at her — they never yelled at her these days, even when she deserved it. They’d just tell her to rest and maybe suggest talking to the doctor. Well, she wouldn’t. She was finished with doctors and rest. She’d been in remission for nearly three months now. When her parents were out at work, she did calisthenics in her room, took runs through the neighborhood. Short runs — she was still pretty feeble. But she was getting stronger, she told herself, every day.
She’d be flying again, soon.
Lenka sat in the kitchen, glumly eating cereal, waiting for the slap of the morning paper on the doormat.
Mama and Papa were always talking about how getting the morning paper delivered was one of the perks of living in the same place for more than a few months. So was Lenka having her own room and a view with trees in it and a separate kitchen and living room, with a TV.
Lenka didn’t care about any of it. She preferred backstage — any backstage. It was where she’d grown up, practically where she’d been born, a space variously sized and furnished, the only constants the smells — makeup, sweat, and do-it-yourself dry-cleaning sheets — and her family: the Fabulous Flying Kubatovs.
At their height, right before Lenka got sick, there had been seven of them: Mama and Papa, her two older brothers and their wives, and Lenka herself — in sweats and leotards, in tights and sequins, hands bound with tape and ankles wrapped with Ace bandages, practicing, stretching, dressing, mending costumes, arguing cheerfully with the other acts, seeing that Lenka got her legally mandated hours of English, math, and social studies. Making her strong. Teaching her to fly.
“You’re awake early,” she accused.
Lenka slid into her chair. “I’m fine, Mama, really. I had a bad dream.”
Her mother rolled her eyes and turned to the refrigerator. “I’m making an egg for your father. You want one?”
“Ick,” Lenka said, and opened the paper to the entertainment section.
She skimmed the movie listings. Nothing she wanted to see — which was good, since movies cost money. Her brothers and sisters-in-law sent what they could, but mostly it had to go for rent and doctors. Having leukemia was crazy expensive, even with insurance, and jobs hard to come by. Mama was temping for an accounting firm. Papa was working the register at Giant Eagle. These jobs yielded enough for food and a family membership to the YMCA so Papa and Mama could keep in shape. But Lenka noticed, every time they talked to her brothers, touring with Ringling Bros. in Florida, how Mama got crabby and Papa’s jokes got even lamer than they usually were. They were as miserable in Cleveland as she was.
A headline caught her eye. CIRQUE DES CHAUVE-SOURIS CONVEYS CLASSIC CIRCUS MAGIC.
Lenka didn’t want to read it, but she couldn’t help herself. Fresh from the eastern European circuit, the Cirque des Chauve-souris is like a glance back into a vanished time. Ringmistress Battina brings the Old Country to the new with a show that is as Gilded Age as the antique wooden tent and the steam organ. The kids probably won’t get it. There are no clowns or flashy high-wire acts; no midway, no concessions, no trendy patter. There is, however, a bar with draft pilsner and some seriously fine acrobatics.
“There’s a circus in town,” Lenka said.
Her mother didn’t even turn from the stove. “No.”
“The tumblers are Czech — you ever hear of the Vaulting Sokols?” Mama shook her head. “And a cat act. You
Papa came in, hair wet from the shower, shirt half buttoned over his undershirt.
“Please what,
“She wants to go to the circus, Joska,” her mother said. “I have already said no. You want fried egg or scrambled?”
Lenka pushed the paper toward her father. He shook his head without looking. “Your mother is right. Your immune system is compromised. Circus means children; children mean germs. Not a good atmosphere for you, princess mine.”
“It’s not a big-top show, Papa, just salon acts. Straight from the Old Country — you’ll love it. Besides, Dr. Weiner didn’t say I couldn’t go out, he just said I had to take it easy.”
Mama beat the eggs with unnecessary vigor. “It will not make you happy, to watch someone else fly.”
“I miss the circus, you know?” Lenka got up and put an arm around her mother’s stiff shoulders. “Please, Mama? I’m going nuts, stuck here wondering if I’m ever going to be well enough to fly again.”
It wasn’t playing fair, but if Lenka had learned anything over the past year, it was that sometimes getting better involved pain.
Lenka and her parents drove in early from University Heights. As they waited for the house to open, they had time to examine the outside of the Cirque des Chauve-souris’s famous wooden tent.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Mama said.
“It’s antique,” Papa said, not quite apologetically.
“So they can’t paint it? It doesn’t make a good impression, all dinged up like that.”
Papa smiled one of his sad clown smiles and took her hand. He reached for Lenka’s, too. Lenka squeezed his fingers gently and disengaged. Yes, it was painful to be waiting in line instead of making up and stretching backstage. But she’d rather he didn’t make such a thing out of it.
Inside, as her mother claimed three empty chairs on a side aisle, Lenka cast a professional eye over the setup.
The tent was roomier than it had looked from outside, but it felt cramped to Lenka, the peaked ceiling too low to fly in, the ring a raised platform hardly big enough for a decent cartwheel. A ramp connected it to a semicircular stage curtained with worn scarlet velvet. The audience was stacked back from the ring in folding chairs. A row of raised booths against the walls was furnished with tables and velvet banquettes. Above them were faded old-timey murals of circuses past. The light wasn’t great, but Lenka made out clowns in whiteface, a ringmaster in scarlet, a girl standing on a fat-haunched pony, a boy on a flying trapeze.
Lenka felt a tug on her sleeve. “They’re starting.”
The houselights snapped off; a portable steam organ struck up a wheezy
She lifted her arms, and the cape hung down from her wrists like wings. “Welcome, mesdames,” she fluted, Russian accent thick as borscht. “Welcome, messieurs. Welcome. Les Chauve-souris!”
Lenka heard a chittering overhead, and suddenly the air was full of movement, half seen and half heard, a restless, leathery flutter. A woman gave a nervous shriek, and Mama covered her head protectively as small, dark shapes flickered through the lights and down to the stage. A crashing chord, and the shapes transformed into a troupe of performers, caped and masked in brown.
Mama folded her hands in her lap. “Handkerchiefs and trapdoors. They’re fast, though.”
As the organ struck up “Thunder and Blazes,” Battina rose into the air and skimmed over the ramp, her cape flaring out behind her. Everyone gasped, even Lenka. Between the cape and the tricky lighting, the telltale bulk of the harness and the glint of the wire were functionally invisible. Battina looked like she was really flying.
She circled over the audience and disappeared behind the curtains.
“Nice effect,” Mama said.
“Shh,” Papa said. “The acrobats.”
Lenka giggled.
There were three Vaulting Sokols, slender young men with white teeth and incredibly fast reflexes.
Papa watched their flipping and posturing for a moment, then whispered in Lenka’s ear. “They tumble like in your grandfather’s time — much skill, but little imagination.”
Behind Lenka, someone got up and headed for the bar. “They’re losing the audience,” Mama muttered.
The next act was better — a big man in a moth-eaten bear suit and a contortionist in a scale-patterned leotard who slithered around his body with multivertebraed suppleness until he plucked her off and spun her in the air like a living ball.
