by Alison Pick
Marta paused with her hand on a jar of preserves. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I suppose that I . . .”
“Shouldn’t we leave?” Anneliese asked. “Doesn’t it make sense for us to get out ‘as fast as our little feet will carry us’?”
This was a line from Der Struwwelpeter, a line Pepik especially liked to repeat. Marta smiled nervously but she could see Anneliese was frustrated, that she would have to produce an opinion or risk displeasing her benefactor for a second time. Did she think they should leave?
It was a question that had so many other questions attached to it, one linked to the next like the butcher’s strings of sausages.
Where would they go?
What would happen to the house?
What about Ernst?
And at the end of this string, the final question, the one that for Marta gave all the others weight: if the Bauers left, what would happen to her?
She opened her mouth to speak, and as she did there was a loud crash above their heads. It was followed by a moment of silence, and then a slow wail that gained in momentum until it filled the air around them like a siren.
The two women looked at each other.
Pepik.
“I’ll go,” said Anneliese, but she didn’t move. Marta took her cue. “No, I’ll go,” she said, grateful to finally be of some use. “Mrs. Bauer, leave it to me.”
Marta went upstairs and soothed Pepik and taped a piece of gauze over the almost invisible cut he had incurred; he’d overturned the lamp on his mother’s bedside table reaching for her peppermints. For such a small injury he was making a big fuss. He seemed, she thought, to be weeping for the crumbling order of the world around him. Marta held him and patted his back until the crying subsided, and then gave him a half-hearted talking-to about not going into his parents’ bedroom in their absence. She got him into his pajamas, settled him in his green bed with the painted yellow feet, and placed Der Struwwelpeter in front of him. It was like setting a needle down on a gramophone. Anyone who didn’t know better would think Pepik was actually reading.
Marta moved around the room, tidying up. She gathered the lead soldiers together and put them in the playroom across the hall, the room that had been meant for the baby girl. It had been painted a beautiful buttercup yellow in the fifth month of Anneliese’s pregnancy, and curtains made with lace from the Weil factory in Nachod had been purchased. Marta remembered the earnestness with which Pavel and Anneliese had debated where to place the change table. Next to the door? Or beneath the window, so the little angel could look up at the clear blue sky from whence she’d come?
The baby died at three weeks of age. The doctors couldn’t say what had happened; Anneliese had gone in to see if she needed a new diaper and discovered her face down in her crib. That was all. There was no need to repaint the room, but the frilly drapes were removed. Pavel must have done it himself in the middle of the night. They were there one evening and the next morning they were gone. So was the change table and the linen diapers with their safety pins and the butterfly mobile made of hand-carved ivory from Pavel’s safari in Kenya. Anneliese herself did not reappear for days. Dasha, the cook at the time, would leave a breakfast tray with an egg cup and toast outside the bedroom door and retrieve it when it reappeared several hours later, untouched. Pavel dealt with the death as if it were just another business deal gone bad. “We’ve lost Eliza,” was all he said to Marta, and Marta had nodded to show she understood.
Marta’s memories of the baby were vivid. The knot of the umbilical cord turning black against her tiny belly. The cry that sounded so much like a kitten. And, just after her birth, a family photograph in which Marta had been included: the thrill of posing for the camera standing behind Pepik, and Pavel with the bundle in his arms. Pepik, though, had been too young to remember. As far as Marta could tell, he had no idea he’d once had a sister.
There hadn’t even been a funeral, no sitting shiva. Marta hadn’t even seen the body.
When Pepik was done reciting his story, she helped him wash his face and brush his teeth. “Measure me!” he said, and pressed his back against the tape on the inside of his closet door. “Am I bigger?”
He was obsessed, after just one day back at school, with being a great big grown-up boy. Marta knew he thought that if he grew tall enough he could once again sit with his friend Villem, up near the front, instead of in the back corner next to Fiertig Goldberg.
Marta couldn’t bear to tell him otherwise.
“You’re bigger,” she said.
“How much?”
He was drawing himself up to his full height, chin tucked in, cheeks puffed out.
“A little more than a centimeter.”
She made a mark with the lead pencil and showed him. “Time for bed, miláčku.” She patted his bottom.
He pouted for a moment. “My cut hurts,” he said, pointing to the gauze on his elbow.
Marta raised her eyebrows to show that she meant it.
“Okay,” he said, relenting. “Time for bed.” And he nuzzled his face into her arm.
Marta tucked Pepik in and went downstairs. Anneliese had abandoned the unpacking of the potatoes. There was a note in her deep blue fountain pen ink that said I’ve gone up to bed, would you mind unpacking the rest of the food? It was signed with a large flourish of an A. Marta was slightly insulted. Of course she would unpack the food; she had expected to.
The thick of the heat had gone out of the day and left a cool that was both pleasurable and ominous. A little taste of the colder evenings to come. The window had been left open an inch and Marta could hear the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs over cobblestones. Somewhere far away a young girl laughed. Marta’s arms were bare in her short-sleeved dress and she shivered. She was so seldom alone, and she was suddenly aware of herself in a different way, as though the self she thought of as solid was instead a million little fragments. As though all of the pieces could fall off their string at any moment and scatter across the pantry floor.
