The Orphan's Tale

by Pam Jenoff

  But no one answers or comes to our aid. It is only us now.

  “Help will be here soon,” Astrid promises.

  In the distance I hear the whir of a siren. The police will be here soon, too. There will be questions, an investigation. “The pass,” I remember. Astrid is supposed to be leaving right now. “After tonight it will be useless. You have to go.”

  She waves her hand, as though swatting a fly. “I won’t leave you.” A few minutes earlier, she wanted me gone. But she is not angry anymore. At last, she has forgiven me. She knows all of my secrets now and has not turned away—which is the one thing I wanted all along. Relief rises over my pain.

  “You have to go.” I raise my hand and touch Theo. “Take him.” The words hurt my throat.

  “But...” Astrid begins to protest.

  “Now,” I add. “Or it will be too late.” I lie back weakly.

  “You can still go,” she presses, unwilling to see the truth before her. “I’ll give the pass to you like I said earlier. You can leave with Theo and the two of you can be together.”

  Her voice is so earnest that for a second I almost believe it. “No,” I say as reality crashes down on me once more. My dream of escaping to freedom with Theo has been destroyed. I cough again, wheezing for air.

  “I’m going to find help,” Astrid says again, starting to rise.

  “Stay with me.” I use my last bit of energy to catch her hand. “I’m not going to make it.”

  She shakes her head, but at the same time, she is unable to deny the truth before her. “I can’t leave you behind,” she says, still fighting.

  “What choice do we have?” The circus is gone; the fire has undone what war could not. “You have to take Theo. You’re his only hope.”

  Theo squirms on my lap, as if recognizing his own name for the first time. I run my hand over the softness of his head and in that moment I see before me the man whom he will grow to be. He will not know me. Tears flow from my eyes, burning the raw flesh of my cheeks. Like his birth parents, I will fade from his memory forever.

  Someday you’ll have to let him go. Astrid’s words, spoken on the night of the first show, come back to me as clearly as though she is saying them now, though her lips do not move at all. Like one of Drina’s predictions come true.

  “You did it,” she says through her tears. “You became an aerialist.” And in that moment, I have everything.

  Almost everything. “Luc,” I say. Though he failed me, I cannot help but think of him. Pain shoots through me as I remember Luc’s betrayal. “You were right about him. I tried to go meet him like we planned. But he never came. He didn’t care for me at all.”

  “No, no, that can’t be right,” Astrid protests. “He came all this way for you. It doesn’t make sense. I’m sure he had a reason. If you want, I will try to find Luc for you,” she offers instead. “Find out why he couldn’t meet you and tell him what happened.” We both know that’s impossible. He has disappeared and she has no way of finding him.

  But I love her for offering. “First you praise my flying and now you are being nice about Luc,” I rasp. “I really must be dying.” We both laugh so improbably then, my throat scratchy as an old record on a phonograph. My chest heaves with pain.

  Astrid takes Theo from me, cradling him in her arms. If only they were mine. She lifts her head. There is a kind of clarity to her now and in the shine of her eyes I see the many siblings of the great circus family that had gone before her. A few hours earlier, I was not sure she could survive herself. How will she flee and care for Theo? But she seems stronger than she had been since losing Peter. And with Theo, she will not be alone. He looks at me as she rocks him gently, not understanding.

  “Go now, before it is too late,” I manage, using the last bit of strength I have left. Astrid does not protest, but kisses my cheek, then lowers Theo to do the same.

  They need to leave now while no one is watching. I close my eyes, knowing that she will not go while I am still here. She does not leave, but lies down beside me, still holding Theo. I will my breath to slow and suddenly it is the three of us back in the railcar, sleeping together as one. I feel her shift away and the space beside me grows cold as she rises and starts for the trees.

  I force my eyes to stay shut, unable to watch them leave.

  When I open them again, they are gone.

  But I am not alone. The sky has cleared and as I look up at the field of stars, not quite yellow, I see faces. First Peter, looking down on Astrid, watching over her. “I did it.” I had saved her, though not at all in the way he had planned.

  Then farther in the distance of the night sky, I see Luc. I will never know why he did not meet me. But I forgive him. Wait for me, my love. I am coming.

  And finally I see Herr Neuhoff. In the end after the performers had taken their final bows and slipped from the stage, he stands as he had started, alone in the spotlight. He sweeps the crowd with his gaze, gives that tip of his hat, an invitation and a farewell.

  And then darkness.

  Epilogue

  Astrid

  Paris

  I was never the one who was supposed to make it.

  My eyes clear. I am still standing before the boxcar in the museum exhibit, staring at the empty berth. I can almost feel Noa lying beside me, cheek warm against mine as our breaths rise and fall in unison.

  It was still dark when Noa’s porcelain eyes closed for the last time. I had seen broken bodies before—the clockmaker and even once a trainer gored by a tiger. But Noa was beyond all of that. The heavy poles that had crashed down upon her had crushed her legs and likely broken her back. She could have just fled when the fire broke out. She had come back to save me, though—and it had cost her everything.

