by Alison Pick
Flax dust coated the floor like snow. Ernst got her up against the chilly wall, pressing his weight into hers. The rough cement grabbed at her stockings. He leaned in to kiss her; Marta turned her head coyly. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”
He laughed. “Hello, lovely.” He brushed his hands lightly over her bottom. “What’s new in your world?”
She tried to think of something of interest, something notable, but her days were all the same. “The Bauers are getting nervous,” she said.
“About?”
“About Hitler.”
She said nothing about her earlier comment at the train station—that Anneliese suspected their liaison—and Ernst didn’t ask. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. “I think he might succeed after all,” he said.
Marta moved his hand off her rear end. “Hitler? At what?”
Ernst moved his hand back, smiling. “At liberating us. From the Czechs.” He gave her backside a little squeeze.
“From the Czechs? Aren’t you one of them?” She paused. “One of us?”
“I’m German,” he said quickly.
Well, of course he was—along with a huge portion of the Sudetenland’s population. This was why, Marta knew, Hitler was so popular in the territory.
“The Sudetenland polled eighty-five percent Nazi in the last election,” Ernst said officiously.
“So you’re pro-German,” Marta clarified, “but not anti-Jew?”
Ernst made a noise from the back of his throat that she couldn’t interpret.
Marta leaned back so she could see his face. She wanted to touch his cheek, but her arm was pinned behind her, caught between her back and the cement wall. “Hitler is just a bullying schoolboy,” she said. But even as she said this, she wondered if it was what she really thought. Her own true feelings—about Hitler, about anything at all—were locked inside her chest, the key long lost. Her contents as much a mystery to her as to anyone else. And what did she really know, about Hitler or anyone else? She was probably just repeating something she’d heard Anneliese say.
At the thought of Anneliese, Marta felt a flash of indignation. Poor thing, he just wanted his mother.
Ernst looked at her closely, seeing the flush of anger on her face. “Hitler might be a bullying schoolboy. Or, he might be the man of the century,” he said mildly. “Either way, it doesn’t bode well for the Bauers.”
“Why not?”
Marta worked to free her arm, but Ernst’s body against her own was too heavy.
“They aren’t Jewish,” she protested. “At least, they’re not Jewish. You know that.”
Ernst had his hands in her hair; he made a knot with his fist and tugged lightly. “People are saying that it’s not just a religion.” He paused. “They’re saying it’s a race.”
“Do you really—”
He nodded. “I’m beginning to think so. An inferior race. I’ve joined a group that . . .” But his voice trailed off, leaving Marta to surmise exactly what kind of group Ernst was now part of. Could he be right? she wondered. It seemed a ridiculous idea—anyone could see the Bauers were just the same as everyone else—yet something about the statement rang true for Marta too.
Ernst coughed into the back of his hand. “You, at least,” he said, “you’re one hundred percent pure.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“A beauty like you,” he said.
Marta squirmed again and he saw her discomfort, her arm bent back so she couldn’t move it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and leaned back so she could change position. He looked at her tenderly, then shifted his gaze, his eyes focused on the wall several inches above her head. He spoke suddenly, the softness gone: “The Jews are the cause of so many of Germany’s problems,” he said. “You can’t separate the two issues.”
“How—” she started, but Ernst seemed to have forgotten she was there. He seemed to be speaking to himself now, as though cementing the answer to a question he’d been wrestling with in his mind.
“Germany—and Czechoslovakia too—would be better off with no Jews at all.”
Marta raised her face to speak—to object—but he covered her open mouth with his own.
Something woke Marta early on the last day of September. Usually she heard Sophie bumping into things in the kitchen, but it was 5:00 a.m., too early even for that. She put on her slippers and went out into the hall, where there was a row of photographs of Pepik, one for each birthday. Five in total; the sixth was still at the framers. It amazed her, really, how he’d grown. The everyday miracle of it. She went quietly into his bedroom; he was on his back with his arms above his head and his fat cheeks flushed like the belly of the coal stove. Since the incident at the train station he had taken to sleeping with one of his lead soldiers clutched in his hand. He clung to it like a vial of magic potion that had rendered him unconscious and would now be required to bring him back to the world of the living.