It was odd, really, the way humans went about their days so boldly, ordering coffee, weighing out exactly a quarter kilo of potatoes on the greengrocer’s scale, as though their lives were something that could be controlled, portioned out as desired. When really, all it took was one little upset to reveal the . . . imbalance of things. Marta thought of how unnerved Anneliese had become earlier, and she wondered about other people’s inner lives; if, despite their polished exteriors, people’s insides were as full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese. She shivered again—she didn’t like to think of it. If the politicians, the councilmen, Ernst, even the Bauers were as uncertain as she herself was—
She had a sudden sensation of being watched and she turned around to see Pavel. His necktie was undone and his shirtsleeves pushed up. His arms crossed in front of him. Marta flushed, ashamed to have been caught daydreaming. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m almost finished.” She gestured at Anneliese’s stockpile, the potatoes and the soup cubes she was arranging on top of the preserves.
Pavel took a step into the pantry. He was close enough that she could see a spot on his chin he had missed shaving. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Marta.”
He said her name as though testing the water at the edge of a lake, dipping his big toe in to get a feel for the temperature.
“I wanted to tell you myself,” Pavel said.
“Mr. Bauer?”
He hesitated, as if he wished to protect her from what it was he had to say.
“It’s President Beneš.”
Marta held her breath, her uncertainty rushing back. Had the president been shot? But Pavel said instead, “He’s resigned.”
Marta exhaled. This was better by far than an assassination. Still, her face fell along with her breath. She knew what this would mean to the Bauers: their last hopes to save their homeland swept away like flax dust from the factory floor. Pavel saw her dismay and mistook it for something different. He reached over and touched her bare wrist.
Marta looked down at Pavel’s hand. His fingernails were neatly clipped and clean. Fine dark hair on the back of the knuckles. It was hair that must also travel, she thought, up the backs of his forearms and onto his chest. She flushed more intensely. She tried to focus on something else—the pile of potatoes, dirt still caked on their skins—but she couldn’t make herself stop; she must look as if she were standing next to a bonfire at the Burning of the Witches.
“I’m so sorry to hear it,” she managed finally.
“On the Day of Atonement,” Pavel said.
So he knew about the High Holidays after all. “What’s he repenting for?” she asked.
“He’s gone into exile.”
“He’s repenting for what the Allies have done to him.”
Pavel smiled at the irony. He circled her forearm with his hand and gave it a little squeeze, and when he backed away he seemed reluctant, or defeated, as though he, not Beneš, was the one who’d been forced to step down.
Through the kitchen doorway she saw him pause in front of the large window. She heard the swish of the curtains being opened; Pavel stayed there for a moment, looking down at the town square, before he turned to climb the stairs to his wife.
It took Marta several minutes to move from the pantry. She was exhausted, suddenly, every last ounce of energy wrung out of her, as though she were a bedsheet that had just emerged from the communal mangle.
She stood there, leaning against the pantry door, looking down at her arm. She half expected to see a mark where he’d touched her, a blister or a burn. Some kind of scar. Pavel’s squeeze had left its opposite: an emptiness, an intensely felt absence. She felt cavernous and echoey. There was a great whoosh in the middle of her chest; it was the sound of the curtains being pulled open, revealing a town square in the centre of herself that was completely unpopulated. The wind blew through it, pushing the dry fallen leaves.
date?
My dear Pavel,
I do not know where you are. I am sending this to your mother’s house in the hopes that it might reach you. In truth, however, it has been months since your mother’s disappearance, and so I am writing into a void. Of absence. Of so many kinds.
I want only to tell you I am sorry. Sorry for our misunderstandings, for my actions that have come between us, sorry for Axmann, for everything. I cannot help but feel that if I had acted differently we would still be together right now. I hope you are safe, wherever you are. Protected. I hope you feel my love.
The way things transpired might lead you to doubt me. You must believe this: I was trying to save us. You can’t imagine how I miss you now. You have known me since I was a child. You have fathered my children. Come back to me, darling. From wherever you are.
Anneliese
(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Anneliese. See Bauer, Pavel, for details.)
I HAVE LOVED, SURE.
It was years ago—years—but contrary to common wisdom, time does not diminish loss.
I myself would say that the opposite is true.
But goodness, my hip is sore today.
What was I saying? Something about hope. For a while it existed, that’s all. In the face of everything: the pogroms, Kristallnacht, the acts of violence and betrayal both small and enormous. The Jews kept planning, trying to get out. What is it they say? That hope dies hard? True enough. If I think of her orange sweater.
I have had a good career: publication, promotion. Things I know other people long for. I’m almost inclined to say my success has come easily, although that would be discrediting much time and effort. As I said, I lived at my desk, cluttered as it was with old Chinese take-out cartons and memos I ignored. Still, there were years when I felt myself swept along, when study came as naturally for me as love seems to come for others. It was hard to be alone.
