Far to Go

Chapter Two



PAVEL BAUER WAS ON HIS WAY OUT when the telegram arrived. He read it. He read it a second time. He slipped it inside his coat pocket.

“I’m off.”

“Where to?” Anneliese asked.

“Where do you think?”

He spoke as though the answer should be obvious to his wife, but Marta had no idea where he might be going either. He was now forbidden by the Nazis to set foot in his own factory. Although she did not want to admit it, this unnerved Marta. That someone else had this authority over Pavel—Pavel, whom she had only ever seen as being in charge. She found herself uncertain about exactly how to speak to him now. She couldn’t help but feel that some sort of imposter had snuck in and taken his place.

Anneliese was acting oddly too, Marta thought, although perhaps this was more to be expected. The town square was overrun with Hitlerjugend and Wehrmacht, after all; with rifles and polished boots and tanks. The Goldstein Tailor Shop was still closed. There was no question of Pepik’s going outside to play. All the good citizens were cooped up like rabbits in holes, Anneliese told Marta, and all the hooligans were parading about like they owned the town. Still, this didn’t stop Anneliese from leaving in the middle of the morning—once she was sure Pavel was gone—with her large Greta Garbo sunglasses and fresh red lipstick. She whispered to Marta that she was going to look in on the Hoffmans. She said she’d be gone several hours, but she returned twenty minutes later. The unpasteurized milk was boiling over on the stove; Sophie was on the patio playing with her Ouija board. The pointer made sweeping sounds, whooshing across the cardboard.

“Sophie!” Marta called. “Mrs. Bauer is back.”

“And?”

Marta winced at the teenager’s insolence; she was finding Sophie harder to bear these days. In light of everything that was going on, though, in light of the occupation, Marta’s earlier grudge against Anneliese was forgotten. It was like that with Anneliese—one minute Marta resented her, the next she adored her. Well, that’s the way it went with family, she supposed. It was the way a daughter might feel about her mother, or a mother about her child. And it was true, she felt almost protective now as she watched Anneliese trying to undo the knot on her kerchief. Anneliese’s fingers were trembling, and it took her several attempts. Finally she succeeded, smoothing down the triangle of bright silk, only to crumple it up again and shove it back in her purse.

“The Hoffmans are gone,” she announced to Marta. She dug around for her silver cigarette case, which she laid on top of the glass-topped cigar box. She dug through her purse some more.

Marta saw a thin film of perspiration on Anneliese’s brow. She offered her the tortoiseshell lighter off the mantel, shielding the flame with her cupped hand. “Mrs. Bauer?”

Anneliese looked up, her cigarette dangling from her lower lip, like a heroine in a romance novel. “Oh, yes, thank you, Marta.” She leaned over and sucked until the tip of the cigarette glowed red. Then she leaned back and let out a long, slow exhale. Her fingers fluttered at her throat. “They left the door unlocked,” she said. “But everything is gone. That beautiful chandelier.”

“Hanna Hoffman?”

Marta had thought that Anneliese was going to look in on Gerta Hoffman. Hanna was lower down on her priority list. She was someone Mrs. Bauer thought of when all the most important dinner guests had already been invited.

“The breakfront is still there, and the armoire, but the sideboard is gone and the Persian carpet. I looked in her wardrobe. In both of them. Empty.”

Anneliese seemed hesitant to convey this last bit of information—that she had gone upstairs and looked through her friend’s closets—but Marta nodded encouragingly to show she understood the circumstance. That Anneliese was acting in accordance with the dire times.

“I suppose they left the door unlocked to prevent the windows from being smashed. They must have figured the hooligans would get in one way or another if they wanted to.” Anneliese shrugged. “There was a steamer trunk left behind too. Several dresses hung on the wardrobe side. As though they left in a hurry.”

