Page 137 of The Ringmaster’s Daughter

‘Missing persons over there.’

I was not sure she was missing, but I did as he said.

There was a woman there with two children; she had misplaced her third. The man behind the desk wore small rimmed glasses. He called over a woman who spoke gently to the frazzled mother, led her to some chairs and gave her some tea.

‘Yes?’ the man asked me.

‘Frieda. Frieda Bonnet?’ I said. Her name on the papers was no longer German. My fake wife. ‘She is sick. She was taken away.’

The man picked up the phone and dialled a number, the dial turning slowly and making me angry with its sluggishness.

He spoke. I heard her name. He nodded, then looked at me, then at the woman who was now reuniting the mother with her young son, who looked suitably abashed at having run off and given her such a fright.

The man nodded into the phone, once, twice. The he put the phone in its cradle and smiled at me for the first time.

‘One minute,’ he said. He stood and went to talk to his female colleague, who nodded a lot and looked at me with sadness in her face.

I felt my whole body go cold. I felt sick. She walked towards me, smoothing down her jacket as she did.

My legs fell from beneath me before she reached me, and the man with the glasses fetched me a chair.

‘I am so sorry,’ the woman said. ‘She died.’

Seventeen

Le Jour de la Libération

Five years away from France, five years away from Frieda.

1945: the first winter of freedom, Miriam has called it. Even though the German army never reached America, she is right; there is a change in the air, the exhilaration of knowing that maybe soon, things can go back to normal.

Miriam asks me over coffee and a bagel in the diner next to the launderette if I will go back to France. Her father has died; she is worried that she cannot manage the business alone.

‘I don’t have a reason to return,’ I say.

‘You have a reason to stay though, to help me?’

‘I cannot marry you, Miriam,’ I tell her. I know this is what her father wanted, but we are like brother and sister.

She laughs. I like it when she laughs, as she so rarely does. She shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to marry you, Michel. But that does not mean we can’t be partners, right?’

I smile and we shake hands. We are partners – business partners, and the best of friends.

This year she is breaking with her traditions and coming to Katarzyna’s for Christmas Eve. I told her about the fun from the last couple of years, and she thought she would like to try it.

She will get a babysitter; she tells me the next day at work.

‘Will the jazz singer be there again?’ she asks, her eyes alight.

‘Perhaps.’

‘I do hope he is.’

That afternoon, I come home to receive a letter with a familiar scrawl – Bertrand.

I have sent him letters over the years, but I have never received a reply. A part of me resigned myself to the fact that he was dead – the bombs that fell in 1943 and ’44 decimated such large parts of Paris and Europe that it would have been a miracle if he survived.

I sit in my chair by the window, the condensation making it hard to see the street below. Yet I do not need to see the street – I have something more precious in my hand.