The Orphan's Tale(45)

It seems so improbable, a Jewish baby finding its way to the circus and to me—another Jew. What were the odds of that happening? But we are not the only ones, I remind myself. I had been with the Circus Neuhoff about a month when I realized I was not the only Jew. I had spotted an unfamiliar man across the dining hall on the side where the workers sat, a slight, quiet laborer with a trim graying beard and a limp who kept to himself. One of the girls said he was a handyman called Metz, good at fixing small things, and so I went to him with my watch, a treasured sixteenth birthday gift from my father that no longer ran.

Metz’s workshop was contained in a small shed at the edge of the winter quarters. I knocked and he bade me enter. Inside the air smelled of fresh wood and turpentine. Through a door at the rear, I could see a narrow bed and a washbasin. Small appliances and broken machine engines filled the shelves and covered the floor of the cramped space. Scattered among them were clocks of different sizes and makes, more than a dozen of them. “I was a clockmaker in Prague before the war,” Metz said. I wondered how he had come to be here, but circus folk did not share much of their past. It was always best not to ask. I handed him the watch and he examined it.

As he opened a drawer to find tools I saw it: a tarnished silver mezuzah. Keeping it could have cost him his life. “Is that yours?” I asked, in spite of myself.

Metz wavered, perhaps no more knowing of my past than I his. I assumed my Jewish background was not a well-kept secret among the circus folk, but he had come during the years I was gone and perhaps had not heard. He lifted his chin slightly. “Yes.”

At first I was alarmed: Did Herr Neuhoff know about this other Jew? Of course he did—he was sheltering this man just like me. I should not have been surprised. I had assumed Herr Neuhoff had taken me in only to help the show, and perhaps as a favor to an old family friend. His kind of courage was boundless, though, and he would not have turned away a person in need, whether a star performer or a simple laborer or a child such as Theo with no skills at all. It was not about the circus or family connections, but human decency.

Herr Neuhoff had not told us of one another, though, perhaps trying to protect us in anonymity. “Beautiful.” I paused. “My father had one just like it.” A silent kinship passed between us.

But the mezuzah sat in plain sight at the front of the drawer, threatening his safety—and mine. “Perhaps you should be more careful with that.”

The clockmaker looked at me evenly. “We cannot change who we are. Sooner or later we will all have to face ourselves.”

A week later he returned the watch to me, refusing to accept money for the work. We have not spoken again since that day.

We reach the edge of the fairgrounds. I carry Theo, whose eyelids have begun to droop, across the backyard. It is a warm spring day and those who can rehearse outside. The sword swallower practices an act where he seems to cut an assistant in two and farther afield one strongman attempts to run over another with a motorized bicycle. I cringe. The acts had grown grimmer since the end of the Great War, as though people needed to see near death in order to be thrilled—mere entertainment was not enough anymore.

My heart lifts as I glimpse Peter behind the big tent, rehearsing. I have seen so little of him since our arrival in Thiers. We are too busy and too exhausted. Even on Sundays like today, our time together is not what it should be. Watching him now, my longing grows. With Erich it had always been straightforward, the way a man and a woman were supposed to be together. But Peter makes love with wild hands and lips where they have never been before and where I least expect them.

Peter is rehearsing the act I know too well, the one that mocks the Nazis’ straight-legged goose-stepping—the very routine Herr Neuhoff ordered him not to perform. I had hoped after the other night’s show, when he had not done the routine, that he had given up on it. He is practicing those unmistakable moves right now, though, with more determination than ever. The circus has always had to tread lightly on politics. There was a story once about an Austrian circus that had met its demise by putting a pig in a pickelhaube, a Prussian military helmet and uniform. But Peter seems more and more reckless these days and his skit, while subtle, is pointed enough that no one would miss the fact it was ridiculing the Germans.

Remembering, I shudder. I should have been more forceful, asked him to stop. This is not some game, poking at an animal with a stick. We have everything to lose. But watching him, my admiration grows: he is standing up to the Germans in his own way and fighting, not simply accepting what is happening and the restrictions that have been placed on us, leading to our own inevitable demise.

Or is it just the liquor that is making him bold? His raised foot wobbles midair and he sets it down hurriedly, so as not to fall. Peter has been drinking—something I can no longer ignore now that Noa had confirmed it. I am no stranger to alcohol. I had seen it among the performers in our own circus, and even with my mother when things got to be too much. Once with Peter it had been benign, a few extra glasses of wine in the evenings. I had not minded; in fact, I welcomed the way it seemed to make him more open. In front of others he spoke little. “Astrid,” he would say when we were alone and I watched the drink take effect, dilating his pupils. He would really talk to me in those times, rambling tales of his boyhood in Russia before the Great War. For a moment I could see inside a bit and actually know him.

But it is different now—his drinking is getting worse. I can smell it on him in the mornings and there is an unsteadiness about him in the arena. If Noa noticed, it is only a matter of time before Herr Neuhoff does, too. Dread seeps through my skin. Drinking before practice or a show could get even the greatest performer fired. The circus cannot afford accidents and there will be no safe quarter for a performer who is sloppy or careless. And he was drinking on the first day of the tour, when things should have been fresh and new. What will it be like a month from now, when life on the road really begins to wear thin?