No Stars at the Circus (7 page)

I really missed Jean-Paul. I even missed Vincent Bel, who used to follow the two of us around like a puppy. If there’d been another boy living on the rue des Lions we could have had some fun together, even if there was nothing to swap any more, no comics, no sweets.

But there’s always a silver lining. My Granny Berlioz used to say that before she died. I suppose her silver lining was that she escaped the war and the bad stuff by dying first.

6 SEPTEMBER 1942

It’s been nearly eight weeks now and there’s still no word from my family. I know Mama and Papa would send a letter or a card to
somebody
if they could let me know where they are.

I don’t know if the people at the fairground can get letters like normal people do. If I were a postman I bet it would be a lot more fun to deliver a letter to a circus van than to a boring lot of letterboxes. And circus dogs don’t bite. They just snore.

I’m thinking about asking the Prof to go to Signor Corrado to ask if there’s been a letter for me. But you couldn’t really imagine him ever going near a fairground. And he’s already done me one favour. He went to see the shop in rue de la Harpe. He said it was open.

“It’s actually still a jewellery business,” he said. “Though, more accurately, a pawnbroker’s shop. It’s called ‘The Viscount’ now, I’m afraid.”

Stupid name!

“Are the grandfather clocks and the carriage clocks still in the window?” I asked.

He looked a bit confused and then he coughed. “I didn’t see any clocks, Jonas. Just some small items.”

“Never mind,” I said. “They were probably moved to the storeroom.”

I didn’t want him to feel bad, but I was pretty sure the Germans had looted them, just like Papa said they would if he wasn’t there to protect them.

I can’t sleep very well. It’s not just because of the planes going over at night. It’s not even the stuffy air in this room. And it’s not because of the German patrols tramping past either, though there are definitely more of them on this street than you’d ever have around rue des Lions.

I just have a bad feeling in my stomach. It gets worse at night when I can’t see anything from the window. It’s getting dark earlier now and I’m fed up with the dark.

I really hate this room now. Yesterday the Prof gave me a brush and a dustpan to use and clean sheets to put on the bed. He said he had a whole linen cupboard full of clean sheets and we might as well use them up.

“Don’t you think it would be a good idea to do a clean up, Jonas? You do your room and I’ll do mine and we’ll feel better afterwards.”

But there was no dirt, not that I could see. Well, there was one spider’s web in the corner beside my bed but I left it alone. Why would I knock a spider’s house down? She probably thinks this room is a great place to live, and the war is great because there are no more vacuum cleaners going around trying to suck her up.

Here’s what I would say to Lady Spider if I could speak Spider: “This is definitely
not
a great place, because there’s nobody here but
me
.”

The Prof has been out of the house quite a lot for the past few days. He has to judge piano exams. The people at the Conservatoire asked him to come back and do that, even though he’s retired. He put a suit on so it must be important.

“It’ll be a little extra money for us,” he said. “I’ll look out for something tasty to bring home if they pay me on the spot.”

Imagine, every month he has food coupons to spare! That’s one thing we never had, that’s for sure. Maybe he hasn’t told them his wife is dead and so he can get hers too.

It’s funny the way you know a house is empty. When there is someone in the house, even if the other person is sleeping and everything is quiet, you know they’re there and it feels all right even if it’s boring. But when there’s no sound at all except from outside, especially when it gets dark and all you can hear is army boots going
tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp
, well, then it’s completely different.

“GONE, GONE, GONE, GONE, GONE.”

That’s what the boots are saying.

If Nadia was here I would tell her about the basking sharks. She’d love them. We could put on a play with basking sharks and pretend her theatre had got flooded because it had a river underneath it, like the deep black river that flows under the Paris Opéra House. Mama told us about that. It’s even got fish in it.

Today I read about the basking sharks in the Professor’s encyclopedia. That was before I got fed up with reading. Or before it got dark anyway.

