The Orphan's Tale(81)

“But it’s gone now,” Noa frets. “They’ll expect more next time.”

“We’ll think of something,” I say. I lie down once more, my throat scratchy from the halo of burnt smoke and coal dust that seems to hang constantly in the air. The cabin, just big enough for Noa, Theo and myself, is scarcely a step above camping, with a roof that leaks and a floor that is mostly dirt. We cannot sleep on the train as we had in Thiers for fear the British RAF pilots might bomb the rail lines. So we have moved to the low cabins, not much more than huts without indoor plumbing, once used as work sheds by workers at the adjacent quarry. Not that they are so much safer. The fairgrounds here are close to the roadway and military vehicles rumble down it all night, making it a prime target for the air raids, as well. Last night the bombs fell so close I pulled Noa and Theo under my cot and we huddled against the cold earth until dawn.

It has been nearly a week since Peter was arrested, taken God only knows where. I see it now in my waking thoughts, like a bad dream I cannot erase. Herr Neuhoff is gone, too, left behind in a hillside grave in Auvergne. I wrap my arms around my stomach, feeling the hollowness and mourning all that will never be. After Erich and my family, I thought I had already lost everything, that nothing more could be taken from me. But this, the final blow, is too much. I had let myself hope again, against every promise I had made myself when I left Berlin. I let myself get close. And now I am paying the price.

Noa presses her hand to my forehead. “No fever,” she says, the relief evident in her voice. Bless her, she tries so very hard to care for me. Her concern is a drop of water, though, unable to fill the ocean of void in my heart.

Noa reaches down and takes both of my hands in hers. “Astrid, I have good news.”

For a second, my heart lifts. Perhaps she has word of Peter. Then I catch myself. Can she bring back the dead? Turn back time? I pull away. “There is no good news anymore.”

“Emmet said you can perform again,” she says, then pauses, watching my face for a reaction. Does she expect me to leap up with joy and change into my practice leotard? Once returning to the trapeze was all I wanted. But it does not matter anymore.

“Let’s go practice,” Noa urges, still trying for all her best to make things better. It doesn’t help at all, but I love her for caring. “Astrid, I know how hard this is. But lying here isn’t going to change things. Why not fly again?”

Because doing the normal things feels like accepting that Peter is gone, I think. A betrayal. “What’s the point?” I ask finally.

Noa hesitates. “Astrid, you must get up again.”

“Why?”

She looks away, as if not wanting to tell me. “Remember Yeta?”

“Of course.” Yeta had survived her fall and been sent to a hospital near Vichy to convalesce. I am suddenly uneasy. “What about her?”

“I asked Emmet about her before we left Thiers and he said she was being sent back to Darmstadt to finish healing. But then I heard the workers whispering that she had been taken from the hospital and sent east on one of the trains.” Noa’s voice drops to a whisper.

“Arrested?” I ask. Like Peter. Noa nods. “No one is arrested for a broken leg, Noa. That’s ridiculous. She didn’t do anything wrong.” But even as I say this, I doubt my own words. These days a person could be arrested for just about anything—or nothing at all.

“They said if she couldn’t perform, then her working papers were no longer valid,” Noa continues. “You have to get better, Astrid, for all of our sakes.” I realize that this was why Noa was so quick to tell the Germans I was not sick. They can smell weakness and want nothing more than to exploit it. “Please come with me to the ring. If you don’t feel well enough to practice, at least watch and tell me what to fix.” Noa’s voice is pleading.

“Performing with a gun to the head,” I say. “Where is the joy in that?” It is not about joy now, though, but survival. And Noa is right: lying here will not change things or bring Peter back. The circus, my act, they are the only things I have. “Fine,” I say, standing up. She takes Theo to the cabin where Elsie is staying as I find my practice leotard and hold it up to the light, remembering the last time I had worn it, feeling Peter’s touch against the fabric. My throat grows scratchy. Perhaps I cannot do this after all. But I put on the leotard. When Noa returns, I let her lead me from the cabin.

We cross the fairgrounds. The workers have done their best to assemble everything, from the beer tent to the carousel, exactly as they had been in Thiers. But the grounds here are abysmal—a dirt field at the edge of an abandoned stone quarry, uneven and pockmarked from fighting that had passed this way earlier in the war.

As we near the big top, I glimpse the trapeze through the open flap. Then I stop. How can I ever fly again, knowing that Peter will not be there to see me?

Noa takes my hand. “Astrid, please.”

“I can do it,” I say, shaking her off.

Inside, I can see that nothing is right. The tent has been shoddily erected with the grounds not properly prepared and with less than half the workers, most local and inexperienced. What would Herr Neuhoff have thought of his grand circus, now in tatters? The will had stipulated that the circus go on, but there are a thousand little details it could not account for, about wages and living conditions and working hours and such. It would be easy to blame Emmet. The downfall of the circus had not begun with him, though; the cracks had been months or years in coming; only now, in this godforsaken village with no one to lead us, the weaknesses have been exposed, their full depth revealed.