No Stars at the Circus (13 page)

“A house,” he said. “It has to be a house, not a van. We have to find someone we can trust who will shelter Jonas Alber. Immediately.”

Pimply Arms and his friends knew about me. One day a policeman had tried to arrest them for smashing the shutters on a shop, but they told the police captain he wasn’t doing his duty. They said there was a boy with the circus who had no papers. Everyone knew what that meant, so why hadn’t the Jew-lover done something about
that
, instead of arresting proper Frenchmen?

“The man is a savage,” said Signor Corrado. “There are people like that in Italy too. But what it boils down to is that you’re not safe here for a minute longer.”

Well, my mother just never stopped doing her best, did she? She was so clever she’d given me that printed card the morning I left with Signor Corrado on the bike. The one with the Professor’s name and address.

It was strange. I don’t know why she did that. She’d never done anything like it before, all the Sunday mornings the Corrados had called to bring me to the fair at Nation. But that morning she did.

Here is something else that is strange: on the morning I came to the Prof’s house Alfredo got up just as early as Signor Corrado and me, something he’d never done before. He took down his precious bottle of hair oil and rubbed some onto my hair. Only my hair is so straight it made it even flatter.

“See you around, little guy,” he said.

20 OCTOBER 1942

It’s getting even colder now. Our rooms in rue des Lions were cold too, but at least there you could snuggle up beside someone in your family. When you’re cold on your own it’s like being a tree in the park when everything is frozen stiff.

Even the spider has gone.

The Prof
does
allow me down for meals. And we have piano lessons every day. They’re really the only good thing, apart from the encyclopedia. I know I’m playing better. Mama would be
really
pleased about that.

The Prof gave me a pair of gloves with the fingertips cut off so I could practise without my hands falling off onto the floor. That’s what happens to Arctic explorers’ hands if they forget and go out without their gloves.

The practice room is nearly as cold as my room upstairs because it faces north. None of the other houses look onto it, though, so that’s a good thing. Nobody will peek in and say,
Who is that boy playing Beethoven with funny gloves on? We’ve never seen him before. We hope he has his papers
.

The Prof loves Beethoven the best so we play him the most. He showed me some music that a friend of his at the Conservatoire had written. It looked like ordinary music writing to me but the Prof said if you play it right it’s supposed to sound like birds. His friend just loves birds. He goes into parks to listen to them and then tries to write down their songs so that people can play a blackbird song or a lark tune on the piano. It’s quite a good idea but the music looked pretty hard to me.

Do birds know their songs are so difficult?

I asked the Prof what kind of sound an albatross makes but he didn’t know. He thought it might be a screech, like a seagull, but I’m not so sure he’s right. He said he’d ask his friend about it. I think an albatross would make a deep note like an organ, when all its stops are out. I mean a real organ like the one they have in the Notre-Dame Cathédral, not like the silly circus one.

One time Mama took all of us to hear a famous person play that organ. I don’t remember what he played but it sounded like music that came all the way down from the skies just to bring you back up again with it. It filled up the whole huge space in the cathedral. It filled up your whole brain too. Even Nadia could hear bits of it, she said, though Mama said that was impossible.

Nothing is impossible for a willing heart
. Didn’t Mama remember that?

Jean-Paul thinks all people who play the organ are mad. He said the gargoyles that are stuck to the outside of old churches start out looking like normal statue people but all the organ music they have to listen to turns them into monsters after a few years. Papa said Jean-Paul never failed to astonish him.

Anyway, there was one gargoyle on the old church at the back of rue de la Harpe that I really liked. It was a beardy man holding up a goblin. The man looked like Monsieur Zacharides did when he was taking his bread out of the oven. Nadia thought so too, but we never told him in case we hurt his feelings.

I saw that gargoyle every day on my way to school. I used to see Monsieur Zacharides every day too.

23 OCTOBER 1942

I’ve been reading a lot about albatrosses. They live all over the world wherever there are huge oceans for them to roam over. The biggest one is called the Wandering Albatross and the next biggest is the Southern Royal Albatross. When their wings are spread out they measure more than
three
metres. That makes them the biggest flying birds in the world.

If an albatross came to my window and if I let it in, it wouldn’t be able to open its wings because the room here isn’t big enough. Actually, I don’t think it could fit through the window anyway, even with its wings folded. But I don’t expect one will be coming along any time soon.

Tick the right reason:

No. 1 – because of the Germans

No. 2 – because there isn’t enough fish in the markets

No. 3 – because Paris is not on the ocean

Albatrosses never feel the cold because they have special feathers. They love the bottom part of the Atlantic Ocean, near the Antarctic, but they fly across the Pacific Ocean too. They don’t flap their wings. They glide.

They spend years out over the ocean, just flying around, watching ships and scooping up fish whenever they spot them. They like squid best of all. Sometimes sailors catch them by leaving out bits of meat on the deck, which is really mean because if an albatross is stuck on a ship in a storm he will get seasick, just like a human. It’s true! Plus it’s not a good idea anyway because it’s really bad luck to catch an albatross.