Basking sharks are the biggest sharks in the world but they don’t eat people at all. They’re more like big vacuum cleaners. They just drift around the Atlantic Ocean and suck up every scrap of food they can see. Only they don’t even have to look for the food, they just open their mouths and everything floats into it. It goes straight down into their liver which is the size of a football field, or something nearly that big.

Maybe it was a basking shark that swallowed the Jonas in the Bible. Not a whale, like it says. Old Jonas probably didn’t know the difference anyway. Mama says they called me after him, No. 1 – because he was a great survivor, but really No. 2 – because they liked the name. So do I. It’s not a boring name like Henri or Georges.

It was the sharks’ enormous mouths I loved best. The encyclopedia had a good picture. They gape open and look like métro tunnels. They don’t have teeth, like other sharks. If you could fit a basking shark into the Deyrolle shop and hang it from the ceiling it would be the best thing they ever had. And Papa could do a really good job making big round eyes for it.

Only it’s just too bad for the basking sharks that everybody wants their oil. The fishermen in Ireland go out on the ocean in tiny boats that look like baskets. They harpoon the sharks and drag them over to the nearest beach and then cut out their livers. Then the livers are sent off somewhere and squeezed like oranges to get the oil out. Cities used to use that oil for street lights in the last century. Now there are no proper street lights. I suppose the basking sharks can be happy about that, even if nobody else is.

I’ll ask the Prof if he knows about them when he comes home. I’ll sit on the top step outside the toilet so he’ll see me when he comes upstairs to go to bed.

There are just a couple of pages left in this notebook so I’ll fill them up and then I’ll begin a new one. And this time I will definitely keep to Monsieur Lemoine’s rules of writing:
BEGINNING, MIDDLE, END
. I’m not sure about today’s date but I know it’s the tenth week anyway because I’ve made nine notches on the leg of the bed. I was pretty good at keeping the score until last week, when I couldn’t stop thinking about bad things.

On the really awful night, the Prof came home and found me on the stairs. He had to pick me up and bring me to bed, but I wouldn’t let him go. I couldn’t. I kept my arms clasped around his neck as if he was Papa. But the Prof is so old I could hear his heart going
boom-boom
. He had to lie down with me until I went to sleep.

The next day he told me we couldn’t go on like this for ever.

“I can’t forget the way I found you, Jonas, curled up and whimpering like a puppy. You could have fallen down the stairs and broken your neck.”

I think he’s making a plan but he hasn’t told me anything. I suppose that’s in case it doesn’t happen. And I don’t know if I want anything else anyway. It might be worse.

The Prof doesn’t have a wireless but he does have a wind-up gramophone. So, it wouldn’t matter if there was no electricity, you could still use it. I saw it in his bedroom, on the next floor down. It was on top of one of the bedside cabinets.

It’s
really
old-fashioned. It has a big horn, like an elephant’s ear or something. It looks exactly like the one in the dog record label. Everyone knows that label. The dog in the picture got an awful shock one day long ago when he heard his master’s voice coming out of the machine. He cocked his ear to listen, and that made him famous.

The Prof doesn’t really seem to bother much about music any more unless I ask him to play. I don’t know why that is. If I could play as well as he does I would get up on the stage and play and make people happy.

I must remember to ask the Prof what the date is because I don’t like not knowing it. After all, guess who’s going to be ten on 15 October 1942?

NOTEBOOK

2

The day I met the Corrados, Papa didn’t say much when I got back to where he was standing with his bike, looking cross. Not even when I told him that we’d just been given a personal invitation to the circus. Papa just said we’d better push on with the job we had or there’d be an iceberg in the grate instead of a fire.

We didn’t find too many good sticks that day. I climbed up pretty high in some of the trees at Vincennes, and broke off branches and twigs for Papa to pick up. But every bit of wood near the bottom of the trees was already gone. Cleared out. You’d think a brontosaurus had just gone by that morning, munching his way through it all.

I saw some magpie nests up higher, which would have been really great to burn. It wouldn’t have been mean because there wouldn’t be any eggs in them yet and the magpies could sleep on top of buildings instead. But when Papa saw me looking at them he shouted at me to come down.

