by Alison Pick
“The nieces?”
“Oskar’s daughters.”
“And Oskar?”
“All of them, Pavel.” Anneliese’s voice revealed frustration. She was a gorgeous young woman, intelligent and sassy, who’d married a mild-mannered, average-looking industrialist. Marta loved both of the Bauers, but the match still sometimes confounded her. Anneliese needed someone with more . . . what? More flourish. Pavel was wealthy, well-bred, intelligent, but Anneliese was diminished by him somehow. She loved him, Marta thought, but part of her had been squandered.
“We did the right thing buying those defence bonds,” Pavel was saying as Marta returned to the parlour. Anneliese gave him a sharp look that meant not in front of the help. “To beating the Germans quickly,” she said, to change the subject. The Bauers raised their glasses.
Marta lifted her own glass, pleased to be included, and then waited for a natural pause in the conversation. “Would you like me to make the coffee now, Mr. Bauer?” Sophie was the cook and Marta the governess but Marta had been there longer. She knew exactly how Pavel liked it, the tiniest bit of sugar stirred in.
Pavel lifted a forefinger to show he’d like another whiskey instead.
Marta moved to get the decanter but saw that Anneliese was eyeing her, looking her up and down as though trying to make up her mind about something.
“Shall I?” Marta asked, suddenly uncertain, and gestured in the direction of the alcohol.
Anneliese nodded to show she should proceed, but she was still looking at Marta, evaluating. “Ernst seems to be around a lot these days,” she said finally.
Marta swallowed. “Would you like a boží milosti as well?”
Anneliese ignored the question. “He keeps stopping by.”
“Let me bring in a plate of cookies.”
But Anneliese wouldn’t let her get away so easily. “Why might that be? Any idea?”
“Perhaps because of what’s going on.” Marta paused, flushing. “The mobilization, I mean.”
She lowered her face and hurried into the kitchen. Reached up to the top shelf, flustered, and the tin crashed down, bits of cookies spilling across the floor. Marta cursed under her breath and knelt down to brush up the mess, replaying Anneliese’s words. What exactly did she know? And had she told Pavel? It wasn’t likely, Marta reassured herself. Anneliese had a secret of her own, something she wanted her husband never to find out. Marta had stumbled on it, in a matter of speaking. They were tied to each other, Marta and her mistress. Like runners in a three-legged race. If one went down the other would go down with her.
The next afternoon, Marta held Pepik’s small hand on the way to the train station. They passed Mr. Goldstein crossing the square, a piece of fringed material draped over his arm. “Shana tova,” he said to Pepik.
Pepik kicked at the toe of one shoe with the heel of the other. “Fine-thank-you-and-how-are-you?”
Mr. Goldstein laughed. “Have a good year,” he translated. “Remember I told you? About Rosh Hashanah?”
Marta held Pepik against her leg, her fingers combing through his curls. “I was just thinking about it yesterday,” she said.
“So my teaching has not been for nothing!” There were crinkles in the corners of Mr. Goldstein’s eyes. “And what about you, the little lamed vovnik?” He looked down at Pepik, but no answer was forthcoming.
Marta prompted her charge. “Do you remember, miláčku? About the Jewish New Year?” Of course he wouldn’t remember—the Bauers’ home was completely secular—but what was the harm? Marta had always liked the old tailor, and he was so kind to Pepik.
“The minute hand is longer,” Pepik declared solemnly, confirming her hypothesis that he had no idea what they were talking about. “Would you like a chocolate?” He held out his precious bag.
“How kind of you. But no, thank you. I have to get back.”
“Are you working?” Marta asked politely. Wasn’t work forbidden on the holiday?
Mr. Goldstein shook his head. “Not working. Praying.” And he held up his arm with the length of material—which she now saw was a prayer shawl—folded over it. He rolled his eyes, pretending to bend under the weight of the holiday’s rigorous requirements, but Marta knew how devoted he truly was.
She laughed. “Happy praying!” She squinted, trying to recall the correct salutation. “Shana tova?”
“To you too,” he smiled. He looked down at the boy. “Shana tova, Pepik.”
