Far to Go

by Alison Pick

  She opened one, saw the picture of Pepik staring out at her, and the exit permit stamped onto the following page. If it was fake, it was remarkably well crafted. Under Pepik’s name was a cursive C, for Christian. She let the little passport fold shut in her hands. There were three of them, she saw. One for each of the Bauers.

  Marta took a slow breath. She covered her eyes with her hand, as she had once seen Pavel’s mother do while blessing the Sabbath candles. She told herself that finding the passports did not mean anything. The Bauers would need them to cross the border into Switzerland to buy flax. But somehow, seeing them there, a certainty made itself known. Pavel was not taking his family to Zürich; they were going somewhere else. She was sure of it. And they were going without her.

  The Bauers were up early the following morning, and Marta was up along with them to make their breakfast while Pavel loaded the suitcases into the car. Pepik wanted to bring his Princess Elizabeth engine along, and he said so over and over, getting no response, until finally Anneliese shouted at him to be quiet, they were going on a real train, which would be much more dangerous and exciting. She was flitting around the flat, picking up things at random—a tennis racquet strung with catgut, the French translation of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. She poured enough water into Alžběta’s wilted hydrangea that it leaked out the crack in the bottom of the pot and Marta had to go for a sponge.

  Marta served the porridge, not taking any for herself, and went upstairs to her rooms in a haze. She would clean the dishes once the Bauers had left.

  After a half-hour of shuffling and clattering down below Anneliese called up to her. “Marta?”

  Marta didn’t answer. She heard Anneliese say, “We should at least go . . . We might not . . .” And Pavel said, “No, it would seem too . . .” He pitched his voice louder and called up. “We’re off, Marta! See you Saturday!”

  There was a pause while he waited for her reply.

  “Have a safe journey!” she called back finally, sounding shrill in her own ears. She had been crying, and she was afraid her cracking voice would betray her. She waited until she heard the door close and the key turn in the lock, then watched the car pull out onto Vinohradská Street. Pepik’s little face was pressed to the glass. His eyes blinking up at her in the window. She didn’t smile, didn’t wave—she couldn’t bring herself to. Instead she backed away from the window, a palm pressed over her heart. Marta waited until the Tatra was gone from sight. She flung herself across her blue quilt and began to sob.

  It was afternoon when she woke. She came down and set the kettle to boil and made herself a cup of linden tea. She and Pepik had gathered the leaves the previous autumn, had dried them and put them in a glass Mason jar labelled “APRIL 1938.” Pepik had drawn a smiling sun on the label beside the date. They had brought the jar along with them from their old town. Marta sat for a long time at the kitchen table watching the steam rise off her tea. Her hands resting, palms down, in front of her.

  She looked around, at Pepik’s half-finished bowl of porridge, the spoon sticking straight out of it like a Nazi flag claiming yet another territory, and at the wooden mill with coffee grounds spilled beneath it. The pan from last night’s goose was still soaking in the sink; a skim of yellow fat had hardened on the surface. There was an ashtray on the table, filled with cigarette butts stained by Anneliese’s red lipstick. Marta thought she’d better get cleaning—and then she realized she was in no hurry. No hurry at all.

  The Bauers were gone. They weren’t coming back.

  She left the mess and took her tea into the pantry, where she made a quick inventory of food. The big pot of soup would last several days if she needed it to. And before the Steins had fled, Alžběta had stocked up on those trendy new soup cubes. How, Marta wondered, could something so tiny produce a real soup with hunks of sausage and dumplings or with curled potato peelings? But maybe it was possible. They were able to do the strangest things these days. The Baecks, Anneliese had told her, had a machine to dry their laundry.

  Marta lit the stove and scraped the fat off the roasting pan. She was getting angry now, going over the details of her abandonment. The pilgrimage to Lány had obviously been Pavel’s last patriotic nod to Masaryk. She’d been dragged along, an oblivious accomplice. And Pavel’s advance had not been so different from Ernst’s after all: he had taken advantage of her, knowing he would never see her again. Last night’s dinner table conversation seemed different too—Pavel’s nerves, the way he’d kept moving the knot of his tie back and forth below his Adam’s apple. It was not about the kiss after all. He was ashamed to be telling her a bald-faced lie.

  The thought of what had happened seemed suddenly unbearable to Marta. She ran downstairs and quickly filled a galvanized pail with water and Helada soap—it was the brand she bought for Pepik’s benefit, because of the pictures of locomotives that came in every box. She started to work vigorously on the inlaid hardwood floors. The flat was large and the panels were wide and knotted: it was a big job. Marta worked, not thinking. When the truth of her predicament threatened to crash over her, she held her breath and scrubbed harder, as though she could use the rising flood of pain against itself, to scrub away her own terror. To scrub away the image of Pepik’s small face, staring up at her from the automobile’s window.

  She didn’t stop for lunch or even for a cup of tea. When she finished with the floors, she moved on to the silver. It needed polishing; whoever worked for the Steins had been lazy, doing the cutlery but leaving the big, intricate pieces that were used less frequently, like the Passover Seder plate. As Marta polished, some Hebrew script came clear. They were cowards, she thought. All of them. To run away so easily from who they were.