When we arrived back home and I told Mama about the circus she got really excited.

“Aren’t you my great fellow, Jonas!” she said to me. “I always love a circus. That is so exciting!”

But Papa said she shouldn’t get wound up about a bit of tinsel tat.

“Anyway, we’re forbidden to go to a film or a play,” he said. “Do you think a circus is any different?”

“But they
said
they wanted us, Papa,” I said. “The man said he would give us the best seats.”

If we didn’t go – well, I didn’t know what I’d do.

Mama just made a face right back at him. “So what if you and I have to stand by the side of the road?” she said. “At least let the children have a treat. We’re all sick and tired of living here like mice in a wall.”

Nadia was so thrilled she said nothing at all. That’s what she’s like. She goes into herself like Papa, but only about good things. He does it about bad things. Mama and I are a bit like each other. When we get excited we talk all the time and we never think something just isn’t going to turn out well in the end.

The really good thing was that the day we were invited was Nadia’s birthday. That was 6 March. She was eight years of age on the Sunday we went to the circus. And if we hadn’t gone, the truth is there wasn’t really going to be anything very much for her, except for what Mama had made for her during the week. Which was a new actor for her theatre.

She made his body out of some nice smooth cardboard she found on a window ledge on the landing and she made his costume out of an old tie of Papa’s that she couldn’t get the stains out of. She drew a face on him and stuck a little clipping of her own hair to make his. Then she stuck another bit onto his face to give him a beard. Actually he looked quite good.

Nadia said later that we had to call him d’Artagnan, but I don’t think d’Artagnan had a beard. She said he was in disguise to fight against the Cardinal, who was just like Hitler.

Mama said the Cardinal wasn’t
that
bad. Papa just stayed worried the whole day long.

I’d forgotten to ask what time the circus began, so, to be sure not to be late, we set out just after all the churches closed their doors, when the Masses were finished.

Mama did her best and stuck some pieces of bread together with tomato paste to bring along in her bag. “It’s getting to be spring,” she said. “We can eat outside and then we won’t look stupid if we’re too early after all.”

Papa was
wrong
to be so gloomy because it was a lovely day, not even one bit cold. We walked the same way as before. We didn’t go the river way, which is nicer, because there were just too many stinky German trucks speeding along. They’re the only ones who are allowed to drive on Sundays. That’s another of their stupid laws.

This time most of the vans at the fair had their doors open. Everything looked busy. We could hear a hurdy-gurdy playing as we crossed the street and got near. There were jugglers, and stalls selling paper hats and strings of paper flowers.

“They’re for men to give to their lady-loves,” said Nadia. “Especially if it’s their birthday.”

Papa bought a pink flower for her and a white one for Mama.

There was a man walking around with a tray full of wind-up toys but they looked a bit old. There were people dressed as clowns, with white faces and hair made of mops, but they were children, really, I think, or else they may have been dwarves. There was a really great smell of burnt sausages, the kind I like best, but we couldn’t see any for sale.

Nadia grabbed my arm and said, “Is that them?” And guess what, she was right.

The Corrados’ van was the only yellow one. All the others were dark green or black or just plain rusty. They had made a special area in front of their van by putting sandbags in a big semi-circle. It looked like a garden, or the outside of a restaurant.

The sandbags looked like army sandbags but I don’t suppose Signor Corrado had stolen them from the Germans because that would be just plain stupid. Maybe he took them from Notre-Dame Cathedral, which has lots of them outside. Anyway, the bags all had letters painted on and they spelled out the words
MAGIC GARDEN
. There was a flag stuck to the door of the caravan that said
CORRADO FAMILY CIRCUS – NO. 1 IN EUROPE
.

Once you stepped over the sandbags there were five rows of wooden seats. Four of the seats in the front row had paper signs that said
RESERVED
. I couldn’t believe they were for us but they were, because Signor Corrado stepped out of the van right that minute and when he saw me he clapped his hands and called us all over. He bowed and pointed towards the seats. He made a special fuss over Mama and kissed her hand.