Of course they have to come back to land to lay their eggs. They go to places like New Zealand and the cold part of Argentina and lay them near a cliff so that the first thing the chick will see when it hatches is the ocean.

The chicks take a long time to come out of the egg. It takes them about three days of banging on their shells to break it, not like a chicken who gets out really fast. That must be a bit scary for them, being stuck inside for three days, but I suppose it makes them very determined.

The parents feed the baby together but what they really want is to get it out to the ocean as soon as its wings are strong enough. That’s the best place for an albatross. It’s their real home. Still, it takes them quite a while to learn to fly. They’re not good to begin with.

The encyclopedia says that albatrosses can fly millions of kilometres. So if they could breathe in space they could go to the moon and back. But they just like the ocean and all the fish.

Scientists think they live for a really long time too, like parrots and elephants. The scientists in New Zealand are going to catch some young albatrosses and put rings on their legs so they can work out how old they get. I hope they don’t frighten them.

I’m sure Beethoven would have liked to write a sonata for an albatross if he’d known about them. He was a very lonely man and then he got deaf, which was terrible for him. Much worse than for Nadia because he used to be able to hear fine in the beginning, and also, of course, because he was a composer. But he did his best. The Prof says he could hear music in his brain instead of in his ears. He just kept on going, like an albatross keeps on flying, across the frozen ocean.

I’m going to make an albatross for Nadia’s theatre. I’ve asked the Prof to give me any leftover paper from his shopping. I’ll soak that and make papier mâché out of it, the way Mama showed us. Nadia would really get a kick out of having a clever bird like that in one of her plays. We could paint scenes of a great frozen ocean, with icebergs at the back and the sides, and whales spouting foam from their blowholes.

Guess what? We’d have the cold for free.

NOTEBOOK

3

BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER 1942

I’ll check the proper date later. I didn’t feel like writing anything much until today.

No. 1 – I had a cold.

No. 2 – There was nothing to write about.

Today I saw a German motorcycle rider come down rue Cuvier. I was in my lookout position by the side of the window in my room, and there he was, really silent and deadly. The bike was black and silver and it gleamed in the sun.

One of the mirrors flashed a beam right through the gap in the curtain, onto the ceiling. It moved around until it was right above me. Like it knew I was there and it was an eye trying to search me out.

Then it passed on.

It wasn’t a friendly motorbike like the ancient Lucifer that Monsieur Zacharides had. That made lots of really black smoke out of its middle and its rear end and it was always gasping and making very rude noises. You’d think it would explode any minute.

Sometimes Madame Perroneau got really mad with the noise it made and then Monsieur Zacharides would go back into the shop and come out with an éclair for her. Papa said Mama should complain about the Lucifer too, but she never did. She said Monsieur Zacharides was too nice for such a carry on. Anyway, he couldn’t run his bike in the end because there was no more petrol.

This German motorbike wasn’t fussy and noisy like the Lucifer. I thought it might skid and turn over because of the frost on the street but the driver was going too slowly for that. He seemed to be looking at the house numbers. I could hardly breathe until he’d gone way past No. 12.

About six or seven houses down the road, he stopped and got off and knocked at the door. I had to move to the other side of the window to see what he was doing. He had a big briefcase in his hand. He wore those trousers that stick out like jigsaw pieces, and tall black boots and a black leather coat. Then the door opened and he went in. I reckoned it was the same house the delivery man had gone to on the day of the burst water pipes.

The bike just stood there on its kickstand. You knew nobody would mess with it, even if they wanted to kick it over or put sugar in its tank.

When I went down for dinner I told the Prof what I’d seen but it didn’t seem to surprise him. He said that last week a really high-up German had moved into the house where the motorbike had stopped.

“My neighbour told me about it yesterday. It’s someone who doesn’t want to live in a hotel, like the rest of them do. It’s meant to be a secret but everybody on the street must know about him by now.”

“Is it Hitler?” I asked. Of course I didn’t
really
think that but you never know till you ask.

The Prof just laughed. He never puts his hand up to his face these days. He is used to me.

“Pity it’s not,” he said. “We’d all help out with that one if it was. I’d say even old Grumpy next door would be willing to light a fuse or two.”

I thought about the Prof and all the neighbours going down the road with a big round black bomb and leaving it on the German’s doorstep. It really
was
a pity. Also, I have to confess that I wouldn’t mind getting a look at Hitler for myself. Not many people get to do that, I bet.

But I was still bothered.

“Do you think they’ll check all the houses on the street?” I asked. “Do you think they already have? Maybe they burst the pipes just to get inside here and have a good look.”

He wrinkled his nose a bit.

“I don’t think so, Jonas,” he said. “If they’d been serious about searching the house you can be sure they wouldn’t have stopped with the kitchen. They don’t have to pretend to be the fire brigade either. But I’ll ask around to find out if anything has happened.”

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.