Peter falls into an instant slumber, one arm flung over his head in a gesture replicating surrender, the other heavy across my chest. He sleeps fitfully, though, tossing and fighting a battle beneath eyelids that never quite still. I wonder what he sees, a chapter from a book I have never read. I run my hand soothingly over him until he quiets.
We became lovers the previous summer on the road. At first we would spend evenings sitting by the fire in the backyard behind the big top long after the others had gone to bed. Only later came the nights together like this one, finding warmth and company with each other. There is sadness in him, a tragedy about which I do not dare ask. Sometimes it is as if in his feverish movements he is trying to reclaim the past. I have not told him details about my years away from the circus with Erich either. Life with Peter is about the here and now. We are with each other just to be—a relationship based neither on a shared past nor future promises that we might not be able to keep. The part of me that might have wished for more from a man died the day I left Berlin.
I stare up at the ceiling beams that rock back and forth with the movement of the train. The previous morning we’d arisen before dawn. The load-in had begun hours earlier, an endless array of boxcars emblazoned with the circus logo, filled with boxes and tent poles. The workers had been up all night and their cigarette smoke and sweat seemed to encircle the train in great rings. The animals went last just before us, blanket-covered elephants urged inch by inch up ramps, big-cat cages painstakingly rolled onto the cars. “Eee!” Theo cried as he spied the last of the elephants being shoved in, four workers pushing against its massive backside. I had to smile. To us circus folk, even the children, the exotic beasts had become commonplace. When was the last time anyone here had marveled at an elephant?
Peter has a private compartment, half a railcar, cordoned off with a makeshift wall. It is nothing compared with the luxury in which my family had traveled: we’d had two carriages, our own beds, private bath and dining table, almost a miniature house on rails. Of course, that had been the heyday of the circus, the golden era.
I touch my right ear reflexively, feeling for the gold earring that had been my mother’s, running my fingertip over the small, uneven ruby. There has been no sign of my family since my return to Darmstadt. My hope of hearing word of them when I went on the road with the Circus Neuhoff the previous year had failed. I could not ask anyone directly lest they make the connection between me and my true identity. And when I made casual references in the cities where we had once performed, people just said that the Klemt circus had not come that year. I’d even sent a letter to Herr Fein, the booking agent in Frankfurt who had arranged the tour for my family’s circus in the larger cities, hoping that perhaps he would know where my family had gone. But it had returned with a scrawl across the front: Unzestellbar. Undeliverable.
Shadows race past along the wall of the carriage. We’ve been on the train for thirty hours, longer than we should have been but for the detours around where stretches of track have been damaged or destroyed. The train sat motionless for hours somewhere close to the border while British warplanes roared overhead and bombs fell so close that they shook our bags from the racks. But now we amble easily across the rolling countryside.
My eyes start to grow heavy, lulled by the rocking of the train and the warmth of passion Peter and I had just shared. I draw his blanket around me as cold air seeps through the cracked window. It’s too cold to be on the road. The railcars are poorly heated, the cabins at the fairgrounds meant for summer.
The program had been set, though. We had started out on the first Thursday in April as we had the previous year. Once the circus would have gone where the money was plentiful, the wine-soaked valleys of the Loire and wealthy villages of Rh?ne-Alpes. Now we perform where we are permitted, a schedule the Germans set. That the Reich has agreed the circus may continue still all these years is no small thing. They trot us through occupied France as if to say, “See, life is still normal. How bad can it all be if such fun still exists?” But we represent everything Hitler hates: the freaks and oddities in a regime that is all about conformity. They will not permit us to go on forever.
The train slows, screeches to a halt. I sit upright, disentangling myself from Peter’s arm. Though we had crossed the border into France hours earlier, checkpoints might come at any time. I jump up, fumbling for my ausweis and other documents. We begin to move again, the slowdown temporary. I sit on the edge of the bed, my heart still pounding. We are close to the line that once divided Vichy from Occupied France. Though both are now controlled by the Reich, there will surely still be an inspection of the train. When—not if—the guards come, I want to be one among a dozen girls in the sleeper car, not in Peter’s cabin, risking more scrutiny of my identity and papers than if I simply blend in with the others.
I climb from the bed, dressing quickly in the icy air. Tiptoeing quietly so as not to wake Peter, I slip into the next car, secondhand and frayed and stale-smelling, where the girls sleep, berths stacked atop each other three high. Despite the cramped quarters, there are real linens, not bedrolls. Beneath the bunks small steamer trunks are lined up neatly, one for each of us.
Noa sleeps on one of the low bunks, clutching the baby to her chest like a stuffed animal. Her face seems even younger in slumber, unlike the night she had come to us. She is backfisch, my mother would have said, on the verge of womanhood. Watching her embrace Theo, something tugs inside me. We had both been abandoned, exiled in our own way from the lives we had known.
But this is no time for sentimentality. Whether she will be able to perform as we need her to—that is the only thing that matters. As an aerialist, it is not enough to be technically good. It is personality, flair, the ability to make the audience hold its breath, as if fearing for their own lives right along with ours. Similarly, mere appearance and personality would not suffice—even the most beautiful woman would not survive a season on the circuit without the pure physical grace, agility and strength to back it up.
Noa has surprised me so far. I had thought she would give up after the first day, that she would never fly. I had not counted on her gymnastics training, though, or her tenacity. She has worked hard and she is smart and capable. And brave—her rescuing Theo from the Nazi car had more than proved that. She’s as good as she can possibly be, though it will all hang on whether she can perform under the lights in front of hundreds of people two and three times per day.
Another girl has taken the berth where I was meant to have slept, so I squeeze into the narrow strip of berth beside Noa. But I cannot sleep. Instead I rehearse our opening performance that evening, marking the movements in my mind.
Beside me Noa stirs and shifts in a slow, practiced way so as not to wake Theo. “Are we there yet?”