No Stars at the Circus (5 page)

She says not to worry, that I’ll soon grow tall enough, like Papa, but it’s hard to grow now because the food is so terrible. You need meat and butter and eggs to get taller but we only have turnips and cabbage soup and nasty black bread. We don’t even get the yucky vitamin pills any more because they’re given out in school.

And guess what, Nadia and I have had no schools to go to since we moved. Papa was considering whether to enrol us in the nearby school, on rue Vieille du Temple, but he said he’d really prefer to keep us away from roll-books and all official things like that.

“I want to keep them away from the spotlight,” he said to Mama one night in the other room. I could hear him even though his voice was low. “Out of harm’s way, as much as we can manage it. I don’t like it one bit that they’ve corralled so many families all around here. They want to know where we are, all the time. They’ve counted us, how many times now? And why is that?”

He told us he was quite sure that between them he and Mama could teach us very well on their own. I bet Jean-Paul would think we were lucky not to have to go to school but I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. There are lots of things about school you miss when you can’t go any more. Your friends, mostly. Football. Swapping things.

Anyway, because we’re not so tall, Nadia and I, Mama was trying to keep our J1 food coupons going as long as she could. You get allowed more food if you are a J1 child than nearly anybody else does, except, of course, the fat potato bugs. They get all the meat they want,
plus
cream and butter. Babies get quite a bit too, even though they’re French.

Mama said that lots of the shopkeepers don’t look properly at a child’s papers to see the real age before they stamp them, but this only happens if the children come along with the mother and look the right age. She did her best but in the end she had to make me a J2. J1s are only for children up to six years of age. I hated being a pretend J1 until I was nearly eight. Anyway, it didn’t matter by then because Jews weren’t allowed to queue for food any more.

But last June, when the new law about the yellow stars came in, then, even though I was officially a J2, Mama thought she would try to keep both of us under the age for wearing
them
too.

Ever since this summer began, every person who is Jewish has had to wear a yellow Star of David sewn onto their coats all the time. That’s the law.
But not if you are under six
.

Nadia definitely looks like she could be that young. But there is no way I do. It is an insult even to think it. I am a full J2.

I had a really bad argument with Mama about it. She was sitting in our living room, sewing the stars onto her and Papa’s clothes. They are huge things, about the size of Papa’s fist, and “JEW” is printed across the middle in black German letters like those on the signposts. You have to use up your own clothing coupons to buy them, which is the meanest thing of all.

The law says that Jews have to have the yellow stars on all their jackets and coats, both the winter ones and the summer ones, so that French people and Germans can see they are Jews, all the year round. But we are
French!
How stupid can they be?

I bet I know what Jean-Paul would say about that. He’d say the Germans should wear hairy potato bugs on their coats, with vampire teeth sticking out. He used to draw them like that on his copybooks. But we can see who’s German anyway, because they wear uniforms, even the women, so there’s no point.

Anyway, Mama said she and Papa would wear the stars since they had no choice because of where we were living now, where nearly everyone wore a star, but Nadia and I should not.

“I’ll be struck down before I’ll sew those filthy things on your innocent little garments,” she said. She looked furious, but because she had a star in one hand and a needle and thread sticking out of her mouth, she sounded a little bit funny.

“Jonas, don’t you see it’s a way of fighting them back if you don’t wear one? I
know
you could get away with it. You’re small enough.”

She said the Germans’ law wouldn’t work the way they wanted if I did that. And then, just like Papa wanted, we’d be well away from the spotlight.

“It’ll be a secret weapon. A disguise that isn’t a disguise,” she said. “You’ll be like a spy.”

I reminded her that everybody in our building in rue des Lions was Jewish and the Germans knew we were too because they’d made us come here and had stamped our papers with the
J
.

“And if we go out walking with you and Papa and you’re wearing the stars people will know we’re Jews too because we’re your children.”

That was so obvious. Why was she being so silly?

