It was only because of me that he was considering acquiescing at all. “Don’t stop yourself on my account.” I did not want Peter to have to sacrifice his art for me and resent me after.
Now the workers have just finished securing the trapeze. The foreman, Kurt, has them do this before the seats and other apparatuses, knowing that I will want to practice right away. I walk to where he is conferring with two laborers about the angle at which the benches are to be set. “Has the ground been leveled?” I ask. He nods. It matters a great deal for the trapeze. The slightest unevenness in the earth could affect the speed at which we fly and destroy the precision of our routine—causing me to miss catching Noa.
I walk to one of the ladders and give it a firm tug to make sure it is secure. Then I climb up to the fly board. From below comes the murmur of some of the dancers, chatting as they stretch. I leap without hesitating. The air rushes beneath me and I stretch forth. As always in this moment I feel sixteen again, the sound of my family’s laughter ringing in my ears as I fly. When I first came back to the circus, I wondered if the time away would have made me slower, if I could remember the moves. I was in my late thirties, perhaps too old for this. Others by now had retired to teaching or marriage or seedy cabarets in Dresden or Hamburg. But the air was all I had known. I was good at it still. Why shouldn’t I keep going? In a few weeks my body thinned, the richness of those long dinners in Berlin melting from my midsection, and I was as good as I had ever been—better even, Herr Neuhoff remarked once. I could not tell him that I flew higher and flipped harder to reach a place in the dark eaves of the big top where I could hear my brothers’ laughter, and where Erich’s rejection could no longer find me.
As I swing back up to the board a few minutes later, the chatter of the performers below stops abruptly and the tent grows quiet. Noa stands at the entrance to the big top, looking young and scared. The other performers eye her warily. They have not been awful in the weeks since she joined us, but they’ve been distant, making clear that she does not belong. It is always hard for new performers at the circus. Indeed, they had hardly welcomed me with open arms when I returned. And it is even more difficult for someone like Noa, who is seen as not qualified, too inexperienced to succeed.
But am I any better? I wonder. I, too, had treated Noa coldly in the beginning, wished that she would go. Though I have accepted her since the police came to Darmstadt, I have viewed her as a necessity, part of the act. I have not done anything to make her truly welcome.
Suddenly guilty, I climb down the ladder to her. I ignore the others, willing her to do the same. “Are you ready?” Noa does not answer but looks around the tent. To me this is normal, almost all I have known. But I see it as she does now: the cavernous space, rows of seats being assembled endlessly after one another.
I take her hand and stare hard at the others until they look away. “Come. The ladders are looser here than in the practice hall. And everything shakes a bit more.” I keep talking as we climb, partly to ease her nerves and partly because there are things—important things—she needs to know about the differences between Darmstadt and the big top. After a lifetime I can perform anywhere—the scenery fades and it is just me and the bar and the air. For Noa, though, every little detail could make a difference.
“Let’s start with something simple,” I say, but there is terror in her eyes as she gazes downward. She is going to fold. “Pretend they aren’t there.”
She takes the bar with shaking hands and jumps. At first she is jerky, reminiscent of her first day on the trapeze. “Feel for it,” I urge, willing her to remember all I have taught her. As she falls into the familiar forward-and-back rhythm, her movements smooth.
“Good,” I say as she returns to the board. I have been sparing with my compliments, not wanting to make her complacent. But now I offer more than usual, hoping to bolster her confidence. She smiles, drinking in my praise like water. “Now let’s practice your release.”
Noa looks as if she wants to protest. I have no confidence that she is ready to do it here, but we have no choice. I go to the other ladder and climb to the catch trap, nodding at Gerda, who has been loitering with a few of the acrobats. She starts up the ladder behind Noa with disinterest. I study Gerda warily. She is no more welcoming to Noa than the other performers, but practical enough to tolerate her because we need her for the act.
As Noa nears the top of the opposite ladder, her foot slips and she nearly falls. “Easy,” I call from my board. Though I mean it as reassuring, it comes out sounding like a rebuke. From below come laughs from the other performers, as their suspicions about Noa’s lack of skill have been confirmed. Even from a distance, I can see her eyes begin to water.
Then her back stiffens and she nods. Noa jumps with more force than I have seen from her. “Hup!” I call.
She releases with surprising precision for her first time in the big top. Our hands lock. Once there would have been a coach on the ground to give the commands, and men to do the catching. But with so many gone to war, we have only ourselves now. My brother Jules had been my catcher. Until these past few weeks of training Noa, I had not fully appreciated his strength and skill.
As we swing back, I release her in the direction of the bar, which Gerda has sent out. With every pass, Noa’s movements become stronger. She is performing in spite of—no because of—the skepticism of the other performers. Grudgingly the expressions below turn to respect. My hope rises. Noa has earned their respect and she will earn the audience’s, too.
“Bravo!” a voice calls out from below. But the tone is mocking. Noa, who is on the return, nearly misses the far board. Gerda reaches out and grabs her before she falls. I look down. Emmet is holding a mop high in the air, mocking Noa.
I climb down the ladder angrily. “You fool!” I hiss.
“She’s not an aerialist,” Emmet replies with exaggerated patience, as though speaking to a small child. “She was a cleaner at the station in Bensheim. That’s all she’s qualified to do.” Emmet, I know now, has been stirring up ill will among the other performers, encouraging them not to accept Noa. He has always needed to pick on others to hide his own weakness. But how had he found out she worked at the station? Surely he does not know the rest of Noa’s past.
“Why now?” I demand. “The show is in an hour. We need her ready and you are undermining her confidence.”
“Because I didn’t actually think we would go through with this farce,” he replies. Or that she would be able to do it, I add silently. A part of him, I suspect, is jealous. Noa has been able to manage mightily with just weeks of practice, whereas he has been here a lifetime with no talent to show for it. But it seems unwise to point this out to him now. “This needs to work, Emmet,” I say slowly.
“For your sake,” he sneers.