Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  The pictures of the sinners stayed in Nellie’s mind. She recalled them in all their vivid details after Dosta’s attack.

  Nellie was five when she had started appearing in the circus ring. She was, from the start, the star of Eduard Pelikan’s Family Circus. She was also Eduard’s great pride. With her legs and arms akimbo, she balanced head-to-head atop her father. And as he rode a galloping horse Roman-style around and around the outdoor ring, she was perched on his shoulders, juggling oranges.

  Each year, as Nellie grew older, she became more accomplished. By the time she was eight or nine, her performances were dazzling to behold. Her platform was the broad back of a loping white horse that endlessly circumscribed great rings in grassy fields and the squares of towns where Eduard Pelikan’s Family Circus appeared. She threw cartwheels and forward and backward somersaults on the back of the smoothly cantering horse. She finished her turn in the manner of a prima ballerina, posing en pointe and seemingly defying all laws of gravity as her four-legged stage continued on and on in its rounds.

  Nellie was joined by other siblings in the shows. Her younger sisters, Toni and Tina, appeared in the ring with Eduard, who juggled the pair with his feet. Adolph, the youngest of the Pelikan children, bounded high into the air from a springboard and then tossed somersaults before alighting on his feet. Julia Pelikan, matriarch of the family, had been a trapeze artist in her girlhood in Bohemia. But because there seemed never a time when she was not either nursing a baby or about to give birth to a new one, her appearances in the ring were limited now to singing and clowning.

  Once the circus came upon a hamlet where Eduard sensed it could attract even a small audience, he would seek out a playing area. Adolph and his brother, Horace, would unhitch the horse from the wagon and brush away the animal’s road dust. Next, as Nellie and the other children were changing into their costumes, the boys walked around the village, banging on drums to let everyone know a circus was about to begin its show. At the conclusion of the performances, Julia and the children would weave among the spectators with tins in their hands, seeking donations. Not all of the proceeds came in the form of coins. Some villagers paid with loaves of bread or live chickens and rabbits. Because the countryside through which the circus traveled was sparsely populated, the family was never rewarded with big purses.

  Still, the summers of trouping were happy times. The family enjoyed the adventure of traveling to new places. There was fishing and swimming in the streams almost every day. Most of all, the Pelikans considered themselves richly blessed because they were always together. Nights, after they were at rest from their travels and performances, they would all gather around a fire. Eduard would then dream out loud about someday when the family circus would have its own big tent, travel by train, and play only the bigger cities. His ambition would never be realized.

  Eduard had been troubled for years with arthritis, a condition aggravated not just by the sprains and broken bones he had suffered over thirty years as a gymnast and professional strongman but also from decades of working and sleeping outdoors in weather that sometimes was icy and rainy. The arthritis worsened each year, and, in time, he also began suffering from rheumatic fever. There were days when he felt that a red-hot coal was glowing inside his chest, and, after the 1889 touring season, he was forced to quit trouping.

  No one was sadder than Nellie. Although quiet and shy in most situations, she reveled in performing and hearing the cheers and applause of the always amazed audiences. She also exulted in the visible signs of pride her father had shown after each of her performances. What troubled her most about the collapse of Eduard Pelikan’s Family Circus, though, was how its demise changed her father. He sank into depression and became snappish to her and the other children, and even to Julia.

  When the family returned to its quarters in a tenement in Breslau in the fall of 1889, Eduard rolled the circus wagon into the backyard, removed its spoked wheels, and painted over the lettering on its side advertising EDUARD PELIKAN’S FAMILY CIRCUS. The wagon that had been the family’s summer home was converted into the quarters for a small cabinetmaking shop. Eduard sold the horse that had been in service to the family for dray and ring performances.

  Willy Dosta must have been surprised at the condition in which he found Eduard in early 1890 when he paid a call at the Pelikan home and saw him in the cabinet shop. By then, Pelikan was bent forward at the waist like a burned matchstick. He needed a cane in each hand to walk.

