The Orphan's Tale

He opens the door to the villa, where I’ve been only for the holiday party Herr Neuhoff throws for the entire circus each December and a handful of other times since my return. We slip inside without knocking. From the top of the staircase, Herr Neuhoff gestures that we should join him. In one of the guest rooms, a girl with long blond hair sleeps in a mahogany four-poster bed. Her pale skin is almost translucent against the rich burgundy sheets.

On the low table beside her, a baby lies in a makeshift bassinet, fashioned from a large woven basket. Moses on the Nile, watching us with dark, interested eyes. The child cannot be more than a few months old, I guess, though I have no experience with such things. It has long lashes and round cheeks that one seldom sees for all of the deprivation these days. Beautiful—but aren’t they all at that age?

Herr Neuhoff nods toward the child. “Before she passed out, she said he is her brother.”

A boy. “But where did they come from?” I ask. Herr Neuhoff simply shrugs.

The girl sleeps soundly. With a clear conscience, my mother might have said. She has thick, blond plaits, like a lass out of a Hans Christian Andersen tale. She could have been one of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, striding along Alexanderplatz with arms linked, singing vile songs about the Fatherland and killing Jews. Peter had described her as a woman but she could not be more than seventeen. I feel so very old and tired by comparison.

The girl stirs. Her arms shoot straight out, searching for the baby in a gesture I know all too well from my own dreams. Then sensing emptiness, she begins to flail.

Watching her desperation, the words run through my head: there is no way that is her brother.

Herr Neuhoff lifts the child and places it in the young woman’s arms and instantly she calms. “Waar ben ik?” Dutch. She blinks, then repeats the question in German: Where am I? Her voice is thin, wavering.

“Darmstadt,” Herr Neuhoff replies. No recognition registers on her face. She is not from these parts. “You are with the Circus Neuhoff.”

She blinks. “A circus.” Though to us it seems quite normal—indeed for more than half of my life it was all I had known—to her it must sound like something from a fantasy tale. A freak show. I stiffen, instantly reverting to the defensive girl facing down stares on the schoolyard. Throw her back out into the snow if we aren’t good enough.

“How old are you, child?” Herr Neuhoff asks gently.

“I’ll be seventeen next month. I fled my father’s house,” she offers, her German smoother now. “I’m Noa Weil and this is my brother.” Her words come too quickly, answering questions that no one has asked.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

A moment’s hesitation. “Theo. We’re from the Dutch coast,” she says with another pause. “Things were very bad. My father drank and beat us. Mother died in childbirth. So I took my brother and we left.” What is she doing here, hundreds of miles from home? No one would flee Holland for Germany now. Her story does not make sense. I wait for Herr Neuhoff to ask if she has papers.

The girl studies the child’s face with darting eyes. “Is he all right?”

“Yes, he ate well before falling asleep,” Herr Neuhoff reassures.

The girl’s brow wrinkles. “Ate?”

“Drank, I should say,” Herr Neuhoff corrects. “Some formula our cook made from sugar and honey.” Surely the girl would know that if she had been caring for the child.

I step back toward Peter, who reclines in a chair by the door. “She’s lying,” I say in a low voice. The fool girl had probably gotten pregnant. One does not speak of such things, though.

Peter shrugs with detachment. “She must have her reasons for running. We all do.”

“You are welcome to stay,” Herr Neuhoff says. I stare at him dumbfounded: What can he be thinking? He continues, “You’ll have to work, of course, when you’re well enough.”

“Of course.” The girl sits up, spine stiffening, at the suggestion that she might expect charity. “I can clean and cook.” I scoff at her naïveté, imagining her in the cookhouse making pancakes and peeling potatoes by the hundreds.

Herr Neuhoff waves his hand. “Cooks and cleaners we have. No, with your looks that would be a waste. I want you to perform.” Peter shoots me a puzzled look. New performers are recruited from across Europe and beyond; the spots are competitive and hard fought, possible only with a lifetime of training. One does not simply find talent on the street—or in the forest. Herr Neuhoff knows that. He turns to me. “You need a new aerialist, yes?” Over his shoulder, the girl’s eyes widen.

