No Stars at the Circus

by Mary Finn

  He chewed on his bread and honey for a while. “You know, in one way, that fellow makes everything safer for us because they’ll already have checked us out. They’ll want a nice peaceful street for Herr Prussian-Boots, whoever he is.”

  Oh, I really wanted to tell Nadia that name.

  I told the Prof that Papa was born in Germany. “He isn’t German, though, he’s French,” I said. “And he wouldn’t speak any German to us. Mama thought that was a pity. She said then we’d be able to speak two languages and get ahead.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  Then he got up and went into his front room, where he hardly ever went. He came back with a photograph in a silver frame. It was of a woman with fair hair, like Mama, but this woman had hers done up on top of her head with a jewel kind of thing. She wore old-fashioned clothes but they were interesting. She looked pretty.

  “My wife, Berthe,” he said. “She was German. She was a singer. I have all her records but I can’t listen to them any more. This photograph was taken in Berlin many years ago. That’s where I met her.”

  “She looks nice,” I said. I didn’t really know what to say because she was dead now and that made him sad. Too sad to use the gramophone.

  “She was,” he said. “The war made her very unhappy. For all kinds of reasons. One was that she couldn’t go back to see her family and that was lonely for her. She spoke very good French but she said she always thought and dreamed in German.”

  He took out a handkerchief and polished the glass of the photograph though it was pretty sparkly clean anyway, just as if Mama had been at it. Then he said something strange.

  “I’m sorry you two never met, you and Berthe. She’d have liked you being in the house. She’d think it was just the right thing for me to do. She was always very kind to my pupils. She used to bake a cake on their birthdays.”

  Mama’s birthday is 15 June. I wondered if Berthe had ever baked her a cake. But I didn’t ask.

  “The Nazis know that my wife was German,” the Prof said. He always called the potato bugs Nazis. “They left us alone. Not that she was glad to see them in Paris, you understand. She would scold soldiers on the street if she saw them bullying people. She wasn’t one to hold back, like I am.” His voice had got a bit trembly.

  “You didn’t hold back with the fire brigade,” I said.

  “If only everything was that easy,” he said, a bit sadly. “You eat up, and then we’ll practise our Beethoven.”

  He brought the photograph along and put it on top of the piano in the practice room. Berthe looked happy there, I thought. She was able to hear music again, even if it wasn’t exactly singing. Or very good either.

  10 NOVEMBER 1942

  OUT OF AFRICA

  The Prof has found out some more about Herr Prussian-Boots down the road, though he didn’t say how.

  “When he was young he was a student in Paris and he worked in the Natural History Museum. That’s why nowhere else would do him to live but rue Cuvier.”

  “Is that because it’s close to the museum?” I asked.

  Which it is. The museum with all the skeletons and fossils is straight across the park from this house. You can’t see it from my room because the big conifer tree is in the way. You can’t see the zoo either, but all the animals are gone, the Prof told me. He said they were in a safe place, just like I am.

  Which really means here is not a safe place. But I didn’t like to point that out to him.

  “Probably,” the Prof said. “But it might also be because our street is named after a famous scientist called Cuvier. He lived on this street, in one of the houses further down. Did you never notice the fountain at the top of the street? It’s got lobsters and baboons and wolves and all sorts of other animals carved around the bowl. It’s the Cuvier fountain.”

  I never had. Whenever we came to the park Papa only showed me the lion and that big old foot he was having for his lunch.

  When the Prof went out I checked the encyclopedia and found out a few good things about Monsieur Georges Cuvier.

  No. 1 – He discovered that Paris used to be under the sea. Millions of years ago. So that means there probably were albatrosses flying over here all the time. French albatrosses! He found this out by digging deep down under the streets and rivers and finding lots of shells and bones of sea animals.

  No. 2 – He cut open cat mummies that Napoléon brought back from Egypt especially to show him. He said they were just ordinary pets that anyone would have. They weren’t cat gods like the Egyptians thought they were. But imagine – Napoléon brought back cat mummies from the war! They never tell you those kinds of things in school, only about battles.

  No. 3 – Cuvier found out that animals could become extinct. People used to think that God looked after everything all the time but it looks like he doesn’t. Cuvier especially found this out about woolly mammoths. Everybody thought they were just stupid elephants, ones who wandered out of the jungle by mistake and went north where it was too cold for them. But they weren’t. They were a different kind of creature entirely and now they’re gone for ever, buried deep in the frost and snow.

  When the Prof came home, he was full of news. Some lady at the Conservatoire had told him what she heard on the wireless from London last night. An army from Britain has invaded Africa to fight the Germans who are already there.

  “That’s a huge blow for the Nazis, Jonas,” he said. “They’re already fighting in Russia. That’s two fronts.”

  I was working on the papier mâché albatross for Nadia’s theatre. I’d been waiting for him, to ask if he had some paints or even just some blue ink so I could finish it off properly, with coloured-in feathers and eyes and a nice curvy beak. But he just sat down and told me more about the Africa thing.

  I asked him what the wireless code messages had been this time but he didn’t know.

