Far to Go

Far to Go - By Alison Pick


Chapter One



SEPTEMBER 1938

It was Friday afternoon, the end of a long week. Misha Bauer made one last telephone call; the operator told him there was a line through Berlin.

“Our calls don’t go through Berlin,” he said. She of all people should know that. But he didn’t want to be angry—not at the start of the Sabbath. He was looking forward to getting home to his wife and his little boy, Tomáš.

“My mistake.”

“Could you book me a line for Monday?” he asked.

“Next Monday?”

“Four o’clock.” He paused. “No, four thirty.”

“Sicher. Ja.”

“Danke. Guten tag.” Misha replaced the black horn on the side of the box on the wall. Pushed back his heavy oak chair and took the pince-nez off the bridge of his nose.

His secretary stood up as he passed her desk on his way out. “Good Shabbos, Mr. Bauer,” she said. Which she need not say, given the times, and which he appreciated all the more because of it.

He had parked the car next to the city-square market where the fresh flowers and root vegetables were sold. Nearby were two blinkered horses and a milkman’s cart, the white cans ready for delivery. Misha was planning to buy Lore a bouquet. He passed the post office—in the window he saw a clerk in a blue uniform bent over a bookkeeper’s ledger. Four or five young men were walking towards him on the other side of the avenue. One, a redhead, was carrying a bucket of water. They were, he knew, going to offer to wash his car. Even the least expensive Opel was a novelty, and an American Studebaker like his—well, people wanted to get close to it. Misha nodded at the redhead, smiling to show that the young man was welcome to take a look. The next thing he felt was a blow to his gut. His back smacked against the cobblestones and his teeth clamped down on his tongue.

Misha lay there for several minutes, the sky a dirty rag above him, the metallic bite of blood in his mouth. When he managed to turn his head sideways, he saw the redhead’s shins, the long white woollen knee socks. What exactly was about to happen remained obscure, but the socks meant it would not be good.

The boy with the sideburns used a saw to cut the tailpipe off his car. Misha heard him shouting, and then the severing of the metal. One by one, the windows of his car were smashed in. Then they kicked Misha onto his hands and knees and made him scrub the sidewalk. The redhead stood above him, brandishing the tailpipe like a club. “Augen unten, Schwein,” he said. Misha could not see if anyone had noticed what was happening; if they did, nobody stopped to help. He was at it for an hour, the hoodlums standing guard. When he asked for a drink of water—

Here Pavel stopped talking. Marta was sitting next to him in front of the large parlour window, trying not to meet his eye. She watched a splatter of starlings swoop out from under the eaves, ten or twelve black blips on the radar of evening.

“When he asked for some water,” Pavel continued, “they made him drink the soapy slop from the pail.”

Marta’s gaze was fixed on the middle distance. “They made him drink it?” she asked, hoping she’d misheard him.

“It was full of shards of glass.”

“And then?”

“They beat him with the tailpipe.”

Marta didn’t answer. She felt as though his words were coming from very far away or from a long ago time. There was a blankness in her head that reminded her of when she was young, and she had to force herself to focus in order to hear what he was saying.

Pavel straightened his tie. He paused, as though he too was having difficulty believing what he was about to tell her. “And then?” he said finally. “They knocked him unconscious and left him. For dead.”

Marta turned towards Pavel finally, looking to her trusted employer to explain how this was possible, but he was a quiet man and seemed to have said all he was prepared to say. She opened her mouth and closed it again. The day was losing shape, like a worn-out undergarment. Time coming loose, a thread at the cuff. Marta twirled a strand of hair around her forefinger. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, but the blanket of fog in her mind had now closed in, and something inside her dismissed the threat entirely. Mr. Bauer clearly had his details confused. Even if—even if this unthinkable thing had actually happened to his brother—well, that was Vienna. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—Hitler had made clear his intent to annex Austria, and then he’d done it. Whereas Pavel and Marta’s native Czechoslovakia was still free.

A final starling dived down through the September dark, descending at the exact speed of a clock’s second hand. Its body compact, black as a bullet. And then, as though it had reached its target, there was a loud explosion close by.

She straightened. “What was that?”

“A gun,” Pavel said.

“Mr. Bauer?”