  From the time he was a boy, Eduard had been a saltimbanque, a member of a nameless tribe of eternally wandering vagabonds without nationality who lived under the sun and stars, and roved everywhere with trained bears and satchels filled with magic props, or maybe no possessions at all except for an ability to eat fire, swallow swords, or walk ropes.

  Spring was just starting its greening. As always at that time, Pelikan was stirred by some unappeasable, almost instinctive urge to again take flight with the family circus. He would not be going out this year, though. He felt like a bird whose wings had been clipped.

  He held his hands out for Dosta to see. They were curled into ugly claws.

  “I used to be able to throw down an ox with these,” he declared. “Now look at them. I can hardly lift a soup spoon to my mouth. How does a man feed a family with hands like these?”

  Because his earnings as a cabinetmaker were skimpy, Julia helped out by taking in laundry, including the bloody aprons of a neighborhood butcher. Late at night, while their children slept, she and her husband talked about the need to place the youngest of them in an orphanage.

  Dosta recruited the children for his circus by approaching large families that were having trouble feeding their broods. He and Eduard had never been anything more than acquaintances, but as the operators of wagon circuses that snaked through the forests and rural arcadias, their paths had crossed over the years. Dosta regarded Nellie as the most naturally talented child performer he had ever seen. When he learned that Eduard’s failing health had forced him to retire the family show, he saw an opportunity.

  The air inside the wood shop was sweet with the scent of wood shavings. Dosta placed a small leather pouch on the workbench where, with great pain, Eduard was moving a plane over a cabinet door. Dosta took a seat on a stool.

  “I’d like Nellie in my circus this year,” he said. He nodded at the pouch on the bench. “It’s payment in advance. Enough pay for the entire season. In the fall, when I bring her back, there’ll be more money.”

  Eduard did not look up from his work.

  “Nellie’s too young,” he said. “She needs to be with her mother and father. Who knows what could happen to her out there?”

  “I’d look after her good,” Dosta said. “I’d look after her like she was my own. She’d never be out of my sight.”

  Eduard may have stolen a sidewise glance at the money pouch. Pay for an entire circus season. Certainly that would help ease the family’s burden. And with Nellie away trouping for the spring and summer, there would be one fewer mouth to feed. Dosta’s offer must have sounded tempting. And he may have reasoned that there could be an even more important consideration why Dosta’s offer would be good not just for the family, but also for Nellie herself.

  Eduard had been around circus people all his life. He saw that, more than any of his other children, Nellie had the potential for greatness, and might someday even monumentalize the Pelikan name in the circus world. When she was performing her lofty springs and graceful pirouettes on the back of a cantering horse, she did not so much resemble a human being as a sylphid, a spirit who, along with the fairies, was most comfortable inhabiting the air. What had hurt Pelikan more than anything else about dismantling the family circus was the disassembling of his ambitions for Nellie. Were he to apprentice her to Dosta, she could continue to burnish her talents as a performer.

  Dosta and Eduard talked from the afternoon into the night about Dosta’s proposal to take in Nellie as an apprentice. Eduard finally agreed to Wi
lly’s request.

  Nellie was sobbing and gasping for breath.

  Eduard and Julia had just revealed the plan to her. They were apprenticing her to another show, Willy Dosta’s Circus. There was no other way. It would mean she would be separated from the family for months, but maybe by the time she returned home, Eduard’s health would be improved, and everything would be easier. Maybe, even, the old family circus could be put back together and roll out again the following spring. Julia was weeping herself. She told Nellie that because things had grown so desperate, she was the only hope of keeping the family together.

  Julia tried putting her arms around Nellie, but she wriggled free. Her eyes were so welled with tears that the man and woman at the table appeared to her as blurred figures, strangers. She had stopped hearing anything they said.

  “No. No. No,” she pleaded.

