Читать книгу The Orphan's Tale: The phenomenal international bestseller about courage and loyalty against the odds - Pam Jenoff, Пэм Дженофф - Страница 14
ОглавлениеShe 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.
She sits on the bar and swings out, then lets go. I gasp as she starts to fall. But she catches herself by her knees and swings upside down. Her dark hair fans out beneath her, and her inverted eyebrows arch toward the ground. She rights herself and climbs back onto the platform. “Hock hang,” she informs me.
“How did you come to be with the circus?” I ask.
“I was born into a circus family nearby,” she replies. “Not this one.” She hands me the bar. “Your turn, for real this time.” She puts the bar in my hand, adjusting my grip. “Jump and swing by your arms.”
I stand motionless, legs locked. “Of course if you can’t do it, I can just tell Herr Neuhoff that you quit,” she taunts once more.
“No, no,” I reply quickly. “Give me a second.”
“This time you will swing by your arms. Hold the bar down here.” She indicates a spot just below my hips. “Then raise it above your head when you jump off to get height.”
It is now or never. I take a deep breath, then leap. My feet flail and I flop helplessly like a fish on a line, the furthest thing from Astrid’s own graceful movement. But I am doing it.
“Use your legs to take you higher,” Astrid calls, urging me onward. “It’s called the kick out. Like on a swing when you were a child.” I shoot my legs out. “Keep your ankles together.” It is working, I think. “No, no!” Astrid’s voice rises even louder, her dissatisfaction echoing across the practice hall. “Keep your body in a line when you return. First in the neutral position. Head straight.” Her instructions are rapid-fire and endless and I struggle to keep them all in my head at once. “Now kick your legs back. That is called the sweep.”
I gain momentum, swinging back and forth until the air whooshes past my ears and Astrid’s voice seems to fade. The ground slips and slides beneath me. This is not so bad. I had done gymnastics for years and those muscles bounce back now. Not the flips and twists that Astrid had done, but I am managing.
Then my arms begin to ache. I cannot hold on much longer. “Help!” I cry. I had not thought about how to get back.
“You have to do it yourself,” she calls in return. “Use your legs to swing higher.” It is quite impossible. My arms are burning now. I kick my legs forward to increase my momentum. I near the board this time, but it is not enough. I am going to fall, injure myself, maybe even die, and for what? With one last desperate kick, I send myself higher.
Astrid catches the ropes as I near the board, pulling me in and helping me to my feet.
“That was close,” I pant, legs trembling.
“Again,” she says coolly, and I stare at her in disbelief. I can’t imagine getting up there once more after nearly falling, much less right away. But to earn my keep, and Theo’s, I have no other choice. I start to grab the bar once more. “Wait,” she calls. I turn back hopefully. Has she changed her mind?
“Those.” She is pointing to my breasts. I look down self-consciously. They had grown fuller since I’d given birth, even though the milk had since dried up and gone away. “They’re too big for when you are in the air.” She climbs down the ladder and returns with a roll of thick gauze. “Take down your top,” she instructs. I look down at the practice hall below to make sure no one else is there. Then I lower the leotard, trying not to blush as she binds me so tightly it is hard to breathe. She doesn’t seem to notice my embarrassment. “You’re soft here,” she says, patting my stomach, an intimate gesture that makes me pull back. “That will change with training.”
Other performers have begun to trickle into the practice hall, stretching and juggling in opposite corners. “What happened to the last girl, the one who swung with you before me?”
“Don’t ask,” she replies as she steps back to study her work. “For the show, we’ll find a corset.” So she thinks I might be able to do it after all. I exhale quietly.
“Again.” I take the bar and jump once more, this time with a bit less hesitation. “Dance, use your muscles, take charge, take flight,” she pushes, never satisfied. We work all morning on that same swinging motion, kick out, neutral, sweep. I strive hard to point my toes and make my body exactly like hers. I attempt to mimic her patterns, but my motions are clumsy and unfamiliar, a joke in comparison with hers. I improve, I think. But no praise comes. I keep trying, evermore eager to please her.
“That was not awful,” Astrid concedes at last. She sounds almost disappointed that I am not a total failure. “You studied dance?”
“Gymnastics.” More than studied, actually. I practiced six days a week, more when I could. I had been a natural and I might have gone to the national team if Papa had not declared it a worthless endeavor. Though it has been more than a year after I had last trained and my stomach is weak from childbirth, the muscles in my arms and legs are still strong and quick.
“It’s just like gymnastics,” Astrid says. “Only your feet never touch the ground.” A faint smile appears on her face for the first time. Then it fades just as quickly. “Again.”