I hesitate. Once the act might have had a dozen or more aerialists, throwing parallel passes and somersaulting past one another in midair. But we have only three now and since my return I’d been largely reduced to the corde lisse and Spanish web. “Of course, but she has never performed. I can’t simply teach her the flying trapeze. Perhaps she could ride a horse or sell programs.” There are dozens of easier jobs she can do. What is making Herr Neuhoff think that she can perform? Usually I can scout talent a mile away. Here I see nothing. He is trying to make a duck into a swan and such a plan would only be met with failure.

“We don’t have time to find another aerialist before we go on the road,” Herr Neuhoff replies. “She has the right look. We have almost six weeks until we leave for tour.” He does not meet my eyes as he says this. Six weeks is a blink of an eye compared with the lifetime of training the rest of us have endured. He is asking me to perform the impossible and he knows it.

“She’s too thick to be an aerialist,” I say, appraising her body critically. Even beneath the duvet, it is plump around the hips and thighs. She is weak, soft in the middle with an innocence that suggests she has never known hard work. She would not have survived the night in the snow if Peter had not found her. And she will not last the week here.

Hearing a shuffling sound, I turn. Herr Neuhoff’s son, Emmet, watches from the doorway, his doughy mouth curled as he takes in our disagreement. He had always been an odd child, playing mean-spirited pranks and getting in trouble. “Wouldn’t want to be upstaged, would you?” he sneers at me.

I look away, ignoring him. The girl is prettier than me, I have to admit, cataloging her looks relative to my own in that way all women do. Good looks will not carry her here, though. In the circus what matters is the talent and experience—of which she has none.

“She can’t stay,” Peter says from his chair, the forcefulness of his voice causing me to jump. Herr Neuhoff is a kind man, but it is his circus and even the star performers such as Peter do not dare to disagree with him openly. “I mean, when she’s well enough she’ll have to go,” he clarifies.

“Where?” Herr Neuhoff demands.

“I don’t know,” Peter admits. “But how can she stay? A girl with a baby, people will ask questions.” He is thinking of me, the additional scrutiny and danger their arrival might bring. Though my identity and past are quietly known among the circus folk, we’ve been able to maintain the pretense with outsiders—at least until now. “We can’t risk the attention.”

“It won’t be a problem if she is part of our act,” Herr Neuhoff counters. “Performers join circuses all of the time.”

They used to, I correct in my head. New performers had joined the circus many times over the years—once we had Serbian animal trainers, a juggler from China. Everything had grown leaner in recent years, though. These days there simply isn’t the money to bring on more acts.

“A cousin from one of the other circuses,” Herr Neuhoff suggests, his plan unfurling. Our own performers would know differently, but the story might satisfy the seasonal workers. “If she’s all ready to perform, then no one will notice,” he adds. It is true that the audience would not pay any attention; they come faithfully each year, but they do not see the people behind the performances.

“That’s very kind of you to offer me a place,” the girl interjects. She struggles to rise from the bed without letting go of the baby, but the very effort seems to wind her and she leans back once more. “But we wouldn’t want to be a burden. As soon as we’ve rested and the weather breaks, we’ll be on our way.” I can see the panic in her eyes. They have nowhere to go.

Vindicated, I turn to Herr Neuhoff. “You see, she can’t do it.”

“I didn’t say that.” The girl straightens again, lifting her chin. “I’m a hard worker and I’m sure that with enough training I can.” Suddenly she seems eager to prove herself where a minute earlier she had not even wanted to try, a kind of defiance I recognize from myself. I wonder if she even knows what she is getting herself into.

“But we can’t possibly have her ready,” I repeat, searching for another argument to persuade him that this will not work.

“You can do this, Astrid.” There is a new forcefulness to Herr Neuhoff’s words. He stops a step short of ordering, instead willing me to agree. “You found shelter here. You need to do this.” His eyes burn into me. So this is how my debt is to be repaid. The whole circus had risked themselves to hide me, now I am to do the same for this stranger. His face softens. “Two innocents. If we do not help them, they will surely die. I won’t have that on my hands.” He could no sooner turn her and the baby away than he could have me.

My eyes meet Peter’s and he opens his mouth to protest once more that we would be risking everything. But then he closes it, knowing as I do that arguing further will do no good.