It was almost, she thought, as though the whole country had fallen into slumber. September 28—the feast day of Saint Wenceslas, patron saint of the Czechs—had passed with none of the usual fanfare. Like the flare of a match, she thought: a brief light, the fall back to darkness.
Marta pulled the covers up under Pepik’s chin, kissed him, and left him to sleep. She went downstairs to grind the Bauers’ coffee beans; it was Sophie’s job, but Marta didn’t mind doing it. When she came into the parlour, though, the radio was on, and Pavel was standing with his back to her, facing the big window. He was wearing only his thin white cotton nightshirt, through which she could see the muscled contours of his behind.
She couldn’t think what he was doing up so early, and she began to back slowly up the stairs. He heard her move, though, and turned towards her.
He said her name, just once. “Marta.”
On his face was a look that Marta had never seen before. The word that popped into her mind was stricken.
“Mr. Bauer? I was just going to—” But Pavel cleared his throat loudly. He seemed not to notice that she was barely decent herself, wearing only her thin robe and slippers, her curls still messy with sleep.
“He’s betrayed us,” Pavel said.
Marta pulled her robe tight around her. “Who has?”
She had a sudden sinking feeling that Pavel had found out about Ernst—what had she been thinking, taking his factory keys right out from under his nose?—but Pavel said instead, “Good old J’aime Berlin.”
“Pardon me?”
“J’aime Berlin,” he repeated. He waited, but Marta didn’t understand the French pun. “Cham-berlain,” he said finally. “Chamberlain. Britain. And France.”
She blinked. “I was just going to make your coffee,” she said.
“We had a pact. And now they have gone to meet with Hitler and have given us up to Germany. The entire Sudetenland. As if we were theirs to give up!” Pavel took a slow, deep breath. “They didn’t even ask us to the table,” he said. “They peeled us off Czechoslovakia like so much nothing.”
Marta pictured the thick peel of a Christmas orange.
The Bauers celebrated Christmas along with almost everyone else, as a kind of folk holiday, the chance to gather with family. She would have to remind Ernst of this.
Pavel was looking at her directly for the first time since she’d come into the room, and she saw now that this was serious—he had tears in his eyes. “Hitler convinced them. Daladier, Mussolini. Chamberlain is saying it will be ‘peace in our time.’”
He touched his face, as though to make sure he was still there.
Marta cast around, wondering what she should say. Perhaps Ernst could help? But that was a silly idea, considering his recent comments; she snorted. Pavel looked up sharply. “What?”
“Nothing,” Marta said. “I just can’t believe this has happened.”
And it was true, she couldn’t. There had been so much talk of Austria and the Anschluss; months and months of Hitler on the radio, singing the praises of his Nuremberg Laws. The thoug
ht that the Sudetenland would belong to him, that he would now come here, seemed impossible. Life happened in the big cities, in Frankfurt and Milan, in Prague, where the Bauers attended symphonies and business meetings. Nothing would ever happen here in their small town. Not now, not ever.
The radio was babbling on like a kettle on low boil. Pavel nodded in its direction. “It’s an actor from the National Theatre reading a script. President Beneš didn’t have the guts to tell us the news himself. Nobody from the government did.”
He was standing a foot away from her in his nightclothes. But Marta realized she could forget about what she was wearing, about what he was wearing; he was not going to notice.
“Cowards,” he said, and she could not tell if he was referring to their own Czech government or to the British and French who had betrayed them.
