No Stars at the Circus (4 page)

“I think we’ll have to draw up a proper educational plan for you, Jonas,” he said. “You’re a bright boy, I can see that.”

I’m not sure what I think of that idea. He might get over it. Anyway he’s getting more relaxed about me. And about the window.

He told me I should be able to see quite a few places if I kept well back and only peeked out by the side, right where the curtain bulges a bit.

“But don’t tweak it, not even a little,” he warned. “People will always spot that kind of thing out of the corner of their eye. It goes back to ancient times when we were all hunters in the forest and had to watch out for branches twitching because that could mean a tiger or a bear was lurking.”

That was an interesting thing for him to say. I hadn’t thought of that.

I pretended I was looking out for the first time. Rue Cuvier runs alongside the park that has the gardens
and
the zoo.

“You can’t see the zoo,” I told him. “Or even most of the park, but you can see people who look like they’re heading for the park, or just coming out of it.”

During the day children go through the park on their way to and from school. I don’t know if any of them go to my school on rue Saint-Jacques. They’re too far away for me to see their faces properly. They look happy enough anyway, especially when it’s the right time for them to be fresh out of class. But I bet most of them don’t know about the lion at the park gate.

People never look up at it. It is a complete waste of a lion. Even if it is only a statue.

Papa first showed the lion to me when I was really small. His den is near the entrance to the park. He’s up there on his own little hill and he has a great big ugly gnawed-off foot in front of him, with the toes sticking right up. Nobody knows whose foot it’s supposed to be. When the war began Papa said he thought it might be Adolf Hitler’s foot.

I told the Professor about that. “Papa said that would explain why the lion spat it out,” I said. “Because it was so ugly. And it would explain why Hitler walked about as stiff as a poker when he came to Paris after the invasion. He was missing a foot.”

Of course it was all just Papa’s joke but the Prof had a really good laugh. The problem is he has this weird way of holding one hand up to his mouth as if it’s a bad thing to laugh. But there’s nothing wrong with his teeth. It’s like he’s really shy, or has forgotten how to laugh, or something.

“Did you know there’s another lion up there beside yours?” he asked. “One that has only a lamb to eat, not Hitler’s smelly hoof?”

But of course we did! I told him that Papa and I called it the Boring Lion.

The Prof said he was sorry he had to lock me up at the top of his house as if I was the poor old Man in the Iron Mask, but he said it was best for both of us and it wouldn’t last for ever, he was sure of that.

He doesn’t really lock me in. I have to say that. And he lets me go down one set of stairs to use the small toilet, though I’m not allowed to flush it. He does that afterwards with a bucket of water in case the toilet makes a noise through the walls. The Prof has his own bathroom and toilet downstairs so he says it would sound funny if he kept running upstairs to use the little one. But it’s a bit awful that he has to do that.

I asked him if he’d heard any news of Mama, because he thought so well of her. This time he put both hands up to his mouth. But he wasn’t laughing.

“No, Jonas,” he said, “I haven’t. But you know, we should never give up hope. She’s in my prayers.”

He said he had lit a candle in a church for all my family.

I asked him if he would play the piano and then I might be able to hear it even up here, so he said he would, tomorrow if I liked.

“But you must understand that I haven’t played for a long time, Jonas.” He did that throat-clearing thing again. When he hasn’t got his hands up to his face he’s doing that. “My wife died last Easter, you know.”

How would I have known that? I didn’t even know he’d had a wife.

Then he asked me what I would like to hear. I said the Brahms lullaby. “Because that would remind me of Mama. She used to sing it when she put Nadia to bed.”

Nadia used to put her fingers up to Mama’s mouth and throat to hear it in her own way. The words in that lullaby are the only German words I know, except for words like
heimensoldaten
,
kommandantur
and
verboten
. Or
jawohl!
Or
Heil Hitler!

