No Stars at the Circus (2 page)

And everything that belongs to me has to go into the trunk.

“Just in case,” the Professor said.

In case what? I wanted to say. In case the Germans track me down
?

I suppose I’m to get into the trunk as well, if he can’t stop the Germans from rushing upstairs. Because none of them would be smart enough to guess there was a boy in the trunk.

Ha ha.

He didn’t say that, of course. He said I had to be completely quiet all the time even though the walls of the house are so thick. Nobody must know I’m here, he said, not even a mouse.

“But there are no mice. I’m pretty sure of that, Jonas.”

That was supposed to be a joke because he smiled. So I smiled too.

At least the window looks out onto the street. Even if I’m not allowed to look out of it I know that much. I can hear street sounds – carts going by, people shouting, that kind of thing.

The thing about the trunk is all a bit daft anyway because he brought things up for me and he said they needn’t go into it. He gave me a grammar work book, some ordinary pencils and a long thin propelling pencil that has a tiny hot air balloon going up and down inside the glass. He told me one of his students left it behind last year. He also brought up a mathematics book, a mythology book and two encyclopedias. One is A–L, the other is M–Z. He says he has books about the lives of the great composers too, if I would like to read them.

There’s a piano downstairs in this house. I saw a bit of the keyboard through a door when we came up here yesterday. I’d love to play it but guess what, I’ll never be able to because he’s afraid to let me come down from this pokey room at the top of the house.

He says that’s because he has no papers for me. But nobody has, except Mama and Papa. Not even Signor Corrado had my papers. Unfortunately, that was what made him even more worried about me.

“If you don’t have papers you’re
finito
, Jonas,” he said.

It
is
a big problem. I don’t blame anyone for being afraid.

Maybe the Professor will get braver later on. If I do everything he asks it might encourage him. He is a little like one of those long thin caterpillars that stand up on their back legs and wave their heads at you but are squishy if you stand on them by mistake.

Maybe he just doesn’t like having a boy in his house. Maybe it’s nothing to do with me not having papers.

Anyway, the good news is that I have four big notebooks from the Deyrolle shop to write in. Signor Corrado gave me the set as a present. Three of them are in the trunk. One is on my lap but it’s going under the mattress when I’m finished writing this. My will is folded inside the beginning pages.

When I was with the Corrados in their yellow van I used to sleep on cushions under Alfredo’s bunk. Madame Fifi’s bed was behind a curtain but even so I could hear her poodles every night. I never knew dogs could snore like that. I suppose they sounded so loud because I was on the floor and so were they. They had fleas too but they were not trained like mine were. They were stupid dog fleas!!!!

I made notches under Alfredo’s bed to mark how long it was since I’d seen my family. There were five when I left, one for every week. Now I have scraped five new notches on one of the legs of this bed, where the Professor will not see them. Two days from now I will make the sixth.

I almost forgot! The third reason I was sorry to leave the Corrado family: they were lots of fun to be around.

25 AUGUST 1942

Monsieur Lemoine, the French teacher in my old school, told us that when we write a story we should start at the beginning, continue as far as the middle and then get to the finishing tape without losing our shorts or our shoes. He said it’s not as easy as it sounds.

I probably won’t have Monsieur Lemoine again for class because I will be going to the collège next and he will stay behind. He likes me. He says I have a spirit of adventure that would serve a pirate well.

But he ruined that when he said, “Of course, very few teachers will appreciate this quality of yours, Jonas. Especially if you are late for school because of your nefarious activities.”

He wrote down “nefarious” in my copybook. It means “bad”, but what he was talking about was the school day he saw me in the Luxembourg Gardens when I was helping to set out the chairs for the puppet show. Stéphane, who owns the puppets, used to let me watch for free if I did that for him.

But that was in the old days, when we lived in rue de la Harpe. When I went to school.

