“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.”