  In his frustration at trying to make Nellie understand the gravity of the family’s situation, Eduard tried at one point to strike her. His arm, crippled with arthritis and slow moving, was easy to dodge.

  Three days later, toward evening, Willy Dosta returned to the Pelikan home. Carrying a small suitcase with Nellie’s costumes, Julia led Nellie to the wagon. Eduard was unable to watch Nellie’s departure and remained in the house. Nellie was quiet until Dosta opened the door at the back of his wagon. She peered into the half light and saw two other children, a boy and a girl. They were huddling in a far corner, quivering like rabbits. Nellie began crying again, promising her mother she would do anything if she did not have to leave home. Dosta placed her suitcase into the wagon. Next, he lifted Nellie, pushed her into the wagon, and locked the door against her.

  She was caged and engulfed in complete darkness. In a moment, the wagon started moving, its creaking wheels crunching over cobblestone streets and then, after it had left Breslau, dirt roads. She sat with her back to a wall, never moving. Everything that had been fixed and familiar in her world was gone. She no longer had a home. Even harder to bear was her father’s betrayal, and his casting her from the family. She lay on the wagon’s floor, trying to fall asleep, but she was used to sharing a bed with her younger sisters, Tina and Toni. Hours may have passed. She became groggy, and then drifted off.

  Upon awakening, Nellie discovered that there were two small bodies bunched up against her. With her eyes not yet opened, she reached to the faces of her sleep-mates, but they were not those of Toni and Tina. They were those of the young boy and girl she had seen in the moment before Dosta had shut the wagon door on her.

  Within days, the captive children were roving the lowlands of Poland’s Carpathians. The ground was still patched with snow, and the trees were only just starting to become lacy with budding leaves, but Willy Dosta was ready to begin a new circus season wherever ten or twenty people could be gathered.

  Always the productions began the same way. Dosta, outfitted in red tights and white trunks, was first to appear in the ring. He was a Scot but knew enough Polish, Czech, German, and Romanian to extend welcomes to the spectators, whatever they were. The sister and brother entered in the ring next. Dosta introduced them as his own children. Finally Nellie stepped into the sawdust ring, leading Reiter by a halter.

  Few of the spectators had ever seen a horse of such titanic size. Many of them shrank back several steps from the wooden curbing of the circus ring. Others, mostly farmers, moved closer, intrigued.

  Dosta, his three wards, and Reiter paraded around the ring three or four times. Then the children and Reiter exited, leaving Dosta alone in the sawdust circle. He searched the crowd, picking out a couple of strapping young men. Just outside the ring, near its entranceway, was a log four or five feet long and a foot in diameter. Dosta directed his enlistees to carry it into the ring. Next, he lay on his back in the center of the ring and signaled his helpers to lay the log across his slippered feet.

  Groaning and grunting all the time, he pumped the log with his powerful legs, causing it to twirl horizontally over him like a giant baton.

  “Arghrr … Arghrr … Arghrr.…”

  After some moments, he stopped the tree-trunk propeller and then restarted it, sending it whirling in the opposite direction.

  “Arghrr … Arghrr … Arghrr.…”

  Dosta’s face was the color of raw meat, and so great was the strain on his legs that the lineaments of his muscles showed through his tights.

  Next he repeatedly thrust the log two or three feet into the air, catching it again with his feet. Finally, first with one foot and then the other, he balanced the thick pole upright on his soles.

  Dosta was always a little woozy and wobbly when he got back on his feet.

  The Czech sister and brother began their turn in the ring with a juggling display, sending wooden balls, hoops, and chicken and goose eggs arcing into the air between them. Next, they walked on their hands and threw cartwheels and forward and backward flip-flops.

