The Orphan's Tale: The phenomenal international bestseller about courage and loyalty against the odds

5

Noa

She comes for me before dawn.

I am already awake, wearing a dressing gown that is not my own. Moments earlier, I bolted upright, shaken. I’d dreamed that I had gone back to the railcar at the station a second time, not just to save more babies but because I somehow knew that my own child was among them. But when I pulled open the door to the train car it was empty. I reached into the pitch-blackness and shrieked as my arms closed around nothing.

I’d awoken from the dream, hoping I had not screamed aloud and startled others in the strange house. I fought to close my eyes again. I had to go back and save my child. But the image was gone.

As my trembling ebbed, I reached for the baby, who slept peacefully in the basket they had made into a bassinet by my bedside. I pulled him to me, his warmth soothing. I adjusted my eyes to the still room, partly lit by the moonlight that filtered in through curtains held back by braided ropes. A low fire burned in the corner. The fine furnishings were grander than any I’d ever seen. I recalled the odd faces assembled when I’d awoken the previous day, the round circus owner and the woman who looked at me with such distaste and the long-faced man who had sat in the chair watching, like the cast of characters from a story my mother read to me as a child. The circus, they said—it is hard to believe that such a world still exists even during the war. I might have been less surprised to find myself on the moon. I had been to the circus only once when I was three and I cried at the glaring lights and loud noises until my father had taken me out of the tent. And now here I am. It is strange, but no stranger than finding a boxcar full of infants, or any of the things that have happened to me since leaving home.

I gaze down at the baby, freshly bathed and nestled in my arms. Theo, I’d called him without thinking when they asked. I don’t know where the name had come from. He sleeps in the crook of my elbow and I hold still so as not to disturb him. His face is peaceful, cheeks now rosy. Where had he slept before being put in the train? I imagine a warm crib, hands that patted his back to soothe him. I pray that my own child is sleeping somewhere just as safe.

The previous evening they had spoken about me as though I was not there. “She’s got a circus look about her, don’t you think?” the circus owner had said when my eyes were closed and they thought I wasn’t listening. They were sizing me up like a horse they were about to buy. I wanted to stand and say thank-you-but-no-thank-you, to pick up the baby and walk into the night. But the fierce winds still howled and through the window the hills were an unbroken sea of white. If I started out with Theo again, we would not make it to another shelter. So I let them talk about me. This isn’t our place, though. We will stay long enough to save some money and then leave. Where we will go exactly, I don’t know.

“You’ll be paid ten marks a week,” the circus owner had said. The price seemed shrewd, but not so low that he was taking advantage. Should I have asked for more? Perhaps it was a generous sum for one who had never performed. I know so little about money, and I am hardly in a position to bargain.

After the circus people had finished talking about me, they had left the room and I’d fallen asleep. I’d awoken once and found my way to the water closet in the darkness. A few times something rumbled in the distance, seeming to echo off the hills. Air raids perhaps, like the ones I’d heard so many times at the rail station. But they were not close enough to cause alarm.

No one had come to the room again—until now. Hearing footsteps in the hall, I slide from the bed carefully so as not to wake Theo, wanting to open the door before anyone knocks. The woman they had called Astrid, the one who had watched me so disdainfully the previous night, stands before me now in the semidarkness, the moonlight behind giving her a strange glow. Her jet-black hair is bobbed short and curled at the ends, framing her face. She wears no jewelry except for a pair of gold earrings with a small crimson gem in each. She is beautiful in an exotic way with too-large features that fit together perfectly. She does not smile.

“You’ve slept long enough,” she declares without greeting or introduction. “Time to get up and start working.” She throws a leotard in my direction, faded and mended at the toe. “You’ll need to wear this.” I have no idea where my own clothes, soaked and tattered, have gone. I wait for her to leave so I can change, but she simply half turns away. “We haven’t a day to lose. I will train you—or attempt to, anyway. I don’t think you can manage it, but if you do, you may travel with us.”

“Train to do what, exactly?” I ask, wishing I had thought to ask the previous evening before saying I could do it.