Marta crossed the room to the window. Sure enough, a row of soldiers was firing a dummy round into the late afternoon sky. Pavel had a Winchester and a Steyr that he took on hunting expeditions to Hungary, so it wasn’t that Marta was unfamiliar with rifles. But this was different. Another kind of fight altogether. She was twenty-three years old. Born during the Great War but too young to remember it. All she’d really known her whole life was peace.

“Do we actually need gas masks?” She found herself wanting to giggle—the whole thing was so absurd—and she cleared her throat and brought a hand to her face to conceal her expression. Why was she behaving like this? It must be nerves. She removed her hand and said, straight-faced, “The gas masks remind me of Pepik’s Botanisierbuchse.”

Pavel smiled at the reference to his son’s botanical specimen can, but now he was staring off into the distance. “The Germans want us next,” he said. “But the Wehrmacht tanks are built for the plains.” He squinted as if he could see into the future. “When they move into the Šumava mountain pass, we’ll get them. We’ve got thirty-five divisions, and forts all along the border of the Sudetenland.”

Marta still couldn’t reconcile the rallying gunfire with their sleepy Bohemian town. It could claim the tallest church spire in the region—fifty-five feet precisely—but there was nothing else remarkable about it. A Gentile butcher, a Jewish tailor, two hundred families grouped together on the east bank of a river with nowhere in particular to go. It was quiet and safe; she knew that’s why Pavel loved it. He loved a week in London, a month on the Adriatic coast in the summer, but beneath it he was a vlastenecký, a Czech nationalist. The thing he loved best was coming home.

Marta could see her reflection in the parlour window. Her hair was dark and curly; she had a dimple in the middle of her left cheek that seemed to drive her innocence home. Pavel got up from his chair, and he stood next to her for a moment, looking down at the town square. There was a woman trying to cram an enormous valise into the boot of a Tatra, and several more detachments of Czech soldiers. A young girl cried openly as she watched a uniformed back retreat across the square. Her man going off to fight. She held a single rose in her hand, the petals pointed towards the ground like a magic wand that had lost its power. And Marta felt suddenly the same helpless dread. The fog inside her lifted and the old familiar feeling came back. Things were about to happen, she knew. Things she would be powerless to stop.

That night she snuck out of the Bauer house. Crossed the cobbled square, passed the grocer’s and the tailor’s shop, her bare feet cold in her sandals. Mist lifted off the river in wisps. Little plumes of anticipation rose inside her as well. An hour ago she’d been soundly asleep, but now she felt alert, wide awake. She heard the quiet burble of water over rocks and, somewhere not far off, the sound of a window being opened. The keys to Mr. Bauer’s factory were clutched in her palm. He always left them hanging from a loop of leather on a hook by the back door; she had learned to pick them up by their long metal ends to avoid the sound of them jingling together.

There was a half-moon edging out from a length of grey cloud. Mr. Goldstein’s beard, she thought.

The moon rubbed the river’s back. She crossed the footbridge, her sandals clacking on the wood, taking the same path she’d taken for several weeks now. Her body moved unthinkingly. The factory was enclosed by heavy iron bars but the gate had been left open an inch. Ernst had arrived before her; he’d be waiting inside.

The rusted latch fell shut behind her like the end of a morality tale.

She went in through the front hall. The secretary’s desk had been cleared for the day, the typewriter covered with a thick canvas sheath. There was a framed swatch of lace on the wall from the textile factory’s first day of production. She had a brief uneasy feeling, remembering Pavel’s story: What had become of his brother Misha’s factory? And what of brother Misha himself? She pushed the thought away, anticipating instead what awaited her. Crossed the foyer and stood next to the elevator, a wooden platform that was operated by pulling a rope. Her nipples were stiff under her sweater. She moved towards the door to the factory floor and slowly twisted the handle.

Inside, everything was dark. An industrial-sized broom had been leaned up against the wall. The giant machines were like sleeping mammals, their silvery flanks fallen still.

She didn’t hear Ernst’s approach. He had her from behind before she saw his face. She laughed, trying to turn in his arms to see him, but he held her firmly, pulling her against his chest. A hand held loosely over her mouth.

“You’re my gas mask,” she said.

“I’m here to protect you,” Ernst whispered into her curls.

“To keep the filthy odours away?”

He hesitated; she felt his muscles tighten behind her. “Do you find . . .” he said.

“Do I find what?”

“The Jews. Do you find that they smell?”

Marta stiffened. “Of course not! What a thing to say.” She tried to pull away, to look Ernst in the face, but he held her firmly.