I won’t start with the war, or with the Germans sneaking into France, because everybody in the whole world knows about those things. Anyway, I was much younger then. I didn’t know so much about what was going on. I remember the gas masks Nadia and I had and how Mama got so cross when we played with them, especially if Jean-Paul was there too. Which he was a lot because he was my best friend. He liked to come to our place because he had no brothers or sisters.

“Gas masks are not toys, they’re meant to save your life,” Mama shouted at us. “And Jean-Paul has his own at home to play with if he wants to.”

We pretended we were giant insects because the masks had big buggy eyes. But when you breathed in with the mask on, it made a noise like a cave monster, not an insect.

Then the summer came and nearly everyone in Paris ran away because the Germans were coming. Even Jean-Paul’s family packed up and left. We didn’t. Papa said he wouldn’t leave our shop to be looted by Germans. “Or anybody else,” he said.

There was one horrible day when a big cloud of black smoke came down on Paris and it rained black rain. That meant the invaders were here at last because the car factories outside the city were burning. Mama said it was like the end of the world with all the boots tramping everywhere, and the filthy devil’s fog that was made of rubber smoke.

“The worst is that everybody’s gone, run away from their own lives, nobody knows where,” she said. That was frightening but she didn’t mean me to hear her. She was talking to Papa in the kitchen.

Nadia and I couldn’t go out to play for whole
weeks
. It was very hot and there were no lemons to make lemonade, like Mama always did in summer. All over town the shops were closed up. The Germans hung up their swastika flags everywhere you looked. They were HUGE and they made a nasty flapping sound when you had to walk under them. I said they were like pterodactyl wings but Nadia said they were like a giant’s dirty washing hanging out.

“Your sister has that one right,” Papa said to me.

When the Germans really got stuck in here, they put up new signposts on the main streets, all done in big black German letters. Nadia called them the witchy signposts. We had to put our clocks forward so they told the same time as Hitler’s watch back in Germany. Papa set the shop wall-clock that way, but all the others he kept on French time.

Most people came back to Paris again after a while and then school started up again. They had all been somewhere in France but it didn’t sound as if it had been much fun. Jean-Paul said there were planes shooting at people on the roads. He showed me how they did it.

“
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
– it’s like a huge mosquito, first.” He buzzed around and then he banked with his arms like a plane does and made a shrieking noise in my ear. “Then the Stuka comes at you straight, like a bat out of hell. And the pilot is so close you can see his face full of hate. Then the gun goes
Da, datta, DA
. And you can see he’s saying ‘Ha ha, Frenchie, you’re dead!’”

That wasn’t fair. The people from Paris had no guns.

Jean-Paul didn’t even know where he had been with his family but they lost their dog, Whistle, somewhere. That was the worst thing of all because we’d been training Whistle to walk on two legs. Now someone else has a clever dog without doing any hard work of their own.

Yes, I know. I
did
begin with the war after all. It’s hard to ignore it, I suppose.

Never mind, I’ll begin again tomorrow with the day my family had to move from rue de la Harpe. You can bet not everybody in the world knows about
that
. But first I have to explain about the shop and my family.

26 AUGUST 1942

My father is a watchmaker and jeweller. He learned his trade in Switzerland when he was young. That’s the absolute best place in the world to learn watchmaking.

Papa was born in Germany but when he was my age his family moved to Strasbourg. When he was only fourteen he took the train all the way to Geneva on his own and he became an apprentice in a famous clock-making place. They wanted him to stay because he had clever hands and could speak French and German. But Papa wanted to come back to France. And when he did, his clever hands were no use at all.

“I could make a clock for the man in the moon,” he’d say to us. “Or a watch that would go on ticking twenty thousand leagues under the sea. But was there any work to be found in Strasbourg?”

“NO!” we had to shout back, quick as quick, because this was his joke. “So, hurry along to platform number 5, Papa. Get the fast train to Paris!”

The joke was that it was a really
good
thing there was no work for Papa because right after he got off the express train in Paris he met Mama. So it all worked out just fine. That’s how our family began.