“Fine,” I say at last. There are limits to what Herr Neuhoff can ask of me, though. “Six weeks,” I say. “I will try to have her ready by the time we go on the road. And if not, then she must leave.” It is the most I have ever stood up to him and for a second it is as if we are equals once more. But those are bygone days. I meet his stare, willing myself not to blink.

“Agreed,” he relents, surprising me.

“We start tomorrow at dawn,” I pronounce. Six weeks or six years it does not matter—she will still not be able to do it. The girl watches me closely and I wait for her to protest. She remains silent, though, a hint of gratitude in her wide, fearful eyes.

“But she was nearly frozen,” Herr Neuhoff protests. “She’s exhausted. She needs time to recover.”

“Tomorrow,” I insist. She will fail and we will be done with her.

5

Noa

She comes for me before dawn.

I am already awake, wearing a dressing gown that is not my own. Moments earlier, I bolted upright, shaken. I’d dreamed that I had gone back to the railcar at the station a second time, not just to save more babies but because I somehow knew that my own child was among them. But when I pulled open the door to the train car it was empty. I reached into the pitch-blackness and shrieked as my arms closed around nothing.

I’d awoken from the dream, hoping I had not screamed aloud and startled others in the strange house. I fought to close my eyes again. I had to go back and save my child. But the image was gone.

As my trembling ebbed, I reached for the baby, who slept peacefully in the basket they had made into a bassinet by my bedside. I pulled him to me, his warmth soothing. I adjusted my eyes to the still room, partly lit by the moonlight that filtered in through curtains held back by braided ropes. A low fire burned in the corner. The fine furnishings were grander than any I’d ever seen. I recalled the odd faces assembled when I’d awoken the previous day, the round circus owner and the woman who looked at me with such distaste and the long-faced man who had sat in the chair watching, like the cast of characters from a story my mother read to me as a child. The circus, they said—it is hard to believe that such a world still exists even during the war. I might have been less surprised to find myself on the moon. I had been to the circus only once when I was three and I cried at the glaring lights and loud noises until my father had taken me out of the tent. And now here I am. It is strange, but no stranger than finding a boxcar full of infants, or any of the things that have happened to me since leaving home.

I gaze down at the baby, freshly bathed and nestled in my arms. Theo, I’d called him without thinking when they asked. I don’t know where the name had come from. He sleeps in the crook of my elbow and I hold still so as not to disturb him. His face is peaceful, cheeks now rosy. Where had he slept before being put in the train? I imagine a warm crib, hands that patted his back to soothe him. I pray that my own child is sleeping somewhere just as safe.

The previous evening they had spoken about me as though I was not there. “She’s got a circus look about her, don’t you think?” the circus owner had said when my eyes were closed and they thought I wasn’t listening. They were sizing me up like a horse they were about to buy. I wanted to stand and say thank-you-but-no-thank-you, to pick up the baby and walk into the night. But the fierce winds still howled and through the window the hills were an unbroken sea of white. If I started out with Theo again, we would not make it to another shelter. So I let them talk about me. This isn’t our place, though. We will stay long enough to save some money and then leave. Where we will go exactly, I don’t know.

“You’ll be paid ten marks a week,” the circus owner had said. The price seemed shrewd, but not so low that he was taking advantage. Should I have asked for more? Perhaps it was a generous sum for one who had never performed. I know so little about money, and I am hardly in a position to bargain.

After the circus people had finished talking about me, they had left the room and I’d fallen asleep. I’d awoken once and found my way to the water closet in the darkness. A few times something rumbled in the distance, seeming to echo off the hills. Air raids perhaps, like the ones I’d heard so many times at the rail station. But they were not close enough to cause alarm.

No one had come to the room again—until now. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I slide from the bed carefully so as not to wake Theo, wanting to open the door before anyone knocks. The woman they had called Astrid, the one who had watched me so disdainfully the previous night, stands before me now in the semidarkness, the moonlight behind giving her a strange glow. Her jet-black hair is bobbed short and curled at the ends, framing her face. She wears no jewelry except for a pair of gold earrings with a small crimson gem in each. She is beautiful in an exotic way with too-large features that fit together perfectly. She does not smile.

