a road not far from the edge of the woods. If the police followed us, my footprints in the snow would easily lead them here. I hold my breath, feeling like a hunted animal as I strain to listen through the stillness for voices or other sounds. Nothing—at least for now.

Closing my coat, I press forward through the trees. I hold the baby clumsily in one arm, using the other to clear a low branch in front of us. Snow shakes from it and falls down the collar of my coat, icy and wet. My feet, soaked through the patchy secondhand boots, begin to ache.

The baby grows heavier with every step. I slow, breathing heavily, then reach down for a handful of snow to ease the dryness of my mouth, the coldness burning through the holes in my glove. I straighten, nearly dropping the child. Is he thirsty? I wonder if giving him a bit of snow will help or make things worse. Holding him at arm’s length, I am suddenly helpless. There is so much I do not know. Other than those fleeting seconds after I had given birth, I have never held a child, much less cared for one. I want to set him down. Empty-handed I might make it to the next village. He would have died in that train car anyway. Would this be so much worse?

The baby’s hand, no bigger than a walnut, shoots up, grasping for my finger and holding tight. What does he think when he looks up and sees a face different from the one that he had known since birth? He is almost the exact same age that my own child would be. I imagine a mother whose scars still ache like mine. Looking at this child, my heart breaks open. He once had a name. How could a child too young to know his own name ever hope to find his parents? I will him to breathe, to keep going until we can find shelter.

I cradle his head gently before covering it once more. Then redoubling my efforts, I press on. But the wind grows stronger now, whipping the snow-clad branches at me and making it hard to breathe. Stopping a second time had been a mistake. There is no shelter other than the train station for many kilometers. If we stay here, we will die, just as surely as the child would have on that train.

“I can’t do this!” I cry aloud, forgetting in my desperation that I must not be heard.

The wind howls louder in response.

I try to move forward again. My toes are numb now, legs leaden. Each step into the sharp wind grows harder. The snow turns to icy sleet, forming a layer on us. The world around us has turned strangely gray at the edges. The child’s eyes are closed, and he is resigned to the fate that has always been his. I take a step forward and stumble and stand again.

“I’m sorry,” I say, unable to hold him any longer. Then I fall forward and everything goes black.

4

Astrid

The squeak of a doorknob turning, hands pressing against hard wood. At first, they seem part of a dream I cannot quite make out.

The sounds come again, though, louder this time, followed by the scraping of the door opening. I struggle to sit. Sharp terror shoots through me. Inspections have come without warning in the fifteen months since my return, Gestapo or the local police who do their bidding. They have not noticed me yet, nor asked for the ausweis Herr Neuhoff had gotten for me, the identification card I fear will not be good enough. My reputation as a performer is a blessing and a curse in Darmstadt, giving me the means to survive, but at the same time making my false identity a thin veneer, nearly impossible to maintain. So when the inspectors come I disappear into the bottom of one of the tarp-covered wagons, or if there is no time, into the woods. But here in Peter’s cabin, with its lone door and no cellar, I am trapped.

A deep male voice cuts through the darkness. “It’s only me.” Peter’s hands, which I feel so often in the night these past months, stirring me from dreams of the past I do not want to leave, rub my back gently. “Someone has been found in the forest.”

I roll over. “Who found them, you?” I ask. Peter hardly sleeps, but walks at night, prowling the countryside like a restless coyote even in deepest winter. I reach up to touch his stubbled cheek, noting with concern the circles that ring his eyes more darkly now.

“I was down by the stream,” he replies. “I thought it was a wounded animal.” Peter’s vowels are over-rounded, v’s nearly w’s, his Russian accent undiluted by time as though he had left Leningrad weeks and not years ago.

“So naturally, you went closer,” I say, my voice chiding. I would have gone the other way.

“Yes.” He helps me to my feet. “They weren’t conscious so I carried them back here.” His breath holds a hint of liquor, drunk too recently to have gone sour.

“They?” I repeat, the word now a question.

“A woman.” A bit of jealousy passes through me as I imagine him holding someone else. “There was also a child.” He pulls a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket.

A woman and child, alone in the woods at night. This is queer, even for the circus. No good can come from strange happenings—or strangers.

I dress hurriedly and pull on my coat. Below the lapel I can feel the rough outline of torn threads where the yellow star had once been sewn. I follow Peter out into the frigid darkness, tucking my chin low against the biting wind. His cottage is one of a half dozen scattered across the gently sloping valley, private quarters saved for the most senior and skilled of performers. Though my official residence is in the lodge, a long building set apart where most of the other girls sleep, staying with Peter had quickly become the norm. I slip back and forth at night and before dawn with only the slightest pretense.

When I came back to Darmstadt, I had meant to stay only long enough for Herr Neuhoff to find a replacement aerialist and for me to figure out where I was going. But the arrangement worked, and as I prepared to join the circus on the road that first year, my visions of leaving waned. And I met Peter, who had joined the Circus Neuhoff during the years that I was gone. He is a clown, though not the type of buffoon whom noncircus folk normally associate with the title. His performances are original and elaborate and they combine comedy, satire and irony with an artistry that even I have never seen before.

I had not expected to be with anyone again, much less fall in love. Peter is a decade older, and different from the rest of the performers. He had been born to the Russian aristocracy when there was one; some said he was the cousin of Czar Nicholas. In another life we never would have met. The circus is a great equalizer, though; no matter class or race or background, we are all the same here, judged on our talent. Peter fought in the Great War. He had not sustained injuries, at least none that were visible, but there is a kind of melancholy that suggested he has never recovered. His sadness resonated with me and we were drawn to one another.

I start toward the women’s lodge. Peter shakes his head and guides me in a different direction. “Up there.” The light of his cigarette gleams like a torch as he inhales.

The newcomers are at Herr Neuhoff’s villa—also rather unusual. “They can’t stay,” I whisper, though there is no one else around to hear.

“Of course not,” Peter replies. “Just temporary shelter so they wouldn’t die from the storm.” His shadow looms over me. It is not only Peter’s sorrow that makes his greatness as a clown so improbable. He told me once that the first time he had tried to join a circus, they sent him away, saying he was too tall to be a clown. So he’d apprenticed at a theater in Kiev, developed an ironic persona that suited his craggy features and long-legged style and then gone from circus to circus, building fame around his act. Peter’s antics, which often feature a humorous disregard for authority, are known far and wide. Through the war years, his routines had grown more caustic and his hatred of war and fascism less veiled. As his reputation for daring irreverence grew, so did the crowds.