  When she was finished, she went down the hall and looked at the empty crib. In the Steins’ bedroom—which she had already come to think of as the Bauers’—she rifled through the drawers but found nothing other than some lacy undergarments she hadn’t seen before and a half-emptied jewellery box. The diamond watch was gone. She left the drawer open—because she could, because nobody was going to return home and catch her. She went into Pepik’s room and looked at his small jackets hanging from the antlers of Max’s prize stag. Anneliese had forgotten to pack her son’s nightshirt: it was still folded in the bottom drawer.

  Marta slept badly that night. The empty flat was full of noise: creakings and a ticking that was too uneven to be the grandfather clock. Around three in the morning she thought she heard a key turning. She crept in her bare feet along the Persian rug that lined the hall, and stood looking at the ornately carved wooden front door. A slow squeak came from the latch. She saw the handle turn, but the door didn’t open. She waited a full fifteen minutes, shivering under her nightdress, but nothing else happened. Finally she heard footsteps retreating down the building’s corridor. She stood there feeling she should do something, notify someone, but there was nothing she could think of to be done, and so she forced herself to go back to bed. She lay there for a long time though, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep. She was thinking of a sheet of paper she’d found, crumpled up in Pavel’s wastebasket. A single question typed in the centre: What if she changes her mind?

  The following afternoon the brass cowbell on the yellow cord by the front door rang. Marta was lifting the newly polished Seder plate up to the highest shelf; she froze with her hands in the air, as if she were being held up at a bank. Her heart leapt when she thought it was the Bauers, already back—but it was far too soon, she realized, and besides, they would just use their key.

  The cowbell rang again and the handle rattled, someone testing the lock. Should she answer? She’d been moving around the flat with the drapes open and the electric lamps lit. It was already dusk. From the street she would have been clearly visible, so she couldn’t very well pretend nobody was home. She looked at the door, wishing she could see through the heavy wood to the other side. The knocking started up again; it went on for a full minute. Whoever was there was going to bre
ak down the door.

  Marta crossed the room, smoothing her hair with the flat of her hand. She moved quietly, and when she pulled the handle the man on the other side gasped in surprise. “Marta! You scared me!” His hand flew up to his chest.

  He knew her name. It was Ernst. He was wearing a day cravat and a black homburg. “May I come in?”

  Ernst took off his hat and made to step past her, but Marta blocked the door. Her heart was thudding in her chest. Ernst belonged to the old town, to the old factory, not to this new world of Prague. She’d almost succeeded in banishing the thought of their affair; to see him now was to be reminded of a part of herself she’d prefer to forget. She’d relegated him to that tiny corner of her consciousness where her father’s memory was hidden. It was a corner she did not visit often.

  But Ernst gave her a look, and she found herself stepping aside in deference. He didn’t speak at first but put his homburg down on the settee and crossed the parlour, his hands clasped behind him. He stood in front of the silver-framed family photos on the mantelpiece, gazing at them for quite some time. “So this is Anneliese’s brother’s place,” he said finally.

  “Sister’s,” she answered.

  “Alžběta. Right.” He peered at a picture of little Eva Stein. “What a beautiful baby,” he said, his back still to Marta.

  He lifted the heavy menorah in one hand, testing its weight. “Are you here alone, Marta?”

  She glanced down at her clothes, the dull tweed skirt and the blouse with a stain on the collar. She felt caught out somehow, as though it was her own fault to find herself without the Bauers’ protection at a time when she needed it most. “No,” she said, “I’m not.”

  Ernst turned towards her. She was still surprised to actually see him in the flesh, in front of her. It was a little like seeing a ghost.

  “The Bauers will be back on Thursday,” she said automatically, picking lightly at a flap of skin by her thumbnail.

  Ernst set the menorah back down on the mantel and gazed at her, vaguely amused.

  “They’ll be back on Thursday,” she repeated.

  Ernst made a little clucking noise. “Is that what you really think?”

  Marta shrugged.

  “Lying doesn’t become you, miláčku.”

  To hear him speak to her this way—the word miláčku soft and surprising after the other, harsh sounds—brought tears to her eyes. She thought for a minute that he was going to try to kiss her, and she took a step backwards. The desire to protect the Bauers rose fiercely inside her. “Mr. Bauer had to go away on business,” she heard herself saying.

  “Did he.” Ernst stayed in his place. “And let me guess . . . He had to take the wife and child with him?”

  It was unnerving to hear him refer to Anneliese and Pepik in those generic terms—wife and child. She brought her thumb to her mouth and tore away the hangnail with her teeth.

  He raised his eyebrows at Marta. “Well?” Still she didn’t answer.

  Ernst pulled a mahogany chair out from the table; it squeaked across her newly washed floorboards. He sat down and folded his hands in front of him and leaned across the table, looking at her intently. “Marta,” he said, “listen to me.”

  He waited.

  She was listening.

  “I’m sorry for what happened between us. For how I behaved.” He paused again, as though he’d rehearsed this speech and was trying to remember his lines. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “But Prague is about to be occupied. It won’t be like in the old town. Hitler is going to take it all now. Everything.” He gestured around him to include the flat, the city, the whole country.

