The wharf smelled of salt, wet canvas and caramelised sugar. The blue dome of the circus rose above the river like a night sky stretched across steel ribs, and golden stars sewn onto the tarpaulin twinkled as the wind slipped through them. From the carts, the sides of which were painted scarlet and pearly white, came the hum of the generator and the muffled exercises of the orchestra: the trumpet cleared its voice, the drum checked the limits of silence with a single pulse. Lena stopped at the entrance, her fingers stroking a thin, yellowed scrap of ticket in her wallet. On the ticket was a sign: a sun with a black hole in the middle, around it in small print: "Circus Aurora". There was no date, just a tattered fold and a cherry juice stain. She had had this slipcase since she was a child. Once, a long time ago, she came here with her mum and.... then it all stopped, as if someone had pulled the plug on it. The circus disappeared from the town after one night she missed. And now it stood here again, bigger, as if the promise had grown up with her. - One for sector C? - The ticket taker in the navy blue cape asked, raising an eyebrow. - Please, fourth aisle, seventh chair. Tonight's premiere. Lena nodded her head. As she stepped inside, she was struck by the smell of sawdust and old perfume with which the curtains were sprayed. The arena was circular, shrouded in the warm light of the row lights. Above it, on ropes like contour lines in a sketchbook, were suspended trapezes. Backstage flashed the silhouette of an acrobat with her head shorn short; her skin glistened with talcum powder and her eyes, smeared with dark blue shadow, were as calm as the surface of the water just before a jump. She sat down in her chair. Next to her, an elderly gentleman in a hat was spreading a newspaper softly, although the lights were already dimming. A child two rows below was waving a neon pinwheel. The orchestra played something with a bandoneon, with notes that seemed to tell of a long journey across the plains, and then the announcer entered the arena. Marcel Gedeon, as the posters proclaimed, wore a tailcoat of bottle green with copper trimmings. Raising his white-gloved hand, he asked for silence not with his voice, but with his presence, as if he could turn the crowd down with a knob hidden in his pocket. He smiled, showing a tooth with a small crack in the enamel, and bowed low. - Ladies and gentlemen, friends under the dome," he began softly. - Aurora has returned to show you what memory, air and courage can do. Let us first warm the nights in your hands with a round of applause for the people who walk the borders. The noise of springs rang out as jugglers in brown waistcoats and white shirts rushed into the arena. Their balls - amber, milky, cobalt - rose and fell like planets in close orbits. There was nothing desperate about it, rather a calm, almost meditative rhythm. Then an acrobat with short hair climbed the scaffolding: Kaja. Her feet, bandaged with plasters, found the steel rope with a tenderly felt certainty. She walked, carrying the pole on her shoulders, and when she reached the centre, she stood on one leg and smiled the way someone who hears the quiet whisper of "you can do it" from below smiles. Lena felt the muscles in her neck relax and then tighten again as Kaja let the pole tilt a fraction of a degree, as if she was balancing not only her body but her memory of balance in a very narrow moment. Kaja descended to applause, disappearing behind the curtain, and three old-fashioned suitcases covered with stickers of towns where perhaps no one had ever been rolled into the arena: Siena, Eastern Refuge, Feather Bay. - 'It's time for a number that we only play once every night,' Marcel announced. - 'We're going to open a study that has no walls, and look at reflections you don't see in bathroom mirrors. Backstage, the wheels buzzed. The side spotlights went out and the centre of the arena was flooded with light from above, focused in a sheaf. Into this sheaf a piece of furniture entered: something between a wardrobe and a wagon. Black wood, brass fittings, tiny mirrors set into panels like fish scales. A lock with a teardrop-shaped hole gleamed on a door that a man could enter. Marcel strolled around the furniture as if greeting an old friend. The orchestra played quietly, steadily: a double bass that turned the heart into a metronome. Lena felt her fingers tighten on the scrap of the ticket. The wooden piece of furniture didn't seem threatening, and yet there was something primal about it, like her great-grandparents' chests, from which the smells of past rains can escape. - 'We need someone who has something in his pocket that he hasn't thrown away over the years,' Marcel said lightly, as if joking, but his gaze was looking for someone specific. - Maybe someone from the fourth avenue? Several heads looked towards the rows where Lena was sitting. Laughter rolled like a wave - someone's clapping summoned echoes. Marcel stopped his gaze. For a second, maybe two, Lena felt that they were standing on one invisible bridge, even though she was sitting and he was in the light. She touched her wallet through the fabric of her coat. - 'Miss Lena Borkowska,' he pronounced her name as if he were reading it from her shoulder, not from a list. - Would you allow me a moment? To her own amazement she stood up without resistance. The footsteps on the sawdust sounded lightly, as if someone had muted the