by Mary Finn
Most of the work I did Alfredo could have done, but he was lazy. I helped put out the chairs and arrange the sandbags and hang the flags up. La Giaconda told me that when I went around with the hat at the end of the show I got a lot more money than Alfredo did.
He didn’t care, he was so lazy. Anyway, he was in love with Violette, the woman who sold cigarettes at the kiosk up the road, the one the Germans used.
Violette had a lot of hair too.
Tommaso was out of hospital on the second Sunday I went. He was better again, they said, but I could see he was maybe a bit deaf. I knew that because of Nadia but I didn’t say it to anyone else in case they worried. I didn’t say it to him either but I taught him some of the signs we used at home with Nadia. I pretended it was a code. Which it is, really.
Tommaso wasn’t Jean-Paul, but he was all right when you got to know him. He was so glad to be home again he didn’t even mind me helping his parents out with the circus. What he really loved was football, so we usually kicked a ball around when everyone had gone home. Sometimes boys from the other vans came along and played too and it felt nearly like being in my schoolyard again. That was fun. We used the sandbags for goal posts.
Tommaso made us all play Italian teams. He knows every team there is, even the French teams, but we weren’t allowed to be French. His favourite footballer is Giuseppe Meazza. Even I’d heard of him. His nickname is Peppino and he’s on lots of cigarette cards. He played right here in Paris when Italy won the World Cup a few years ago.
Jean-Paul went to see the final with his father but Papa wouldn’t take me. No. 1 – he said I was too small and No. 2 – he said there would be a bad lot over from Italy he didn’t want to tangle with.
He didn’t say No. 3, of course, which was that he didn’t care anything about football. But I didn’t say that to Tommaso. He definitely wouldn’t understand because football is all he cares about.
La Giaconda always made a big pot of spaghetti or noodles before I went home. She just used tomato paste like the stuff in tins Mama bought, with no meat or anything like that, but hers tasted different. She said it was because the tomatoes were Italian and so were the herbs. When she couldn’t find noodles she made something out of potatoes. I don’t know what it was, but I could have eaten two plates of it at a time.
I always helped with the flea circus, just like the first time. And when Signor Corrado took the organ out of its tent, I always played it for Alfredo’s act and for Madame Fifi and her poodles.
But one Sunday it rained and nobody came. Nobody. So, that day, I asked Signor Corrado if I could learn to train fleas for myself.
TA-DA!
THE AMAZING FLEA CIRCUS OF JONAS ALBER
Signor Corrado gave me some of his special fleas to start off with. First he explained that all a flea wants to do in its whole life is jump. Except when it’s biting you and drinking your blood.
If our legs had the strength of a flea’s legs we would be able to jump as high as the moon. Well, pretty high, anyway. Definitely as high as the Eiffel Tower. Maybe as high as Mount Everest, which is the highest mountain in the world. Nobody has ever climbed to the top of it. Or if they did, they didn’t come back alive.
Here is something most people don’t know: there are mountains that are even higher than Everest. They’re in the oceans. The basking sharks swim over them all the time. So do ships, and that’s why some ships disappear. If they strike the top of an underwater mountain they sink to the bottom of the ocean and nobody ever finds them.
Anyway, if you harness a flea to something like a chariot it will pull it along because it wants to jump. It can’t jump so it pulls the chariot instead, even though the chariot is much bigger than the flea. Signor Corrado said this is flea power at work.
Some people think flea circuses are all a trick of the eye but they are not. At least mine wasn’t, and Signor Corrado’s wasn’t.
You need neat fingers and ladies’ tweezers or the fleas will get away. It’s tricky. I lost a few before I learned how to lift them properly from the box and harness them and then put them back in the box again afterwards. I hope the ones that got away jumped right on top of a fat potato bug and sucked out lots of his blood.
Mama wasn’t one bit happy about me training fleas. The first day I came home with the box of fleas and the chariots that Signor Corrado had given me, she screamed and ran out onto the landing.
Papa was interested, though, when I told him about the leg muscles fleas have. He took a good hard look at the cardboard chariots when I had everything working and he said he was sure he could make something better for me.
He was doing a few jobs by then but because that was against the law for Jews it had to be a secret. On Mondays and Wednesdays he went off to work with another jeweller on the Île Saint-Louis. That’s quite close to rue des Lions but it’s full of rich people’s houses and rich people’s shops.
I don’t know what the other jeweller’s name was. Papa wouldn’t tell us. I think all Papa did was fix watches somewhere in a backyard but at least he got a little money. And he had a place to go to so he wasn’t hanging around with his black face on. That’s what Mama said to him one day when they had a fight. Which was awful because they never used to fight.
When he brought home the silver carriages I didn’t know what to say to him. There were three carriages and each one could fit perfectly into a hazelnut shell. Papa had a shell ready, just to prove it. He had beaten the silver so fine it was thinner than paper.
Each carriage was different. One had a roof, one was open – Nadia said that one was the queen’s carriage – and one was quite like a Roman chariot because it had only two wheels, not four like the others.
