A moment later, Herr Neuhoff appears at the door of the carriage and gestures to me. “Here,” he says when I reach him. In his thick fingers he holds all of our documents. A strange look crosses his face and I wonder how much he had to bribe the guard to look the other way and not ask too many questions.
As the train picks up speed there is a collective exhale, the whole carriage seeming to relax at once. Everyone is awake now and the girls rise and dress, jostling into one another in the cramped, swaying space. Outside, the sky is lightening, pink behind the dark silhouette of a terraced vineyard, capped by a crumbling church.
Sometime later, one of the kitchen workers appears at the end of the carriage, passing out a breakfast of cold bread and cheese. The countryside begins to thin, farmhouses dotting the fields more frequently. Children peer curiously from the windows of houses and run along the tracks as our brightly painted train cars pass, hoping to catch a glimpse of the animals.
We continue on in silence, traveling over an aqueduct, and a valley unfurls, revealing a red-roofed village beneath stone castle ruins, ringed by fields of withered brush. Mossy-roofed cottages dot the hillside. They are punctuated by the occasional chateau or church with a crumbling belfry, alabaster stone walls warmed by the sun now high in the sky.
A ripple of excitement runs through the coach. Almost there. “We have to get ready for the parade,” I tell Noa.
“Parade?” Noa asks, her brow furrowing.
I sigh inwardly, reminding myself how much she still does not know. “Yes, after we arrive we will get off the train and immediately parade through town on carriages. We offer a preview to get the locals excited about the show.”
I watch her face as she processes this new bit of information, looking for signs of nervousness or fear. But she simply nods, then sets Theo down so she can dress.
The girls begin to primp as well as they can in the cramped space, applying rouge and blackening their eyebrows. “Here.” I pull a pink sequined dress from my trunk and pass it to Noa. She looks around, still embarrassed to change in front of the others. But there is nowhere to go, so she slips it on, nearly stumbling in her haste.
“Will they even come see us?” Noa asks. “The French, I mean? Surely to them we are still German...”
“I thought the same thing the first year after the war began,” I reply. “Not to worry. The people still love the show. The circus has no borders.” The audiences do not see the show as German, and they come faithfully each year.
The train wheels grind to a halt as we near the station. We do not get out right away, but continue preparing as the wagons, which had gone ahead or been leased locally, assemble out front. The animals are unloaded first, their cages placed on wheeled platforms. We shuffle toward the exit, the space becoming cramped and the midday air warm as we await our cue.
At last the door to the carriage is flung open and cool, fresh air wafts in. The station is nearly as packed as the railcar had been, dozens of spectators pressed close, waiting to welcome the circus to town. Flashbulbs pop from cameras in rapid succession. After the quiet of the train the chaos is jarring, like someone turning on the lights too quickly in the nighttime. I stop midstep, causing the girl behind me to bump into my back. I am filled with doubt, unable to move. Usually I love the open road, but suddenly I long for Darmstadt where I know every inch of the land—and where I have a place to hide. Going on the road last year as if it were not wartime was hard enough. Now I have the added burden of making sure that Noa can perform, that she and Theo are kept safe. How can I possibly carry on?
“Astrid?” Noa says in her timid voice. I turn to her. She watches me nervously, uncertain what to do.
I push past my doubts, and take her hand. “Come,” I say and together we step from the train.
Scanning the crowd, I see a look in the eyes of the people, not of scorn but of admiration and hope brought by our arrival. Adults watch us with the wonder of children. The circus had always brought light to the places it visited. Now it is a lifeline. I lift my chin. If we can still give them this, then the circus is not dead. There have been circuses from the times of the Romans and Greeks, our traditions centuries old. We had survived the Middle Ages, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great War. We would survive this, too.
8
Astrid
We make our way across the station platform. The horses, which have been hitched to the beast wagons, stomp their feet impatiently, snorting steam from flared nostrils. In the cages they pull, the lions and lone tiger are on full display. There are camels, too, and a small brown bear, standing alongside the procession on a leash. Last year, we had a zebra, but it died over the winter and Herr Neuhoff had not been able to replace it.
Slowly the parade begins to move, snaking forward toward the village, a spray of faded slate rooftops cast into a hillside with a medieval cathedral at the top watching over it all. Not so very different from the dozens of villages I’ve seen on the road over the years. Once the circus had moved more swiftly, a town a day, setting up and performing two or three times before taking down the chapiteau and moving on at night. But the train lines have slowed us now and the Germans restrict where we can go. So the bookings are chosen more strategically, places where we can camp for a week and draw spectators from the surrounding villages, like spokes on a wheel. Or can we? Noa’s earlier doubts echo in my mind. It has been more than four years of suffering and hardship here. It seems if the war drags on much longer, the people will simply stop coming.
The incline grows steeper and the procession slows as the horses strain against the weight of the wagons. Alongside the roadside there is a small cemetery; a tangle of headstones sits embedded in the side of the hill. At last we reach the edge of Thiers, a tangle of narrow streets lined by three-and four-story houses pressed close, seeming to lean on one another for support. At the top of the high street, the din of the awaiting crowd grows and the air crackles with excitement. A trumpet blares as the parade begins, heralding our arrival. Our open carriage, adorned with streamers and drawn by horses in jeweled headdresses, is near the front, ahead of the lions’ wagon with the trainer riding atop. The grandeur and bright colors of our procession glare against the withered facades of the buildings. The streets are unchanged from the villages in past years. But for the red flags with swastikas hanging from a few buildings, it would be possible to imagine we are not at war.