DeWoskin - Someday We Will Fly

In the last act I saw my parents perform, they already looked like ghosts of the Stanislav Circus. It was spring, this spring, May 17, 1940. Alone in low light, they stared at each other for six seconds before my father bent at the knees and took my mothers hands in his. She stepped onto the bend in his arm and kicked off as he lifted and turned her upside down. He straightened slowly and she rose, her hands atop his, her hair falling into the space between their heads. They were dressed in blue and silver, like liquid or vapor, moving. They stayed, as they had my whole life and I guess even before that, in motion, attached to each other. Papa walked toward the audience, with Mama above him.

As they came forward, no one breathed. The audience was just a few of their former colleagues from the circus, my silent baby sister, Naomi, and me. Mamas face was turned away from us, but Papa smiled and in spite of the poor light, we saw his teeth flash, saw the glitter tear painted on his cheek. He lowered Mama so slowly, smiling, maybe feeling the joy theyd decided was worth risking a performance. Even though they were forbidden. They hadnt performed in so long it felt unbearable. So here they were, although there was no real ring, no antique building, no fiery spotlight. There was no music.

Their faces met, hers upside down, and then he lowered her more, until she was at his chest, his stomach, his knees. She bent and suspended herself across him, making their bodies a V before rising up again to his shoulders, where she balanced the back of her neck against the back of his. This was their most perfect act, and I waited, squeezing my sister tight, knowing next our father would flip our mother from his shoulders and catch her so surely that her body would look, even in this pitiful place, as certain as an arrow finding its bulls-eye.

But everything went black. We heard the cracking of a door kicked open, broken, something slamming across the floor my parents had taped up. There was a chorus of screaming voices, my mothers among them. I began to scream, too. Someone grabbed me so roughly I didnt know until I felt the shiny fabric of his blue-and-silver suit that it was my father. He put me on his back, and I held on as he ran into the blank night, gripping my sister under his arm so she wouldnt slip from his grasp and be lost. We flew to Zgoda Street, where he bounded into the back of our apartment, set us down, locked the door, pulled the blinds, and turned to me, no breath left in him. Shell come. We have to wait.

I hadnt asked.

We waited all night. Naomi cried the way she does, clicking a cricket noise in the back of her throat, exhausting herself and us. There was nothing we could do. Only Mama knows what Naomi wants, and most of the time what she wants is Mama.

The sun rose and we stared through a tear in the drapes my grandmother had sewn as Warsaw came alive outside. In the days first dim light, silhouettes of soldiers moved like shadows. Our non-Jewish neighbors, still allowed to work and study, hurried by. When Naomi finally fell asleep, I turned to my father, wild with fear I saw in his face, too. Why hadnt he gone back into the night to find her? Was he afraid of vanishing, too? Had he chosen between her and us?

Where is she? What happened?

He said, I dont know.

We had tickets on a train leaving Lithuania for Italy in two days. We were to drive to Lithuaniathe four of usand then take the train to a ship that would sail in six days. Sail to Shanghai, a place we couldnt imagine. I tried to clear my mind by counting: six days was one hundred and forty-four hours, eight thousand six hundred and forty minutes. That was enough time. She might come back, meet us at home in time to drive to Lithuania, ten hours away, or in Lithuania in time for the train from there to Italy, which took two days. As long as she got to us before we drove, or met us at the train, or found us in Trieste, at the dock. Those were all possibilities, and the more I considered them, the more I felt a good one might come true. I told myself she had climbed down from my fathers arms, skipping the finale intentionally, to escape. I put the screaming outside of my mind and imagined her on her way back, coming through the door, scooping Naomi up, wrapping her arms around Papas neck, turning to wink at me. My grandmother, Babcia, would come in singing off-key, delighted. If I thought hard enough, really believed they would be home any minute, there were lots of minutes for God to make it happen.