  “Maybe it was ‘The camels have woken up at the oasis’,” I said. “Or ‘The ostriches’ legs are growing longer’.”

  He thought they were good code messages but I knew Nadia would have thought of something better.

  Our old neighbour Madame Perroneau had a Sunday hat with ostrich feathers on it, really soft and swishy-looking feathers. Nadia thought they were probably the best feathers in the world. She asked me to try to knock Madame Perroneau’s hat off her head with my football so she could pick it up and feel the feathers, maybe even pull one off. I had to tell her it wasn’t that easy. You could kill someone with a football and even if I hadn’t killed Madame Perroneau, Mama would definitely have killed me if I’d knocked that hat off.

  Now I wish I’d tried.

  The Prof said I was the first person he’d told the Africa secret to and I’d probably be the last because pretty soon everyone would know and it wouldn’t be a secret any more. The Nazis couldn’t stop people talking, he said. And when the British ran them out of Africa, people would talk about that too.

  “But of course you have to be careful who you talk to, Jonas. Even an old man like me. There are some dodgy people around.”

  Well, he wasn’t dodgy and I wasn’t dodgy so right that moment I decided to ask him straight out if he’d found out anything new about my family, like he promised he would. Because it’s been weeks since he’s said anything about that.

  And that’s much more important than any old English army scaring the poor ostriches in Africa.

  WHAT THE POLICEMAN KNEW

  The Prof went over to the sink to get us some water. I didn’t really want any but he put a cup in front of me anyway. We sat there, not drinking it.

  “I didn’t know who I could ask,” he said, after ages, and one of his coughs. “I told you that I didn’t want to go to the police and make any connection between you and me, especially when my plan is nearly worked out. So I went across the river to the fair the day before yesterday.”

  He’d been to the Corrados? And he hadn’t told me anything? I was still staring at him when he started up again.

  “You
remember Signor Corrado’s friend, the policeman?” he asked. He drank some more water. I could see it going down his throat as if his throat were made of glass. He put down the cup but he didn’t look at me this time. He was talking to the window.

  “I’ll tell you what the policeman told Signor Corrado, Jonas. Signor Corrado wasn’t sure if I should tell you, but there it is. Now you’ve asked me, I will.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off him.

  “Signor Corrado has been pestering that policeman for weeks to find out what has happened to your family,” he said. “Just a short while ago he came back and told Signor Corrado what he’d found out. Something only a policeman could do, it seems.”

  More water going glug, glug, glug down.

  “After the round-up, your parents were sent down the country somewhere. Then they were brought back to Paris again, with all the other people. And now they’ve been sent off to work. He doesn’t know where. There are different places, apparently.”

  He coughed then, even after all that water. He was coughing so much he didn’t hear what I’d asked and I had to shout it again.

  “Nadia can’t work! Who’ll look after her? She’s only little and she’s deaf!”

  It was odd but he looked a bit happier then. He stopped looking out of the window and looked at me.

  “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “The policeman’s wife has a sister who works with deaf children. The night before the round-up he told her about a little Jewish girl he knew about who was deaf. That was your Nadia, of course. He’d seen her on her birthday at the fair. You told me all about that day, remember?”

  I just kept staring at him so he wouldn’t be able to look away again.

  “He told this woman, his wife’s sister, that Nadia was a lovely little thing, bright as a button, and it was a terrible pity about what was going to happen to all the Jewish families the next day, and he was just telling her about this one girl.”

  Cough.

  “He said his sister-in-law went out very early that morning, and left while it was still dark. That’s all he knows because she won’t talk to him any more even though she lives in the same house. He told Signor Corrado he doesn’t know what happened exactly but he does know that Nadia’s name is not on any list. He doesn’t think she was in the vélodrome at all.”

  “The vélodrome? What do you mean? What list?”

  The Prof looked like he might be sick.

  “The Vél d’Hiv, that big cycling stadium down near the Eiffel Tower. That’s where the police took everybody they rounded up on 16 July. They kept them there for five days. Your parents were there, the policeman knows that, because there’s a list that has their names on it. But, like I said, there was no sign that Nadia was ever there.”

  He picked up the albatross. It was still wet, so the big wings drooped right down. It didn’t matter.

  “So that’s good news, because it looks as if she’s probably hidden and safe, just like you, Jonas. In fact, she’s probably making puppets right now at a kitchen table somewhere. Like you.”

  “But she’s deaf!” Did he not understand anything important? “She needs Mama or Papa or me! They always said I had to look out for her if they weren’t around. Hardly anybody in the world knows how to do sign language.”

  “Of course they said that,” the Prof said. “And they were right. But it just didn’t work out that way. I’m sorry. This woman works with deaf children so she would understand about your sister. That’s all I know. I’m glad you asked. I was going to tell you as soon as I knew about the other business.”

  He put the albatross down again, carefully.

  “I’m sorry, Jonas. But you must keep your hopes up. Signor Corrado said I was to tell you that. Which reminds me.”

  He took out a piece of crumpled paper from his jacket pocket.

  “He said to give you this. He said Tommaso got a signed letter from this person. And they all send their love.”