  To Dosta, the girl and boy were less valuable as performers than as human props in his own shows as a strongman. After they finished their juggling and acrobatic routines, he reentered the ring and, once again, lay on his back at its center. The act started with the brother and sister performing handstands on Dosta’s upraised feet and hands. By turns, the routine became more and more complicated. At one point, the girl stood slippers-to-slippers on Dosta’s feet while her brother balanced on her shoulders. It was, though, the close of the trio’s act that drew the loudest cheering. The boy perched on Dosta’s feet and tucked his body into a ball while his sister assumed a similar posture on Dosta’s hands. Over and over again, Dosta juggled the pair back and forth from his feet to his hands, thrusting the children ever higher into the air as he did so. As spectacular as the feat was, it was punishing for the children. The bodies of each bore bruises from occasional midair collisions.

  It was Nellie, though, who was always the favorite of the mountain dwellers wherever the Willy Dosta Circus rolled. It had been that way from the first of her appearances with the show. To these woods people whose days were mostly drab and numbingly the same from sunup to sundown, she must have appeared almost otherworldly, a tiny, curly-haired moppet in a tutu who leaped and somersaulted atop the back of a gigantic horse that just kept cantering around and around in a circle.

  Dosta’s assaults on Nellie continued almost daily after that night in the field. Some afternoons, when the circus was at rest, he would sharply scold the eight-year-old boy and nine-year-old girl for not working harder to become better performers, and send them into a field to rehearse their juggling and tumbling. He would then lead Nellie into the wagon, latch the door from the inside, and force her down on the mattress where she and the two other children slept. Other times, late at night, he would creep into the wagon, rouse her from sleep, and lead her outside to have his way.

  In his drive to take his show ever higher into the Carpathians, Dosta seemed drunk with a belief that somewhere in the timberland, he was going to discover a Shambhala, a kingdom unknown to the rest of the world with hundreds of thousands of free-spending inhabitants. In such a place, he dreamed, he would be able to put on three or four shows a day. Why, when the summer was over, his fantasy continued, there would be so many sacks of copper, silver, and gold coins in his wagon that he could begin assembling a new Willy Dosta Circus, one twenty or forty times bigger than his one-horse operation.

  Nowhere did Dosta find any great cities, though. Mostly the circus put on its performances in villages of fifty or a hundred inhabitants. Now and then, when the circus had traveled for two or three days without happening upon a town, he and the children would present shows for a single large farming or lumbering family. Dosta seldom collected any income from these performances. Instead, he and his charges might be rewarded with some venison stew at a table with people speaking in languages that Nellie could not understand.

  In its meanderings in 1890, the circus had woven in and out of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Transylvania. There were already spits of snow in the air
when, after being gone for eight months, the Willy Dosta Circus began journeying home.

  Nellie was changed when Willy led her to the door of the Pelikan house in Breslau and re-presented her to her father and mother and four younger brothers and sisters. She was still tiny and delicate, but her belly was rounded out to there.

  A few months later, on January 2, 1891, a daughter was born in the Pelikan household to her. The birth certificate, filed in Breslau, listed the mother as an “artiste.” The space on the form for the father was left blank.

  The baby, with green eyes and a fluff of red hair from her Scottish father, was christened Leopoldina Alitza Pelikan. Almost immediately, Nellie started calling her “Litza,” a diminutive meaning “Little Alice.” In time, that would change to Lietzel and then to Leitzel.

  Nellie was a month and a half short of her thirteenth birthday on the day she gave birth to Leitzel. What she did not know, what no one in the Pelikan household knew, was that a genuine princess had been born to her, one who someday would move through thin air with the ease of angels, one who would be adored around the world.

  CHAPTER 2

  At day’s end, when the sun was sinking and bleeding oranges and reds into the sky, Edward and Hortense Codona liked to sit outside with Victoria, their two-year-old daughter, and watch the hummingbirds. By then, the frying-pan heat was beginning to rise, as though returning to the sun, but it always came back the next day, as fierce as ever.

  The three were in Hermosillo in northwestern Mexico, two hundred miles from the United States border. In fact, they had been marooned in the desert town for weeks, living in a boardinghouse, and waiting, waiting.