Jean-Paul told me that if you ever have to say that last thing, say if a German soldier puts his gun to your head or holds you out over the river and roars that he’ll drop you down unless you say Heil Hitler, well, then you can say it but you must put your fingers in a
V
behind your back to take the harm away.

“
V
is for Victory,” he said. “Victory for us.”

The words to that
lullaby
sound very different from any of those words but I suppose it was written especially for babies who need soft sounds to help them go to sleep. When I go to the collège I will learn the German language anyway. Or maybe English. Papa would definitely prefer me to learn English.

Now I am a little tired of writing so I will continue the story of my family tomorrow.

31 AUGUST 1942

Yesterday I had a fever and a bad pain in my head so I didn’t write anything after all.

The Prof was out shopping or something, and I really needed a drink of water. I would have gone all the way downstairs for it, no matter what he said, but when I got out of bed and went to the door my legs were too shaky. It was like when Nadia and I had the measles last year and I couldn’t walk properly. So I had to get into bed again. The Prof got an awful shock when he came up with my food.

“Look, Jonas,” he whispered when he opened the door, “I’ve made a pancake for you. My friend who keeps a beehive nearby gave me a little honey as a treat.”

Then he saw me shivering and shaking underneath the bedcover. He left the pancake on the floor and ran out and brought back a basin of cold water and a sponge. I just wanted to drink the water from the basin but he sponged me down first, like Mama did when we had measles.

Then he went downstairs and brought up a big tall cup of water and something hot in a glass that he said was a tisane. It’s for fever. I drank everything and fell asleep and when I woke up it was getting dark and I was nearly better. So at least it wasn’t measles again, which was good.

The pancake was cold but it was nice anyway, with the honey. The Prof looked in when I was eating it. He said he was sorry but he didn’t have enough flour in the house to make another hot one. Then he said he’d leave all the doors open and play the lullaby for me downstairs. He did, and I could hear it quite well, though of course it would have been far better if we’d been in the same room. He is a really great pianist.

I think I would like him even if he didn’t play well. First I thought he was too grey and quiet to like very much, but I know now he is kind. Maybe he can’t help being grey and quiet. Or coughing, or moving his head that way. Maybe if he was different he wouldn’t be able to play the piano like he does. But he was so good it was almost like hearing a gramophone recording, or music on the wireless. I’ll ask him to play more.

Our new apartment was at 10a rue des Lions, in the fourth district. Even though Papa said it was not very far away from rue de le Harpe as the crow flies, it felt like a long walk to us because of all the stuff we had to carry. And because it was across the river. We hardly ever used to go in that direction.

Papa tried to cheer us up. He told us that long ago the old French kings used to keep their lions in a den somewhere nearby and that’s how the street got its name. Nadia wanted to know if there were lions roaming around Paris back then, like cats, but Mama said the place was probably just a kind of zoo the kings had. I would say the kings used to run proper gladiator games with the traitors and spies they had back then. They would have learned how to do that from the ancient Romans. But I wonder where they got the lions.

Anyway, the bad thing was the street looked very dull and quiet, not interesting like its name. Nor like rue de la Harpe either. There was no shop at No. 10a, just a boarded-up front window where there had been a shop years ago. Papa had to knock because we didn’t have a key. After a long time a very old woman opened the door and Papa explained that we were going to live on the top floor and that his friend had made all the arrangements with her husband. She was very deaf so he had to shout but it was only at about the third time shouting that she heard him at all. People in the next houses were opening their windows to see what the noise was all about.

“Léo, we’ll need a front door key at once because that poor woman is failing,” Mama whispered, even though the woman was deaf. “Get one quickly.”

The three of us went upstairs while Papa waited and tried to get a key from the old woman.

We knew there would be only two rooms but we hadn’t expected them to be so small. They were both at the back, like Nadia’s room at rue de la Harpe, but hers was bigger than either of these. The windows were dirty but Mama said the floors had good wood in them. “And there’s nothing so bad that some elbow grease won’t shift it.”