“You’ve slept long enough,” she declares without greeting or introduction. “Time to get up and start working.” She throws a leotard in my direction, faded and mended at the toe. “You’ll need to wear this.” I have no idea where my own clothes, soaked and tattered, have gone. I wait for her to leave so I can change, but she simply half turns away. “We haven’t a day to lose. I will train you—or attempt to, anyway. I don’t think you can manage it, but if you do, you may travel with us.”

“Train to do what, exactly?” I ask, wishing I had thought to ask the previous evening before saying I could do it.

“Learn the flying trapeze,” she answers.

I had heard them discuss this the previous evening. They used the word “aerialist,” I recall now. Through the fog of my exhaustion, I had not contemplated what it really meant. Now the outrageousness of the proposal crashes down upon me: they want me to climb to the ceiling and risk my life swinging like a monkey. I’m not captive here. I don’t have to do this. “That’s very kind of you, but I hardly think...” I don’t want to offend her. “I can’t possibly do that. I can clean, or perhaps cook,” I offer, as I had the night before.

“Herr Neuhoff owns the circus,” she informs me. “This is what he wants.” Her diction is polished, as if she is not from around here. “Of course if you can’t manage it...you have maybe a rich uncle waiting to take you in?” Though her tone is mocking, she has a point. I cannot go back to the station where surely the baby and I have both been noticed missing by now. On my own I might have kept running. But the bitter cold had nearly killed us once. We would not make it a second time.

I bite my lip. “I’ll try. Two weeks.” Two weeks will give me time to get stronger and find somewhere for Theo and me to go. We will not, of course, stay with the circus.

“We were going to give you six.” She shrugs, not seeming to care. “Let’s go.” I change into the leotard as modestly as I can beneath the gown.

“Wait.” I hesitate, looking at Theo, who still sleeps on the bed.

“Your brother,” she says, emphasizing the second word. “Theo, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She hesitates for a beat, watching me. Then she picks him up. I fight the urge to protest, the notion of anyone else holding him unbearable. She places him into the makeshift bassinet. “I’ve asked the housemaid, Greta, to come up and watch him.”

“He’s colicky,” I say.

“Greta has raised eight of her own. She’ll manage.”

Still I hesitate. It is more than just Theo’s care that concerns me: if the maid changes his diaper, she will learn that he is a Jew. I take in his clean outfit and realize it’s too late. Someone already knows the truth about his identity.

I follow Astrid down the stairs of the darkened house, the air musty and burnt. Then I put on my still-damp boots, which stand by the front door. She hands me my coat, and I notice that she does not wear one. Her figure is flawless, lean legs that belie her strength and a perfectly flat waist like I’d had before the baby. She is shorter than I thought the previous day. But her body is like a statue, elegant lines seemingly carved from granite.

Outside, we pad silently across the open field, our footsteps crackling against the ice. The air is dry and milder, though; had it been like this a day ago, I might have made it farther into the woods without collapsing. Moonlight shines down brightly. The night sky is filled with stars and for a second it seems that each is for one of the infants on the train. Somewhere, if they are still alive, Theo’s parents are wondering where their child has gone, hearts crying out in anguish, just as my own does. I look at the sky and send up a silent prayer, wishing they might know their son is alive.

Astrid unlocks the door to a large building. She flicks a switch and lights splutter on overhead. Inside, it is a run-down gymnasium that smells of sweat, old tumbling mats rotting in the corner. It is dingy and worn, worlds away from the glamour and sparkle I’d always associated with the circus.

“Take off your coat,” she instructs, stepping closer. Her bare arm brushes mine. My own pale skin is marred a thousand times with moles and scars, but Astrid’s is a smooth, unbroken canvas of olive, like a lake on a day without wind. She produces beige tape that she wraps around my wrists slowly and methodically, then kneels and covers my legs with chalk, taking care not to miss a single spot. Her nails are perfectly polished, but her hands are lined and coarse, unable to hide the years the way her face and body can. She must be close to forty.

Finally she pats a thick powder onto my hands. “Rosin. You must keep your hands dry always. Otherwise, you will slip. Do not assume the net will save you. If you hit too hard it will drop to the floor or you’ll be thrown off. You must land in the center of the net, not by the edge.” There is no warmth in her voice as she rattles off instructions, practiced over time, that will help to keep me from falling, or killing myself if I do. My mind reels: Does she actually think I can manage this?