Of course, I’d never complain.
You’d think I could forget, though, since so much time has passed. Memory bleeds out, or gets covered in snow. We have databases—who escaped and who wasn’t so lucky—lists of the dates they were moved to the ghettos or sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. There are whole libraries full of books on the subject. It is even possible to construct little narratives, to attempt to give the whole thing order. But it’s all just memory’s attempt to make order from chaos. It is a trick of the mind, to keep it from boggling. The enormity of the loss can be too much to handle.
I never travelled with my lover. We never slept in an Irish country inn in a single bed under the eaves. We never walked down a gravel road holding hands as the crickets started singing. And all the things we didn’t do come back now as though they really happened. This is the nature of longing. I wish to wake to the sound of her shovel, to hear the door open and to pull back the covers. To watch her peel off her snowy clothes and crawl in beside me. And stay.
People disappear. Despite all the information available to us, there are cases that are never solved. We can guess what happened but we cannot say for certain. And there is nothing to be done about it now anyway, so late in time. Even in the instances where there are surviving cables and telegrams, they tell only a fraction of the story. For my part, among all the letters I have read, there is one that I always keep with me. “Your mamenka and I send you a hug and a snuggle . . .” I could probably recite that letter by heart. And yet, I’m aware of its failure, of all the white space surrounding its words.
Sometimes I have the sense, when I’m meeting somebody to record their testimony, that I’m opening a worn paperback three-quarters of the way through and trying to piece together a very complex plot. To glean even a fraction of what came before. People’s lives, their infinitely tangled histories, are almost impenetrable—to themselves, let alone to an outsider. My students, of course, would cringe to hear me say this, so full of optimism are they about the historical method. Some still believe in the idea of truth; some, even, that they will find it.
I’ll admit there is something shared between the stories I hear, though, something common to those who survived. The gnawing longing, the desire to keep searching, even when your rational mind knows everyone involved is gone. That particular ache at the core of human memory. I have to say I am familiar with it myself.
The vows we never took have their own particular bittersweetness. I can only imagine her coming in from the snow, slipping a cold hand under my sweater. I imagine that pain, the opposite of pleasure. The other side of being alive.
Precisely because my lover went, there is something to wait for. And this is the history of the people I study as well. The presence of loss makes a longing for arrival. The other side of leaving is return.
The last time I heard her was on my machine. When she said my name, there was a catch in her voice. It was winter; she had a cold. She was clearing her throat. It was probably nothing.
Still, I lay in bed by the flashing red light and listened.
To my name. To my pain. To that breaking.
It seems so long ago it might never have happened. It could be that I made it up, the orange sweater, a fragment to keep me warm. It’s possible, I guess, that my lover never existed.
It’s possible I’ve spent my whole life alone.
Chapter Three
MARTA’S FACE WAS PRESSED INTO the cold concrete wall, her underpants down around her ankles. Ernst fumbled with the buckle on his belt; she wasn’t ready, but he didn’t seem to notice. He spat on his fingers and touched her briefly, then grunted, pushing himself inside her. She inhaled sharply, surprised by the pain. “Wait—” she started, but her back was to him and she knew he couldn’t hear, or was choosing not to. With each thrust her cheekbone dug into the rough wall; she braced herself with her palms, pushing back against his weight, but Ernst was stronger.
“Stay still,” he panted.
She felt a dribble on the inside of her leg. He was already close, she could tell. The head of his penis swelling. For a moment she thought of Pavel—a brief flash of his hand gripping her wrist—Ernst gave a final shove and m
oaned, emptying himself inside her.
He pulled out right away. Tucked in his shirttails and zipped up his fly, taking his time to adjust himself inside his pants. She turned to face him, leaning weakly back against the wall. Her knees were shaking. Ernst glanced at her, then looked again. “You’re bleeding,” he said.
She brought a hand to her face. He was right.
“You’d better watch it,” he said.
“The bleeding?”
“You’d better watch yourself.”
Marta’s underpants were still around her ankles; she bent to pull them up, followed by her stockings. Her body felt numb, as if it were made of rubber. She was suddenly shivering with cold.
“What do you mean, watch myself?” she asked, but she knew exactly what he meant. It was dangerous for her to be aligned with the Bauers—Ernst had been saying it for days now. That uncertainty she’d noticed in him, the need to be reassured, was gone. All at once it was like he’d never had any doubts, like he’d been dedicated to National Socialism all along.
Ernst was pulling on his jacket. He looked at his reflection in the shine of the flax-spinning mill and smoothed back his hair with the palms of his hands.
“Jews have taken over everything,” he said, gesturing around at the other machines on the floor, the industry Pavel and his father had worked so hard to build. “It’s time for it to stop.”
But Marta could hardly hear what he was saying; his voice seemed to come from very far away. Ernst was buttoning his jacket. He leaned in towards her, suddenly an inch from her face. “Clean yourself up,” he said, then turned to leave.