My eyes clear. I am still standing before the boxcar in the museum exhibit, staring at the empty berth. I can almost feel Noa lying beside me, cheek warm against mine as our breaths rise and fall in unison.
It was still dark when Noa’s porcelain eyes closed for the last time. I had seen broken bodies before—the clockmaker and even once a trainer gored by a tiger. But Noa was beyond all of that. The heavy poles that had crashed down upon her had crushed her legs and likely broken her back. She could have just fled when the fire broke out. She had come back to save me, though—and it had cost her everything.
I brush at my eyes now, remembering. Though I’d had many brothers, she was so much closer, the sister I never had. I’d been ready to give up my freedom for her. Of course that was out of the question with her injuries. Looking down at her piteous face and helpless, broken body, I could not bear to leave her. I was Theo’s only hope for survival, though. So I waited until Noa’s eyes had closed for the last time and then I set out across the barren field, Theo tucked firmly against me. I stood straighter, truly on my own for the first time.
Providence seemed to smile on Theo and me during our escape, as if saying we had already suffered enough. We’d made it to Lisbon mostly by train then on foot into the city itself. There the visa my brother had arranged was waiting at the consulate. Though the city was teeming with refugees desperate to flee, the money Erich had deposited was enough to buy us a place on board a steamer. Little breaks of luck, when before there had been so few. Perhaps it was more than I deserved.
A few weeks after our ship reached New York, we received word that the Allies had landed and were headed toward Paris. The end of the war, though not here yet, was in sight. I was flooded with doubt: maybe leaving Europe had been a mistake. We might have been safe. But there was no going back.
I never flew again after the night of the fire. We found a life outside Tampa where my brother Jules ran a carnival. I worked hard, selling tickets and concessions. Returning to the trapeze was more than Jules or I could have borne. At first, I feared life without performing would prove stifling and strange as it had with Erich. But on my own, I was free.
Only now I have come back. I clear the memories from my mind and gaze up at the circus exhibit, celebrating the acts and spectacles of that bygone era. Of course the exhibit makes no mention of the circus’s greatest feat—saving lives.
There is a lone photo of Peter, resplendent in his clown costume. Behind the white makeup are the dark, sad eyes that only I knew. A note beneath his picture reads: Killed in Auschwitz in 1945. That is not quite the truth. Peter, I’d discovered from the Yad Vashem archives decades earlier, had been sentenced by a Nazi tribunal at Auschwitz to die before a firing squad. The morning the guards had come for him, they had discovered that he had hung himself in his cell. I press myself against thick glass that covers the photo, cursing it for separating the image from my skin.
And what of Erich? For some time, I had not been able to learn his fate. I wondered if he had died in combat or perhaps escaped to South America like that Nazi butcher Josef Mengele and the other bastards who were never brought to justice. Then about three years after the war ended, I received a letter from a law firm in Bonn that found me through the bank account in Lisbon, informing me that Erich had left me a small inheritance. It was only then that I learned he had been killed when the apartment building on Rauchstrasse had been hit by a mortar shell. The building had been bombed on April 7, 1944, just days after he forwarded Jules’s letter on to me. The air raid had come in the predawn hours when everyone who lived there was still asleep. I would have been in bed, too, and surely killed, had Erich not cast me out. I donated the money he left me to the Joint Distribution Committee.
I never married again. I had healed once after Erich, but losing Peter was simply too much. Two heartbreaks such as the ones I had known were enough for any lifetime.
Noa’s face appears in my mind. There is no photo of her in the exhibit, other than a piece of her face visible behind one of the acrobats in a photo of the full circus taking its final bow. She had performed so briefly, an unnamed footnote in the centuries of circus history. But I see her, young and beautiful on the trapeze, experiencing the wonder of flying for the first time. She had known heartbreak, too, in a lifetime a fraction as long as mine. I had always wondered about Luc: Why hadn’t he shown up to meet Noa that last night? Though I had disliked him, he seemed to genuinely care for her. What had stopped him from coming for her?
It is this question that in large part brought me here. That, and an idea of where I might find the answer, once I had realized the railcar pictured in the Times was one and the same. I stare at the carriage once more, eyes focused on the belly box below the rear of the car. Noa and Luc had left messages for one another there, thinking that no one else knew. I had seen them, though, exchanging confidences there like a childhood game of Post Office. Fools! If someone else had found out, they would have jeopardized us all. But I waited, let her have her fun, watching carefully to make sure no one else had seen. When I read the article in the paper about the circus exhibit, glimpsed the train car that was so improbably ours, I thought it was possible that the boy had left a message for Noa there, explaining.
Only now I found the belly box empty.
I lean against the side of the train car, pressing my head flat against the worn wood. Like holding up a shell to hear the sea, voices echo that are no longer there. Then I take a few steps farther along the exhibit.
There is an oil painting I have never seen before of a young woman on a trapeze. I gasp. The pale, slim figure is undoubtedly Noa, the sequined costume one of my own that I had given her. Where had it come from? If someone had painted her portrait while she was at the circus, surely I would have known.
I move closer and squint at the small plaque beneath the painting:
Oil painting found in the possession of an unidentified young man who was killed when the Germans bombed a resistance stronghold near Strasbourg in May 1944. His connection to the circus and the subject of his painting are unknown.
I freeze, my blood running cold. Noa had told me once that Luc wanted to be a painter. I had not known he was so talented. The image had been rendered with great skill, the artist having the clearest of affection for its subject. Taking in Luc’s work, I am certain now that he would not have abandoned Noa.