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I suppose I should not have been surprised to learn the truth about her. In wartime we all have a past, don’t we, even a baby like Theo? Everyone needs to hide the truth and reinvent himself in order to survive.
“I still dream about Erich,” she confides. “And I still have feelings for him.” I am surprised. “Even though he...”
“Turned me out? Rejected me? Yes, even then. You love the people they were before, below all the awfulness that made them do this thing, you know?”
“Sometimes our forever life does not last as long as we think.”
His kind of courage was boundless, though, and he would not have turned away a person in need, whether a star performer or a simple laborer or a child such as Theo with no skills at all. It was not about the circus or family connections, but human decency.
“We cannot change who we are. Sooner or later we will all have to face ourselves.”
The acts had grown grimmer since the end of the Great War, as though people needed to see near death in order to be thrilled—mere entertainment was not enough anymore.
We have everything to lose. But watching him, my admiration grows: he is standing up to the Germans in his own way and fighting, not simply accepting what is happening and the
restrictions that have been placed on us, leading to our own inevitable demise.
