by Esther Freud
We managed to pass our days quite tolerably, crouching round a tiny stove, playing cards and singing while we watched the countryside go by. And after weeks of travelling on various ramshackle trains we finally reached our destination. If I had arrived in Nova Nikolaiesk any sooner than I did, I would very likely have been wiped out by the typhoid epidemic, which had been raging there since the previous winter. Thousands and thousands of prisoners, housed in squalid, lice-ridden camps, died within a few weeks, and once dead they were thrown into a makeshift mortuary. In their greed the local people crept out at night and robbed them of their clothes, and so, of course, the typhoid spread into the town and became even more impossible to control. There was a story circulating that a prisoner, assumed dead, was thrown into the mortuary only to appear again to lodge an official complaint that his trousers had been stolen. But by the next day he was also dead. There were no lists kept, and out of ten thousand prisoners, eight thousand are said to have died within a few weeks. And I don’t suppose their families will ever know what happened to them.
Eva had a plan to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. A circus was reopening near the Bourse Exchange and she hoped that all the family might go. When it was mentioned, Bina frowned, insisting that it would be undignified, so close to Papa’s death. Martha agreed. ‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘only three out of the herd of elephants survived the food restrictions of the war.’ But Eva would not be put off. On the opening night she went to look at the huge tent. Band music was swelling up inside, and people were arriving in a steady stream, sailors, girls, old women and young men, all pushing their way forward. The air was full of children, chattering like birds, some smart and scrubbed and tightly held while others, barefoot and in rags, scrambled to get in for nothing under the canvas walls. Through the open curtain of the door, Eva caught sight of the arena. A golden round of sand lit up from above with arcs of light. She stood and watched the audience push in and swore she’d find the money somehow. If no one else wanted to go, she’d take Emanuel as his birthday treat. And then the cymbals of the orchestra began to ring, splashing in the beginning of the show, and a rumble rose up as the crowd, intent on having fun, forced themselves forward in their seats. Eva caught sight of a clown, jumping through mid-air, his mop of orange hair standing on end, before the cloth door of the tent was pulled tight behind him.
Eva walked slowly towards home. She crossed the Friedrichs Bridge and headed for the Linden. Then laughing and rushing out of a side street, two people arm in arm knocked her down. The woman was large and loud and, without giving her companion a moment even to catch his breath, she whisked him on, shouting that they’d miss the best part of the show.
‘Emanuel?’ Eva scrambled up. She was convinced that she recognized her brother’s dragging leg, but they were off over the bridge, laughing and grabbing at their open, flapping coats. Eva, her nose stinging with the shock, stood stranded in the road. She’d hesitated too long, and she took off after them towards the high dome of the tent. ‘Wait! Wait for me!’ But they had a good start on her, and although her brother stumbled as he ran, the strong arm of his companion swept him up and carried him along.
She arrived in time to see them disappear, the last of the latecomers, into the circus tent. She saw a slice of darkness and felt a low hush of suspense as the audience waited, breathless, on a wave. Manu must have already bought the tickets, she thought, and a surge of resentment rose up for his hideous laughing friend, as wide as a house in her old clothes, and her feet in great black boots. She considered waiting for them to come out, catching them as they recrossed the bridge, but it was already dark and growing cold and for all she knew the show might last and last.
I owe my life [Marianna read] and the use of my legs to a Hungarian doctor, who worked tirelessly in the camp to make life bearable. I was lucky to end up there and not at the hospital where I was first sent, where there was a Tartar doctor who had a great lust for operations. He would roam the wards looking for a likely victim, and every few weeks indulged in an orgy of amputations, cutting off the arms and legs, quite unnecessarily, of up to forty people in a night. I was in a hospital in Tarkov, another in Saratov, and finally with thousands of others in a camp in Astrakas, a town famous for its caviar. Unfortunately nothing so delicious reached us there, and we existed on watery tea, fish soup and a scrap of bread. The real reason there was so little to eat was because the camp commander used only a fraction of the money set aside for food. It is common knowledge that, since the start of the war, he had saved enough to buy himself a house, a cart and a horse. Many of the men were so weak they gave up hope, and if you talked to them they answered only with a monosyllabic grunt. On the day that I arrived there, a thin and filthy man, wearing only his underwear, made a protest, by cutting open an artery with his shaving knife on the steps of the barracks.
