No Stars at the Circus Read Free

hard to ignore it, I suppose.
    Never mind, I’ll begin again tomorrow with the day my family had to move from rue de la Harpe. You can bet not everybody in the world knows about
that
. But first I have to explain about the shop and my family.

26 AUGUST 1942
PAPA AND OUR SHOP
    My father is a watchmaker and jeweller. He learned his trade in Switzerland when he was young. That’s the absolute best place in the world to learn watchmaking.
    Papa was born in Germany but when he was my age his family moved to Strasbourg. When he was only fourteen he took the train all the way to Geneva on his own and he became an apprentice in a famous clock-making place. They wanted him to stay because he had clever hands and could speak French and German. But Papa wanted to come back to France. And when he did, his clever hands were no use at all.
    “I could make a clock for the man in the moon,” he’d say to us. “Or a watch that would go on ticking twenty thousand leagues under the sea. But was there any work to be found in Strasbourg?”
    “NO!” we had to shout back, quick as quick, because this was his joke. “So, hurry along to platform number 5, Papa. Get the fast train to Paris!”
    The joke was that it was a really
good
thing there was no work for Papa because right after he got off the express train in Paris he met Mama. So it all worked out just fine. That’s how our family began.
    Papa made a very beautiful ring of pearls and rubies for my mother and engraved her name in fine writing along with his, on the inside. I can read it without a magnifying glass but Nadia can’t.
    It says:
* Anne Berlioz et Léopold Alber * 7 January 1930
.
    It’s true. Mama has the same name as the famous composer Hector Berlioz. (But that is all. We are not related!) She always says that is probably why she learned to play the piano. She nearly became a famous pianist but then she got married instead.
    As well as all his other jobs, Papa does some special work that he learned to do all on his own, when he was young: he makes eyes for stuffed animals and sometimes claws and beaks too, if they are missing or broken. He does this work for museums, but also for my favourite shop in Paris, Deyrolle. If you’ve never been there, it is like a zoo that’s inside a shop. Except all the animals are stuffed.
    When I was eight I was old enough to do deliveries there for Papa even though it was quite a long walk from our shop. The lady clerks and the taxidermists who stuff the animals always came over to the desk to see what I had brought. They would open the boxes in front of me and they were always delighted with Papa’s work.
    “Such fierce eyes!” they would say. “Perfect for our new panther.” Or, “Jonas, tell us the truth. This claw is not just porcelain. Your father must have fought a grizzly bear in the park!”
    That is why it was so strange later on when Signor Corrado found the pile of Deyrolle notebooks. He said they’d been left behind at the circus after a show. I don’t think I had told him about the work Papa did for the shop. But when I did, all he said was, “Did I not tell you La Giaconda has great powers?”
    I wonder about that.
    La Giaconda is another name for the Mona Lisa, the famous painting in the Louvre. It’s also another name for Signor Corrado’s wife. It’s her stage name. She’s Italian too. But they are
not
in the war against France, like lots of Italians are.

OUR HOME
    Our apartment had five full rooms on the second floor over Papa’s shop on rue de la Harpe. Old Madame Perroneau lived on the first floor with her cat, Grimaldi.
    My bedroom was in the front, beside Mama and Papa’s, so it overlooked the street. Nadia’s room was bigger than mine but all she could see was the backs of the houses behind us and all their washing, so if she was bored she’d come into mine and we would sit on the windowsill and look out.
    That could be boring too, unless there was a fancy horse carriage or a brand-new