“What is it?” Noa asks. She bends to read the letter over my shoulder. Then she wraps her arms around me from behind and rocks me back and forth gently. “Astrid, I’m so, so sorry.” I do not answer, but sit silently, letting it sink in that the very worst I had feared is true.
“There’s more to the letter,” Noa says gently several seconds later. She gestures to the paper that lies crumpled in my lap, pointing to the text a few lines down where I had stopped reading after learning about my parents. I shake my head. I cannot. She takes the paper and clears her throat, then begins to read aloud:
I have not been able to find the twins. It may well be that it is only the two of us now. I know that you do not want to leave your husband, but I have arranged for a visa at the Swiss consulate in Lisbon. They say it is good for forty-five days. Please consider coming to me, at least until the war is over, and then you can return. We only have each other now.
Yours, Jules
I try to process it all as Noa hands the paper back to me. The envelope bears official markings from Berlin. Jules had sent it to the apartment Erich and I once shared. Erich must have read it and then sent it on by courier, trying his hardest to make sure it reached me. He had forwarded it to my family’s home in Darmstadt, knowing somehow that I would go there. But there are no winter quarters for my family anymore, so the postmaster must have delivered it to the Neuhoff estate. Perhaps Helga, who remained behind each year to mind the winter quarters in our absence, had corrected my name and forwarded it onward to our first stop in Thiers.
“How did it get here?” I ask.
Noa clears her throat. “Forwarded from Thiers,” she says. I nod. The circus always leaves the address of its next destination behind for bills and other mail. So many stops along the way—the letter might have never reached me at all. But it had.
“My family,” I say out loud. I am not sure what that means anymore. The sob that I have held back for so many months rips from my throat. I am crying then for the brother who had lived and for the so many others who had not. My parents and brothers, all gone.
Or so I have thought these many months. But Jules is alive. I remember our goodbye at the station in Darmstadt a few years ago, made hasty by Erich’s impatience to board the train. I picture Jules as he must look now, a bit older, but still exactly the same. Somewhere a tiny part of our family’s circus dynasty persists, like a seed carried to a new land to be planted.
I look down at the envelope again, which is thicker than it should be if empty. “There’s something else in here.” Two things, actually. I pull out first a bank receipt of some sort. But it is in an unfamiliar language and the only words I recognize are my own name. “What on earth?”
Noa steps forward. “May I see it?” she asks. I hand her the paper. “I can’t read it, but it looks like money for your journey, placed in your bank account in Lisbon.” She hands it back.
I stare at her, dumbfounded. “I have no such account.”
“It looks like it was opened about six weeks ago,” she adds, pointing to the date. “Did your brother put it there?”
I study the paper. “I don’t think so.” There is a lone transaction, a deposit from Berlin. Ten thousand marks, enough money for me to get wherever I need to go, including America.
“Then who?”
I take a deep breath. “Erich.”
Erich, having read Jules’ letter, wanted to make sure I had the resources to go to my brother in America. He had given me the very last and only gift he could—a chance at escape. I shake the envelope one last time and pull out a small card. A German exit permit, also filled out in Erich’s blocky script and bearing the official seal of the Reich. He had thought of everything to make sure I could get out of the occupied territories and reach safety with Jules. Had Erich done it out of guilt or love? Though it is a part of my past before Peter, so long ago it seems almost like a dream, part of me cannot help but ache for the man who cared enough to do all of this, but not enough to fight for us.
“Astrid, you can go to your brother.” Noa’s expression lifts with hope at the prospect of my finding safety. Then conflict crosses her face as she realizes that she will be left behind.
“I can’t leave you,” I say. Suddenly she looks even more young and vulnerable than the day she arrived. How can she possibly manage without me?
“You’ll go. Theo and I will be fine,” she replies, trying without success to force the quaver from her voice. Then, scanning the papers again, she frowns. “Your brother’s letter said the visa is good for forty-five days. The letter took over a month to get here. And there’s no telling how long it will take you to get to Lisbon, or to the States from there. You need to go right away. Tonight. You will go, won’t you?” Noa asks, her voice somehow filled with hope and dread at the same time.
Not answering, I start for the train.
“But Astrid,” Noa calls after me. “I thought we were going to practice. Of course, if you are leaving...”
It doesn’t matter anymore, I finish for her silently. “You go on without me,” I say. “After all the news it is really too much.”
I walk back to the cabin where Elsie is minding Theo. “Darling boy,” I say. His face breaks into a wide smile of recognition. As I go to take him from her, he reaches his arms for me for the very first time. Something inside me wells up then, another wave of sorrow rising and threatening to break. I push it down. Later there will be time for tears. Now I must figure out what to do.
I draw Theo close, holding him in one arm, the pass in the other, as if weighing each on a scale. How can I abandon him and Noa? With Peter gone, they are all I have left in the world—or so I thought, until Jules’s letter came today. Now I must think about him, too. I am the only family he has left. And he worked so very hard to get this visa to me, my one chance at safety; letting it go to waste would be a crime.
Theo swats at my chin with his tiny hand, breaking me from my thoughts. His dark eyes look up at me searchingly. The idea of leaving Noa and Theo alone to face an uncertain fate is unfathomable. There has got to be another way.
My eyes travel to the cot. Beneath it Noa’s trunk and mine are lined up neatly side by side. A plan begins to form in my mind. I set Theo down on the bed, then reach for my bag to pack.
24
Noa