Papa made a very beautiful ring of pearls and rubies for my mother and engraved her name in fine writing along with his, on the inside. I can read it without a magnifying glass but Nadia can’t.

It says:
* Anne Berlioz et Léopold Alber * 7 January 1930
.

It’s true. Mama has the same name as the famous composer Hector Berlioz. (But that is all. We are not related!) She always says that is probably why she learned to play the piano. She nearly became a famous pianist but then she got married instead.

As well as all his other jobs, Papa does some special work that he learned to do all on his own, when he was young: he makes eyes for stuffed animals and sometimes claws and beaks too, if they are missing or broken. He does this work for museums, but also for my favourite shop in Paris, Deyrolle. If you’ve never been there, it is like a zoo that’s inside a shop. Except all the animals are stuffed.

When I was eight I was old enough to do deliveries there for Papa even though it was quite a long walk from our shop. The lady clerks and the taxidermists who stuff the animals always came over to the desk to see what I had brought. They would open the boxes in front of me and they were always delighted with Papa’s work.

“Such fierce eyes!” they would say. “Perfect for our new panther.” Or, “Jonas, tell us the truth. This claw is not just porcelain. Your father must have fought a grizzly bear in the park!”

That is why it was so strange later on when Signor Corrado found the pile of Deyrolle notebooks. He said they’d been left behind at the circus after a show. I don’t think I had told him about the work Papa did for the shop. But when I did, all he said was, “Did I not tell you La Giaconda has great powers?”

I wonder about that.

La Giaconda is another name for the Mona Lisa, the famous painting in the Louvre. It’s also another name for Signor Corrado’s wife. It’s her stage name. She’s Italian too. But they are
not
in the war against France, like lots of Italians are.

Our apartment had five full rooms on the second floor over Papa’s shop on rue de la Harpe. Old Madame Perroneau lived on the first floor with her cat, Grimaldi.

My bedroom was in the front, beside Mama and Papa’s, so it overlooked the street. Nadia’s room was bigger than mine but all she could see was the backs of the houses behind us and all their washing, so if she was bored she’d come into mine and we would sit on the windowsill and look out.

That could be boring too, unless there was a fancy horse carriage or a brand-new American car going down the street. They did come, sometimes, because foreigners like to do that sort of thing, especially in the old narrow streets like ours. Then we’d rush down onto the street to cheer them on.

At least you can drive down rue de la Harpe, not like poor little rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, which is close by. It has nothing in it, nothing at all, and only a bicycle can ride through it. Because of its name Nadia says it should be for cats only. Especially Grimaldi, who loves fish.

Anyway, there are no foreigners now, only Germans and they don’t count because they are invaders, not proper foreigners. And there are hardly any cars any more because there’s very little petrol. Top brass Germans grab everything they want, so they’re pretty much the only ones with big cars now. They’re the ones with the medals and ribbons over their pockets who get driven everywhere.

“The ones with the golden nooses,” Papa said. “The lords of misrule and destruction.”

Mama said, “Shh,” but Papa said nobody would know what he was talking about even if he went and shouted it outside the Hôtel Meurice, where the top brass Germans have their parties. Then she said he should think of his family if he wasn’t going to think of himself. What would happen to us if he was dragged off for shouting insults at German soldiers? He didn’t say anything for ages.

There
are
horses still, of course, lots of them, but they don’t pull carriages any more, only delivery wagons.

Nadia is only a year younger than me but I am allowed out on my own and she is not. This is not just because she is a girl and younger than me but because she is almost completely deaf, and Mama and Papa are afraid she might not hear a car coming and would get knocked down.

She used to go a special school for deaf children which is not too far from my school. She can talk pretty well and people often do not realize she is deaf, but we have to write everything down for her, or else use signs.

Mama made up a special language of signs just for Nadia when she was a baby and couldn’t read. We, all of us, learned how to use it and now we can say most things we want to say to her with our hands. But she had to learn different signs when she went to school, and so did we. She can lip-read now too.