The room was slowly gathering light as a small child gathers cornflowers in a field. It would be another warm day. Marta and Pavel stood looking down at the square. Marta had never been to the cinema but she had heard about the big screen, and this was how she thought of the window looking over the town: as a screen on which the events of the world played out. A sound was moving towards them now, rumbling over the cobblestones. Pavel swore under his breath and held his face in his hands. He looked up again, then lowered his face quickly, as though to make what he had seen disappear.
Trucks were entering the square. Large trucks, with guns protruding from them, and tanks that bore the Wehrmacht insignia. The morning light crept up behind them, a rosy pink that was almost flattering to their shiny metal. Pavel squared his shoulders in defiance. He lifted a finger and put it on her elbow, as if he could not face this alone.
Marta shifted away automatically—it was not right to touch her employer. She had a flash again, of Ernst saying, “Dirty . . .” But Mr. Bauer smelled of soap or shaving lotion, and beneath that of warm blankets and skin. He smelled as she did: human. Besides, something dramatic was happening, something extraordinary, and extraordinary events called for extraordinary measures. It was the kind thing to do, to reassure someone in distress. She knew nothing about politics, but the Bauers were her family. What had she been thinking? They were the same as they’d always been, and she was on their side. On Mr. Bauer’s side. Ernst could believe what he wanted.
Marta shifted back towards Pavel and their two arms touched again. They stood as a team, next to each other, as the German tanks filled their town square.
By mid-morning, when Marta came back downstairs, Pavel had taken the car to the factory. He could afford a chauffeur, like everyone who had an automobile, but he chose not to employ one. Why, he liked to ask, would he pay for someone else to have the pleasure of driving?
Marta spent the bulk of the day tidying Pepik’s room. She swept beneath the bed, where she found two lost lead soldiers and a pair of brown knickerbockers crushed up into a ball. She shook them out; there was a round hole in the fabric, the exact size of a ten-koruna coin, and she set to work darning it, all the while trying not to think about the arrival of the Germans. The occupation would be short-lived, she told herself; it had to be.
In the late afternoon she went down to the kitchen to make herself a cup of linden tea. Sophie was standing over a bowl of peeled apples, the peels’ perfect corkscrews like the ones on Sophie’s head. Of course, thought Marta, Sophie slept with strings tied in her hair.
Sophie was in her late teens, and would have been almost beautiful if not for her harelip. It was not a severe one—just a spot beneath her nose where the skin looked shiny and flat. Still, Marta found it hard to look past.
“You’re making strudel,” she said.
“What about it?”
“Isn’t it too . . . German? On today of all days?”
Sophie picked up an apple. “Pass me the knife.”
“Mr. Bauer’s mother is coming for dinner. It’s Friday.”
“What do you mean, too German?”
“With what’s going on.” Marta raised her eyebrows but Sophie only shrugged.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” She did not bother to lower her voice and Marta worried Anneliese would hear her, but from above came the sound of floorboards squeaking and then the scrape of the stove door being opened and the thud of a charcoal brick being tossed in.
“Is it?” Marta asked. “Wonderful?”
“Of course it is. He’s rooting them out.”
Sophie held the paring knife still, turning the fruit under the blade.
“The Jews?” Marta asked dumbly. Why did everyone care so much about Jews all of a sudden? First Ernst, and now Sophie. It was tiresome. And worrying.
Sophie nodded. “If you have one grandparent who is Juden,” she said, “then you are Juden too. You must have four pure grandparents to get an Ariernachweis.”
“To get a what?”
“Here.” Sophie passed Marta the peeled apple.
“What’s a—”
“Here.” She passed Marta the knife.
“Ouch! Careful.”
“Sorry,” Sophie said.
Marta put her finger in her mouth. “Soph, to get a what?”
“Ariernachweis. An Aryan certificate.”
Marta spoke Czech. The only German she knew came from Der Struwwelpeter; Pepik could recite its stories by heart, about a boy who sucked his thumb and had it cut off by a tailor with big shears, a boy who refused to eat his soup and died of starvation, et cetera. An ominous book, to be certain.
