The Orphan's Tale. Pam Jenoff
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energy and risking an injury that would jeopardize the show. As children we loved to sleep under the open sky in the yard in summer, fingers intertwined, the sky a canopy of stars above us.
I stop. A large red flag with a black swastika hangs above the door. Someone, a high-ranking SS officer no doubt, has moved into the home that once was ours. I clench my fists, sickened to think of them using our linens and dishes, soiling Mama’s beautiful sofa and rugs with their boots. Then I look away. It is not the material things for which I mourn.
I search the windows of the villa, looking in vain for a familiar face. I had known that my family was no longer here ever since my last letter returned undeliverable. I had come anyway, though, some part of me imagining life unchanged, or at least hoping for a clue as to where they had gone. But wind blows through the desolate grounds. There is nothing left anymore.
I should not be here either, I realize. Anxiety quickly replaces my sadness. I cannot afford to loiter and risk being spotted by whoever lives here now, or face questions about who I am and why I have come. My eyes travel across the hill toward the adjacent estate where the Circus Neuhoff has their winter quarters. Their hulking slate villa stands opposite ours, two sentries guarding the Rheinhessen valley between.
Earlier as the train neared Darmstadt, I saw a poster advertising the Circus Neuhoff. At first, my usual distaste at the name rose. Klemt and Neuhoff were rival circuses and we had competed for years, trying to outdo one another. But the circus, though dysfunctional, was still a family. Our two circuses had grown up alongside one another like siblings in separate bedrooms. We had been rivals on the road. In the off-season, though, we children went to school and played together, sledding down the hill and occasionally sharing meals. Once when Herr Neuhoff had been felled by a bad back and could not serve as ringmaster, we sent my brother Jules to help their show.
I have not seen Herr Neuhoff in years, though. And he is Gentile, so everything has changed. His circus flourishes while ours is gone. No, I cannot expect help from Herr Neuhoff, but perhaps he knows what became of my family.
When I reach the Neuhoff estate, a maidservant I do not recognize opens the door. “Guten Abend,” I say. “Ist Herr Neuhoff hier?” I am suddenly shy, embarrassed to arrive unannounced on their doorstep like some sort of beggar. “I’m Ingrid Klemt.” I use my maiden name. The woman’s face reveals that she already knows who I am, though from the circus or from somewhere else, I cannot tell. My departure years earlier had been remarkable, whispered about for miles around.
One did not leave to marry a German officer as I had—especially if one was Jewish.
Erich had first come to the circus in the spring of 1934. I noticed him from behind the curtains—it is a myth that we cannot see the audience beyond the lights—not only because of his uniform but because he sat alone, without a wife or children. I was not some young girl, easily wooed, but nearly twenty-nine. Busy with the circus and constantly on the road, I had assumed that marriage had passed me by. Erich was impossibly handsome, though, with a strong jaw marred only by a cleft chin, and square features softened by the bluest of eyes. He came a second night and pink roses appeared before my dressing room door. We courted that spring, and he made the long trip down from Berlin every weekend to the cities where we performed to spend time with me between shows and on Sundays.
We should have known even then that our relationship was doomed. Though Hitler had just come to power a year earlier, the Reich had already made clear its hatred for the Jews. But there was passion and intensity in Erich’s eyes that made everything around us cease to exist. When he proposed, I didn’t think twice. We did not see the problems that loomed large, making our future together impossible—we simply looked the other way.
My father had not fought me on leaving with Erich. I expected him to rebuke me for marrying a non-Jew, but he only smiled sadly when I told him. “I always thought you would have taken over the show for me,” he’d said, his sad chocolate eyes a mirror of my own behind his spectacles. I was surprised. I had three older brothers, four if you counted Isadore, who had been killed at Verdun; there was no reason to think that Papa might have considered me. “Especially with Jules taking his own branch of the show to Nice. And the twins...” Papa had shaken his head ruefully. Mathias and Markus were strong and graceful, performing acrobatic marvels that made the audience gasp. Their skills were purely physical, though. “It was you, liebchen, with the head for business and the flair of showmanship. But I’m not going to keep you like a caged animal.”
I’d never known he saw me that way. Only now I was leaving him. I could have changed my mind and stayed. But Erich and the life I thought I always wanted beckoned. So I left for Berlin, taking Papa’s blessing with me.
Perhaps if I hadn’t, my family might still be here.
The maid ushers me to a sitting room that, though still grand, shows signs of wear. The rugs are a bit frayed and there are some spaces in the silver cabinet that are empty, as though the bigger pieces had been taken or sold. Stale cigar smoke mixes with the scent of lemon polish. I peer out the window, straining to see my family’s estate through the fog that has settled above the valley. I wonder who lives in our villa now and what they see when they look down at the barren deserted winter quarters.
After our wedding, a small ceremony with a justice of the peace, I moved into Erich’s spacious apartment overlooking the Tiergarten. I spent my days strolling the shops along Bergmannstrasse, buying richly colored paintings and rugs and embroidered satin pillows, little things that would make his once-sparse quarters our home. Our biggest dilemma was which café to frequent for Sunday brunch.
I’d been in Berlin for almost five years when the war broke out. Erich received a promotion to something I didn’t understand having to do with munitions and his days became longer. He would come home either dark and moody, or heady with excitement about things he could not share with me. “It will all be so different when the Reich is victorious, trust me.” But I didn’t want different. I liked our life just as it had been. What was so wrong with the old ways?
Things had not gone back to the way they had been, though. Instead they worsened rapidly. They said awful things about Jews on the radio and in the newspapers. Jewish shop windows were broken and doors painted. “My family...” I’d fretted to Erich over brunch in our Berlin apartment after I’d seen the windows of a Jewish butcher shop on Oranienburger Strasse shattered. I was the wife of a German officer. I was safe. But what about my family back home?
“Nothing will hurt them, Inna,” he soothed, rubbing my shoulders.
“If it’s happening here,” I pressed, “then Darmstadt can be no better.”
He wrapped his arms around me. “Shh. There have just been a few acts of vandalism in the city, a showing. Look around you. Everything is fine.” The apartment was scented with the smell of rich coffee. A pitcher of fresh orange juice sat on the table. Surely it could not be so much worse elsewhere. I rested my head on the broad shelf of Erich’s shoulder, inhaling the familiar warmth of his neck. “The Klemt family circus is internationally known,” he reassured. He was right. Our family circus had been generations in the making, born from the old horse shows in Prussia—my great-great-grandfather, they said, had left the Lipizzaner Stallions in Vienna to start our first circus. And the next generation had followed and the one after that, the very oddest sort of family business.
Erich continued, “That’s why I stopped to see the show on my way back from Munich that day. And then I saw you...” He pulled me onto his lap.
I raised my hand, cutting him off. Normally I loved his retelling of how we met, but I was too worried to listen. “I should go check on them.”
“How will you find them on tour?” he asked, a note of impatience creeping into his voice. It was true; midsummer, they could be almost anywhere in Germany or France. “And what would you do to help them? No, they would want you to stay here. Safe. With me.” He nuzzled me playfully.
He was right of course, I had told myself, lulled by his lips upon my neck. But still the worry nagged. Then one day the letter came. “Dearest Ingrid, we have disbanded the circus...” Papa’s tone was matter-of-fact, no plea for help,