There were two beds in one room but she said that she and Papa would need one of them. She said they’d keep it in the other room for daytime use, as if it was a sofa, because that room would have to be their bedroom and our living room and kitchen all in one.

“You two will have to share this room and take turns with the bed. One week one of you will have the bed and the other one can sleep on cushions on the floor. It’ll be fine. It’ll be like camping.”

How would Mama know
that
? We’d never gone camping in our whole lives.

Papa had the key by then so we all got to work cleaning the place up and he went off looking for water.

It was on the next floor down but there was only a trickle in the tap. Papa told us when he came back with half a bucket of water. “The toilet has to do five families,” he said. “I think mostly we’ll be using this very bucket, or something like it.”

Mama looked like a statue when he said that but we knew she was upset. So were we. It was not very nice to hear something like that.

We worked really hard to clean the floors and the windows but most of the dirt on the windows was outside. “Pure grime,” Mama said. Nadia said it might be lion spit from years ago but I told her that was just silly.

“Lions can climb,” she said. “Silly
you
not to know that.”

I would have quite liked to have stood on the windowsill and scrubbed the glass from outside but Mama wouldn’t let me. I reckoned because we were so high up I would be able to see the river bending around like it does in the maps in geography class. I even thought I might be able to see rue de la Harpe too, and be able to keep an eye on our place, even though it was on the other side of the river.

But we never saw our home again after that. Even I didn’t, not even when I was out and about. That’s because the fairground is on the same side of the river as rue des Lions but away to the east, at Nation. And Papa made me promise I wouldn’t cross the river again.

If the Prof is going to be kind like he was yesterday I might ask him if he wouldn’t mind taking a walk in the direction of rue de la Harpe to see if our shop looks all right. It’s not too far away from this house so he wouldn’t get too tired.

1 SEPTEMBER 1942

I will make up for the day I didn’t write by explaining about some of the new German laws. Most of them seemed to be about things Jews couldn’t do.

When we were settled into the apartment in rue des Lions, Papa told us that the reason we were forced to move from our home was because of pure spite on somebody’s part.

“As your mother knows by now, spite is a bottomless well,” he said. “Then there’s all that German paperwork that catches people out. Between them that’s what’s put the Alber family in the soup this time.”

I’m not sure what he meant. I think somebody reported we were Jews who hadn’t put their names on that stupid file. But why would they go and say that to the Germans? If you’re French you shouldn’t say anything to them.

One of the really worst laws they passed said that Jews couldn’t go to parks or use public telephones. Also, if you had to shop you could only do it between three and four o’clock. But most shops are closed then! And what would Papa have done if he was still in his own shop? Would he have to do all his work between those times and then go and drink tea for the rest of the time? We thought it was a very,
very
stupid law.

“If we try to go into a park how will the Germans know we are Jews, anyway?” Nadia asked Papa.

It sounded like a baby question but actually it was clever. Except that the mean old potato bugs thought of it in the end. Though it took them a long time. They didn’t figure it out until just a few months ago.

Papa is a man of average size but Mama is very,
very
small, just about 150 centimetres tall. Papa calls her a pocket treasure. Even when she wears her funny high heels made of cork she only comes up to his clavicle.

“Look, your mother
still
only comes up to my clavicle! We’ll have to send her back along with the geraniums that didn’t grow last year either!”

That’s what he said on her last birthday. Mama thumped him but it was just pretend.

“Clavicle” sounds like a musical instrument but it’s a bone. The collarbone. Papa always uses the proper words for things. I like that.

Anyway, Nadia is small just like Mama, but it doesn’t really matter that much for a girl.

The unfortunate truth is that I am small too. For my age, at least. Here is a confession: I won’t be ten until October but I wrote down “ten” in my will anyway because it looks better to have an age in double figures.

I still wear short pants all the time even though Jean-Paul was already into his longs last year. That’s what you have to wear in the collège but Mama says there was no chance of me having anything new to wear for a long time, short or long.