  Marta glared at him. Did he think she was stupid?

  “I know that in the past I have said some unkind things about the Bauers,” he said. “But I need to speak with Pavel now. It’s about . . . the factory. It’s very important. I need to contact him—for his own good.”

  Ernst was lying; that much was clear. Either he’d forgotten how frank he’d been with her in the past, or he really did underestimate her intelligence. She was a means to an end, nothing more. She thought of telling Ernst that he too was a bad liar, but she was afraid that if she opened her mouth she would begin to cry.

  “They gave you up,” he said softly.

  She closed her eyes, the truth overwhelming her. She’d been keeping busy cleaning, avoiding it, but she couldn’t deny now that Ernst was right. There was no way around it. She’d been abandoned.

  “Where have they gone?” he asked. “To England?”

  She could feel the tears rising. She held up a finger to show Ernst she needed a moment.

  “Take your time.”

  The grandfather clock doled out its ticking.

  “To Wales?” Ernst suggested gently.

  Marta shook her head and closed her eyes again. They were gone. But where? She thought back to Pavel’s conversation over coffee with his foreman, Hans.

  You’re needed to go on a flax-buying mission.

  I see. To Paris?

  No, not to Paris. To Zürich.

  They’d been speaking so loudly, like two deaf old generals. Marta remembered how odd it had seemed at the time, and realized all at once that they’d wanted her to hear. That she had been the intended audience for their little performance.

  Pavel had been trying to confuse her.

  “You know where they’ve gone,” Ernst said.

  She nodded yes. Her jaw was clenched shut. After everything they’d shared—the years of her employment, that beautiful kiss—what did Pavel take her for? Something that could be forsaken along with the silverware and linens? He should have known better, she thought. She’d been taken advantage of too many times already. She would not be made the fool, not again, not this time.

  She thought back again to the words Hans had spoken: No, not to Paris.

  Marta closed her eyes and rubbed them with the back of her hands. She looked up at Ernst. “They’re on the train to Paris,” she said.

  Part Three

  Occupation

  12 March 1939

  My dear Max,

  I am writing from Paris. Anneliese and Pavel were due to meet me yesterday. They never arrived. No wire, nothing. I don’t know what to do.

  If only you were here to advise me.

  Where are you, my darling? It has been more than two months since your last correspondence. I am sick with worry and can neither eat nor sleep.

  Shall I mail the envelope now? I’m afraid that our time is drawing short, that if we don’t follow through on this option the window will close altogether. My instinct tells me to act.

  Still, I will await your instructions.

  The day is almost done; you are here next to me in your silver frame, your smile beaming in my direction. How I wish I could kiss you! Thinking about you gives me courage. I have said it before, and I don’t want you to think me overly sentimental, but it is simply true. I could not live without you.

  Your Al

  (FILE UNDER: Stein, Alžběta. Died Auschwitz, 1943)

  I WAITED A LONG TIME FOR YOU TO SHOW UP.

  Every time the restaurant door opened and the little bell above it jingled, my nerves jingled right along with it. I’ve become good at identifying people I’ve never met, based on a few photos of their relatives or a letter about how they loved to play marbles as children. I watched the older Eastern European men come in, the Ashkenazi Jews with their thin grey hair and their pocket watches. None of them were you.

  I thought: He probably won’t come. Why should he want to talk to an old lady anyhow?

  But I had put on lipstick before leaving the house. I placed my Star of David on a silver chain around my neck—the only piece of jewellery I have from my mother. I combed my own thin hair and looked at myself for a long time in the mirror.

  My eyes are watery, a problem that has increased with age. I blink and blink but they will not clear.

  I must seem perpetually on the verge of tears.

 
; You and I had spoken on the phone.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said.

  Silence.

  I made myself speak. “You had . . .” I faltered. “A sibling,” I said. Careful to say this in the past tense. I waited for your response, for the shock or, at the very least, surprise.

  “I know,” you said.

  “You know?”

  “I have a photograph,” you said. “My father has a baby in his arms.”

  I was quiet then, puzzling. I had a hundred questions but I wanted to ask them in person. We made plans to meet at 8 p.m. at Schwartz’s, a popular Jewish deli on Saint-Laurent. It was a bit of whimsy on my part, but you didn’t argue. Our phone conversation, the few words you spoke in that muddled accent of yours, kept playing over and over in my mind afterwards, like the opening phrase of Dvořák’s haunting Prague Cello Concerto—I couldn’t sleep that night for the music it was making.

  The morning of our meeting I forced myself to sit at my desk, pretending to transcribe an interview with a woman in Montana who had just discovered the “Jewish branch” of her family. In all honesty though, I was unable to work, as full of excitement as a teenager heading off on a first date. I’d been waiting for this for more than—Well, I’d been waiting forever.

  I should have known better than to get my hopes up. The one thing you most want will always elude you. That’s the rule. And I don’t care if you call me a pessimist; I come by it honestly. I am also fretful and fussy, even with the people I study. Especially with the people I study. Truth be told, I think of myself as a kind of a mother hen to them. Which is ironic, given our respective ages.