Papa showed me where he had stamped the hallmarks. It was done really neatly, right across the wheel axles. Hallmarks are like a code, or a signature, for things made of silver or gold. They tell you who made the piece, when it was made and where, and how much precious metal is in it.
Papa had used up some really precious silver to make my flea carriages. That made Mama very cross. For ages she wouldn’t speak to him or me all evening and Nadia had to make up a spy message to tell us there was soup left out on the table for our dinner. But Papa said there was nobody left in the city who would give him a decent price for the silver.
“Why shouldn’t the boy have some fun, anyway?” he said. “And if they raid our house, or if anything happens to us, that bit of silver will stay out of German hands as long as Jonas keeps it with his friends. That’s worth something, surely?”
Papa had begun to say things like that. He said the mood was turning nastier by the day, even though the winter was over. Mama had those lines around her mouth all the time now, even when Papa was safe at home. She didn’t tell us stories anymore. She just told us what we should do if something happened to Papa and her, and we were left on our own.
She told me I should take Nadia and go straight to the old church behind rue de la Harpe and tell the priest there who we were.
“He’s duty-bound to help you,” she said.
I didn’t think so. Surely Monsieur Zacharides would be better because he was our friend? But she shook her head and made me promise to do what she said.
But she let me go to the circus every Sunday, even though Papa had wasted the silver, and even though Tommaso was getting better. She told me it was really because of the noodles.
“I think you’re growing a bit, Jonas, with that extra meal Signora Corrado gives you, whatever she puts into it,” she said. “And Nadia can eat your share here so it suits all of us.”
Poor Mama. She did her best but she felt worse and worse. I could hear her crying at night sometimes, though I never told Nadia that. Sometimes I felt glad to be away from our apartment and with the Corrados, but I couldn’t tell anybody that. So, in the end I felt bad about that too.
But every Sunday I got better at the work. Signor Corrado let me use his theatre to show off my fleas and La Giaconda found a piece of black
velvet which showed the silver carriages off really well.
What I liked best was having the carriages on my arm, making the fleas pull them from my elbow to my wrist. Their legs tickled! When people saw that they wanted to do it too so I charged them for it and Signor Corrado let me keep that money. Girls and women never wanted to do it but they always looked at the men who did. Sometimes they screamed.
I called my fleas Athos, Porthos and Aramis because they were the Three Musketeers. To be honest, I didn’t really know which one was which and there were always lots more than three fleas in the box anyway.
At the circus you have to pretend a lot. I told people Athos was the clever one, Porthos was the fat one and Aramis was the joker. They laughed. People like you to tell them stuff like that, especially if you mix the facts up a bit. It becomes a new kind of a story and people like to hear stories, even when there is a war on.
Especially when there’s a war on, La Giaconda said.
Last night I dreamed that Jean-Paul came to the circus. He had Whistle with him and we put on our own circus, just the two of us, me with my fleas and him with his dog. Only it was in a railway station, not out in the open air at Nation. All the trains waited until our show was finished and then they all took off at the same time, tearing down the tracks as if they were in a race. They made loads of steam and when it was all gone so was Jean-Paul.
I really missed him.
THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR
The Prof lets me come down to the kitchen now for all our meals. When he goes out I’m supposed to go back upstairs and stay there, in case I drop something and the neighbours hear the noise. He told me that patrols were beginning to call at houses for no reason, even in a street like this one where no Jews are living any more. Apparently, before I came here somebody’s house down the street had been cleared out, just like our shop. The Prof looked really sad when he told me that.
But when he headed out today I knew he wouldn’t be long so I decided to stay in the kitchen. It’s really cold at the top of the house. Anyway, he’d only gone to the rue Mouffetard, which is close by. He said if there was any street in Paris where there’d be cheese for sale that’d be the one.
He told me one day he’d seen a shop window with beautiful cheeses on plates and there was no queue outside, but when he got up close there was a sign under the cheese that said “Everything here is false”. He said he laughed so much it was nearly better than real cheese. Try telling that to a mouse, though.
Anyway, I washed up our porridge bowls and then I sat down to read. I was still at the Atlantic Ocean in the A–L encyclopedia. I’ve never seen any ocean in all my life but that’s the one I want to see most. It has the basking sharks, of course, but also lots of different whales. It stretches all the way down from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic Ocean.
The eels are in the middle, close to America. Eels have their own part of the ocean which is called the Sargasso Sea. Every eel in Europe and America has to go there to breed. Then they die, which isn’t really fair after going all that long distance. But the clever thing is that their children come back to the country their parents came from. It takes them years but they have a good system and they just know how to do it. They never make mistakes, unless they get eaten by a shark or a big fish or get caught in a fishing net.
I was drawing a picture of the Sargasso Sea, filling it with eels of all different sizes. Then – CRASH! BANG! – there was the worst noise you ever heard at the front door.
It was much worse than knocking. It was hammering and banging. Someone began to shout. I couldn’t make out the words so I was sure they must be German. Whoever it was sounded really, really angry. The banging just got louder and then something made of metal started to make a cruel hurting noise against the door. They were going to splinter it to bits.
