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At dawn, when tangerine fingers of sun sliced the sky, men in boots came. They rammed the door to the residences. The building shook as if it were made of paper, waking the performers wrapped up in bed. Half-dressed people stumbled into the corridors to investigate the commotion. They gathered together in groups, leaving their doors ajar. Others barricaded themselves in, terrified, their instincts primed to fear the worst.
The men sought Dawud.
“Who told you? Who told you it was me?” said Dawud, a scream tearing from his throat.
Dawud had once been as strong as a tree, sturdy legs and lean arms, early signs of puberty shadowing his cheeks. Over the past weeks, the guilt about Simeon had withered him, and it showed in his sudden weight loss, gaunt crescents underneath skittish eyes, jerky movements of a boy ill at ease with himself and the world around him.
“Tell me! Does no one love me?” he said.
The men took him, bodily, as if he were a thing and not a person. As if his feelings and thoughts counted for nothing, and only theirs did, or rather the papers thrust into Doris's hands.
Dawud struggled, no longer a man-child, but a broken boy who kicked and screamed in the arms a of tall blond man going about his job with ferocious intensity.
The man barked. “Quiet! Be still.”
Yusuf placed a hand on Dawud, seeking to inject calm.
“Stand back,” said the man.
The boy writhed still, his face painted in terror.
“Where are you taking him?” said Yusuf, eyes wild in his search for Doris or anyone who could stop this culling.
“Frau Kaun has all the information.”
Doris stood to one side, ashen-faced, her dressing gown tied hastily at her waist.
Yusuf turned to her. “Doris? What’s going on? Why now?”
She shook her head, but her eyes lingered on Najib, who stood sullen against the wall. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Simeon didn’t want to press charges.”
She held her head high but her chin quivered. “It’s not Simeon who spoke. It doesn’t matter now. The order came from the top. I can’t protect you anymore.”
Behind them, the men dragged Dawud along the corridor.
“I’m sorry!” he screamed, choking on his tears, beating his fists against his captor’s chest.
Osman stormed forward, and all around, emotion flared, but Doris placed herself in between the two groups.
Yusuf clenched his jaw. “We can’t just let them take him.”
She met his eyes, openly weeping, her mouth slack. “We have no choice.”
Around them, the refugees touched Dawud as he passed in his captor’s arms, as if it were his funeral and the finality of his death had already been written. As if he wasn’t a live body, but a casketed one, and this was their last chance to say goodbye.
Demons crawled through the performers’ nightmares. The following day, practice started later than usual. The performers clung to one another in the common room over hot spiced tea and eggs whipped up by Leyla, rehashing the traumas of the night before, clinging to one another, wondering whether Dawud would return from the detention centre, worrying that they might be next.
A clawing guilt attached itself to Yusuf, weighting each step he took so that his body seemed to press into the earth with the burden. He should have done more to help the boys; the responsibility for their fate lay at his feet. His mind conjured up flashes of a blade at his wrists or a cocktail of drugs bought from one of the layabouts at the edge of the park, whose deep pockets might be filled with stashes of white powder. The thought of oblivion beckoned, until he remembered Selim. Suicide would be an insult to the brother who should have lived.
The immigrants’ dream of Berlin still existed. The one he’d chased while at the mercy of the smugglers. It couldn’t all have been in vain.
None of the performers supported active measures to help Dawud, nor did anyone question Najib and the prickles that revealed his guilt. The minutes passed and their anguish, worn initially for all to see, transformed, burying deeper and deeper until by early afternoon, Dawud had been all but expunged from their vocabulary. They were helpless to change his outcomes, so what could they do?
Enough compassion remained in their well to smother Yusuf with concern after his fall from the trapeze. Emir had forbidden him from practice and performance until further notice. It stung Yusuf to be away from the blood and sweat of the circus ring. How could he exorcise his demons without it, or contribute meaningfully to the circus with a ban? He was a grown man, not a child to be told he couldn’t participate. The ban became like a scab or a knot of scar tissue that didn’t heal. Every time he answered an inquiry about his health, the scar opened up. He hated repeating the same assurances about his well-being. Being the centre of attention away from the stage embarrassed him, especially in light of Dawud’s fate, rotting somewhere far away from the people he knew.
They deported Dawud.
Yusuf refused to give up. His anger at Najib pulsed red-hot beneath his skin. The Judas had thought only of himself. His fingers twitched with the need to strike Najib, to demand he exchange places with the boy. To tell him that Dawud was worth a hundred of him. But to fracture their community even further in fraught times would be unwise. Neither would it help Dawud.
“There must be something we can do or say to bring him back to us,” said Yusuf.
Esme slipped away first. She’d grown accustomed to wearing trousers and Wellington boots for practice sessions, and teamed with her headscarf, it looked an odd ensemble. “I can’t think about this anymore. I need to check on my birds,” she said.
