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Although the role of de facto leader of the circus–due to age, culture and personality–naturally fell to Emir, today Yusuf stepped into the breach. It often happened this way, an unremarkable sharing of the burden, normal for this new family of his. With their blood relations for the most part absent, the circus family filled the chasm and ministered to each other’s suffering.
Most days, Emir wore his responsibility well. It went hand in hand with being ringmaster: buoying the troops through the sunshine and rain, here in this land far from their homes. Always benign, Emir had become the father figure the performers had lost, or the one they had always wanted. Yusuf loved and respected him for his generosity of spirit, and for the steadying hand he brought as an older man within a young troupe. The sight of his tatty top hat around the circus, or the wiry hair that Leyla transformed into a halo before a show, meant that a kind word or a keen ear was always within reach.
Emir was integral to the mood of the show. Without his showmanship, the links between the acts fell flat and the dazzle of the circus dampened, as did the crowd’s reactions. But when his nerves were frayed, the joyful energy he expended in the ring transformed into something else entirely: a frenzied angst which in turn depressed even the most spirited performers. It was then that Yusuf would gently take the reins.
“It’s only a matter of time before they close us down, son,” said Emir, his coarse hair unkempt.
This man was more a father to him than his own had been. “Don’t worry about that. You concentrate on being well for tonight, and leave the rest to me.”
These little disturbances cannot go on.
These past few days, Silberling’s voice had stalked Yusuf’s dreams. Even so, veiled threats didn’t paralyse Yusuf with fear. He understood the disquiet that gathered in Emir like a storm, the setbacks that wreaked havoc with his digestive system and, sometimes, his heart. But Emir was an old man who had fought numerous battles. Why should he have to fight again on the cusp of old age? He shouldn’t be here, bereft and separate from all he cared for, with the exception of his beloved Leyla. He should be sitting in a sweets shop in Afghanistan, with his grandchildren playing on the street outside not dead in a ditch.
Yusuf gulped down the rising bile in his throat.
Sometimes the circus morphed from a fantasy world to a bubbling cauldron of grief. The surfacing of one person’s pain became a touchpaper for everyone else, a doorway to their own hells. Yusuf’s nostrils filled with impossible smells from his last months in Syria: acrid chemicals that stung his throat, rotting corpses and burning bodies. He tasted hunger, the rawness of his stomach lining. He remembered children crying from chemical gas dropped by planes everyone saw but no-one claimed as theirs. Fathers digging sons out of the rubble and clawing sand from their throats. Faces looming, covered in dirt, wet from the sea or from tears. Grief rising like a wave through his body. He fought to keep the ghosts at bay, the faces he loved and would never see again.
It didn’t do any good to dwell. In these moments, overwhelmed by the deep well of his grief, he heard his mother’s voice again and again. Do what you must to survive. He took his pain and fear, and instead of paralysis, he used it as fuel. It galvanised him to do better. If the immigrants did their best to be exceptional, if they were good and followed all the rules, they would be safe. If they were loved, they would be safer still. How better to secure their status in their new home than to put on a show Berlin would never forget?
So he toiled.
Yusuf made a worthy apprentice ringmaster, when Emir required it. The young people gravitated towards him and he possessed the requisite energy and gravitas. In another life, he thought perhaps he might have been a teacher. He wondered sometimes if he was an old man trapped in a twenty-seven-year-old’s body. It had taken no time at all for him to learn the expressions of his new family, not when vulnerability stripped away masks, when war had given him a new compass. Maturity had come to him ahead of time, in the arms of grief.
He’d spent the morning with the young circus hands, who too often lost focus and needed a firmer hand. Working with the children gave him renewed purpose. Perhaps he couldn’t erase his own troublesome memories, but he could help the children gain confidence and set them on a brighter path. He recognised the need in them for someone like him. He wanted to give them something to live for, someone to depend on. Grief followed an unholy pattern, and untended to, it could spiral out of control. In the girls, more often than not, it unleashed an unbearable sadness; the boys grew angry instead. Dawud and Simeon in particular, thirteen and fourteen years old respectively, had been sparring of late. Tensions had reached a high amongst the boys, perhaps due to boredom or anxiety at the recent microaggressions against the circus. But Yusuf had a plan. He would be a listening ear and a guide, but the children also needed responsibility. It was time for them to graduate from being part of the circus crew to developing their own acts.
