What seizes my heart the first time I see The Sensational Sebastian is how he fastens his eyes on me, only me, as he lets go of the trapeze and catapults himself through the air in his emerald suit. A man built for flying.
I’m sure he hasn’t performed with the Ludwig Zirkus because I went to the show every September when the Zirkus arrived in Rodenäs, my village near the German-Danish border where I went to school and served my apprenticeship at the Becker Mode Atelier. I came for the stories the ringmaster staged. Herr Ludwig had such high regard for his monkeys that he assigned them roles in his Biblical stories, elevating them to saints and angels. Affectionate and clever, they brought him whatever he wanted for his stories—banners or candles, a stuffed parrot or Moses’s stone tablets. Although his stories began with scenes from the Bible, he roused his audience to change the outcome with their imagination and memories. As ringmaster, he tapped into your hunger for magic because he understood you hadn’t come to see a performance. No. You’d come so that he could show you what you wanted, something fantastic, so uniquely yours that later—when you talked about the Ludwig Zirkus—you’d mention details others won’t recall, the white dog’s blue eyelids, say, or that Luzia The Clown reminded you of your Erbtante—inheritance aunt.
Outside the big tent, The Sensational Sebastian stands in his shimmering suit and extends one hand as if to bless me. He lays two fingers between my eyebrows.
“I have not seen you before,” I manage to say, intimidated by his elegance and confidence.
“It’s my first year with the Ludwigs.”
Instead of going home, I let him lead me toward a wagon decorated with panels of life-sized angels and saints. The entrance is in the center of a carved panel with the Annunciation scene. As he folds down his front stoop, the door swings open, and I have to laugh because here I stand in front of the Jungfrau Maria while the Archangel Gabriel informs her she’ll carry the son of God inside her womb.
“Why are you laughing?” The Sensational Sebastian asks.
I motion toward the panel. “Plenty of warning for any woman who has her doubts about immaculate conception.”
“Ah. So you would like to come inside.”
“I would like to stay outside,” I say, intent on hiding my awkwardness.
“Should I believe you?”
Quickly, I sit down on the front stoop. Hide my hands in the pleats of my skirt, hands chapped from fine stitching and from lace. “I’m a seamstress. Wedding and evening; silk and satin; lace and beads—”
“Does the seamstress have a name, or must I invent one for her?”
“Sabine Florian,” I say, wishing I’d let him invent a fashionable name for me.
The Sensational Sebastian lowers himself next to me on the stoop, one elbow braced against the Archangel Gabriel’s wooden knee. His thighs stretch the emerald fabric. Those eyes of his—burning my skin.
I want to touch the dip of his throat. No—
“Don’t let some archangel scare you away.” His smile. No woman in the world for him but me.
I know I can’t tell my mother about meeting him. She’s so proper and strict that she won’t see his beauty. Just his danger. As if I didn’t know. I turn from him, point at the pink-gray sky where geese pull their arrows toward the Nordsee—large arrows and smaller arrows—their harsh calls dwindling the farther out they fly.
But he won’t let me distract him. “All those Bible scenarios bring us customers. Even the preachy ones justify buying Zirkus tickets. The Ludwigs aren’t even like that.”
“Like what?”
“Church-fearing.” He tells me about growing up in a Zirkus family. “Once I was two I trained daily, bending and leaping and hanging.”
“That’s awfully young.”
“With children you have to start early.”
“Not that early.”
“I walked on my hands before I turned three.” He sounds proud. “I earned my own money before I could count it.”
He doesn’t have the propriety to spare me from his gaze as most people will when your face is afire, and I long to brush against his thigh, undo the braided closures on his emerald jacket. The fabric is worn shiny, but the design is fashionable, sculpting his chest and waist and shoulders.
I can learn to copy this design once I sew his clothes …
Though my mother has warned me about the fragile worth of a young woman’s reputation, I follow The Sensational Sebastian into his Annunciation wagon.
“I’ve never been with a woman who wants sex as much as a man,” he tells me when I wake to sun through the curtain and the shadow of a wash line against the wall.
The heat of his breath races from my ear to my down-there. I feel luscious. Greedy.
“Women,” he says, “endure men’s lust without pleasure.”
“I can’t believe I’m the only woman who—”
“Oh … but you are, Sabine.” He studies my face, closely. Is he shocked by my appetites? Intrigued? Trying to prove to himself—and to me—that I’m not like other women?
I’m embarrassed, push back. “How many women?”
He makes a fist, counts his fingers as he lets them pop up, makes another fist, and continues counting. “Eight. That includes you.”
“Hardly enough for your assumption about women.”
He laughs. “You’ll make me reconsider.”
“About those women before me…”
He presses himself against me, traces my jaw from one ear lobe to the other.
“… those women merely endured you?”
He yanks an invisible blade from his chest. “How about you and men?”
“Nine,” I lie, tripling my sins to be ahead of him.
“Did you count me?”
I try for a mysterious smile.
“Did you, Sabine?”
“Not yet.” I swing myself across his thighs, flick my thumbs across his nipples, then rake my fingers toward his navel—who am I? what am I doing?—and down through his pubic hair without touching him, there, not yet, though he bucks to get himself into my hand.
