The Orphan's Tale. Pam Jenoff
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love. Peter is a decade older, and different from the rest of the performers. He had been born to the Russian aristocracy when there was one; some said he was the cousin of Czar Nicholas. In another life we never would have met. The circus is a great equalizer, though; no matter class or race or background, we are all the same here, judged on our talent. Peter fought in the Great War. He had not sustained injuries, at least none that were visible, but there is a kind of melancholy that suggested he has never recovered. His sadness resonated with me and we were drawn to one another.
I start toward the women’s lodge. Peter shakes his head and guides me in a different direction. “Up there.” The light of his cigarette gleams like a torch as he inhales.
The newcomers are at Herr Neuhoff’s villa—also rather unusual. “They can’t stay,” I whisper, though there is no one else around to hear.
“Of course not,” Peter replies. “Just temporary shelter so they wouldn’t die from the storm.” His shadow looms over me. It is not only Peter’s sorrow that makes his greatness as a clown so improbable. He told me once that the first time he had tried to join a circus, they sent him away, saying he was too tall to be a clown. So he’d apprenticed at a theater in Kiev, developed an ironic persona that suited his craggy features and long-legged style and then gone from circus to circus, building fame around his act. Peter’s antics, which often feature a humorous disregard for authority, are known far and wide. Through the war years, his routines had grown more caustic and his hatred of war and fascism less veiled. As his reputation for daring irreverence grew, so did the crowds.
He opens the door to the villa, where I’ve been only for the holiday party Herr Neuhoff throws for the entire circus each December and a handful of other times since my return. We slip inside without knocking. From the top of the staircase, Herr Neuhoff gestures that we should join him. In one of the guest rooms, a girl with long blond hair sleeps in a mahogany four-poster bed. Her pale skin is almost translucent against the rich burgundy sheets.
On the low table beside her, a baby lies in a makeshift bassinet, fashioned from a large woven basket. Moses on the Nile, watching us with dark, interested eyes. The child cannot be more than a few months old, I guess, though I have no experience with such things. It has long lashes and round cheeks that one seldom sees for all of the deprivation these days. Beautiful—but aren’t they all at that age?
Herr Neuhoff nods toward the child. “Before she passed out, she said he is her brother.”
A boy. “But where did they come from?” I ask. Herr Neuhoff simply shrugs.
The girl sleeps soundly. With a clear conscience, my mother might have said. She has thick, blond plaits, like a lass out of a Hans Christian Andersen tale. She could have been one of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, striding along Alexanderplatz with arms linked, singing vile songs about the Fatherland and killing Jews. Peter had described her as a woman but she could not be more than seventeen. I feel so very old and tired by comparison.
The girl stirs. Her arms shoot straight out, searching for the baby in a gesture I know all too well from my own dreams. Then sensing emptiness, she begins to flail.
Watching her desperation, the words run through my head: there is no way that is her brother.
Herr Neuhoff lifts the child and places it in the young woman’s arms and instantly she calms. “Waar ben ik?” Dutch. She blinks, then repeats the question in German: Where am I? Her voice is thin, wavering.
“Darmstadt,” Herr Neuhoff replies. No recognition registers on her face. She is not from these parts. “You are with the Circus Neuhoff.”
She blinks. “A circus.” Though to us it seems quite normal—indeed for more than half of my life it was all I had known—to her it must sound like something from a fantasy tale. A freak show. I stiffen, instantly reverting to the defensive girl facing down stares on the schoolyard. Throw her back out into the snow if we aren’t good enough.
“How old are you, child?” Herr Neuhoff asks gently.
“I’ll be seventeen next month. I fled my father’s house,” she offers, her German smoother now. “I’m Noa Weil and this is my brother.” Her words come too quickly, answering questions that no one has asked.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
A moment’s hesitation. “Theo. We’re from the Dutch coast,” she says with another pause. “Things were very bad. My father drank and beat us. Mother died in childbirth. So I took my brother and we left.” What is she doing here, hundreds of miles from home? No one would flee Holland for Germany now. Her story does not make sense. I wait for Herr Neuhoff to ask if she has papers.
The girl studies the child’s face with darting eyes. “Is he all right?”
“Yes, he ate well before falling asleep,” Herr Neuhoff reassures.
The girl’s brow wrinkles. “Ate?”
“Drank, I should say,” Herr Neuhoff corrects. “Some formula our cook made from sugar and honey.” Surely the girl would know that if she had been caring for the child.
I step back toward Peter, who reclines in a chair by the door. “She’s lying,” I say in a low voice. The fool girl had probably gotten pregnant. One does not speak of such things, though.
Peter shrugs with detachment. “She must have her reasons for running. We all do.”
“You are welcome to stay,” Herr Neuhoff says. I stare at him dumbfounded: What can he be thinking? He continues, “You’ll have to work, of course, when you’re well enough.”
“Of course.” The girl sits up, spine stiffening, at the suggestion that she might expect charity. “I can clean and cook.” I scoff at her naïveté, imagining her in the cookhouse making pancakes and peeling potatoes by the hundreds.
Herr Neuhoff waves his hand. “Cooks and cleaners we have. No, with your looks that would be a waste. I want you to perform.” Peter shoots me a puzzled look. New performers are recruited from across Europe and beyond; the spots are competitive and hard fought, possible only with a lifetime of training. One does not simply find talent on the street—or in the forest. Herr Neuhoff knows that. He turns to me. “You need a new aerialist, yes?” Over his shoulder, the girl’s eyes widen.
I hesitate. Once the act might have had a dozen or more aerialists, throwing parallel passes and somersaulting past one another in midair. But we have only three now and since my return I’d been largely reduced to the corde lisse and Spanish web. “Of course, but she has never performed. I can’t simply teach her the flying trapeze. Perhaps she could ride a horse or sell programs.” There are dozens of easier jobs she can do. What is making Herr Neuhoff think that she can perform? Usually I can scout talent a mile away. Here I see nothing. He is trying to make a duck into a swan and such a plan would only be met with failure.
“We don’t have time to find another aerialist before we go on the road,” Herr Neuhoff replies. “She has the right look. We have almost six weeks until we leave for tour.” He does not meet my eyes as he says this. Six weeks is a blink of an eye compared with the lifetime of training the rest of us have endured. He is asking me to perform the impossible and he knows it.
“She’s too thick to be an aerialist,” I say, appraising her body critically. Even beneath the duvet, it is plump around the hips and thighs. She is weak, soft in the middle with an innocence that suggests she has never known hard work. She would not have survived the night in the snow if Peter had not found her. And she will not last the week here.
Hearing a shuffling sound, I turn. Herr Neuhoff’s son, Emmet, watches from the doorway, his doughy mouth curled as he takes in our disagreement. He had always been an odd child, playing mean-spirited pranks and getting in trouble. “Wouldn’t want to be upstaged, would you?” he sneers at me.
I look away, ignoring him. The girl is prettier than me, I have to admit, cataloging her looks relative to my own in that way all women do. Good looks will not carry her here, though. In the circus what matters is the talent