“I’m not the only one saying it.” He paused, as though suddenly aware of himself. “I’m not saying it,” he said quickly. “I’m not saying it at all.”

She could tell he was ashamed, and felt a rush of sympathy. He was only repeating what people on the streets were saying, after all. And who was she to judge whether these statements were true? The Jews she knew best—Mr. Bauer, for example—they weren’t really Jewish, at least not in the way she knew was meant by the word. She tried to think if she knew anyone Jewish who was actually practising. There was Mr. Goldstein, of course, but he was perhaps the only one.

“Mr. Bauer says we will need a gas mask,” she said.

Ernst’s thumb was tracing her jawline.

“Perhaps he’ll prove right.”

“Do you think so?” This surprised her, and part of her started to panic. “I have no family,” she said suddenly, although she’d told herself she would not, and pivoted in Ernst’s arms so that her face was directly in front of his: the square jaw, the pockmarks, the faint pebbling of stubble. The thought of war terrified her, and she clung to him tightly. “What will I do? If the fighting starts in earnest?”

“Pavel will protect you,” Ernst said mildly.

She lifted her chin to hold his eye. “He isn’t obliged.”

“But he will.” She could see Ernst wanted to give Pavel the benefit of the doubt, to paint his friend in the best possible light, as though in apology for his earlier comment.

“You have your wife,” Marta heard herself say in the petulant voice of a child.

Ernst’s gaze softened; he ran the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip. “And you have your beauty,” he said, as though that would solve anything. Marta had noticed this about the few men she interacted with on a daily basis; they thought a woman’s good looks could protect her, like some kind of shield.

He drew her to him, then kissed her softly, holding her bottom lip between his teeth ever so briefly. He cupped her breast lightly, and then more firmly, his touch getting rough. The hand was back over her mouth, but she yielded, her body giving in to his command. She was not about to scream. This was part of it, part of their game, and if she was honest, it was the part she most enjoyed.

She was caught now. He would not let her go.

From the kitchen came the sound of the cook chopping beets, the running of water followed by scrubbing, then the thwack, thwack of a knife against the board. It was the sound of Marta’s pulse, of the ache in her temples. It had been another night without any sleep.

“Dinner is at seven, Mr. Bauer,” she said.

Pavel, she saw, had moved to the hall and was pulling on a green wool cloak, the one he usually wore mushrooming. He held his pipe away from his face. “Off to enlist,” he grinned.

She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment; she could actually feel the tired pouches of flesh beneath them. “You can finally take action,” she said.

All summer Pavel had been enraged by the Völkischer Beobachter’s headlines: “Czech Police Burn Sudeten Farms”; “German Peddler Killed by Czech Mob.” Lies, he said, every word. For months Sudeten Germans had been under orders to provoke Czechs, and the Czechs were under orders not to be provoked. But now, finally, Pavel would have the chance to stand up for what he believed.

Marta paused and shut her eyes again briefly. She took a half-step towards Pavel and inhaled deeply. Did he smell? Like tobacco, certainly, but beneath that?

“What about the factory?” she asked. “If you enlist?” It was a bold question on her part, but Pavel didn’t seem to notice.

“We need men to fight,” Pavel said. “We need men, and we need boys!” He punctuated with his pipe, jabbing at the air with its stem. Pleased, she thought, to have her as an audience.

“And your workers?”

“The workers will fight.”

“Even Ernst?” She tasted the plant manager’s name.

“I’m halting production tomorrow,” Pavel said, not answering her question.

“Really? Are you certain?”

But who was she to ask? Mr. Bauer obviously had a vision: it had pulled him out of the depths of himself. She’d heard him speak more in the past day than in the thirty days before that combined.

“If Germany takes us, there will be nothing left for the workers at all,” Pavel said.

There was a sharp knock at the door. It was Ernst—she’d known it would be. He’d shaved since the night before, she saw, and his sweater had been replaced with an Austrian cloak like Pavel’s. An ostrich feather stuck out from the side of his cap. He seemed a different man from the one she’d just been with, remote and apart from her. To think of the intimacies they had so recently shared made her flush.

“We were just talking about you,” Pavel smiled, and clapped his friend on the shoulder.

“Good things?” Ernst looked at Marta.

“Of course!” Pavel said. “I was telling Marta how the whole factory will enlist . . .”