She gestures that I should follow her to a ladder that stands close to one of the walls, bolted perfectly upright. “The act will have to be simplified of course,” she says, as if reminding me that I can never possibly be good enough. “It takes a lifetime of training to truly become an aerialist. There are ways to compensate so that the audience will not notice. Of course, there is no room for conjuring in the circus. The audience has to trust that all of our feats are real.”

She begins to climb the ladder with the ease of a cat, then looks down expectantly to where I stand, not moving. I scan the length of the ladder to the high ceiling. The top must be at least forty feet from the ground, with nothing below but a tired-looking net just a meter or so off the hard floor. I have never been afraid of heights, but I’ve had no cause: our house in the village was a single story and there were no mountains for hundreds of kilometers. I’ve never imagined anything like this.

“There has to be something else,” I say, a note of pleading creeping into my voice.

“Herr Neuhoff wants you to learn the aerial act,” she replies firmly. “The trapeze is actually easier than many of the other acts.” I can’t imagine anything more difficult. She continues, “I can guide you, put you where you need to be. Or not.” She looks at me evenly. “Perhaps we should go tell Herr Neuhoff that this isn’t going to work out.”

And have him cast you out into the cold, seems her unspoken conclusion. I’m not sure the kind-faced circus owner would actually do that, but I don’t want to find out. More important, I’m not going to give Astrid the satisfaction of being right.

Reluctantly, I begin climbing rung by rung, trying not to tremble. I tighten my grip, wondering when the bolts had last been checked and whether it is sturdy enough for both of us. We reach a tiny ledge, scarcely big enough for two people. I wait for Astrid to help me onto it. When she does not, I carefully squeeze myself on, standing too close beside her. She unlatches a trapeze bar from its catch.

Astrid leaps from the platform, sending it rocking so that I grasp for something to hold on to to keep myself from falling. I marvel at how she swings easily through the air, somersaulting around the bar, twirling with just one hand. Then she opens her body like a diving gull, hanging upside down beneath the bar. She rights herself and returns, aiming for the platform and landing neatly in the tiny space beside me. “Like that,” she says, as though it were easy.

I am too stunned to speak. She hands the bar to me. It is thick and unfamiliar in my hand. “Here.” She adjusts my grip impatiently.

I look from her to my hands, then back again. “I can’t possibly. I’m not ready.”

“Just hang on and swing,” she urges. I stand frozen. There have been moments when I have acknowledged death—during childbirth when life seemed to rush from my body, when I saw the babies on the train, and as I struggled through the snow with Theo just days earlier. But it lies before me more real than ever now in the abyss between the platform and the ground.

An image of my mother pops improbably into my mind. In the months since I had been gone, I’d struggled to push away thoughts of home: the patchwork quilt on my bed tucked in the alcove, the corner nook by the stove where we used to sit and read. I have not allowed myself to think of such things, knowing that if I allowed even a trickle of memories I would be drowned in a flood I could not stop. But homesickness washes over me now. I do not want to be here on this tiny platform about to leap to my death. I want my mother. I want to be home.

“Are there other aerialists?” I ask, stalling for time.

Astrid hesitates. “Two others, and one of them will help us when we get further along. But they will primarily be working on the cradle swing, or the Spanish web, which is my other act. They will not be working with us.” I am surprised. I imagine that the flying trapeze is the centerpiece of the show, the goal for any aerialist. Perhaps they do not want to work with me either.

“Come now,” she says, before I can ask further. “You can sit on the swing, if you aren’t ready. Pretend you are on a playground.” Her tone is condescending. She takes the bar and draws it close to me. “Balance just below your backside,” she instructs. I sit on it, trying to get comfortable. “Like that. Good.” She lets go. I swing out from the platform, grasping the wires on either side so tightly that they cut into my hands. There is a kind of natural flow to it, like getting your feet under you on a boat. “Now lean back.” Surely she is joking. But her voice is serious, her face unsmiling. I lean back too fast and upset my balance, nearly slipping from the seat. As I swing back closer to the platform, she reaches out and grabs the ropes above the bar, pulling me onto the board and helping me off.