No Stars at the Circus (12 page)

“I’ll write a letter to Peppino at his football club and tell him you’re in hospital. When he writes back then you’ll have his autograph and it’ll be worth a fortune. But he won’t write back unless you’re in hospital because he’ll have to feel sorry for you and he won’t if you’re just at home like any other boy. So you have to go to the hospital to have a proper hospital address.”

La Giaconda squeezed my hand hard. “Look, Jonas,” she said. “He’s smiling!”

Maybe he was, but it wasn’t much of a smile. Then the one eye closed.

Signor Corrado had stayed at the door. “What do you think, my love?” he asked. “Will I go for them?”

“Yes!” she said. “Go!”

And then she said to me, “You’ll have to hide for a bit, Jonas. He’s gone for our friend, the policeman. He promised us they’ll take Tommaso to the hospital in their van. That’s the best way. And it’s so far away. But you’d better not be found here by the police, not without your papers.”

She lifted up the big curtain with the printed stars that I’d seen the first day, the day I met the Corrados.

“In there, pet. There’s room under Alfredo’s bunk.”

I looked back at Tommaso but he seemed to be asleep. I thought of the comics I’d promised to give him. He might not be able to read them because they were in French, not Italian, but it was too late. And now I had to find out where Peppino’s club was so we could get a letter to him.

“Right,” I said.

That was the first time I got under Alfredo’s bunk.

I heard the policemen coming into the van, two of them. Their boots sounded loud and mean from where I was but at least they didn’t shout and bang on the door. That’s what you heard them do up and down our street, whenever they saw any bit of light escaping from a window at night, or when they came looking for people’s identity papers.

Tommaso didn’t make any noise at all when they carried him out. He must have been properly asleep by then.

Both La Giaconda and Signor Corrado went away with him and the policemen. I fell asleep for a while and the next thing I knew, Alfredo was coming in. It was the smell of his cigarette that woke me up. I could see his long spidery legs and his pointy shoes with the heels made of cork, like Mama’s. He nearly jumped out of his skin when I whispered to him from under the bed. Then he got cross.

“Get right out here so I can see you,” he said. “I’m not going to talk to someone with no face.”

When I said I was just doing what La Giaconda had told me to, he got even crosser.

“Of course it’s all right to come out now!” he said. “Do you think you’re some great Resistance hero and the cabbage-heads are all waiting outside the van to pounce on you? Get up!”

He heated some beans for the two of us. Then Madame Fifi came in with her dogs. Every day she walks them down to the huge market at Les Halles, just before it closes, and somehow she gets enough scraps for all the dogs to eat. Tommaso told me she puts on a special show for the butchers there, the ones that wear the funny hats. She doesn’t bring her buckets, though. They were in a heap in the corner of the van.

She wasn’t surprised to see me and neither were the dogs. Oscar jumped up on my lap and licked me. He had horrible bad breath so the butchers must have given him something smelly to eat.

When Alfredo cleared the table Madame Fifi sat down and started to play solitaire. I said I’d better go home.

“You can’t go now,” Madame Fifi said. “It’s nearly curfew time. And there’s something up tonight, anyway. There are police on every corner between here and the markets.
Far
more than the usual band of blackguards.”

She banged down a card. “And with the kind of papers you have, Jonas, or don’t have, I can never remember which it is, if they stopped you they’d just throw you over to the Boche. Maybe to the Gestapo, and they’re the worst of the lot.”

“Don’t say that to him,” Alfredo said. “He’s cocky enough.”

“I don’t have my papers here,” I said. “But I have to get home. My parents will go wild if I stay out.”

“Sorry, hero,” said Alfredo. “You can’t go. Anyway, they’ll know it’s to do with Tommaso. Your parents, I mean. They’ll know you’re with us.”

I went to the door. It wasn’t completely dark outside yet because it was summer but it was very quiet. At least it was quiet until the German patrols went tramping by.

What should I do? I was a bit afraid now. Madame Fifi seemed very sure about all that police stuff. Mama wouldn’t want me to do anything stupid, especially with the curfew. Suppose old Pimply “Sieg Heil” Arms was still prowling around somewhere? I didn’t even know if he knew I was Jewish and shouldn’t be at the circus at all.