The Sensational Sebastian and I live three wagons from the kitchen wagon called The Last Supper. I’ve missed my chance of returning home the night of the show. Missed it again the following morning. And now that I’ve missed that chance for eleven days, it’s too late to go home. Too soon. I earn my wages: mend costumes, match old designs, help The Sensational Sebastian brew an elixir that he claims will make mortals live forever. Though skeptical, I make sure he swallows a spoonful at breakfast, because every time he performs I’m terrified he’ll tumble into death: his hand will sweat and slip from the trapeze or he won’t catch the trapeze as he flies toward its arc. I cannot imagine being without him.
At the concession stand, before and after each show, I sell his elixir in clay pots with calligraphed labels, Für Immer—Forever. Next to me our cook sells Würstchen—sausages, and Brötchen mit Fisch—rolls with fish. Her face is lovely except for the lower half, sunken as if her features were patched from different lifetimes.
“If you are ever ill,” she tells me, “I’ll make your favorite food for you, but I need to know what it is. Now. You may not be able to tell me if you ever get deadly ill.”
“Kuchen. Apfelkuchen.”
Customers wait in line for our Venetian candy, a golden confection of nuts and honey, so unlike the cheap candies other Zirkusse sell. Our recipe comes from Herr Ludwig’s dead wife, Pia, who grew up in Venice where she sold her confections from a wooden display strapped to her waist.
“And your second favorite?”
“Some other Kuchen.”
She nudges me. “Confess.”
“Erdbeertorte.”
“A sweet lining to your stomach, then, Danish Woman!”
“Why do you call me that?”
“Because you’re from the Danish border and are fluent in German and Danish.”
Everyone at the Ludwig Zirkus speaks and dreams in several languages, evidence of where we’ve lived and worked, plenty to serve us as we cross the borders. Dutch, German, and Italian for both Ludwigs. French and German for The Sensational Sebastian. Russian and German for Luzia The Clown. Half a dozen languages for Marliss The Cook and her husband.
Back home in Rodenäs, I recalled my dreams upon waking, but being with The Sensational Sebastian erases those flicker images of night, draws me beyond my skin, toward him.
We travel north, cross the border into Denmark to perform in Tønder and Boderslev. No matter where we stop, we barter Zirkus tickets for food: vegetables and fruit in season or canned; wrinkled apples and pears and carrots from the root cellars of farmers; fish and sometimes meat.
In the towns where we set up the big tent, The Sensational Sebastian points out statues in parks and cemeteries. “Men who turned to stone because they settled in one place.”
“Those statues have never been anything but stone.”
“Ach, Sabine … Sabinchen.” He cups his long hands around my face. Kisses me. And again.
“Chiseled from stone to resemble humans,” I whisper into his mouth.
“I love you so much.” Tears in his eyes. He blinks them away. “You’re so lucky it’s me you found.”
“Before you turn to stone?”
“No no.” His laugh lines deepen.
“I miss my dreams.”
“I mean lucky you didn’t get seduced by one of those fellows who have a new woman every season. Some women will follow a Zirkus for months.”
“And now I’m one of them?”
“Not like you. Last spring a woman from Oberkassel followed us. She was after the Twenty-Four-Hour Man. As usual.”
“Every night I used to dream.”
“Audiences think Zirkus people are amoral. That’s why they expect behavior they won’t tolerate in their towns. I still don’t see why the Twenty-Four-Hour Man. He’s so ugly.”
“So ugly he’s handsome.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s what Cook says.”
“What else does she have to say about her husband?”
“It’s … confidential.”
“Tell me.” He plants flutter kisses all over my neck.
I laugh. “He isn’t just called the Twenty-Four-Hour Man for arriving twenty-four hours ahead of the Zirkus.”
“Too fast, then?”
“Stamina.”
The Ludwigs barter a young lion from a big Zirkus that won’t keep crippled animals. His left hind leg turns inward—a genuflection, a curtsy—so that he stumbles over himself; but he doesn’t look clumsy.
“He looks majestic,” says Luzia.
“Like a Sphinx,” Herr Ludwig says.
“Good temperament,” Silvio says.
“Let’s name him Egypt.”
Egypt becomes ours for two ponies and forty hours of tent repair by The Whirling Nowacks—Icarianists—not only quick and talented at foot juggling one another, but also at patching and mending canvas, using pliers to yank long needles with twine through the stiff fabric.
At the Ludwig Zirkus, the lion Egypt does not have to brace the head of the ringmaster between his jaws.
He does not have to leap through burning rings.
He does not have to feign fury.
He is Egypt now, the leading actor in Herr Ludwig’s scenario: The Seven Plagues of Egypt. Egypt is content to amble around our arena, led by Luzia The Clown. I design a saddle for him, silver and cognac damask, and one matching stocking that we pull up high on his injured leg and anchor to his saddle where seven monkeys teeter and clutch one another.
Every performance is unique. What remains the same is Herr Ludwig’s dignity when he strides into the ring, tuxedo and top hat, giving all of you magic and exhilaration that make the intake of your breaths more vibrant.