No Stars at the Circus (6 page)

“But only in your liver or some other hidden part of you because the rest of you is still as skinny as one of my old Auntie Gertrud’s chickens.”

“If only you’d had some real coffee, you’d be like a racer, Papa,” I said.

He made a face. “So, let’s go and see if there’s any wood left in the forest,” he said. That was meant to be a joke so I laughed. We got back on the bike.

Papa’s plan that day was to head for the park at Vincennes, not to follow the train tracks. I was disappointed. I thought if we went along the tracks we just might get lucky and see a train being blown to bits by the train saboteurs. I didn’t say that, though.

However, it was just as well we went the way we did. That’s for sure.

We got to the big round space at Place de la Nation and Papa swung himself off the bike. There was more noise than I could believe. I don’t know where those people had got their petrol from, but there was a lot of traffic. It was mostly German army trucks, stuffed with potato bugs and their guns, but there were quite a few cars too. Some of them had funny gas tanks on the roof. There were motorbikes too, smelly and smoky. And lots of vélo taxis.

One poor Citroën with a funny petrol tank, like a bottle stuck to the radiator, suddenly drifted to the side and halted, right in front of us. Papa stopped me staring at the people inside by pulling me away from the kerb.

“Mind yourself, son!” he said, really loud. He was holding me so tight it hurt. Then, when we were well away from the car, he spoke with his teeth closed together. “Didn’t I warn you not to draw any attention to us?”

I said I was sorry. But the car stopping wasn’t my fault.

We crossed all the avenues. It took us ages to get to the big wide one called Cours de Vincennes. It has two statues standing on great tall columns on either side of the road. They look like Romans but Papa says they’re French kings. Anyway, when you see them you know you have arrived at the fairground, the Foire du Trône.

And there was
still
a fair there, just where I remembered, from the time before the Germans. We used to come every summer.

Maybe there weren’t as many stands or carousels as there used to be but there was a string of bunting between the trees, and some coloured flags flying. There were vans parked in a line, stretching down the avenue. But since nobody in a fair gets up early in the morning all the van doors were closed.

Except one.

Papa was just about to lift me back onto the crossbar when I left him standing there. I just had to.

“I’ll only be a minute!” I shouted back at him. “Just wait!” I didn’t stop to hear if he said anything. I had to see IT close up before it broke up.

IT = THEM.

Outside the big yellow van whose door was open there were two people on a bright green deckchair, as if it was summer. The two of them were on the same chair. One was sitting the ordinary way people sit. He was a man dressed in a Pierrot costume with a big red bow at the neck and he was smoking a cigarette. The other person was standing upside down on his head.

Actually, I don’t know whether you can say “standing” if the person is upside down. Maybe there’s another word.

The upside down one was a woman and she was wearing a long black striped costume with legs, a bit like an old-fashioned bathing suit. She had lots of black curly hair but it was spread out on top of his, like a wig. Like him, she was smoking, only not a cigarette – a big fat cigar.

They both looked really comfortable.

I could hear Papa calling me back but now that I’d got up close I wasn’t going to go away without a proper look. Besides, it would do his wheezing good if he took a rest.

“Hello, boy,” said the woman. She could see me coming even though we were upside down to each other. “Are you useful?”

“Yes,” I said. What else could I say?

“Then please go inside the caravan and fetch me my mirror,” she said. “You’ll find it on the table in the kitchen.”

I did what she asked. The van had a set of little wooden steps with flowers painted on them. It was quite roomy inside, and whoever lived in it had made different rooms by hanging curtains from one side to the other. They were printed with stars.

I knew the room I’d walked into was the kitchen because there was a small fat stove with a frying pan on it, and a small dresser with cups and plates, all in bright colours. There was a round table opposite the door with a beautiful silver hand mirror on it.

I brought it out to the woman. She took it and held it by the handle with the right side up. Of course, for her that would have been the wrong side. The man said nothing, just puffed on his cigarette, but he had a nice smiling kind of face. He was very dark-skinned.