  I brush at my eyes now, remembering. Though I’d had many brothers, she was so much closer, the sister I never had. I’d been ready to give up my freedom for her. Of course that was out of the question with her injuries. Looking down at her piteous face and helpless, broken body, I could not bear to leave her. I was Theo’s only hope for survival, though. So I waited until Noa’s eyes had closed for the last time and then I set out across the barren field, Theo tucked firmly against me. I stood straighter, truly on my own for the first time.

  Providence seemed to smile on Theo and me during our escape, as if saying we had already suffered enough. We’d made it to Lisbon mostly by train then on foot into the city itself. There the visa my brother had arranged was waiting at the consulate. Though the city was teeming with refugees desperate to flee, the money Erich had deposited was enough to buy us a place on board a steamer. Little breaks of luck, when before there had been so few. Perhaps it was more than I deserved.

  A few weeks after our ship reached New York, we received word that the Allies had landed and were headed toward Paris. The end of the war, though not here yet, was in sight. I was flooded with doubt: maybe leaving Europe had been a mistake. We might have been safe. But there was no going back.

  I never flew again after the night of the fire. We found a life outside Tampa where my brother Jules ran a carnival. I worked hard, selling tickets and concessions. Returning to the trapeze was more than Jules or I could have borne. At first, I feared life without performing would prove stifling and strange as it had with Erich. But on my own, I was free.

  Only now I have come back. I clear the memories from my mind and gaze up at the circus exhibit, celebrating the acts and spectacles of that bygone era. Of course the exhibit makes no mention of the circus’s greatest feat—saving lives.

  There is a lone photo of Peter, resplendent in his clown costume. Behind the white makeup are the dark, sad eyes that only I knew. A note beneath his picture reads: Killed in Auschwitz in 1945. That is not quite the truth. Peter, I’d discovered from the Yad Vashem archives decades earlier, had been sentenced by a Nazi
tribunal at Auschwitz to die before a firing squad. The morning the guards had come for him, they had discovered that he had hung himself in his cell. I press myself against thick glass that covers the photo, cursing it for separating the image from my skin.

  And what of Erich? For some time, I had not been able to learn his fate. I wondered if he had died in combat or perhaps escaped to South America like that Nazi butcher Josef Mengele and the other bastards who were never brought to justice. Then about three years after the war ended, I received a letter from a law firm in Bonn that found me through the bank account in Lisbon, informing me that Erich had left me a small inheritance. It was only then that I learned he had been killed when the apartment building on Rauchstrasse had been hit by a mortar shell. The building had been bombed on April 7, 1944, just days after he forwarded Jules’s letter on to me. The air raid had come in the predawn hours when everyone who lived there was still asleep. I would have been in bed, too, and surely killed, had Erich not cast me out. I donated the money he left me to the Joint Distribution Committee.

  I never married again. I had healed once after Erich, but losing Peter was simply too much. Two heartbreaks such as the ones I had known were enough for any lifetime.

  Noa’s face appears in my mind. There is no photo of her in the exhibit, other than a piece of her face visible behind one of the acrobats in a photo of the full circus taking its final bow. She had performed so briefly, an unnamed footnote in the centuries of circus history. But I see her, young and beautiful on the trapeze, experiencing the wonder of flying for the first time. She had known heartbreak, too, in a lifetime a fraction as long as mine. I had always wondered about Luc: Why hadn’t he shown up to meet Noa that last night? Though I had disliked him, he seemed to genuinely care for her. What had stopped him from coming for her?

  It is this question that in large part brought me here. That, and an idea of where I might find the answer, once I had realized the railcar pictured in the Times was one and the same. I stare at the carriage once more, eyes focused on the belly box below the rear of the car. Noa and Luc had left messages for one another there, thinking that no one else knew. I had seen them, though, exchanging confidences there like a childhood game of Post Office. Fools! If someone else had found out, they would have jeopardized us all. But I waited, let her have her fun, watching carefully to make sure no one else had seen. When I read the article in the paper about the circus exhibit, glimpsed the train car that was so improbably ours, I thought it was possible that the boy had left a message for Noa there, explaining.

  Only now I found the belly box empty.

  I lean against the side of the train car, pressing my head flat against the worn wood. Like holding up a shell to hear the sea, voices echo that are no longer there. Then I take a few steps farther along the exhibit.

  There is an oil painting I have never seen before of a young woman on a trapeze. I gasp. The pale, slim figure is undoubtedly Noa, the sequined costume one of my own that I had given her. Where had it come from? If someone had painted her portrait while she was at the circus, surely I would have known.

  I move closer and squint at the small plaque beneath the painting:

  Oil painting found in the possession of an unidentified young man who was killed when the Germans bombed a resistance stronghold near Strasbourg in May 1944. His connection to the circus and the subject of his painting are unknown.

  I freeze, my blood running cold. Noa had told me once that Luc wanted to be a painter. I had not known he was so talented. The image had been rendered with great skill, the artist having the clearest of affection for its subject. Taking in Luc’s work, I am certain now that he would not have abandoned Noa.

  She had told me, too, that he planned to join the Maquis, and that he had gone to a resistance location not far from the fairgrounds. I hear then the bombs that rained down the night of our last performance and know then why he had not come for her. Noa and Luc had died the same night, just miles apart, neither knowing. Tears fill my eyes and run over.