Pepik reached up to twist the tip of the tailor’s long beard. This was a joke that they shared. Mr. Goldstein’s beard held the cone shape as he hurried across the town square.
The train station’s platform was crammed with soldiers and housewives and young girls pushing prams and crying. A man with mutton chop sideburns wore a ribbon on his jacket, gold and black, the colours of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Marta held Pepik’s little shoulders, guided him around two women in wide-brimmed hats. She heard one of them say, “It makes sense to create one big country out of two German-speaking ones.”
“You mean Germany and Austria?”
“I mean Germany and the Sudetenland!”
Through the crowd she thought she saw the back of Ernst’s head. She checked herself; lately she saw the back of Ernst’s head everywhere. And what would he be doing here at the station?
Still, she craned her neck. She couldn’t help it.
Pepik was tugging at her dress. He wanted to be carried. “You’re a big boy,” she said, absently. “You’ve started school now.” She stood on tiptoe. The man with the mutton-chops moved and she got a clear view of Ernst’s profile, the pocked cheeks and high forehead—it was him after all.
“School is over,” Pepik said, triumphant. He was pleased with his reasoning.
Marta scanned the platform, looking for Ernst’s wife, but didn’t see her anywhere. He must be alone. She lifted a hand to the side of her face, trying to get Ernst’s attention, but discreetly.
“School is over,” Pepik repeated.
“It’s not over. It will start again soon. The soldiers are just using it as a base.” Her eyes were on Ernst, willing him to meet her gaze.
“Will they learn to tell time?”
Marta finally looked down at Pepik, a rush of affection rising through her. “Yes,” she said gravely. “Just like you.”
That was all he’d needed, she saw, a little bit of attention. He was emboldened. He ran across the platform with his bag of chocolate cherries clutched in his hand, shouting something at a blond boy he must have recognized from his class.
Marta watched him disappear into a wall of bodies. She turned back; Ernst was moving purposefully towards her. She hastily smoothed down her curls with the palms of her hands. When he was a few metres away, he motioned with his head towards a nook beside the ticket counter.
She ducked into the small space behind him.
They didn’t speak. The desire to lie together was palpable, a carpet of heat laid out beneath them. “Tonight?” Marta said, before she could stop herself. It was wrong, what they were doing; she should be able to extricate herself. But part of her was lonely all the time, a young, hungry part, and it got the better of her. Something in her was starving to be noticed, truly seen.
Ernst looked down at her; he was taller than her by a head. “Not tonight,” he said. “Unfortunately.” He didn’t need to explain; it would be some kind of obligation with his wife. “Tomorrow?” he asked.
She smiled. “You have something . . .” She reached over and picked an eyelash off his cheek.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll try for tomorrow.”
“You’re busy?”
He shook his head, to show that, yes, he was busy but did not want to waste their time telling her about it. He leaned towards her, his lips an inch from hers. She wanted to push her own weight into the bulk of his, to fuse herself with the feeling he lit in her chest. Instead she tried to say something that she knew would please him.
“We just saw Mr.
Goldstein. You were right. He did smell a little.”
Ernst pulled back, raised an eyebrow.
“Remember? You said—”
“I said what?”
“About the Jews.”
“What about them?”
“How they smell,” she said finally. But Ernst’s face registered nothing, and she swallowed, wishing she hadn’t brought it up. The slur tasted wrong in her mouth, like cookies made with salt instead of sugar.
“I said nothing of the sort,” Ernst said, a bemused expression on his face. “I might have thought it, but I certainly would never have voiced it. Nor should you. It doesn’t become you.”
Marta flushed. “It was just a joke.” How had he managed to make her seem the fool when it had been his idea in the first place?
She tried again. “Remember? You said . . . the other night . . . ?” But she could see he would admit to nothing. Which was to be expected. If their secret was discovered it would be, she knew, the same—he would save himself at her expense.
She wound a curl around her forefinger and tugged at it. A sliver of anger was rising within her, and she groped around for some way to correct the imbalance, for some way she could hurt him back. “Anneliese suspects,” she heard herself saying.
She had a flash of a bathtub full of blood.