Alfredo was probably right. My parents would guess that something was up, something that meant I had to stay. But I really really didn’t like not being with them. Me and Nadia – we’d never spent even one night away from our parents in all our lives. She always liked to sign me some daft story before we went to sleep. She’d never speak it. It was to test my signing.

These days the stories were always about d’Artagnan. Guess what, he was lonely after the other musketeers had been turned into fleas so he was sending messages to them through me. It was just like the wireless from London, only for fleas. That’s how daft Nadia is.

But I waited. It got all dark in the end and then Signor Corrado and La Giaconda came. They’d had to walk back but they had a special note from the doctors in case they met a patrol.

“Did you notice all the policemen around the place, sprung up like mushrooms in the dark?” Madame Fifi asked. They hadn’t. But then they were bothered about Tommaso.

“They said he was very weak,” La Giaconda said. “But they have good medicine and he’s in a ward with lots of other children so he’ll have company.”

“He’ll do just fine,” Signor Corrado said.

He hugged me and told me he’d take me back home on Papa’s bike in the morning.

“We’re ever so grateful to you for helping with our Tommaso,” he said. “Heart’s truth, my friend.”

We all went to bed then, except Alfredo, who put on more hair oil and went off to visit somebody in one of the other vans.

That was the end of Wednesday, 15 July.

We were woken up very early the next morning. At least Signor Corrado and I were. Nobody else seemed to hear the noise.

It was the policeman who sometimes helps out the Corrados. The one who sent off Pimply Arms and got the van to take Tommaso to the hospital. He banged on the door, really loudly, and shouted for Signor Corrado to come out. He said he needed to speak to him urgently. Signor Corrado went out but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then the policeman must have gone away, because everything went quiet again.

Signor Corrado stayed outside for a long time. I could see him sitting on the step with his legs drawn up, because he hadn’t closed the door completely. I suppose he was having a cigarette, because that was the first thing he did every morning. He came in at last.

“Are you awake, Jonas?” he whispered.

Of course I was! It was bright outside and I was just about ready to get up and leave so I could be back home before Mama and Papa got up for breakfast. I could go on my own. Anyway, Alfredo was fast asleep, with his mouth open to catch flies. The dogs were snoring. They were such clowns they’d forgotten dogs were supposed to bark at strangers making noise.

I got out from under the bed and piled my cushions up into a tower, but it fell over.

“Never mind that,” Signor Corrado said. “Come over here to the table and sit down with me for a minute.”

He looked pretty much the same as he’d looked the day before – all worried, with his beard showing through, like tar under his skin. Maybe he hadn’t slept, for thinking about Tommaso.

But what he said was, “I’m afraid you can’t go home, Jonas. There’s been a police round-up, all over Paris. Of…”

He stopped there. I was staring at him because I thought he’d gone plain crazy. Of course I was going home. What else would I do?

Signor Corrado cleared his throat and got a whole lot of stuff up into his mouth. He went to the door to spit it out. Then he sat down again and took my hand in his.

“The police have rounded up Jews all over Paris,” he said. “Our friend there, you know, who just called. Well, he knows about you, of course he does, because he’s a policeman and they have special eyes out on stalks so they can see where to poke their noses. That’s their job, poking their noses into other people’s business.”

This time he just spat into the corner.

“But that one, he’s not bad. He came here to warn me. To warn
you
. You can’t go home because your parents won’t be there. They’ve been rounded up. The police have been on the go since four o’clock this morning.”

I heard all these words but they made no sense. Why would anyone round up my parents? They hadn’t done anything.

“But what about Nadia?” I said. “I’ll have to go and get her. She’ll be really scared there on her own.”

I could hardly stand, I was shaking so much, but I found my sandals under the bed and started to put them on. Then Signor Corrado came over and put his hands on my shoulders and made me sit down.

“Look,” he said. “It’ll all prove to be a stupid mistake, you’ll see. Your parents are French, aren’t they? They were born here, weren’t they? When that lot find out they’ve made a mistake they’ll let your parents go. And Nadia too.”

They’d taken
Nadia
?