I looked around for Papa but he was just standing by the footpath, holding his bike.

“I was right, Luigi,” the woman said, after a minute or two. “I
do
look like our very own Mona Lisa when I am upside down. It’s the way my mouth goes. I can’t think why you haven’t noticed before now.”

Then she suddenly did a flip. Or maybe there’s another word for what she did, some word that only circus people know. I’ve never asked. Anyway, she managed to knock herself off the man’s head. She ended up standing on her feet beside me, with the cigar still burning away, like the ones cowboys in the pictures have.

She held out her left hand to me and I took it. I could see that she was not as young as she had looked when she was upside down. She was probably around Mama’s age. But who could imagine Mama upside down on top of Papa’s head, smoking a cigar?

“You have the honour of meeting La Giaconda, boy,” she said. “Mona Lisa, if you prefer. Yesterday I was plain Lucia, but now the whole of Paris lies at my feet.”

“Never plain,” said the man. “That, never.”

“I’m Jonas,” I said to the woman, because she was still holding my hand. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

Out by the roadside Papa gave a roar so I knew I had to go.

“Your father?” asked the man. I nodded. “Well, Jonas,” he said. “Since you were here to witness the magical transformation of my wife into La Giaconda, a real live Italian work of art, why don’t you and your father come and see our show tomorrow afternoon? You would be most welcome.”

He spoke French, but not like anybody I knew. His voice seemed to have the sun in it, just like his face did, and his teeth, which were really white. He spoke every word slowly and smoothly, as if he was spinning sugar on a stick.

I don’t know why I said what I said next. Mama had warned us never to say anything about ourselves.

“But we’re Jewish,” I said. “I don’t think we can come.”

Then I remembered my manners. “But thank you very much.”

The man sat up straight, as if the deckchair had suddenly grown a long stiff back. He took the cigarette from his mouth, stubbed it out and put it in his pocket. Then he stood up.

“In that case, Jonas,” he said, “I promise that you will have the best ringside seats.”

He made a little face.

“Well, that is, you would have them, if we
had
a ring,” he said. “But you will have the best of what the Corrado Circus has to offer. And if you have any brothers or sisters or cousins or any companions in crime like yourself, bring them too. Your party will be our most honoured guests.”

3 SEPTEMBER 1942

Today is the war’s third birthday. The Prof made scrambled eggs for us. He said they weren’t hen eggs
exactly
but they had just the same kind of protein inside them that would make me grow. When I asked if they were magpie eggs he just laughed.

“I’ve a source not so far away that sometimes comes up trumps,” he said. “It’s like having shares in a shipping line. Of course, I refer to the days when shares used to come up trumps.”

I didn’t know about that, but for someone who is so shy he seems to know quite a few people who give him things. Maybe they were once his pupils, like Mama was.

Anyway, the eggs were delicious even though there was too much pepper in them. I didn’t even mind that the bread wasn’t toasted, because the eggs took the staleness out of it. But I don’t know why he wouldn’t say what kind of eggs he’d used. Were they dinosaur eggs? The museum is just across the park. But I didn’t say that in case it sounded like the eggs were bad.

He brought everything up to my attic room – the pot with the eggs, the bread, the plates – and he ate here with me, both of us sitting on the floor with our backs to the bed. That’s the first time he’s done that. Really, I’d much prefer to go downstairs and eat with him in his kitchen but maybe this was a start.

“It makes a change to eat with somebody else,” I said. “I like it better.”

He coughed for a bit about that. Then he told me that he and his wife have a son called Robert, but he lives in the United States of America. They were going to go there to be with him, just before the Germans came, but then Madame Prof got ill and so they couldn’t go. Then she died. He said Robert plays the violin in an orchestra in New York, so that means he must be an adult, not a child. The Prof is definitely too old to be a child’s father.

I feel bad sometimes that I’m getting better food here than I did in rue des Lions. Mama did her best but there was very little she could find for us. And because Papa couldn’t work, at first there was only the little bit of money he had left from the shop.