Emir threw dark looks at Najib, but he agreed with the others that they had to let Dawud go. “For our own sake, Yusuf. I wish we could help, but how? Maybe if we were different people–richer, whiter, more powerful–maybe then we could save him, but he set the ball in motion when he hurt Simeon. Violence has its own path.”
Inside, Yusuf railed at Ellie, holding her partly responsible. If only she’d revealed the truth about Silberling sooner, he could have protected Dawud. He would have known this was coming.
Now it was too late.
Doris’s anger pulsed, as palpable as his own. “Dawud’s just a boy.”
Even so, she offered no solution, as if the driving force of her nature, a staunch practicality and resolute courage, had somehow been diluted by circumstance.
“I’ll try and find out where they are taking him, but our hands are tied,” she said.
Yusuf bristled. “What good will that do without the means to be there for him? He has no-one. Who will tell Simeon? How will he feel to know that Dawud has suddenly gone, without even a goodbye, because of what happened that night? Don’t we all carry enough guilt?”
She lay a hand on his shoulder, and leaned into his ear, motioning to Najib. “There are others here who will find their sanctuary short-lived if I have anything to do about it.”
When Esme returned with a pale face, trailing mud from her boots all over the common room, Emir tutted.
“Take off your boots, child,” he said. “Have you finished seeing to the animals already?”
She ignored his instruction, and her stricken face drew the eyes and ears of those around her. “There are government men at the circus putting up signs, and some walking this way.”
Emir and Doris drew closer.
“What signs?” said Doris, disquieted.
Esme thrust a white page with red and black lettering under Emir’s nose. He smoothed it out with his square, hairy hands. As he read it, his face twisted in despair and he slumped into the chair behind him, wheezing. Leyla and Yusuf hurried to his side. The old woman whispered softly into her husband’s ear.
Yusuf unpeeled the page from Emir’s hand, and sucked in his breath. He stammered, reading the sign out loud, for all to hear.
TREPTOW CIRCUS
FIVE DAYS UNTIL CLOSURE
Gasps and a flurry of chatter swept across the room. Even the children stopped playing and came to stand with their guardians.
“They asked me to give this to you, Doris,” said Esme, handing over a sealed envelope. “It’s a copy of a letter sent to your email address last night.”
Doris flushed. “There was a lot on my plate. I didn’t check my emails last night.”
“Open it now,” said Esme.
Doris tore open the letter, fingers clumsy. Her voice stretched out across the common room, clear as a bell, cutting through the whispers.
To whom it may concern,
Following a thorough evaluation conducted by officials in my department over the past few months, I have come to the conclusion that the refugee programme at Treptow Circus is no longer fit for purpose.
I have not come to this decision lightly. Multiple violent and disruptive incidents in and around the circus have convinced me that closure of the circus is the best possible outcome. The recent fall during an acrobatic performance highlighted health and safety implications that cannot be ignored. Furthermore, as Interior Minister, I am unable to sanction the use of state funds for a project that has lost its bearings.
While there is only a small fraction of the funding that remains, I have instructed my officers to release it for your use. The final performance of the Treptow Circus will take place on 5 May. After this, the circus tent and its furnishings, as well as the animals, will be sequestered.
Despite your inevitable disappointment about this decision, I would like to congratulate you on your role in contributing to the Treptow Circus project over the past two years. While your service falls short of the tenure required to secure the permanent right to reside in Germany, rest assured that your applications will continue to be assessed through the normal channels.
Please address any issues about the next stage of your applications to your warden Frau Doris Kaun, who will be acting as liaison in this matter, and who will be providing you with information on interim accommodation upon closure of the residences.
Regards,
Rex Silberling
Interior Minister
Emir leaned forward. “What does sequestered mean?”
“Taken away,” said Doris, her voice small.
May the fifth.
That left five days.
“How can he do this?” said Emir. “Does the man have no honour? And to think, in two weeks, it’s the start of Ramadhan, and here we will be with our prayer mats but no home, no family to call our own. What have we done to deserve this?”
Yusuf’s anger twisted inside, a swirling storm that controlled him. He should have known better than to trust Silberling. His instincts had always told him to be wary. All this time, he’d wanted to prove to Silberling that the circus folk were good enough to merit German citizenship. What a fool he’d been.
They had travelled great distances to escape war, but sometimes it appeared as though war had followed them, or they’d carried it within them, a raging beast caught within living carcasses. It hit him then, that maybe Allah had imposed a penalty on him for escaping, for severing the tether to the land of his ancestors and to his mother while true Syrians stayed to die or suffer.
Maybe none of his circus family deserved to be happy.
They had squandered their chance of a new life together.
In five days, their family would be torn apart.