In circus life, exposure lead to experience. Merely watching didn’t lead to expertise. Tightrope walkers, acrobats, even clowns, all had to start somewhere. Yusuf set a small group of young girls and boys to work spinning plates. He coaxed them to display their skills in a comedic fashion, mixing tricks with deliberate breakages and exaggerated reactions to entertain crowds waiting for the show to begin. The sun warmed their backs as they practiced. Dawud and Simeon looked sullenly at one another at the start of the session, but soon their discord became competitive as the practice plates fell and they experimented pulling faces.
“You’d be better off helping Leyla with the cooking than juggling,” said Simeon, pleased at his own progress. He had a smart tongue and even quicker reflexes.
Dawud swivelled and flung plates at Simeon as if they were frisbees. “You’ve got such a big head, I’m surprised it fits in the tent.” Ever the sullen one of the group, Dawud could be hard to reach but sometimes, when the rest of the performers drifted away, he’d tell Yusuf the ghosts of stories about the friends he’d once had.
A practice plate veered out of Dawud’s hand in an awry fashion. Golden-haired Mirjam, a mere nine years old, ducked too late and yowled as the plastic disc hit her on the nose.
Yusuf knelt to squeeze the little girl’s slight shoulders. “Are you okay, little one?”
She frowned at him.
“Look what you did,” said Simeon. He planted two palms on Dawud’s chest and shoved hard.
Dawud tripped and fell, but sprang up a moment later, his fists ready to pummel Simeon.
Yusuf separated them. “That’s enough, boys. Just when I thought you were doing so well. Dawud, a slip of concentration like that can have big consequences in circus life. You could hurt yourself, a team member or one of the crowd. If that hand been a real plate, Mirjam’s nose would be gushing blood right now.”
Dawud avoided Yusuf’s eyes and dipped his head to his chest.
“Both of you, keep your tempers in check. We’re a family.” He glared at them, then softened, remembering how easily emotions had flared in his own youth, how he wouldn’t have survived without allies and guides. “Right, we’ll pick this up later. Go call the others. I need everyone in the tent in ten minutes.”
They raced off, in competition with one another once more. Yusuf shook his head. He hadn’t been able to penetrate their walls completely yet, but he would. He stooped to collect the discarded equipment. Then he checked the perimeter of the circus tent, using his weight to drive the stakes deeper into the dry ground, as he’d been trained to do in the early days when he’d passed the auditions for Silberling’s programme.
A quarter of an hour later, his circus family gathered underneath the big top: Zul, the Clown of Aleppo, who had always known the promise of the circus and who’d not dismissed Silberling out of hand; Najib, the hardest to know of them all, even now tapping a beat with his foot; Old Sayid the maestro, who had vomited on the seas until his body ejected only bile; the twins; burly Osman, who tended to the animals and had lost his sons; Amena, Aya and Aischa, sisters in spirit who had been captured and tortured by Yemeni secret police because of their videos documenting the progress of the Arab Spring; Dawud, Simeon, Mirjam; and two dozen others, who performed, carried out chores, managed the rigging or performed administrative jobs. Yusuf called them to attention with two sharp claps of his hand.
He spoke in a mixture of German and Arabic. That covered the bulk of the refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. Osman spoke Pashto and acted as translator for the Yemenis, where required. Usually, Emir delivered a pep talk, but today the job fell to Yusuf. “Tonight, we are going to excel. We may have had some knocks, but we train hard, we know what we have to lose, and we know how to put on a show. There’s no room for lapses of concentration. Dig out your best smiles, every inch of charm. I’ll be coming to see each of you individually in training. Get to it. Push hard, but leave something for the big top tonight. I want the tent swept, the seats gleaming, and costumes dazzling. Young ones, with me. I want this city in the palm of our hands.”
They dispersed: the ones who had come to this trade, not with circus in their blood but who had learned it, painstakingly, and now understood the allure of this world of make-belief and camaraderie. Broken people plucking pearls of talent from the strings of their DNA and making the impossible possible.
“Roll up, roll up!” Emir’s voice boomed through Treptower Park, carried on the wind through the sun-bleached dinosaur models, remnants of failed fairgrounds now consigned to history. “Come, old friends, and new! Our tricks will delight and surprise you, even shock you.”