“If you don’t have an Ariernachweis, you’ll need one,” Sophie said. “Soon.” She spread her fingers and began to lick the juice from them, one by one.
Marta moved the bowl of peeled fruit aside, covering it first with a chipped porcelain plate. She had never known her mother, let alone her mother’s parents. There could be any number of secrets in that part of her past.
Her father she remembered, despite the desire not to—but the Bauers were her family now. They had never said so, not in so many words, but she felt they had an understanding.
“Chamberlain says there will be peace in our time,” Marta said.
Sophie dumped the apple peels in the bin under the sink. She filled the empty mixing bowl with water and scrubbed.
“Peace in our time,” she said. “We’ll see about that.” She leaned out the window to pour the dirty contents down the outdoor drain.
“We’ll see about that? What do you—”
But there was the sound of Pavel entering the house, the clinking as he hung his factory keys on the hook by the door. Through the archway between the rooms Marta saw his business suit and cufflinks. She thought of him just that morning in his thin nightshirt, and of the moment of closeness they’d shared. But he was changing guises so frequently these days. Now he seemed a different person entirely.
Marta heard Pavel shout upstairs for his wife, and then she heard Anneliese’s footsteps descending the stairs. There was no small talk, no kiss hello. “I want to leave for Prague,” Anneliese said.
There was a silence, and Marta looked up from the chlebíčky she was making. Pavel was lighting his pipe, teasing out the strands of tobacco, holding a match to the bowl and sucking on the stem to make it catch. His cheeks working like bellows.
“I am buying new bobbins,” he said.
“New what?” Anneliese asked.
“New bobbins. For the flax-spinning frames.”
“Pavel. Did you hear what I said?” Anneliese was unused to her wishes being challenged. There was the click of her own lighter; from where Marta stood in the kitchen she could see the parlour filling up with smoke, the grey of Anneliese’s cigarette rising to meet the sweeter blue of Pavel’s pipe.
“Two types of bobbins are possible,” Pavel said. “Ernst recommended the more expensive type.”
“What an ass,” Anneliese said, forcefully. “To be thinking of bobbins at a time like this.”
Marta wondered if she meant that Ernst was an ass, or her own husband, standing in front of her.
&n
bsp; There was another silence and Marta turned back to her task, laying slices of cheese against the dark, dense bread. Pepik liked onions too, and she cut him a sliver—the smell was sour and made her eyes water. When Anneliese finally spoke again there was a waver in her voice. “Hitler has arrived, Pavel,” she said. “Don’t you see what is happening all around us?”
Beyond the window a stream of people was moving towards the train station. They were carrying baskets and hat boxes and birdcages, their winter coats pulled on top of sweaters despite the fact that it was a gorgeous fall day. But Pavel did not indulge his young wife. “We have invested in our country, and we shall continue to do so,” he said, testing out his new-found certainty. “The only way to function here is to base our actions on a belief in permanence.”
“Prague is part of our country.”
“The factory is here.”
“But your mother—she wants to go.”
Pavel scoffed. “Like Jesus rose to heaven she does!”
“She’s too old to stay if things continue this way.”
“My mother would not leave here if—”
“Then what about Pepik?”
Marta had heard a rumour that the Jewish children from Cheb had been rounded up and shot. It was only a rumour though, and nothing she could be sure of. She wiped it from her mind like a schoolgirl wiping a sponge across her slate.
Pavel was saying something Marta could not discern; she cocked her ear towards the parlour but made out only the words “bonds” and “infrastructure.” She could see him sweeping his wife into his arms, stroking her dark, curly hair. When he spoke again his voice was clear and calm. “My mother will be fine,” he said. “She wouldn’t leave here if you put a gun to her head. And Pepik will be fine. I’ll make sure of it.” He paused. “We can’t run away, Liesel,” he said. “We must stay and live what we believe in. Otherwise Hitler has won without even firing a shot.”