“Learn the flying trapeze,” she answers.

I had heard them discuss this the previous evening. They used the word “aerialist,” I recall now. Through the fog of my exhaustion, I had not contemplated what it really meant. Now the outrageousness of the proposal crashes down upon me: they want me to climb to the ceiling and risk my life swinging like a monkey. I’m not captive here. I don’t have to do this. “That’s very kind of you, but I hardly think...” I don’t want to offend her. “I can’t possibly do that. I can clean, or perhaps cook,” I offer, as I had the night before.

“Herr Neuhoff owns the circus,” she informs me. “This is what he wants.” Her diction is polished, as if she is not from around here. “Of course if you can’t manage it...you have maybe a rich uncle waiting to take you in?” Though her tone is mocking, she has a point. I cannot go back to the station where surely the baby and I have both been noticed missing by now. On my own I might have kept running. But the bitter cold had nearly killed us once. We would not make it a second time.

I bite my lip. “I’ll try. Two weeks.” Two weeks will give me time to get stronger and find somewhere for Theo and me to go. We will not, of course, stay with the circus.

“We were going to give you six.” She shrugs, not seeming to care. “Let’s go.” I change into the leotard as modestly as I can beneath the gown.

“Wait.” I hesitate, looking at Theo, who still sleeps on the bed.

“Your brother,” she says, emphasizing the second word. “Theo, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She hesitates for a beat, watching me. Then she picks him up. I fight the urge to protest, the notion of anyone else holding him unbearable. She places him into the makeshift bassinet. “I’ve asked the housemaid, Greta, to come up and watch him.”

“He’s colicky,” I say.

“Greta has raised eight of her own. She’ll manage.”

Still I hesitate. It is more than just Theo’s care that concerns me: if the maid changes his diaper, she will learn that he is a Jew. I take in his clean outfit and realize it’s too late. Someone already knows the truth about his identity.

I follow Astrid down the stairs of the darkened house, the air musty and burnt. Then I put on my still-damp boots, which stand by the front door. She hands me my coat, and I notice that she does not wear one. Her figure is flawless, lean legs that belie her strength and a perfectly flat waist like I’d had before the baby. She is shorter than I thought the previous day. But her body is like a statue, elegant lines seemingly carved from granite.

Outside, we pad silently across the open field, our footsteps crackling against the ice. The air is dry and milder, though; had it been like this a day ago, I might have made it farther into the woods without collapsing. Moonlight shines down brightly. The night sky is filled with stars and for a second it seems that each is for one of the infants on the train. Somewhere, if they are still alive, Theo’s parents are wondering where their child has gone, hearts crying out in anguish, just as my own does. I look at the sky and send up a silent prayer, wishing they might know their son is alive.

Astrid unlocks the door to a large building. She flicks a switch and lights splutter on overhead. Inside, it is a run-down gymnasium that smells of sweat, old tumbling mats rotting in the corner. It is dingy and worn, worlds away from the glamour and sparkle I’d always associated with the circus.

“Take off your coat,” she instructs, stepping closer. Her bare arm brushes mine. My own pale skin is marred a thousand times with moles and scars, but Astrid’s is a smooth, unbroken canvas of olive, like a lake on a day without wind. She produces beige tape that she wraps around my wrists slowly and methodically, then kneels and covers my legs with chalk, taking care not to miss a single spot. Her nails are perfectly polished, but her hands are lined and coarse, unable to hide the years the way her face and body can. She must be close to forty.

Finally she pats a thick powder onto my hands. “Rosin. You must keep your hands dry always. Otherwise, you will slip. Do not assume the net will save you. If you hit too hard it will drop to the floor or you’ll be thrown off. You must land in the center of the net, not by the edge.” There is no warmth in her voice as she rattles off instructions, practiced over time, that will help to keep me from falling, or killing myself if I do. My mind reels: Does she actually think I can manage this?