It was Nadia who saw Papa going to where he’d hidden the stuff we’d brought with us, the watches and jewels wrapped up in the chamois skins. He’d made a safe place for them under the floorboards. Nadia saw him take two watches out and put them in his pocket. She can be really quiet when she wants and people sometimes forget she is there.

Papa must have, that day at least. He wrote a note for Mama and left it by the sink. Then he went out.

When he came back he had some fish, red mullet I think it was, and some bread that was
nearly
white. Well, at least it wasn’t black with spots in it, like the usual bread. He had some big green apples too, eggs, a bag of flour and a tiny tub of butter.

“Well, you know I can’t make an apple tart,” Mama said. “We’ve no oven, only that useless fireplace. So don’t you people get your hopes up too high.”

But she was smiling. She made pancakes with apple sauce instead. You see? She always does her best.

You’d have thought Papa would be really happy that he was able to bring back some really nice food that day, just like in the old times. But no, his face was like thunder. I heard him mutter something to Mama about enjoying the food because there wouldn’t be much more like it.

“I got a miserable price from someone I trusted,” he said. “They have us over a barrel.”

I guessed the food had been very dear, wherever he’d bought it. You could see it was black market stuff, the kind that comes up from the country, or from somewhere that isn’t ordinary. Black market stuff is always dear because you can’t use your food coupons.

But when we were in our room that night Nadia told me about Papa taking the watches out of the hiding place. She said he must have sold them. Of course she hadn’t heard what he’d said at dinner, so I didn’t tell her. She was still so happy about the pancakes.

She said there must be at least ten more watches left in the safe place. “Because I carried six and so did you. I don’t know how many rings there are. Enough for years, I bet.”

The next chance I got I lifted the floorboard and counted them. There were twenty-two rings left.

Nadia was a year older than Giselle Bauer but she used to play with her anyway, even though Giselle didn’t really understand about Nadia being deaf. She kept yammering away, like a stupid little budgie in a cage, just baby stuff and doll stories. It drove Mama mad to listen to her, never mind me.

It was a funny thing but right where we lived on rue des Lions all the other children were girls – or boys who were very young, just babies, really. I had nobody to play with. Mama began to say things about me going to school after all because I needed the company, but Papa was dead set against it. He had a notion something would happen to me there and he wouldn’t be able to stop it.

He began to teach me some mathematics, and even a bit of chemistry, which only happens when you go to the collège. Except we didn’t have any materials, just flour and salt, cooking things like that.

“What about our gold and silver?” I asked. “They’re elements. Couldn’t we do something with them?”

Papa had shown me their names on the periodic table of the elements. Gold is
Au
; silver is
Ag
. I thought it was a smart idea but he just got cross.

“Don’t be silly, Jonas,” he said. “Just learn the names. It’s a start.”

He wasn’t a bad teacher but he wasn’t as good at explaining things as Mama was. She told great stories. I suppose it’s easier to tell stories when the lessons are about history and books. Mama was very good at giving descriptions of people from history, like Vercingétorix and Roland, who were great French fighters. And she was really sorry for poor Napoléon, cruelly locked up on his island in the middle of the ocean.

“Maybe he had a cat for a friend,” Nadia said. “Or hens.”

Mama also told us proper stories that she remembered. Some were written by Charles Dickens, who was English, and some came from the
Arabian Nights
. She read out bits from the book she’d brought with her from rue de la Harpe,
Les Misérables
, and made me and Nadia copy them out, to practise our handwriting and spelling. But there was no paper so we had to use the back pages in our school books. My eraser was just about rubbed out with all the work it had to do.

I think what upset Mama most was that I had no music. So she made me sing scales and taught me all the songs she knew.

“Remember, your voice is an instrument too.” she said. “So learn to use it.”

I don’t have a great voice, though. Not like Jean-Paul. Everyone thought he sounded like an angel. He even looked like one because his hair was fair and curly. Monsieur Lemoine used to say that Jean-Paul’s angel voice was proof that God has a sense of humour.