They came, more than Yusuf had anticipated. It relieved him that Emir’s free day had reinvigorated his spirits. Esme circled the wooden trestle tables outside, offering tickets, exotic juices and sweet treats for sale. Yusuf headed into the tent, and for a moment it seemed he’d travelled through a portal into a new land. The circus tent gleamed from polish and elbow grease. Man, woman and child had worked their fingers to the bone to provide tonight’s spectacle. The ground beneath his feet reverberated with deep bass notes underlying the frisky tune played by Old Sayid’s house band. Stars made from delicate silver fabric lined the upper parts of the tent. Strings of fairy-lights had been strung through the rafters. They twinkled in the dark, blazing just for this brief hour or two when the circus came to life.
Yusuf breathed in the sawdust and scent of popcorn and Eastern treats. From the corner of his eye, he noticed Rex Silberling arrive together with his entourage and slide into his house seat. Knots formed in the pit of Yusuf’s stomach. He’d heeded Silberling’s warning. They’d worked harder than ever before.
To the left of him, Amena helped a child with pigtails onto a saddle. A stallion kicked at the ground, eager to take the girl around the ring. Osman, an incongruous bald-headed giant atop stilts, zigzag-ed through the arena. At centre stage, the plate-spinners showed off their tricks, dressed in simple tracksuits of shimmering blue. The growing audience tittered at their antics as the young performers feigned disappointment at missed catches, sending ceramic crashing to the floor atop a carefully laid tarpaulin that would be rolled away before the main event. Little Mirjam was the star of the group, throwing her wares up to nearly double her height, dressed in a long-sleeved leotard, ballet shoes and a slick of lipstick. Her importance equalled Emir’s; in the circus, there were no hierarchies. Even Eastern masculinity, dominant often in the ancestral homes of the refugees, had been neutralised here, as if the circus tent possessed magic all of its own.
So it began. The oohs and the aahs, and the perilous feats of agility they had first learned under the tutelage of the Chinese State Circus, an exchange of skills orchestrated by the German government that had involved a year’s intense, disorienting programme of circus skills and language training when they’d first arrived on German soil. Their bruises and broken bones now came not from war but from performance, from willing rather than inadvertent participation. The lean diet they ate to build strength seemed rich in comparison to what they had become accustomed to. Not one of them would have chosen to return to their blood-soaked ancestral homes.
The crowd involuntarily bobbed in their seats to Najib’s beat-boxing. The spotlight widened as the band struck up a Berlin hip-hop beat and Najib jerked into action, delighting the children with handstands and break-dancing, his body at times almost parallel to the ground. Emir conversed with the crowd, a microphone curling from this ear to his mouth. The audience gasped as he juggled batons encased in fire, his hands an effortless blur. At the top of the arc, the fiery batons transformed into colossal icicles, before sparking into fire once more as they neared the round ball of Emir’s belly.
“Watch out!” said a boy in the stands, jumping up and down in his seat.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m a superhero!” said Emir.
Next followed Esme’s doves, which cooed as they pattered up one side of a miniature seesaw and glided down the other. They came to rest on her arms, apart from the naughty one which always preferred her head and charmed the crowd most of all. A little girl in the front row pointed to the dove, and Esme darted over to carefully show off her animal friend, which seemed to coo in the little girl’s ear, before Esme exited the ring to a smattering of applause.
Hot on Esme’s heels came the stallion and his stablemate, thrilling onlookers by turning on the spot, and disappearing in a mist. When the horses reemerged, they cantered around the ring with Amena, Aya and Aischa riding pyramid on their backs, not a wobble between them. Next, Osman’s pygmy goats jumped over fences and wove though slalom poles that rearranged themselves like an enchanted maze, earning cheers. To end their act, the goats sat obediently on stools, crossing their legs as if they were in a Parisian café and not a circus ring. The audience tittered.
Yusuf bloomed with pride at their feats of imagination and strength, such that when his turn came, his fear rescinded into the background, even when he hung upside down like a bat and only his feet held him to the trapeze. The crowd went quiet, as if the merest peep would cause him to fall. Only when he had spun through the air with gut-churning speed and landed on the ground did they clap, and he was glad he’d managed another performance without incidence.