Ernst made a noise in the back of his throat that seemed, to Marta, noncommittal. But Pavel didn’t appear to notice. “We’re late,” he said. Then, “See you shortly, Marta.”

She lowered her eyes and fiddled with the string of her apron, then slipped out of the hallway. “It’s a great day,” she heard Pavel announce to Ernst. “A great day for us. A bad day for the Germans!”

Ernst’s voice was muffled; Marta couldn’t hear his reply.

When the men were gone, Marta walked slowly around the parlour, running a palm over the polished oak table, touching the throne-like wooden chairs with the hunting scenes carved into their backs. A crystal candy dish held a bag of Pepik’s chocolate-covered cherries.

Upstairs, the door to the master bedroom was open. There was an ornate Victorian sofa in the corner, the kind that would stay in the room forever because it was too heavy and awkward to move, and French doors that gave way to a little balcony with a wrought-iron table where nobody ever sat. Books were stacked up on Pavel’s side of the bed: Talks with Tomáš Masaryk by Karel Čapek, his favourite Czech author, a boy from his hometown of Hronov who had made good. And Das Unbehagen in der Kultur by Sigmund Freud, the famous doctor who had just died of cancer.

Marta went over to the bed and fluffed up the goose-down pillows. There was a silver boar’s-hair brush on the vanity, and the watch was beside it, left there casually, as though it was not worth a small fortune. Its case made a sound like a door that needed oil. She held the watch tentatively to her wrist; she imagined herself in a silk dress and elbow-length gloves, being twirled by Ernst across a glimmering ballroom floor. How glamorous she’d appear, how worldly. Pavel had brought the watch back from Paris; the band was made completely of diamonds, with a thin blue line of sapphires down the centre. He was trying, she knew, to convert his wealth into solid assets. If war broke out the currency would be useless.

Engraved on the underside of the band was a woman’s name: Anneliese.

Marta shut the watch case. She closed the bedroom door behind her.

Downstairs Pepik was on his stomach, splayed out in front of his train with his buckled shoes crossed behind him. Two clothespin people clutched in his fists. “All aboard!” she heard him whisper forcefully. A shy boy usually, but in charge of this domain.

She got down on her hands and knees and whispered in his ear: “Pepik. Kolik je hodin?”

He started as though waking from a long and feverish dream. The blush of pleasure on his face at seeing her never ceased to amaze her. That she gave someone such comfort. That she could be so needed. He squinted up at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, taller than him by half, with its regal stature and chimes.

“Two o’clock.” He tugged at his suspender.

“Two o’clock minus . . . ?”

“Where’s my little man?” Pepik asked.

She passed him the clothespin doll. “Minus?”

“Some minutes!”

Marta laughed. “Minus ten minutes,” she said. “Look at the long hand.”

Pepik wiggled his fist, causing the tiny man to run away and hide behind the caboose.

“Would you like one of your chocolates?” she asked.

She knew he would say no: he was saving them to share with his friends. It was a magnanimous approach for such a small child, but she also knew where it came from—Pavel was equally generous.

Marta suddenly remembered Pepik’s first weeks home from the hospital, how hard he had cried in the evenings, and the thrill she felt as the cloudy newborn eyes slowly clarified to the same bright blue as hers. A stranger might see them together and remark on how the child took after his mother.

Was this what every governess secretly hoped for?

A sharp gust of wind squealed down the chimney. In the silence that followed another shot rang out; the soldiers across the square were hard at work at target practice. Pepik didn’t seem to notice but Marta shivered involuntarily; she kept expecting the whole situation would blow over, but instead it seemed to be escalating. She got back down beside Pepik and crossed her legs and looked at him closely. “Miláčku,” she said. “Did you hear that gun? Do you remember the big trucks yesterday?”

He looked at her blankly. Blinked his long lashes.

“That was the Czech army. They’re here to protect us.”

Pepik turned back to the train, focused on his goal. “All aboard,” he muttered again. But Marta took his face by the chin and turned it towards her. This was important.

“Your tata,” she said, “and all of his workers—everyone is ready to fight.”

She paused, wondering if this was really true.

Would Ernst fight? On which side?

And which side was she herself on?

“Come here, Pepik,” she whispered. She wanted, suddenly, to hold him. But Pepik seemed to have forgotten her entirely. He turned back to the scene in front of him, the Princess Elizabeth engine, the livestock cars loosely linked like the vertebrae of some long reptile’s spine.