Ernst’s expression immediately went slack. He took a large step back. “About us? How?”
There was the roar of the train arriving in the station. Marta didn’t answer his question; he deserved to sweat, to feel the same fear she felt. She looked away from him, nonchalant, and leaned for a moment out of the nook where they were hidden. She saw Pepik standing next to a group of boys: Hanka Guttman’s son Ralphie and one of those very blond Ackermans, with eyes like blue ice—what was his name? They all looked so identical, and so much like their father.
“Marta,” Ernst said urgently. “Are you sure? How does she know?” He was a married man, Pavel’s right hand at the factory, and close friends with both of the Bauers. It would not do to be caught sneaking around with their governess. But she still didn’t answer: her eyes were on Pepik now. He was standing with his back to her; she saw him hold out his chocolates to the Ackerman boy. The boy grabbed the sack out of Pepik’s hand. A fat man in a conductor’s uniform blocked her view, and the next thing she saw was Pepik’s shocked face and the bag of chocolates spilled across the pavement.
Ernst grasped her elbow. “Marta,” he said. But she jerked away and pushed past a woman carrying a violin case, a group of young girls who were playing marbles. Pepik was behind them, standing still. Bewildered. She could not get to him fast enough. A stone hit the side of his face. He brought his hand to the back of his head and rubbed it. Another stone hit his forehead and he flinched and covered his head with his hands.
Marta finally reached him and scooped him up and pulled him close to her. The relief at having him safe in her arms.
The Ackerman boy had stopped throwing stones and was now making a show of stepping on Pepik’s chocolate-covered cherries. They broke on the pavement, Marta thought, like blood vessels.
“Crybaby!” the boy said to Pepik. “Sehen Sie sich die Heulsuse an!”
Marta turned her back to the boys, Pepik in her arms. He’d been cut by one of the pebbles—the cut was small, but quite deep. She licked her thumb to rub the blood off his cheek. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, turning again to face the Ackerman boy, surprised by the fierceness in her voice. “Wait until I tell your mother.”
But the boy wasn’t chastened. “My mother will be pleased,” he said, and folded his sturdy arms across his chest, defiant. There was a scab, Marta saw, large and infected, on his elbow. And behind his shoulder, hanging from the station rafters, was a banner depicting the German coat of arms, the black eagle with a wreath in its talons, a stylized swastika at its centre.
On the walk back home Pepik was quiet. He didn’t want to be lifted onto the stone ledge at the edge of the square to balance with his arms out as he usually did. He declined Marta’s offer of a piggyback. When they entered the house, Anneliese was standing by the big window, wearing ruby high heels and a skirt cut on the bias, smoking a cigarette. Pepik dropped his satchel on the leather ottoman and ran into the dining room to lose himself in his empire.
His mother inhaled from her cigarette and pitched her voice in his direction. “Pepik,” she said. “Come back and take off your shoes.” She touched her bottom lip with her forefinger.
“It’s a lovely day,” said Marta, trying to keep her voice cheerful. She could see that Anneliese was in a mood, and wanted to shield Pepik after what had just happened at the station. But Anneliese would not be distracted.
“Pepik. Tomáš. Bauer,” she said (the Tomáš, Marta remembered, was in honour of former president Masaryk. Many little boys had the name). “Come back here this moment and do as I say.”
Pepik hesitated, weighing his options.
“Pepik,” Marta said softly. “Listen to Mamenka.”
The boy turned towards them, and Marta thought he was going to obey, but instead he ran towards her, burying his face in her skirt.
Anneliese’s jaw clenched. She took another sharp drag on her cigarette. “Why isn’t he at school?” she asked, smoke coming out of her nostrils.
“My cheek hurts,” Pepik mumbled into Marta’s leg.
But Marta kept her eyes on Anneliese. “The school has been occupied by the young Czech reserves, Mrs. Bauer.” She tried to relay this information as though for the first time, although she had already told Anneliese, the previous evening as they fiddled with the radio dial waiting for the BBC broadcast to come on. The opening notes of the program’s theme, Beethoven’s Fifth “Fate” Symphony, always brought the whole house to silence and turned their ears to the radio. Pavel was the only one who understood English, though. It fell to him to translate.