But then something quite extraordinary happened. Two officers escaped, and in an attempt to conceal the error, the camp commander decided to transfer two ordinary men to make up the numbers. And I, an ordinary man, was chosen, and was moved from the barracks where three hundred men are packed in so tightly it is impossible to sleep in any other position than on your side, to a house on the edge of the Volga where the officers live in relative comfort, with beds and a view of the river.
Marianna slipped across the hall with Emanuel’s rough pages in her hand. She twisted the handle of his door and, knowing which floorboards to avoid, tiptoed into the room. It was after midnight and she’d copied the final instalment of his story, surprised to find that it ended so abruptly with Emanuel slipping like a thief across the line. It should have finished with a trumpet call of honour for his safe return and she’d been tempted to add one more page in which he received a medal for his bravery. Marianna bent to push the pages under his bed when she noticed that it was empty. She stared at the smooth outline of the quilt, the undented pillow and, frightened suddenly that she might meet him coming in, she hurried from his room.
Eva watched her brother balefully over breakfast. It was true that he looked less grey, the whites of his eyes less yellow. He caught her and smiled their own conspiratorial smile, his hands trembling as he raised toast to his lips.
When he went out she followed him and walked at a safe distance towards the newly opened cafés around Kurfürstendamm. She wandered up and down while he drank a cup of coffee, followed by long glasses of water. He must be waiting for someone, but eventually he stood up to leave, and after a long and meandering walk he led her back to Potsdamer Strasse 12.
As they reached the door she called out to him in mock surprise, ‘Well, Manu, hello,’ and finding she had nothing else to say, she told him to expect a birthday treat.
Emanuel leant against the door as if the thought of it exhausted him. ‘Have our birthdays come around again so soon?’ he asked, and Eva remembered the length of the last year, the endless months and empty hanging weeks, and wondered if this was meant to be a joke.
‘Not quite yet,’ she said, ‘but when they do, will you be my guest at the circus?’
Emanuel raised his eyebrows. ‘The circus? Is that right?’
‘Next week,’ she assured him. ‘We’ll go together and sit high up at the back.’
‘The circus,’ he repeated, as if the thought of it was quite extraordinary. And, thanking her, he turned to go inside.
Eva began to doubt that it had been her brother whom she’d seen in such high spirits flapping along over the Friedrichs Bridge. She’d have to watch him closely to see if his reactions to the clowns were new and if the sight of the three elephants surprised him. She crept into her room and opened up her treasure box. It was a long time since she’d added anything and small webs of dust had collected in the hinges of green felt. The wood looked scratched and dull and she spat against the inlaid flower, rubbing at the mother-of-pearl until it broke back into life. Inside, her photograph had curled in on itself. She had to turn the edges back to get a good look at Fräulein Schulze’s eyes, star
ing straight ahead and ringed with light. Dried flowers hung together on their fragile threads and her thimble, once overlaid with silver, had turned into a little pewter cup. She tipped the contents out on to the floor, cupping small beads as they threatened to roll off and picking out the severed stalks of roses. Eva stared down in dismay. She had been convinced, if she could bring herself to part with anything, that she’d have no trouble raising money for two circus seats, but now as she rolled the missing marble from the solitaire around her palm, she realized that there was nothing here of any value. With her fingertips she brushed the green felt of the lid and closed it again. Then it occurred to her that she had another box. Her birth box, locked up in the safe. ‘We’ll keep it for you here,’ Papa had said, ‘until you need it.’ And the gold to celebrate her seventh birthday, brought from Hamburg by her uncle Dagebert, had been dropped in with the rest. Eva rushed through to find her mother.