She gestures that I should follow her to a ladder that stands close to one of the walls, bolted perfectly upright. “The act will have to be simplified of course,” she says, as if reminding me that I can never possibly be good enough. “It takes a lifetime of training to truly become an aerialist. There are ways to compensate so that the audience will not notice. Of course, there is no room for conjuring in the circus. The audience has to trust that all of our feats are real.”

She begins to climb the ladder with the ease of a cat, then looks down expectantly to where I stand, not moving. I scan the length of the ladder to the high ceiling. The top must be at least forty feet from the ground, with nothing below but a tired-looking net just a meter or so off the hard floor. I have never been afraid of heights, but I’ve had no cause: our house in the village was a single story and there were no mountains for hundreds of kilometers. I’ve never imagined anything like this.

“There has to be something else,” I say, a note of pleading creeping into my voice.

“Herr Neuhoff wants you to learn the aerial act,” she replies firmly. “The trapeze is actually easier than many of the other acts.” I can’t imagine anything more difficult. She continues, “I can guide you, put you where you need to be. Or not.” She looks at me evenly. “Perhaps we should go tell Herr Neuhoff that this isn’t going to work out.”

And have him cast you out into the cold, seems her unspoken conclusion. I’m not sure the kind-faced circus owner would actually do that, but I don’t want to find out. More important, I’m not going to give Astrid the satisfaction of being right.

Reluctantly, I begin climbing rung by rung, trying not to tremble. I tighten my grip, wondering when the bolts had last been checked and whether it is sturdy enough for both of us. We reach a tiny ledge, scarcely big enough for two people. I wait for Astrid to help me onto it. When she does not, I carefully squeeze myself on, standing too close beside her. She unlatches a trapeze bar from its catch.

Astrid leaps from the platform, sending it rocking so that I grasp for something to hold on to to keep myself from falling. I marvel at how she swings easily through the air, somersaulting around the bar, twirling with just one hand. Then she opens her body like a diving gull, hanging upside down beneath the bar. She rights herself and returns, aiming for the platform and landing neatly in the tiny space beside me. “Like that,” she says, as though it were easy.

I am too stunned to speak. She hands the bar to me. It is thick and unfamiliar in my hand. “Here.” She adjusts my grip impatiently.

I look from her to my hands, then back again. “I can’t possibly. I’m not ready.”

“Just hang on and swing,” she urges. I stand frozen. There have been moments when I have acknowledged death—during childbirth when life seemed to rush from my body, when I saw the babies on the train, and as I struggled through the snow with Theo just days earlier. But it lies before me more real than ever now in the abyss between the platform and the ground.

An image of my mother pops improbably into my mind. In the months since I had been gone, I’d struggled to push away thoughts of home: the patchwork quilt on my bed tucked in the alcove, the corner nook by the stove where we used to sit and read. I have not allowed myself to think of such things, knowing that if I allowed even a trickle of memories I would be drowned in a flood I could not stop. But homesickness washes over me now. I do not want to be here on this tiny platform about to leap to my death. I want my mother. I want to be home.

“Are there other aerialists?” I ask, stalling for time.

Astrid hesitates. “Two others, and one of them will help us when we get further along. But they will primarily be working on the cradle swing, or the Spanish web, which is my other act. They will not be working with us.” I am surprised. I imagine that the flying trapeze is the centerpiece of the show, the goal for any aerialist. Perhaps they do not want to work with me either.

“Come now,” she says, before I can ask further. “You can sit on the swing, if you aren’t ready. Pretend you are on a playground.” Her tone is condescending. She takes the bar and draws it close to me. “Balance just below your backside,” she instructs. I sit on it, trying to get comfortable. “Like that. Good.” She lets go. I swing out from the platform, grasping the wires on either side so tightly that they cut into my hands. There is a kind of natural flow to it, like getting your feet under you on a boat. “Now lean back.” Surely she is joking. But her voice is serious, her face unsmiling. I lean back too fast and upset my balance, nearly slipping from the seat. As I swing back closer to the platform, she reaches out and grabs the ropes above the bar, pulling me onto the board and helping me off.