  I straightened out the paper. There were just two words on it, in big black printy handwriting.

  “GIUSEPPE MEAZZA.”

  I put my head right down on the table. I knew I was squashing the albatross good and proper but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the Prof, or Signor Corrado or Tommaso and his footballer’s letter, or anybody else. I only wanted my family to be together.

  But we had all disappeared.

  THE SALMON OF KNOWLEDGE

  Paris is as big as an ocean. If you were an ant in the forest at Vincennes you couldn’t even imagine Paris. You’d think your bit of sandy path was the whole world and all you had to do was fight off other ants who tried to get into it. Or if you were one of Madame Fifi’s dogs, you’d think the world began at the circus in Nation and ended at the meat market in Les Halles. You wouldn’t even know there were animals like cows and pigs that had made the meat.

  My poor fleas too. I reckon they thought a human arm was like heaven because it was huge and full of nice hot blood. I don’t know what they thought of pulling carriages, though. Probably that was hell for fleas, now that I think of it. I feel sorry about that.

  When we lived in rue de la Harpe I knew the way to my school and Nadia’s school and the park and the Luxembourg Gardens, and where our doctor lived, and down to the river, and across the bridge to the cathédral, and back to the métro station at Cluny.

  But I’d only been to the fairground, oh, maybe twice. I’d never even heard of rue des Lions. Or rue des Rosiers, where the Jewish families who were very religious lived, where some of the boys my age had long curls at the side of their head and wore hats and funny black suits.

  I know those places now. The map in my head has got bigger.

  I guess when the small eels begin to leave the Sargasso Sea they don’t really know their way to the rivers where they’ll grow up. They just set out one day and the more they swim the bigger the map in their head gets and pretty soon they find out where they have to go.

  Salmon do it too, except the other way round. They’re fully grown up when they swim all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. What they want is to get home to the rivers they were born in. When they find the right river they swim right to the top of it and breed and then they die, even though some of them have got really big in the ocean, maybe as long as a man’s leg. They find their way because they grow a map like the eels do.

  The Prof’s mythology book says that long ago in Ireland, the basking shark country way out in the Atlantic Ocean, there was once a very famous salmon. It was so big and old it knew everything in the world, even algebra and constellations. All the people knew that the person who ate the salmon would swallow all its knowledge and know everything too. One day a king caught it and gave it to his servant to cook. But when the servant was turning the salmon over he burned his hand on the skin and sucked the burn, swallowing a piece of fish skin. Guess what, it was bad luck for that king because the servant knew everything then.

  Mama used to say fish was good for our brains so maybe that story is a bit true. I like fish but Nadia hates it. It doesn’t matter because she knows lots of things anyway.

  The problem is that ever since I came here my world has got small again. Now it’s just got four sets of stairs, a table room, a piano room, a bedroom and a trunk. And the window. I’m nearly as bad as the circus dogs, except that I’ve got my memory. I’m sure I could still get to all the places I used to know. But what about the places I don’t know? There won’t be time to grow a new map. You have to be travelling and doing things to grow a map.

  And there isn’t much time because the Prof says my new papers are nearly ready.

  So I’ll only have one chance to find out exactly what happened to Nadia. I need to know for sure.

  WHO IS GREGOIRE VOLET?

  The identity papers are the Prof’s famous Plan. It’s taken him a long while to work it out. I’ve been here in this house since the 23 August and now it’s well into November.

  The Prof has a friend who lives somewhere in Nor
mandy. The friend had a boy who was a bit younger than me but he died of some disease last spring because there was no proper medicine in the hospital he went to. That was awful for everyone, but after the boy’s funeral his family kept his identity card. They didn’t use it to get food but they couldn’t bear to throw it away either, the Prof said. He knew all about it and that was how he started to make his plan.

  Last month the Prof’s friend came to Paris to play some music in a concert. The two of them met at the concert and they started talking about Guess Who:

  No. 1 – Robin Hood.

  No. 2 – The Boy Who Knows Nothing Any More.

  No. 3 – (Sorry, I can’t think of any No. 3 right now.)

  The Prof didn’t ask his friend straight out for the identity card. He’d never do that, he said. It would be insensitive. But he told him lots of things, about me being on my own and how great it would be for me to be in a proper family.

  Well, I could see some problems there.

  “What about all the people in Normandy?” I asked when he first told me about his plan. “They’ll know I’m not the boy who died! I wouldn’t even look like his ghost!”

  But the Prof said his friend was moving with his family to a different town, to share a house with his sister and her family. Rouen was the new town.

  “That’s the beauty of it, Jonas. The people in Rouen won’t know the boy is dead. And the Nazis there won’t know any better. It’s a big port. They have other things to worry about.”

  I asked him what the dead boy’s name was. “Grégoire Volet,” he said.

  I said that a few times in my head. It was the same length as my name. But nothing like it.

  The Prof had been Grégoire’s godfather but he’d met him only once, when he was just a baby. The Prof looked really sad. It’s rotten when anybody dies, even if they were only a baby when you met them, long before they started to do anything much.