  I stare at the painting of Noa, which has been encased in glass to protect it from age and wear. “He didn’t leave you after all,” I whisper.

  In the reflection of the glass behind me, something moves. A woman stands there behind me with hair a dome of white. Noa, I think, even as I know it is impossible. I spin toward the image, fantasizing that she is here and I can ask forgiveness for all I have done.

  “Mom?”

  I turn. “Petra.” My beautiful girl. There she stands, the child whom I was supposed to have lost all those years ago. I raise my hand to my stomach, feeling as I have so many times over the years the blow that almost took her from me. My miracle.

  “Now, how did I know that I would find you here?” There is no anger in her voice. Just a smile about those full lips and the dark eyes that I will always see as if behind a sheet of white greasepaint. Performing.

  At first, my losing the pregnancy had not been a lie. There had been a sharp pain and bleeding that terrible night when the guard struck me. I had assumed after the blow that I had lost the child. But a few days later as I stood atop the trapeze, considering whether to jump, I felt that familiar nausea return. I recognized instantly what it was: my child, defiant, insisting upon life.

  I had not told Noa—she would never have taken the pass if she knew I was still pregnant. It was not that I did not want freedom or to live for my child. I did, so much so I could taste it. But Noa was younger, not as strong. She needed to go, and to take Theo with her. Without the circus, Noa would have nothing. I could manage, get by, find somewhere else to perform and survive. But she could barely take care of herself and Theo with all of our help. She would not make it on her own. So I had lied.

  My plan was a good one and it might have worked if not for Luc and the fire. If it had been given a chance. How had the fire started, though? Across the years I wondered if it had been set deliberately by a disgruntled circus worker or even Emmet, wanting to be free of it all. Or perhaps a stray piece of shrapnel from one of the bombs. To this day I do not know.

  In the end, it hadn’t mattered. The fire, not the war, had taken Noa, just as arbitrarily as Herr Neuhoff had been felled by his heart. I had no choice but to take the pass and save Theo.

  And my daughter. Petra has her father’s features, but she is petite like me, a four-foot-eleven surgeon for Doctors Without Borders and a force to be reckoned with. I reach over the roped stanchion and brush her bangs from her eyes instinctively as though she is six. Only her hair is almost completely white. How odd it is to see your own child age! Petra, shielded on the inside and born in America, knew nothing of the hardships we had lived. Almost nothing. My daughter had been born blind in one eye, the sole injury the guard’s club had inflicted the night Peter was taken.

  As Petra steps forward to embrace me, someone taller appears behind her. “Mom, come out of there.” I obey and reach up to hug Theo, who stands a full head above his sister, his own hair gray and wiry. Though they are not blood siblings, their features look remarkably the same.

  “You also came?” I ask chidingly. “Don’t you have patients to care for?”

  “We’re kind of a package deal,” he replies, putting an arm around his sister’s shoulders. It is true—the two couldn’t be closer.

  They had both become doctors. Petra, who had not escaped the travel gene, circled the world in her practice, and Theo, ever content to stay, was a surgeon at a hospital in the same town where I had raised them, with his wife and my three beautiful granddaughters, themselves now grown. My two children, cut from different cloth, yet so very alike in shape. And medicine a kind of family business to them as much as the circus had been to my brothers and me.

  I push the belly box shut with my backside so Petra and Theo will not see and let her lead me from the exhibit back to the other side of the ropes.

  “How did you get here so q
uickly?” I ask Theo. “I only left New York two days ago.”

  “It was dumb luck that I was at a conference in Brussels when I got the call from the nursing home,” he replies. “I phoned Petra and she flew in from Belgrade.” Petra spent most of her time in Eastern Europe helping refugees. She had been drawn, it seems, back to this part of the world from which we had worked so hard to escape.

  I look at my children adoringly. In their faces, I can see the past as surely as Drina once read the future: Peter is so readily visible in our daughter, most days it is like having him walk with me. Theo was not born to Noa, but somehow he absorbed so much of her looks, as if by osmosis, her expressions and even her manner of speech. She had loved him so in the few short months she cared for him and he could not have been more hers if she had given birth to him.

  Then there is that other face always in my mind, though I never met him, never had a photograph. Noa’s child, taken from her at birth. I see him next to Theo, wonder so often what he would have been like as a man.

  “Mom...” Theo’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “You just took off from the home. We were so worried.”

  “I had to see the exhibit,” I offer weakly.

  Theo steps back, noticing the portrait of Noa. “That’s her, isn’t it?” he asks, a catch in his voice. He and Petra both know about Noa. I told my children when they were old enough the truth about Noa and the way she had saved Theo. But the details of how she had come to be with the circus and the other sibling who might be out there still—well, some things are better left unsaid. I nod. “She was beautiful.”

  “Beautiful,” I repeat. “In more ways than you will ever know, I think. It was painted by a young man she met while she was with the circus. She only knew him a short while, but they loved each other very much. I never knew what became of him—until now.”

  We stare at the picture for several seconds without speaking. “Are you ready to go now?” Petra asks gently.