“So we
still
won’t be able to go into the parks unless you stay outside and peek through the railings at us as if we’re animals in the zoo. Anyway, somebody would see you watching us and so they’d know right well we’re Jews too.”

But Mama said I was far too logical, just like Papa, and it drove her crazy.

“You should do this one thing for me. And you can’t make me sew anything onto your clothes, Jonas. I’ll just drop my needle and thread on the floor right now and there they’ll stay till the war’s over. So there!”

She did just that too. She threw down the needle and thread.

I asked her did she think her son was some sort of dwarf, and she began to cry. It was just as well Papa was out because he would have been furious with me for getting Mama into a state.

In the end we fixed on a bargain. She sewed a star on my winter coat, which is far too small for me now anyway. Dwarf or not, I don’t think I’ll be wearing it when it gets cold again. Anyway, I don’t have it here. But she didn’t sew stars onto my other clothes. And Nadia didn’t mind at all that she had no star.

I was glad she didn’t have one when I saw poor little Giselle Bauer from the apartment on the ground floor wearing a star on her silly-frilly white dress. It looked horrible, as if someone had come right up and stood in front of her and thrown a dirty rotten goose egg straight at her heart.

2 SEPTEMBER 1942

We’ve been at war for nearly three years. The Prof told me that last night when he brought up my food, but I knew it anyway. Nobody in France is ever,
ever
going to forget the date of 3 September 1939, not even babies. We declared war on Germany that day. It’s like 14 July only it’s the dead opposite. It’s a black day, not a blue-white-red one. No fireworks. Just nasty blue light bulbs and a curfew instead. And mountains of turnips.

And boys shut up at the top of strange houses. Maybe there are other boys living all over Paris in little rooms like this one. Who knows?

It’s now much more than six weeks since I last saw Mama, Papa and Nadia. The date was 15 July. They were all taken away somewhere on 16 July. Somewhere in France.

In all that time nobody has ever been able to tell me any more than that. But then the only people I’ve talked to since then are the Corrados, the other people at the fair and the Prof. And sometimes I think he knows more than he’s letting on.

I wonder if he has a proper wireless set. That’s how you get to know things.

One thing we really missed when we moved to rue des Lions was our wireless set. Because guess who isn’t allowed to have a wireless:

No. 1 – Germans

No. 2 – Marshal Pétain

No. 3 – Jews

Not so hard, huh?

Anyway, Papa left our wireless set with Monsieur Zacharides. It was a really good one too. It got all the stations you ever wanted.

Here is an announcement: everybody in France is supposed to have their wireless tuned to TSF or Radio Paris so they can hear all the stupid potato bug news and their stupid potato bug music. But nobody does
that
.

When it gets dark and you have to pull your curtains for the blackout everyone turns their wireless on. You watch the screen light warm up until you can read the names of all the cities in Europe. And even Istanbul, which is in Asia. Then when the wireless set is good and hot and working properly everyone turns the sound down really low and twists the dial all the way round to London. London sends out the proper French news. The French people living there tell the truth. They know about all the battles the Germans are losing and getting killed in, stuff we never hear about. Ha ha – now we do.

When the news is over they send out all the spy messages. They’re the best. Stuff like “The cocoa is getting cold”. Or “Madeleine has no cigarettes tonight”. Or “The wolf has bitten the lamb in three places”.

But every word means something special to someone, somewhere. It’s a code that tells that person what they should go and do next. Maybe blow up another train or put sugar in German petrol tanks so they can’t move their trucks.

One day Nadia made up a play that was full of spy messages, after I explained to her what they were. She had her king and queen and the princesses and the fairies and even old Puss in Boots running about the stage, shouting out stuff about the lambs drinking the cocoa, and giants sharpening their razors on Madeleine’s hatpin.

It was crazy but it was funny too. Mama said she had a great imagination. Jean-Paul heard her at it one day but he just thought she was mad. He was silly sometimes.