Marianna opened up the airing-cupboard door and, standing on a stool to get a better view, unlocked the safe. In Eva’s box there was one single gold coin. It had been placed there by Wolf’s father the week before his death and she hesitated to remove it. Bina’s box was empty, but in Martha’s there was still a small assortment of coins. She took one of these and quickly closed the door.
Eva turned it over in her hand. It was dense and heavy, warming so quickly that she had to stop herself from placing it like chocolate on her tongue.
‘Thank you, Mama,’ she said, and for a moment she felt tempted to invite her to the circus too.
Marianna bundled up her stack of neatly written pages and tied it tight with string. The sight of those last coins had given her an idea and as she walked across the square she wondered what it would cost to have Emanuel’s memoir printed into a book. She could make a limited edition of fifty private copies, bound up in leather with a thread of gold, and inside the front page a portrait of the author. She might have to use the last of her daughters’ gold but she would present it to Emanuel on his birthday as a present from them all.
The printer laughed at her mention of leather and suggested instead a cover made from cardboard, offering her a choice of grey or blue. Marianna chose pale blue and asked to see the paper. She touched the loose sheets, nodding over the light tint and the tiny horizontal lines. ‘I’ll need the copies soon,’ she told him, and the printer put his head to one side and said that that might cost a little more.
Marianna had to make do with a photograph. She found one, taken on the first leave of the war, Emanuel, clean-shaven, his sweet smile just hovering, his head a little to one side as he leant against the perfectly smooth fingers of one hand.
Marianna helped Eva to get ready. It gave her pleasure to shake out her yellow Chinese shawl, the silk downy with age. It was dotted through with tiny perfect darns, but the fringe was still intact, long and thick, and reached down below her daughter’s waist. Marianna brushed her hair. ‘One hundred times,’ Eva demanded, remembering Omi Lise’s strict regime, but Marianna stopped before she got to twenty and, with a mouthful of long pins, piled it on top of Eva’s head.
‘What a shame,’ she mumbled, through the pins, ‘that we can’t have a ball for you.’ But Eva only laughed, open-mouthed, into the mirror and said she’d much prefer a circus.
Emanuel had rubbed black on to his shoes and his hair was flattened back against his head. He took Eva’s hand and kissed it, tucking it away under his arm, and together they walked out into the summer street. It was true, Emanuel had changed. His face was fuller, and his waistcoat did not hang so loosely on his chest. Eva adjusted her quick walk to his, hardly noticing his limp, and adding up admiring glances on the fingers of one hand. He let her choose their seats. She wanted to be high, high up, and they climbed, stumbling over benches until they were nearly at the back. They had only just sat down when the first clash of the cymbals cut through the round of tunes and, with one great, thrilling flourish, the clowns were ushered in. Eva gripped her brother’s hand and stared down at a troupe of dwarfs, their white faces painted into smiles, their huge shoes spraying sand into the air. They chased after each other on short legs, grappling and butting, pinning down and tripping up, their tricks growing more violent with each lap of the tent until the laughter of the crowd began to mingle with shouts and shrill wild cries. The ring-master in his shiny suit put up his hands and shooed them like children from the stage. Martha had been right about the elephants. Their skin looked sad and old as they loped, heads down, one close behind the other, the round grey circles of their feet falling into step, their knees like knitted underwear creasing obediently in time. Even when they dipped their trunks and showered the strong man with spray, they might have been in mourning for their friends, the water sliding down the flat sides of their heads like tears. Eva glanced across at Manu, anxious that he might want to leave, but he was bent forward in his seat, his eyes fixed on the circle of gold sand, waiting with the others for the next act to come on.