“So where have you been?”
“We went down to the station to watch the trains.”
Anneliese held her cigarette over her shoulder between two polished red fingernails. “Let’s have him doing something school-related, shall we? Not taking him somewhere that’s overrun with hooligans and indulging his every whim?”
And then, in a ploy to win back her son’s affection, she softened her voice. “Did you see the trains, miláčku?”
Marta knelt down in front of her young charge. She wrenched open the small hands. His chubby cheeks were flushed and the skin around the small wound was puffy and pink. She pulled him close and whispered in his ear, “Go and give Mamenka a big kiss.”
It was a gamble. If Pepik didn’t obey she would appear willful, telling him secrets in front of Anneliese. Pepik was frozen, his doe eyes moving back and forth between the two women.
“Go on,” Marta said. She raised her eyebrows to show she meant it.
Pepik pulled from her grip and ran across the room to his mother, where he assumed the same position, burying his face between her legs. Anneliese crushed out her cigarette and ran her slender fingers through the boy’s curls. “There,” she said to Marta. “Poor thing, he just wanted his mother.”
The comment took Marta by surprise, and she flushed with indignation. Two words flashed through her mind: dirty Jew. She flushed more, surprised at herself for thinking them, but she let the words hover behind her eyes, testing out their weight. She had just been the one to encourage the child to go to his mother; where did Anneliese get the nerve to make such a jab?
But Marta took a deep breath, steeling herself. She reminded herself that she was the one who had really raised Pepik. She knew how much chocolate to sprinkle on his kashi and how long to warm his milk at night. She was generous too, sharing the child with his mother. And, although she would never admit it, deep down she felt that Pepik loved her more.
Anneliese bent down in front of her son. She looked up at Marta sharply. “What happened to his face?”
Marta hesitated. “He fell, Mrs. Bauer,” she said.
The lie gave her a little thrill, a tiny moment of retribution. Besides, to explain about the Ackerman boy would mean explaining that she hadn’t been properly supervising Pepik. Anneliese was already suspicious about Ernst; Marta did not want her to guess she’d been paying attention to him instead of Pepik.
Marta told herself that she shouldn’t bother Anneliese with the truth. Anneliese was still upset by Hitler’s speech the previous night: he was asking for the surrender of the Sudetenland. The Bauers had stood over the radio, fuming. Hitler had said that after the last war Germany had given up all sorts of places—Alsace-Lorraine and the Polish Corridor—and now it was Czechoslovakia’s turn. Pavel had translated rapidly, almost under his breath.
“He doesn’t mention that Germany was forced to give those places up,” Anneliese had said to her husband, her fists clenched by her sides.
No, now was not the time to further upset Mrs. Bauer with this new injustice against her son. It was for Marta to know, who already knew everything about the boy. She kept the secret, along with all the others. She told herself it was for Anneliese’s own good. And that Anneliese deserved to be deceived.
In the early evening Marta glanced out of Pepik’s window to see Ernst looking up at her from the street. He held her eye for a moment, gave a little nod. Almost indiscernible, but there it was.
She pulled Pepik’s nightcap down over his ears and kissed his forehead, inhaling the scent of soap from his bath. “Sweet dreams, miláčku.” His breathing softened to sleep almost before she could extinguish the lamp. The Bauers were sitting beside the radio in the parlour; she bid them goodnight and went into her own narrow room. Took off her sturdy shoes and lay down on top of the blankets, fully clothed. The voices from below rose like woodsmoke, a warm, unintelligible murmur. She drifted off but woke to the sound of Pavel climbing the stairs and the Bauers’ bedroom door closing down the hall.
She waited another hour, just to be certain.
The factory keys were cold in her hand, and she wished she had thought to bring gloves. The nights were getting cooler, she thought. Winter, like a bad premonition. She crossed the footbridge, let the heavy iron gates fall closed behind her. The factory foyer was dark; the shadow of a black trench coat hung on a hook by the door. Ernst’s face made her think of the train station, of the little boys throwing stones at Pepik, but there was nothing she could do about it now, and she pushed the thought out of her mind.