scene with an appropriate filter. Someone at her side gave her a hand, soft as a bag of flour. In front of her, the cabinet of mirrors seemed larger than from the audience, as if it had grown, seeing that she was not joking. Marcel took from his pocket a pendant on a short black ribbon. At the end of the pendant shone a key. It was not quite ordinary: in the arc of the pen, small, cursive engravings of letters could be seen. LB. - You lost it here many years ago,' he said quietly, but in such a way that the first rows heard and drew in air. - It should go back into the hand where it fits. The key rested on her skin and it was cool on the side that didn't remember the warmth. Lena felt a wave of chill pass through her stomach. She couldn't recall a time when she had lost anything at the circus. And yet this shape - she knew immediately where in the house it would lie if she never lost it: on the windowsill in the kitchen, next to the drying tangerine shells. - Is this part of the trick? - She asked in a half-hearted voice, as if the question might be left under the edge of the arena. - Everything here is part of the art,' he replied. - 'And a trick is just a word when you don't know which mechanism is pulling the lever. She brought the key closer to the lock. The audience fell silent; you could hear someone coughing at the back, the whistling of a neon fan. The orchestra paused for breathlessness. Someone in the last rows moved a chair and it creaked like a cloud of knives. In the side aisle stood motionless a figure in a fox mask, wearing a navy blue coat, with his hands tucked into his sleeves. Metal hit metal. The key turned so quietly that Lena felt it more in her wrist than heard it. The lock clicked - a single, inarticulate sound, like the kiss of a mosquito in the shadows. The door swung open a centimetre. No cloud burst from inside, no smoke, just a very slow, barely perceptible breathing, as if someone was breathing behind the panels with a very long pause between inhalation and exhalation. - 'Miss Lena just take a peek and tell us if you recognise the shape,' asked Marcel in a whisper that carried like a migrating bird along the ropes. - 'You don't have to take anything out until you feel she's holding something of her own. Inside, in the thick blackness, was a mirror. Not a flat one, not a crooked one. Rather, one that knew at what angle to reflect a person to see them from the inside. When she looked, she saw herself, clutched in her coat, with her hair slipping out from under her cap. And then behind the back of her reflection - a corridor. Not a circus corridor, not a wharf corridor. A corridor with wallet-painted pipework, with a cloth hook and a light as yellow as lemon tea. The corridor from her former flat. She felt the taste of that light in her mouth and the apple seeds spilling out in her fingers. - Can you see? - Marcel asked. - You don't have to make anything up. Just let the hinge open. She wanted to look away, but couldn't, because for a second the shadow of a small figure shimmered in a corridor that couldn't exist in the middle of a circus cabinet. Someone was passing there with a cup enamelled in blue. The image was as pixelated as on a TV with a pocket antenna, yet sharper than anything she'd held in her hand recently. And then she heard a melody - four uncomplicated notes played long ago by a music box enclosed in a tin marzipan box. She always played them when it rained. The audience sat breathless, but Lena felt their presence like warmth against her neck. She also felt something in the mirror behind her move, as if the reflection was not faithful, but gently delayed. Her fingers trembled on the key. The furniture was breathing. - 'If there's something you want back, slide your hand in,' Marcel said softly, yet there was a shadow of a hurried tic in his voice that she hadn't sensed before. - 'Just please don't take your eyes off me, because what happens likes to happen in the gaze. Kaja, the acrobat, stood on the edge of the sweeping curtain, not even moving a toe, but watching as if her balance depended on what Lena would see. The masked fox in the side aisle tilted his head. The orchestra picked up quiet, dragging notes, like when the wind blows the clouds apart. The old gentleman in the hat stopped winking, and the child with the neon fan stopped spinning it as if someone had pressed pause. In the mirror, in that impossible corridor, something flashed - a small silver thing, next to an enamel bowl. Lena knew the sheen. It was the same metal as the key, the same shape she'd lost before she'd realised it was possible to have something so forever that you don't put it away just anywhere. A current ran down her neck. Marcel raised his hand, ready to touch her arm, but he didn't. - Now," he whispered. - Now, please. Lena took a breath and raised her right hand while her left still held the key. Her fingers slid over the edge of the door. She felt the coolness of the metal and the surprising softness of the air on that side, a softness like a bathroom after a hot bath, but without the smell of soap. The image in the mirror fluttered like the wings of a bird perched at the ceiling. And then, just as her fingertips were about to cross the border, in the reflection behind her, someone moved their lips and said her name the way only one person ever did - and the lights under the dome dimmed by a shade, as if the night had slanted inwards into the tent to see better.