Pepik flicked the switch.

The electric train seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then it sighed on its tracks, a traveller hoisting very heavy bags.

Pavel wasn’t home until eight o’clock that evening. Marta heard him say thank you to Sophie the cook as he passed her his felt hat. He came into the parlour, his jacket thrown over his shoulder and a copy of Lidové noviny tucked under his arm. Whistling. He was off-key but she recognized the first few notes of Smetana’s patriotic “Má Vlast.”

“Where is your train headed?” he asked his son. “Is it off to fight the Germans?”

Pepik was in his blue flannel nightcap. He nodded mutely, pleased with his father’s attention and suspicious of it at the same time. Marta could tell he knew something strange was astir. He sensed his environment, she thought, in the same way an animal could sense rain. She remembered the farm where she had grown up, how the chickens would fuss on a hot July evening. As the air thickened there was an increasing sense of panic. Or maybe that was just how she’d felt; hot weather meant her father would be restless.

“How’s the Crown Prince?” Pavel asked his son, trying again to engage him. But Pepik was allowed only a few more minutes of play before bed, and he ignored his father, focused on his train. He was fiddling with the little piece on the front—what was it called?—the fan shape that stuck out like a dustpan. It reminded Marta of Hitler’s moustache.

Vermin, Hitler had called the Jews. But he spoke with compelling confidence.

Pavel gave up on his son and turned away and opened his leather briefcase on the oak table. He was wearing not his usual business suit and tie but informal soldier’s clothes: corduroy pants and a sweater with leather patches on the elbows. He pulled several manila dossiers out of the case, each neatly labelled, and smiled at Marta. “I’ll have a cup of coffee, please,” he said. He considered for a moment, then slid the files back into the case, snapping the clasps shut. “No,” he said. “I’ll have a whiskey.”

The decanter was chiselled crystal with a stopper shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Pavel placed two small glasses close together on a round silver platter.

“Care to join me?”

“Me?”

But there was nobody else in the room. “To what occasion?” asked Marta.

“To victory!” Pavel responded with gusto, but didn’t yet raise his glass. He looked at her, challenging, his jaw square. For a moment she saw what he must have been like as a child: stubborn, impulsive. Something else he’d passed on to Pepik.

“To beating the bastards down,” Pavel said, gesturing with his drink to the window and the implied enemy beyond it. “The Russians are on their way with support . . .” He railed on about fortifications, about the Maginot Line. Marta had never heard him so energized about anything. She wondered vaguely whether he knew that tomorrow was the first day of Rosh Hashanah. How did she herself know this? Someone must have told her—Mr. Goldstein? Yes. Who else could it have been? There was no Judaism in her family, of course—none as far as she knew—but she found the religion’s customs curious, the candles and skullcaps, the prohibitions against various foods. Marta thought about the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, which would follow—the Day of Atonement, Goldstein had said, the day of repenting for sins.

Could she ask forgiveness for her own sins? If only, she thought, it was that simple.

“Either Hitler gives in,” Pavel was saying, “or there will be a war.” He paused, and Marta was suddenly aware that he had asked something of her, that he was soliciting her opinion. She blurted out the first thing she thought of. “Those white woollen knee socks,” she said. “Are they worn by Nazis?”

She was remembering Pavel’s story about his brother Misha, how he’d been knocked to the ground by the gang of boys and had seen their socks and known.

But Pavel ignored her. “Even if the government yields,” he said, “the army would never listen.” And the truth of this seemed confirmed for him in the act of speaking it aloud. “You,” he said to Marta, “have no idea how lucky we are now. Compared to the way it was before.”

Before, she knew, meant before Tomáš Masaryk, before 1918, when Czechoslovakia did not exist. He was right, she thought; it was hard for her to imagine. She told him as much.

“That’s the peril of youth,” Pavel said. “The lack of experience against which to compare.”

He was thirty. There were only seven years between them, but he chose to assert them now.

“You old man,” Marta said, smiling.

“And you are a lovely young lady.” Pavel raised his glass. “To beating those Germans,” he said, holding her eye, just as they heard his wife coming up the stairs.