Nearly an hour passes and we are still working. “Water,” I pant.
Astrid looks at me in surprise, a pet she has forgotten to feed. “We can break for a quick lunch. And then after, we will begin again.”
We climb down. I swallow a capful of tepid water Astrid offers from a thermos. She drops to one of the mats and pulls bread and cheese from a small pail. “Not too much food,” she cautions. “We only have time for a short break and you don’t want to cramp.”
I take a bite of the bread she has offered me, taking in the now-bustling practice hall. My eyes stop on a heavyset man of about twenty in the doorway. I recall seeing him the previous night. Then, as now, he slouches idly, watching.
“Keep an eye out for that one,” Astrid says in a low voice. “Herr Neuhoff’s son, Emmet.” I wait for her to elaborate, but she does not. Emmet has his father’s paunchy build, and he does not wear it well. He is stoop-shouldered, pants gapping a bit where they meet the suspenders. His expression is leering.
Unsettled, I turn back to Astrid. “Is it always this hard? The training, I mean.”
She laughs. “Hard? Here in the winter quarters, this is rest. Hard is two and sometimes three shows a day on the road.”
“The road?” I picture a path, long and desolate, like the one I had taken the night I fled the station with Theo.
“We leave the winter quarters at the first Thursday in April,” she explains. “How’s your French?”
“Passable.” I had studied it a few years in school and found that I took to languages readily, but I had never quite mastered the accent.
“Good. We will go first to a town in Auvergne called Thiers.” That is hundreds of kilometers from here, I recall, seeing the map on the wall of my classroom at school. Outside of occupied Germany. Until last year, I had never left the Netherlands. She continues rattling off several additional cities in France where the circus will perform. My head swims. “Not so many this time,” she finishes. “We used to go farther—Copenhagen, Lake Como. But with the war it isn’t possible.”
I am not disappointed, though—I can hardly fathom traveling farther than Germany. “Will we perform in Paris?”
“We?” she repeats. I realize my error too late: it is one thing for Astrid to include me in the circus’s future plans, but to do it myself is overstepping. “You have to prove yourself before you can join us.”
“I meant, does the circus go to Paris?” I correct quickly.
She shakes her head. “Too much competition from the French circuses there. And too expensive. But when I lived in Berlin—”
“I thought you grew up in Darmstadt,” I interrupt.
“I was born into my family’s circus here. But I left for a time when I was married.” She fiddles with the gold earring in her left ear. “Before Peter.” Her voice softens.
“Peter...he was the man who was with you last night?” The somber man who sat in the corner of my room smoking had spoken little. His dark eyes burned intensely.
“Yes,” she replies. Her eyes turn guarded, like a door snapping shut. “You should not ask so many questions,” she adds, terse once more.
I had asked about only a few things, I want to point out in my own defense. But sometimes one question can feel like a thousand—like the previous night, when Herr Neuhoff asked about my past. There are so many other things I still want to know about Astrid, though, like where her family had gone and why she performs with Herr Neuhoff’s circus instead.
“Peter is a clown,” Astrid says. I look across the practice hall at the handful of other performers who have come in, a juggler and a man with a monkey, but I do not see him. I picture his large Cossack features, the sloped mustache and drooping cheeks. He could not have been anything but a sad clown, so fitting for these dreary times.
As if on cue, Peter enters the practice hall. He does not wear the makeup I would have imagined for a clown, but baggy trousers and a floppy hat. His eyes meet Astrid’s. Though there are others here, I suddenly feel like an intruder in the space between them. He does not come over, but I can feel his affection for her as he studies her face. He walks to a piano in the far corner of the hall and speaks with the man seated at it, who begins to play.
When she faces me, Astrid’s expression is hard and businesslike once more. “Your brother,” she says, “he looks nothing like you.”
I am caught off guard by the abrupt shift of topic. “My mother,” I feign. “She was very dark-skinned.” I bite my tongue, trying to counter my natural instinct of offering too much information. I brace for an onslaught of additional questions, but Astrid seems content to leave it alone and continues eating in silence.
At the end of the theater, Peter is rehearsing an act, goose-stepping with legs straight out, imitating with great exaggeration the march of the German soldier. Watching him, I grow nervous. I turn to Astrid. “Surely he isn’t planning to do that for the show?” She does not answer, but stares at him, her eyes narrow with fear.
Herr Neuhoff enters and crosses the hall with more speed than I would have thought he could manage, given his age and weight. He barrels toward Peter, face stormy. Had he seen Peter rehearsing through one of the windows or had someone told him about the routine? The music stops abruptly with a clatter. Herr Neuhoff confers with Peter. Though his voice is low, he gestures wildly with his hands. Peter shakes his head vehemently. Astrid’s brow wrinkles with concern as she watches the two men.