“More, more applause for our resident Spiderman. Who else can fly through the ring like him? Not Zul the Clown, that’s for sure,” said Emir, adjusting his tatty top hat and revelling in the excitement that fizzed around him.
Zul the Clown tumbled into the ring—he who had once been the Clown of Aleppo, and before that a bookish accountant known for his mild nature and extraordinary number recall. He’d taken to clowning as the war deepened and bookkeeping no longer seemed necessary, when bombs rained down all around. His clowning had brought smiles to children whose childhoods had been stolen. He continued, even when his own family died, until the day orphaned Mirjam took his hand, and asked him to be her friend and take her somewhere far away. So Zul the Clown of Aleppo became Zul of the immigrant circus, and he was cheered by the joy he brought to others, and Mirjam filled a place in his heart that might have grown cold and hard after the death of his son had she not been there.
Tonight, he arrived in the ring dressed in an evening gown and clown shoes, a faint smile on his lips, drawing attention with his stillness. His lips and eyebrows had been painted a stark white, and bright rouge adorned his cheeks. He’d mastered his art of connecting to the audience through mime. He clowned through language barriers and won fans in seconds, whichever routine he attempted. This evening, he poked a hairy leg through a split in the dress and cocked an eyebrow, his miming exquisite. Every time an eyebrow rose, his dress changed colour: first moss green, then coral pink, olive, and petrol blue. Zul looked down, surprised at his costume, at the cinch of the fabric across his narrow hips, and the cut of his neckline. The audience roared with laughter.
Next, Zul’s face became hypermobile, his energy boundless. He waved at the children.
They waved back.
“Bobobeebimboop,” he said, swinging his arm in a great arc and cupping a hand to his ear.
The children caught on quicker than the adults. “Bobobeebimboop,” they said, beaming.
Zul’s bulbous nose grew bigger still. He looked cross-eyed at the crimson red splotch as he stumbled and tottered across the ring in his enormous shoes, causing children to erupt into fits of laughter. After a few moments, Esme appeared, ethereal in a sea-green shift dress and matching headscarf. Zul preened in his dress and attempted to mimic Esme’s allure, failing disastrously. He leant forward for a kiss and fell flat on his face. He followed her around the ring, emulating the sway of her lips and tripped in his shoes. He shook his bosom and looked disappointed to find nothing there.
Then he stopped short.
His surprised drawn on eyebrows followed the progression of something beyond the crowd on the outer rim of the tent. Old Sayid the maestro noticed his hesitation. He waited for a long moment for Zul to resume. When he didn’t, Old Sayid started up the swinging beat of the band, cutting short the wheelbarrow farce Zul had intended to close his act with.
Yusuf frowned, a sense of foreboding deep in the pit of his stomach. The whole troupe had worked so hard for tonight’s show. There could be no question of failing; he would hold the threads together, no matter what it took. He darted forward in the direction of Zul’s gaze.
A scuffle at the eastern perimeter of the tent.
Two faces twisted in anger.
With a thud, Yusuf recognised the sparkling tracksuits and clumsily gelled hair. Simeon and Dawud brawled, oblivious to the commotion they caused, anger transcending any sense of shame or decency. They pushed hard, alphas vying for ascendency, though they were only boys and should have been in their mother’s arms, in bed, or at school, anywhere but here. They fought, behind the turned backs of the audience, who strained to see what new marvel would be presented in the ring.
Please! Don’t jeopardise what we have built here.
Keep up the pretence that we are whole, that we can be good.
Yusuf’s lungs pumped as he ran, and he wondered whether Silberling was already tracking him, judging them all, not on their merits but on their value to him.
Thirty seconds and Yusuf would reach them.
Please, boys, don’t do anything stupid.
Nearly there. He’d take them outside for some air, then they’d come back for the finale and forget all about this tussle. Tomorrow, he’d find a way to show them they weren’t alone.
His heart lurched.
Something glinted in Dawud’s hand: white, an irregular shape held between his fingers, gleaming against the velvet innards of the circus tent.
A thrusting motion.
“No!” Was that his own voice or someone else’s?
The blood drained from Yusuf’s face. He ran towards the boys with futures blackened by tragedy.