I nearly made it to the door then, but Signor Corrado caught me and held me, really tight. It hurt, so I kicked his shins but he wouldn’t stop. He has extremely strong arm muscles and he just wouldn’t let me go. Then I started to cry. He took one hand away and just rubbed my head, over and over.

“They’ll let them go, Jonas,” he said. “Don’t worry. Nadia will be fine. They’ll all be fine.”

“But Papa was born in Germany!” I shouted at him. “That’s why he didn’t put his name down on their stupid list. It was so he wouldn’t have to fight for the Germans!”

I didn’t care who heard me. Anyway, everyone was awake now. La Giaconda came out of their little room and just stood there in her stripy pyjamas, staring at us. Alfredo was sitting up in his bunk and I could hear Madame Fifi saying soothing things to the dogs to calm them down.

“I’ll make coffee,” said La Giaconda. “Will you get the water, Jonas?”

“He won’t,” Signor Corrado said. “I’ll do it. Lock the door after me.”

He locked me inside the van for the rest of the day. Once I tried to get out through the window but he must have thought of that because it was nailed shut from the outside.

In the afternoon he sent Alfredo to rue des Lions, to see what he could find out. The problem was that Alfredo is not very good at doing things properly. Anyone could see that.

That’s why I wondered for ages if Mama and Nadia were hiding under the bed or somewhere like that when Alfredo arrived at the house. I wondered if he knocked loudly enough, thinking Nadia might have felt the vibrations if he’d had a really good go at it.

When he came back Alfredo told us the main door to No. 7 was nailed shut and there was a big sign plastered across the lock. But he can’t read French or German, only Italian.

He said nearly all the doors on the street were like that, and further up too, all along rue des Rosiers and rue Vieille du Temple. He said the signs looked a bit like circus posters.

“Only not cheery like ours, but with that ugly thick black print all crammed together. You know the kind.”

Like the signs Nadia called the witchy signs.

When Madame Fifi came back from the meat market later on she said the policeman was right about the round-ups.

“I heard some really bad things,” she said. She turned the corners of her mouth down, like a clown. “The poor people.”

La Giaconda glared at her but she just shook her head. All that evening, every time she looked at me she shook her head again.

It was La Giaconda who told me I had to stay with the circus and keep myself safe.

“For Nadia’s sake, Jonas, if not your own. Because when they let her go she’s going to need you. You’re going to have to be somewhere she can find you, and that’s right here. There’s no point in the whole of creation you getting rounded up too and sent off somewhere completely different. You just can’t go back to your home.”

She reached over and put my right hand across my chest. “I’m putting you on your honour, little Musketeer. Do you promise, hand on heart?”

So I stayed. I kept my promise. I worked away like before, helping with the circus. But it wasn’t the same. Now I
really
wanted to go home in the evenings but my home was all locked up, with nobody in it.

When my fleas died I didn’t bother burying them, like I used to. I just got more from Signor Corrado. I kept all the money I earned wrapped in a handkerchief under Alfredo’s bed.

Tommaso came back home from the hospital after a few days. He was much deafer this time. He’d stare at you if you said something, and even though his eyes would get bigger you knew he couldn’t understand almost anything you were saying. The thing was, even though he wasn’t as deaf as Nadia, I was sure he wouldn’t manage as well as she does.

One day I wrote a letter to Peppino, the footballer, like I’d promised. It was in French but it was supposed to be from Tommaso, so Signor Corrado turned what I’d written into Italian. He wrote it out on another piece of paper that had the Necker Hospital’s name printed on it. He addressed the envelope to a football club in the city of Milan, in Italy. He wrote “Signor Giuseppe Meazza”, not “Peppino”. Then he posted it.

I told Tommaso and his parents about the sign language we used to talk to Nadia. I told them about her special school too, and how she really liked it because the teachers were clever and kind. Signor Corrado said he’d look into it for Tommaso before school started up again in September.

I said I’d help Tommaso out with all the signs I knew while I was waiting for my family to come back. But in the end I didn’t get much of a chance because the policeman came round again. I didn’t meet him that time either, because Tommaso and I were out kicking a ball around. But when he went away, Signor Corrado took me for a walk. He said he was going to have to find a new home for me.