Anneliese Bauer’s fingernails were painted a deep shade of scarlet. She was carrying a flat white box tied with a blue ribbon, the signature of the Hruska patisserie. What she was doing buying the medovnik herself Marta couldn’t imagine, and for a moment she felt guilty, or neglectful, as though this somehow reflected on her own job as hired help. There was something wrong about it, something out of order. Then again, Marta thought, everything was topsy-turvy these days. And Anneliese, she reminded herself, was not one to do anything she didn’t want to do.

“Am I to be included in cocktails?” Anneliese asked now, stepping into the parlour and fanning her face with an open hand, as though her nail polish were not quite dry. Her brown hair was set in a finger wave, the wide curls clinging to the sides of her head. She looked like a model from an ad for the alpine spas where Pavel’s mother went to convalesce in the summers. Marta imagined herself sashaying across the Persian carpets, mingling with the men with gold-tipped walking sticks and women in hats with veils. The European elite gossiping over their wineglasses, shifting effortlessly between languages to get across the exact nuance of what they meant.

She curtsied, and Anneliese turned and acknowledged her, passing her the cake. “Put this in the icebox, please?”

“Of course,” Marta answered, part of her relieved that the natural order of things had not been eclipsed by the mobilization after all. Anneliese would still make requests and Marta would still carry them out.

Pavel had gone to the sideboard and was bringing down a third glass. “To what do we owe the pleasure?” Anneliese asked her husband.

“To war,” he said. He could barely keep the smile off his face.

From the corner of the room came the tick-tick-tick of Pepik’s electric train rounding its track.

Anneliese grasped her earlobes and pulled off her clip-on earrings one at a time. She snapped open her small Chanel purse and deposited them inside. “Let’s hope it’s over fast.” She dug around for her silver cigarette case. “The Fischls are leaving,” she announced to her husband.

Pavel was being generous with the whiskey; he did not turn to face her. “Bon voyage to the Fischls.” Now he turned and passed the glass to his wife. “Just goes to show. One bit of trouble and they’re out of here as fast as Jesse Owens.” He paused, pleased with his comparison.

“They’re leaving tomorrow. Hanna Fischl got an international phone call—from her mother in England,” Anneliese said.

Marta remembered the box of cake in her hand. She put down her whiskey and went to the kitchen, wondering if she’d understood correctly. An international phone call—but England was an ocean away. How was it possible to speak across such a distance? She pictured a thin wire high above the clouds, and then she pictured tiny men running back and forth through the hollowed-out centre of the wire to deliver their messages into the waiting ears of their listeners.

She put the cake in the icebox, just as Mrs. Bauer had asked.

“They’re all going,” she heard Anneliese say to Pavel. “Even Dagmar and Erna.”

“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.

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 thought 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.

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.”

“Hasn’t he already won without firing a shot?”

Marta realized that Anneliese was right. But Pavel would not be baited.

“We’ll stay,” he said. “You have to trust me. Everything will be fine.”

Three days later Marta carried a telegram over to Pavel to open. The Bauer factory would be occupied by the Nazis.





Český Krumlov, 1 March 1939

My dear son Pavel,

Where are you? Have you arrived?

I posted a letter to you via Ernst Anselm, but as yet have heard nothing. I also asked him to send a telegram on my behalf.

Did you not receive it?

I hope that Anneliese is happy to be in the city of her birth. Have you settled into Max and Alžběta’s flat? And how is your new job? Is the factory continuing to run despite XXXXXXXXXX?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. I am very eager to discuss this. I fear I made a grave mistake by staying behind. I have tried to contact you, but to no avail. I wonder why I’ve received no response and I wonder if XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Please, send a letter or a cable as quickly as possible. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX phone lines, so it is better to write. I look forward to hearing from you and trust you will help me join you and that we will all be happily reunited.

Please give my love to Anneliese and little Pepik.

Your forever loving,

Mother

(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Rosa. Died Birkenau, 1943)





SOMETIMES I’LL BE WALKING.

Say it’s dusk, and the end of October. The buses leaving the university are lit up like bright aquariums, the buses themselves swimming through the dark element of the evening. The ducks have forgotten to fly south, and huddle dimly together at the edge of the pond. Say there’s a chill in the air; I’ve been resisting my winter jacket, and now the wind slips a cool hand down my back, the first touch I’ve felt in . . . forever. It comes over me then. I’ve had a good day at my desk but still I get the sense that I’m missing, or that something within me is missing, some crucial piece of me that used to make my whole self run. I’ve been taken apart one too many times, and the little cog at the centre of my chest has slipped into the gutter and been lost.