I knew right that minute that it must have been like this for Mama and Papa that morning in July. What did they do? Did they open the door or did they let it be broken down? Which was worse? Did Mama try to hide Nadia under the bed, telling her to run to the church on her own afterwards?
I couldn’t run anywhere now. If I tried to go upstairs they’d see me through the smashed door. But if I waited they’d be in the hall in a minute. The kitchen was only a couple of steps down from the hall and then they’d find me.
And I couldn’t just open the door now, not after all the banging.
“Who are you? Why didn’t you open up straightaway? Where are your papers? Don’t you know we’re cleaning up this country?”
That’s what they’d shout at me when they saw me.
But first they shouted something else.
“OPEN UP, BY ORDER OF THE—”
I didn’t catch the next word, but now I could make out that they were speaking French. And then someone swore and a dog barked.
Everyone knew the Germans had search dogs. They could sniff people out, even if they were covered in meat and hiding in a butcher’s shop.
HIDING
The window in the kitchen was very small and very high up. There was a tiny yard outside but the Prof had told me that if you went out there you could be seen from the other houses. And there was no kitchen cupboard deep enough for me to fit into and hide, because they all had narrow rows of shelves inside them. Anyway, you can bet Germans know full well to throw open the cupboards first thing when they break into a house.
But the kitchen was the only place I had.
I got up really, really quietly and went to the cupboard nearest the cooker, where the Prof kept his sheets and towels. I rooted out some of these and then I sat on the floor and curled up. I pulled a few of the sheets and towels down and wrapped them around me, underneath as well. I wanted it to look as if the linens had fallen out while the Prof was in a mad rush looking for a clean shirt, or something. But I knew it wouldn’t fool the dog.
Then I just sat. If I put my hands over my ears it would block out the noise at the door, but it would be worse not to know what was happening. Suppose they got in and I missed hearing that and then I sneezed? So I waited.
Maybe it wasn’t even me they were after. Maybe the Prof had done something else wrong. Maybe he was a Commie. Papa said the Germans hated Commies nearly as much as they hated Jews. That’s because they’re fighting the Russians now and they’re Commies.
If the police came and took the Prof away what would I do? What would he do? He was so old.
I was breathing so fast I was sucking the sheet into my mouth. I’d no spit left and I really wanted to cough. Then I heard the door being flung open. Boots in the hall. It sounded like there was a whole battalion out there.
I peed a little then, because of the shock, but I managed to stop. I tried to make myself stop shaking too. Towels don’t shake. I tried to breathe through my nose. Then I tried to become invisible.
Signor Corrado says if you do a trick you have to believe in it yourself, totally.
“Do you know why everybody believes my wife looks just like the Mona Lisa, Jonas?” he asked me one day. “It’s because she believes it herself.”
He said an acrobat or a wire walker has to believe they can fly or walk through the air. They have to believe they will never fall. Or else they will.
I had to be a towel or a pillow case that nobody would even notice if they walked into the kitchen, but I didn’t believe it myself. Anyone would see I was a boy. The dog would tell them. And if they had bayonets they could find out for sure.
AN EMERGENCY
Then I heard the Prof. He was in the hall too, and he was shouting above the noise of the boots tramping around.
“Who are you? How dare you break into my house!”
He sounded really brave. After all, they must have all had their guns pointed at him. And I’d never have thought he could shout like that. He sounded scary when he should have been scared, like I was.
The boots stopped right where they were, just before they’d reached the steps to the kitchen.
Then someone said, �
�We apologize, Monsieur. But your neighbours said you weren’t home and this is an emergency. There’s a bad leak on the street and that means trouble with your inflow pipe. If we don’t fix it the street pipe will fail, and so will yours, and your house will be destroyed.”
It was the fire brigade! Not the Germans. Not the police. And the dog that barked must have been just a normal dog walking by who didn’t like all the racket.
But what could I do now? I couldn’t come out because the firemen would know there was a boy in hiding, someone who didn’t answer the door even when someone else was battering it down. And the poor Prof standing out there in the hall didn’t even know where I was.
But he was smart. He guessed I’d stayed in the kitchen. I don’t know how. That Prof was as smart as any spy.
He said, “Give me one minute to move a few things I have in the kitchen.”
I didn’t move, even when I heard his step. Then he was right beside me. He picked me up carefully and threw me across his shoulder and then he reached in for more sheets and put them over me so that they hung down. Then we were out in the hall and we were going up the stairs and he said, “Go right ahead, gentlemen. And thank you for allowing me to save my wife’s best linen.”
He brought me up to his room, set me down on the bed and lifted the sheets and towels from me. He kept one finger stuck to his lips. Not that I needed to be told that. Then he pointed me towards his wardrobe. I climbed into it and he piled the linens in on top of me.
“Stay brave, Jonas,” he whispered. Then he was off downstairs again.
I took the sheets away from my face. I could breathe again, just about, even though there was a fur coat brushing against my face and tickling me. It was very dark in the wardrobe and there was nothing to hear.
I think I fell asleep then, which was a pretty stupid thing to do because if anyone had opened the wardrobe they’d have seen my face shining out of the dark like a moon. But I woke up when the Prof touched my shoulder and told me I could come out.