The orchestra were whispering among themselves, plucking strings and tightening their bows, while the crowd, restless, shuffled their feet and let out small impatient grunts. A rumour rippled through the tent that the trapeze artist had been injured in a fall, and Eva wondered what, after the horses, there was left to come. A trickle of despair seeped into her heart and she clenched her fist, holding tight onto her hopes and trying not to cry with disappointment. Then the tent began to hum. All along her row feet drummed against wood and Emanuel, his face burning, knocked his knuckles on the bench.
The arc lights twisted up to brilliant white and a man in a top hat and tail-coat sauntered into the ring. He pushed back his shoulders, tilting his chin, and there, far above him, a rope was being strung. It was a silver wire, as sharp and tight as gut, and with a low rolling of the drums the man began to climb. He climbed slowly, pausing half-way as the violins rattled after him, urging him on. Eva thought she saw his shoulders swell as he took a last great gulp of air and then, with a hissing of the lightest drums, he slithered to the top.
He pointed a toe and stepped out on to the line. There was a silence, thick with swallowed breath, and then the orchestra began to play. They played quietly, gaining strength as he stepped out, until with a flourish he began to dance back and forth across the wire to the tune of a Hungarian march. His coat-tails flapped, his top hat spun, and his feet, invisible, picked up speed until he was whirling, shimmering in a gloss of black. Then, with both hands, he picked up a small table and holding it above his head he skipped with it along the rope. He placed it, swaying, in the centre of the wire, returning a moment later with a matching chair, and then a stove. The drums hissed and burst and a frying pan was tossed up to him. The frying pan began to sizzle on the stove and from his pocket the man took an egg and broke it high into the pan, scattering the shell on to the sand below. He broke another and another until the drums were beating in a frenzy of delight, and Eva gasped to see the pan of eggs sending up a trail of steam. He tucked a cloth into his collar and then, stirring his omelette with one hand, he caught a bottle of champagne. The drumbeat eased into a waltz and the man sat down to enjoy his meal.
Eva felt her smile stretched wide across her face, her heart skipping in and out of love as she watched the magician on the wire polish off his food. He took one last leisurely mouthful of champagne, and then, holding up his glass, he raised a toast, and the whole tent exploded in a cheer as the stove, the table and the chair were all tossed down to the ground.
Eva joined in the thunderous applause. Her mouth was aching with delight and she stood up to continue clapping. ‘The diner on the wire,’ Emanuel shouted to her, ‘I knew you’d like him.’ And he began to cheer as the man swung down to earth.
‘I love him,’ Eva said, while, with a quick bow to the left and right, the diner skipped out of the tent. Eva felt her heart heavy and hot with longing, and in a daze she let herself be led out into the night, the crowd humming all around her.
‘It’s better than before the war wh
en Houdini appeared at the Wintergarten,’ someone shouted over her head.
‘He freed himself from a closed water tank,’ an indignant voice yelled back. ‘Nothing could be much better than that!’
And Eva whispered to herself that it was better than anything ever in the world.
‘Manu?’ She looked around for him. He had let go of her hand, and she’d been so caught up in her reverie that she hadn’t seen him disappear. People everywhere were shoving and hurrying, swirled up with excitement for the new sensation of Berlin. Breathing hard, she pushed her way out of the crowd, keeping her head tilted up to catch sight of her brother. She’d almost given up when she saw him standing at the edge of a group. He was staring down at his feet, his head a little to one side, and she was surprised to find he wasn’t looking round for her. ‘Manu.’ She began to run towards him, and then a woman in a pale green coat stepped out from the group and took his arm. She turned him towards her and let her arms circle his back. Eva saw her face over his shoulder, eyes closed, wide cheeks bunched up in a smile, and in a strange cold flash she recognized her.
‘Schu-Schu?’ she gasped, and Fräulein Schulze’s eyes opened and stared right into hers. Eva came a few steps nearer, shivering suddenly with cold and wondering why, after all this time, she wasn’t happier to see her. Schu-Schu’s red hair had darkened. It was brushed upside down under a straw hat, and her hands, out of their gloves, were large and blotched.
