“Come now,” she says, before I can ask further. “You can sit on the swing, if you aren’t ready. Pretend you are on a playground.” Her tone is condescending. She takes the bar and draws it close to me. “Balance just below your backside,” she instructs. I sit on it, trying to get comfortable. “Like that. Good.” She lets go. I swing out from the platform, grasping the wires on either side so tightly that they cut into my hands. There is a kind of natural flow to it, like getting your feet under you on a boat. “Now lean back.” Surely she is joking. But her voice is serious, her face unsmiling. I lean back too fast and upset my balance, nearly slipping from the seat. As I swing back closer to the platform, she reaches out and grabs the ropes above the bar, pulling me onto the board and helping me off.
She sits on the bar and swings out, then lets go. I gasp as she starts to fall. But she catches herself by her knees and swings upside down. Her dark hair fans out beneath her, and her inverted eyebrows arch toward the ground. She rights herself and climbs back onto the platform. “Hock hang,” she informs me.
“How did you come to be with the circus?” I ask.
“I was born into a circus family nearby,” she replies. “Not this one.” She hands me the bar. “Your turn, for real this time.” She puts the bar in my hand, adjusting my grip. “Jump and swing by your arms.”
I stand motionless, legs locked. “Of course if you can’t do it, I can just tell Herr Neuhoff that you quit,” she taunts once more.
“No, no,” I reply quickly. “Give me a second.”
“This time you will swing by your arms. Hold the bar down here.” She indicates a spot just below my hips. “Then raise it above your head when you jump off to get height.”
It is now or never. I take a deep breath, then leap. My feet flail and I flop helplessly like a fish on a line, the furthest thing from Astrid’s own graceful movement. But I am doing it.
“Use your legs to take you higher,” Astrid calls, urging me onward. “It’s called the kick out. Like on a swing when you were a child.” I shoot my legs out. “Keep your ankles together.” It is working, I think. “No, no!” Astrid’s voice rises even louder, her dissatisfaction echoing across the practice hall. “Keep your body in a line when you return. First in the neutral position. Head straight.” Her instructions are rapid-fire and endless and I struggle to keep them all in my head at once. “Now kick your legs back. That is called the sweep.”
I gain momentum, swinging back and forth until the air whooshes past my ears and Astrid’s voice seems to fade. The ground slips and slides beneath me. This is not so bad. I had done gymnastics for years and those muscles bounce back now. Not the flips and twists that Astrid had done, but I am managing.
Then my arms begin to ache. I cannot hold on much longer. “Help!” I cry. I had not thought about how to get back.
“You have to do it yourself,” she calls in return. “Use your legs to swing higher.” It is quite impossible. My arms are burning now. I kick my legs forward to increase my momentum. I near the board this time, but it is not enough. I am going to fall, injure myself, maybe even die, and for what? With one last desperate kick, I send myself higher.
Astrid catches the ropes as I near the board, pulling me in and helping me to my feet.
“That was close,” I pant, legs trembling.
“Again,” she says coolly, and I stare at her in disbelief. I can’t imagine getting up there once more after nearly falling, much less right away. But to earn my keep, and Theo’s, I have no other choice. I start to grab the bar once more. “Wait,” she calls. I turn back hopefully. Has she changed her mind?
“Those.” She is pointing to my breasts. I look down self-consciously. They had grown fuller since I’d given birth, even though the milk had since dried up and gone away. “They’re too big for when you are in the air.” She climbs down the ladder and returns with a roll of thick gauze. “Take down your top,” she instructs. I look down at the practice hall below to make sure no one else is there. Then I lower the leotard, trying not to blush as she binds me so tightly it is hard to breathe. She doesn’t seem to notice my embarrassment. “You’re soft here,” she says, patting my stomach, an intimate gesture that makes me pull back. “That will change with training.”
Other performers have begun to trickle into the practice hall, stretching and juggling in opposite corners. “What happened to the last girl, the one who swung with you before me?”
“Don’t ask,” she replies as she steps back to study her work. “For the show, we’ll find a corset.” So she thinks I might be able to do it after all. I exhale quietly.
“Again.” I take the bar and jump once more, this time with a bit less hesitation. “Dance, use your muscles, take charge, take flight,” she pushes, never satisfied. We work all morning on that same swinging motion, kick out, neutral, sweep. I strive hard to point my toes and make my body exactly like hers. I attempt to mimic her patterns, but my motions are clumsy and unfamiliar, a joke in comparison with hers. I improve, I think. But no praise comes. I keep trying, evermore eager to please her.
“That was not awful,” Astrid concedes at last. She sounds almost disappointed that I am not a total failure. “You studied dance?”
“Gymnastics.” More than studied, actually. I practiced six days a week, more when I could. I had been a natural and I might have gone to the national team if Papa had not declared it a worthless endeavor. Though it has been more than a year after I had last trained and my stomach is weak from childbirth, the muscles in my arms and legs are still strong and quick.
“It’s just like gymnastics,” Astrid says. “Only your feet never touch the ground.” A faint smile appears on her face for the first time. Then it fades just as quickly. “Again.”
Nearly an hour passes and we are still working. “Water,” I pant.
Astrid looks at me in surprise, a pet she has forgotten to feed. “We can break for a quick lunch. And then after, we will begin again.”
We climb down. I swallow a capful of tepid water Astrid offers from a thermos. She drops to one of the mats and pulls bread and cheese from a small pail. “Not too much food,” she cautions. “We only have time for a short break and you don’t want to cramp.”
I take a bite of the bread she has offered me, taking in the now-bustling practice hall. My eyes stop on a heavyset man of about twenty in the doorway. I recall seeing him the previous night. Then, as now, he slouches idly, watching.
“Keep an eye out for that one,” Astrid says in a low voice. “Herr Neuhoff’s son, Emmet.” I wait for her to elaborate, but she does not. Emmet has his father’s paunchy build, and he does not wear it well. He is stoop-shouldered, pants gapping a bit where they meet the suspenders. His expression is leering.
Unsettled, I turn back to Astrid. “Is it always this hard? The training, I mean.”
She laughs. “Hard? Here in the winter quarters, this is rest. Hard is two and sometimes three shows a day on the road.”
“The road?” I picture a path, long and desolate, like the one I had taken the night I fled the station with Theo.
“We leave the winter quarters at the first Thursday in April,” she explains. “How’s your French?”
“Passable.” I had studied it a few years in school and found that I took to languages readily, but I had never quite mastered the accent.
“Good. We will go first to a town in Auvergne called Thiers.” That is hundreds of kilometers from here, I recall, seeing the map on the wall of my classroom at school. Outside of occupied Germany. Until last year, I had never left the Netherlands. She continues rattling off several additional cities in France where the circus will perform. My head swims. “Not so many this time,” she finishes. “We used to go farther—Copenhagen, Lake Como. But with the war it isn’t possible.”
I