A minute later Herr Neuhoff clambers toward us, red-faced. “You must talk to him,” he thunders at Astrid. “This new act mocking the Germans...”
Astrid raises her palms plaintively upward. “I can’t stop him. That’s who he is as an artist.”
Herr Neuhoff will not let the matter go. “We keep our heads low, stay out of the fray—that’s how I’ve been able to keep this circus going—and protect everyone.” From what? I want to ask. But I do not dare. “Tell him, Astrid,” Herr Neuhoff urges in a low voice. “He’ll listen to you. Tell him—or I’ll pull him from the show.”
Alarm crosses Astrid’s face. “I’ll try,” she promises.
“Would he?” I cannot help but ask after Herr Neuhoff has walked from the building. “Pull Peter from the show, I mean.”
She shakes her head. “Peter is one of the circus’s biggest draws and his acts are what hold the whole thing together. Without him, there is no show,” she adds. But she is still upset. Her hand shakes as she puts her sandwich away, largely uneaten. “We should keep going and rehearse the next bit.”
I take a bite, swallow hurriedly. “There’s more?”
“You think people will pay just to see you hang there like a monkey?” Astrid laughs harshly. “You’ve only just started. It is not enough to simply swing back and forth. Anyone can do that. We need to dance in the air, do things that seem impossible. Don’t worry, I will line up your trick so that when you release and fly, I’m in place to catch you.”
The bread I’ve just eaten sticks in my throat as I remember the way she tumbled through the air. “Fly?” I manage.
“Yes. That’s why it is called the flying trapeze. You are the flier and you will release and come to me. I will be the catcher.” She starts for the ring.
But I remain in place, feet planted. “Why must I be the one to let go?” I dare to ask.
“Because I would never trust you to catch me.” Her voice is cold. “Come.”
She heads for a ladder on the other side of the room, parallel to the one we’d climbed earlier, but with a sturdier-looking swing. I follow, but she shakes her head. “You go on that side with Gerda.” She gestures to another aerialist whom I hadn’t seen come in and who is already climbing the ladder Astrid and I had used previously. I follow her. At the top, Astrid and I stand on opposite platforms, an ocean apart from one another. “Swing just like before. And when I say, you let go. I will do the rest.”
“And Gerda?” I ask, stalling.
“She will send the bar back for you to catch on the return,” Astrid replies.
I stare at her, not believing. “So I have to let go twice?”
“Unless you have wings, yes. You have to get back somehow.” Astrid grabs the opposite bar and leaps, then swings around so she is hanging by her legs. “Now you,” she prompts.
I jump out, kicking my toes high. “Higher, higher,” she urges, her arms extended toward me. “You have to be above me when I tell you to let go.” I force myself upward, driving with my feet. “Better. On my cue. Three, two, one—now!” But my hands remain stuck to the bar.
“Fool!” she cries. “Everything in the circus depends upon timing, synchronicity. You must listen to me. Otherwise you will get us both killed.”
I manage my way onto the board, then climb down the ladder and meet Astrid back on the ground. “You let go in gymnastics, surely,” she says, clearly frustrated.
“That was different,” I reply. By about thirty-five feet, I add silently.
She folds her arms. “There’s no act without the release.”
“There is no way that I can do this,” I insist. We stare at each other for several seconds, neither speaking.
“You want to go, so go. No one expected more.” Her words shoot out at me like a slap.
“Least of all you,” I retort. She wants me to fail. She does not want me here.
Astrid blinks, her expression somewhere between anger and surprise. “How dare you?” she asks, and I fear I have gone too far.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. Her face softens somewhat. “But it’s true, isn’t it? You don’t think I can do it.”
“No, I didn’t think this would work when Herr Neuhoff suggested it.” Her tone is neutral, matter-of-fact. “I still don’t.”
She reaches out and takes my arm and I hold my breath, hoping for a reassuring word. Instead, she rips the tape off my wrist. I let out a yelp, my skin screaming at the burn. We stare at each other hard, neither blinking. I wait for her to tell me I will have to leave here, as well. Surely they will make us go.
“Come back tomorrow,” she relents, “and we will try it again one last time.”
“Thank you,” I say. “But Astrid...” My voice sounds pleading. “There must be something else I can do.”
“Tomorrow,” she repeats before walking away. Watching her retreat, my stomach leadens. Though grateful for the second chance, I know it is hopeless. Tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, I will never be able to let go.