There are lots of French people in England, Papa says. They escaped, but one day they’re going to come back here with an army, and American soldiers and English soldiers will come too. The Germans had better look out then because all those soldiers will be really angry about all the bad things that have happened here since the war began. And they’ll have bombs and tanks and stuff because the radio people in London will make sure they get everything they need. Colonel de Gaulle is the boss over there, Papa says.

Sometimes I think maybe Mama and Papa and Nadia escaped after all. Nadia has her great imagination. She’d be able to make up a story that would fool any stupid German. They could have gone south, over the No-No line, to the other part of France, where there are hardly any Germans bossing people around.

But I know they wouldn’t have tried to escape unless I was with them, so I suppose they just didn’t, and that’s that.

My teacher, Monsieur Lemoine, would be cross with me. I’ve just read back the last few pages and I can see I am not composing this story the way he likes, with a Beginning, a Middle and an End.

I really
do
think it’s good advice but:

No. 1 – It’s not always easy to see where things should go in a story when you’re getting it all down.

No. 2 – Sometimes you remember a thing suddenly, and it’s best to put it in right away or you might forget it. And it’s something you would really miss.

I don’t want to forget anything. But sometimes I get confused about which thing happened before which other thing. Like the different laws for Jews, because there are so many of them, and even though they are all awful they got worse.

But I know for sure we were in rue des Lions for the whole of last winter. I remember that because we all spent days in bed trying to keep warm and not grow an appetite.

“When they’re not starving us they’re trying to freeze us to death,” Mama said. “But we’ll show them.”

We weren’t growing but we weren’t exactly starving. We were hungry. But you can get very tired of turnips and watery beetroot soup.

Only Papa went out. Every morning, after one cup of the stinky coffee made of roots that hasn’t even
one
coffee bean in it, he went out to the parks, looking for logs or twigs for our fire.

“It’s bloody hard work to find anything bigger than a match,” he said. Mama made a face because of his bad language but he didn’t care. “Everyone in Paris is up at the crack of dawn with a fine-tooth comb, crawling under the trees.”

So, after a while Papa took to going quite a long way on his bicycle, past the city ring road, which is pretty far. Then he would walk along the railway lines. This was
so
much against the law. Twice over.

No. 1 – Jews were not allowed to go more than five miles from their home.

No. 2 –
Nobody
was supposed to go near the train tracks anyway. VERBOTEN.

But what else could Papa do? There was much more wood and brambles and stuff to be had along the railway.

“Nothing is impossible for a willing heart,” Mama said, every time he went out. She always used to say that to encourage us, even before the war. But there were deep lines all around her mouth until Papa got home again. Nadia tried to smooth them out with her fingers but it didn’t work.

The best thing about Papa going along the tracks was that sometimes he found little rough pieces of coal that had fallen from the train tenders.

He used to bring a sack and scissors, and heavy gloves for the brambles. One day when the snow had gone I went with him.

Papa said he would bring me out with him because:

No. 1 – I was getting too pasty being inside and

No. 2 – I was giving Mama too much cheek.

“I don’t mind that, Léo,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, leave the boy here where he’s safe.”

“He has to learn,” said Papa. “He has to know what to do, just in case.”

He didn’t say what just in case meant. But we all knew it would be something bad. Lots of French men were sent off to work in Germany because the German men were away fighting. If that happened to Papa…

When we got up on the bike he folded his sack to make a kind of cushion on the crossbar. But I could still feel the cold on my bottom. My legs were frozen, even though Mama had done her best and knitted long socks for me and Nadia with wool from an old cardigan.

Long ago Papa would put me on the crossbar and Nadia on the carrier, and we would whizz along the best boulevards until we spotted an ice cream van and then we’d stop. Chocolate for me, vanilla for Papa and Nadia.

But when we left rue des Lions that day there was no whizzing, and you can bet there was no ice cream either. I could hear Papa puffing really hard, even though there was no Nadia. We had to stop a few times and wait until he got his breath back. He said he was out of practice having a passenger on board. He said I must have put on weight.