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever finding it.

It’s too hidden, too covered in leaves.

It would take a small person, someone curious, someone low to the ground.

It would take a child—and of course it’s far too late for that.

The children suffered the most. This is what my research has led me to believe. Some would say otherwise, but the children did know. Even the little ones—perhaps the little ones especially—soaked it all up. They absorbed it directly, a straight hit to the bloodstream. All of the stress, the incredible tension, the relentless, insidious day-to-day: encroaching hunger, restricted living quarters, the edicts marching forward, a row of shiny boots and polished guns. They took in their parents’ fear like black milk—that’s Celan, of course—from the breast. They were raised on it, fed on fear, until fear itself was in their bones, in their visible skeletons, where baby fat should have been. When the children at Auschwitz were sent towards the gas chambers, on the most basic level they knew what was coming.

Tell me, how should I have faith in the world when I know the things that I know?

The children I’ve dedicated my life’s work to—they got out. But it wasn’t easy for them either. They were sent away from their families, from houses full of fighting they could not understand, and they blamed themselves. They were given away as Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland. They thought they had done something terrible to merit this. Even when they were reassured otherwise.

Sometimes, walking in the evening, a toque pulled low over my thin white hair, I try to summon up the child I myself must have been. All I get are flashes: shoes with brass buckles, a curl against my forehead, a sliver of female laughter and a back that turns and disappears.

There is a feeling that I could have done something. Shame that I couldn’t save her.

Beneath the shame: fear. Beneath the fear: grief. Alone in my small rooms, so late in life, the knocking from the centre of my ribs. Someone is locked inside there. Has been for years. I roll onto my side, pull the pillow over my ears. And still the little voice, the pleading. Mama.

I’ve lived almost my whole life without her. There is no reason I should expect to be walking late in November, my hands in my pockets, and turn a corner and see her, her thin coat, no scarf. Her cheeks hollow, the way I last remember her, in the winter of 1945. There is no reason I should still hope to find her, to take her home to my apartment and heap blankets over her, to spoon hot soup into her mouth and whisper her to sleep.

I will never sing to her—some old Yiddish folk song—while the snow sifts silently down.

It’s shameful really, the weakness of my longing. And yet the heart continues. There’s the fluttering in the ribs. The hope that all the loss might somehow be redeemed.

Ach—that’s the phone. Probably the new department secretary. Mara? Marsha? Excuse me for a minute. No, don’t. I’ll just let it ring.

What was I saying? Yes, the children. There were, of course, among the children whom I study, situations that worked out well. There were the people we now call “righteous Gentiles,” Christians who risked their lives. There were families in England who gave up everything they had, and often what they did not have, to offer a tiny traveller some kind of home. There are stories of love and heartbreaking humanity—but these are not the bulk of the stories.

What I have found far more frequently are cases of trauma and upset. The Kindertransport children who were sent out of Czechoslovakia often spoke no English. They arrived in a country with no desire for war, battling tensions about its own role in the conflict brewing across the Channel. The children arrived in homes where money was scarce, to foster parents who had been shamed into taking them. At what we would now call a “critical developmental stage,” everything solid was pulled out from under them. Children do not forget that. It stays with them, a wall that goes up at the first hint of intimacy.

We academics are told to frame the world in objective terms, but I am speaking now, as you’ve guessed, from my particular experience.

There are things I remember about my mother.

The growling of her stomach late at night.

Her fingers combing gently through my hair.

The first notes of—what?—a lullaby? No. Something less certain, less solid.

I remember a dim street, late fall, and my mother at the end of it, a kerchief knotted under her chin. She was looking back at me already then, as though across a great gulf of time. I tried to move towards her but the street was so long, and there were people blocking my path. When I caught another glimpse, she had taken off her scarf. It was crumpled in a ball in her hand, which she held against her chest. A bit of wind played with the hair around her face. She held my gaze—there was something she was telling me, something she needed me to know. The whole history of our family was contained in that look. Then she turned a corner and was gone.

I’ve spent years going back to this memory. It is so clear, so real. And yet. What was she doing leaving such a very young child alone in the street? The first flakes were already falling.

Time is a snow globe; you shake it and everything changes. A thin coat of white and the world disappears. This memory I have of the look on her face: it must be something I made up.

The mind plays tricks, inventing what wasn’t there.

Of my father, I remember absolutely nothing.