I confide in Lotte. Wish I hadn’t confided. Wish I could ask her if I stop by her door too often. Not often enough. If I ask her invasive questions. If I don’t ask her enough about herself.
Luzia would know. She’d tell me, “You’re so used to starting anew each week in another place that you try too hard with Lotte. You’re both on Nordstrand to stay, neighbors, and you don’t have to rush. Lotte is not going away.”
How I miss Luzia.
Once again I’m at Lotte’s door.
“How do you go on after—”
Lotte blinks.
“I shouldn’t ask.”
“I saw you at dusk. On the dike. You stood close to the beekeeper…”
Claws. Lotte has claws, I think. That’s how she goes on. She won’t say anything she doesn’t want to say. And I’m glad for her.
“… the kind of close that reveals—”
But I know what she stopped herself from saying: that reveals your bodies want to couple. I know because it’s true and because I can tell with others—by the distance between their bodies, the charge between them—if they’ve slept together or if they want to sleep together or if they haven’t caressed one another for years.
“People talk,” Lotte warns.
I shrug.
“You must be discreet. For your daughter’s sake.”
Between Luzia and Oliver that charge is almost constant, stronger than at their wedding two decades ago.
I rush to their wagon first, Heike and Tilli and Wilhelm trailing along. With Pia they play family—Mutti und Vati and their son and their tiny daughter, their favorite game because Pia is little forever.
Except they must not tell her that, Pia’s father says. “It will make her sad. She doesn’t know yet.”
Luzia paints butterflies on their cheeks and foreheads.
When we leave their wagon, Pia comes along. Heike wants to carry her on her hip but Tilli won’t allow that. Whispers that Pia’s legs are too short for that. So Pia walks between Heike and Wilhelm, her hands in theirs, and hiccups with delight.
At Herr Ludwig’s wagon Heike has to knock twice, and when he calls for her to come in, his voice flutters. She pats his skinny arm that make his hands seem huge. Crusty specks on his wrists.
“Heike,” he says to Pia. “My dear Heike. Will you play the cello for me?”
“Not Heike.” Pia shakes her head.
Heike doesn’t know what to tell him. If she offers to play, he’ll get embarrassed that he called Pia by the wrong name.
“Pia is too little for the cello—” Tilli starts.
But Heike interrupts. “She means too young. I can play the cello for you.”
“Every rehearsal,” Herr Ludwig reminds Pia.
On the way out Heike whispers to Pia that she’ll share the name Heike with her. “But just for Herr Ludwig.”
At the rehearsal they perch on hay bales, clap and holler just as real audiences will clap and holler. The Whirling Nowack Cousins are still amazingly agile, slower but more precise, a choreography that lingers on the play of muscles in their arms and legs, demonstrates the confidence of their bodies.
“Pia Pia! Look—” Wilhelm yells as Oliver rises and spreads his arms and legs. “Your Vati flies!”
Pia paddles the air with her hands to reach her Vati.
“But your Vati will come back to you,” Heike assures her.
Just before Pia’s Vati lowers himself to the ground, he stretches up, bends at the waist, then grasps the ankles of Hans-Jürgen. Together The Whirling Nowack Cousins flip into a kneeling stance, heads thrown back, throats arched.
Pia clambers across Heike to sit on Kalle’s knees.
And he whispers to her his silent chant, silent no more, “You are part of my story … And I’m part of your story.”
Her gaze is on him.
So is Wilhelm’s.
Kalle reaches for his son, pulls him up next to her. Pia, so fierce while Wilhelm is cautious. Black hair and olive skin while his son’s hair and skin are pale. “Your story, too, Wilhelm,” he says. “I’m part of that and you’re part of my story.”
In the Whirling Nowacks’ wagon, Silvio stretches out on the bed and Hans-Jürgen strokes his lean face as he listens to how Silvio used to adore his parents when he was just with one of them.
“But not when they were together with me the only spectator to their melodrama. The promises and the love and the fights and the hurling and the passion.”
“Performing?”
“Like being in the arena with a huge audience.”
“You think he knew about you all along?”
“I don’t know. He’s never said anything like that before.”
“Maybe he knew before you knew.”
“Then why all that matchmaking with Sabine and me?”
“He wants her to be his family, her and the little girl. But he can have that without turning you into her father.”
“And now he’s losing more of himself every day.”
Hans-Jürgen traces Silvio’s hairline, the peak just off-center, and lets his hand be caught.
“Why are you so … sweet to me?” Silvio asks.
“We could fight?”
“Too easy.”
“Lots of experience, though.” Hans-Jürgen smiles with that lovely laziness that comes before embracing. “Now?”
Now—
“They fuss over him like he’s their child,” says the Cook, but she fusses just as much, makes Vanillepudding for the old man who has trouble eating and forgets her name.
Most of his hair has fallen out, and his flat ears have grown huge. If you were to see his face for the first time, you wouldn’t know if he’s a man or woman. Along the route, people hear crying from the biggest wagon where he lies in bed, curved into himself as he waits to sleep in the arms of Silvio or Hans-Jürgen. When he confesses that he didn’t like him at first, Hans-Jürgen says it’s like that for most people and massages the old man’s shoulders.
For the parades, Silvio organizes the animals in the same order his father used to: Egypt’s cage is in the last wagon, the first to be loaded, the last to unload, so that the smaller animals don’t have to be led through Egypt’s wagon. Still, some get spooked by his big-cat smell that lingers when they return to their cages.
When Silvio offers Hans-Jürgen the job of ringmaster, Hans-Jürgen says he’d rather be the ringmaster’s assistant. He suggests carrying Herr Ludwig into the arena on a gold-painted throne, still the official ringmaster in top hat and tuxedo, the whip across his knees.
“To represent the magic,” he says.
“Even if he falls asleep on his throne?”
“He is the magic. Especially if he falls asleep on his throne.”