Marta heard Sophie slip back into the kitchen and begin banging pots and pans together loudly. It sounded like she was making the noise on purpose, like a child’s imitation of cooking. Marta wished Mrs. Bauer would scold Sophie, show her that, despite the chaos of the occupation, the Bauer household would continue to run unchanged. But Anneliese only grimaced in the direction of the kitchen and said she was going to go take something for her nerves and lie down and should not be disturbed.

She paused, though, before climbing the stairs. “Hanna isn’t even Jewish!” she said. “But Francek is enough for them, it seems.” She hesitated again. “And who knows about Hanka. Maybe she has an illegal grandfather in her past.”

At the word past a silence rose up between the two women. Marta liked to pretend that nobody knew the depravity she came from, but that of course was not the case. Anneliese knew. Maybe not everything, but she knew enough. And was kind enough to pretend she did not. What if things were otherwise? What if she weren’t so gracious? Anneliese exhaled cigarette smoke and fanned above her head as though trying to clear the air of what had suddenly materialized. The ghosts seemed to respect what Mrs. Bauer wished; the moment passed and Anneliese crushed out her cigarette, climbing the stairs to her room.

Pavel was gone for hours, returning only in the middle of the afternoon, with Ernst. They came in the door mid-conversation. “It might be wise,” Ernst was saying.

“All the accounts?”

“Just as a precautionary measure. To have them in a Gentile’s name.”

Marta looked up. What was Ernst up to? She tried to catch his eye, but the men took the stairs to the study without even removing their overcoats. She heard the heavy door closing behind them. By the time they came downstairs again the sun had slunk from the square like an old stray tabby. Anneliese had still not reappeared, and Marta was feeding Pepik an early meal of knedlíky cut into bite-sized pieces.

The men had obviously concluded whatever business they’d been discussing. The conversation had moved on to lighter things. In the front hall she saw Pavel pass Ernst his hat. “What’s the definition of the perfect Aryan?” Ernst asked.

Pavel made a face to show he didn’t know.

“Number one,” Ernst said, raising his forefinger, “he’s as slim as the fatso Goering. Number two, he’s eagle-eyed as the bespectacled Himmler.” He paused. “Number three? Swift and stealthy as the club-footed Goebbels. And number four, he’s as blond as the dark-haired Hitler!”

Pavel laughed, then the two men lowered their voices, speaking for several minutes in hushed tones. “There’s something else,” she heard Ernst say to Pavel.

“What’s this?”

“Put it on your lapel.”

“But they must know I’m—”

Marta peeked into the hall and saw the small flash of the swastika Ernst was pinning to Pavel’s breast. He looked up as he did it, catching and holding Marta’s eye. He winked. She felt, for a brief moment, like she was going to be sick.

“It can’t hurt,” Ernst said to Pavel.

“Are you sure?” Pavel asked.

“Just don’t forget to take it off if you cross into France!”

Pavel clapped Ernst on the back. “Good man,” he said. “Thank you.”

Marta turned back to give Pepik another bite. She heard the sound of the door opening and closing, of Pavel turning the lock.

Pavel Bauer was a thin man; Marta would even use the word small. And now as he sat at the table, he seemed, she thought, like a lost little boy. His shoulders were narrow and the skin at the back of his neck where the barber had shaved looked as pink and exposed as a newborn’s. She could barely stand to look at him, so vulnerable, so unaware of his friend Ernst’s shifting allegiances.

Pavel Bauer sat for along time with his hands folded in front of him.

He slowly lowered his head into his hands.

Now that the factory had been occupied, there was nowhere for Pavel to go during the days. He took Pepik across town to visit his Baba and brought him back home in time for dinner.

“I feel all cooped up,” Anneliese said at the table. “Like a rabbit in a hole.” She held her silver cutlery to her head like long ears. It was an analogy she had grown fond of in the past several days, an analogy she thought was particularly apt. But Pavel said, “Things will change. I just need to make myself indispensable.”

He tucked his linen napkin into his shirt. “Pepik,” he said. “Stop that.”

Pepik had massed his mashed potatoes like mountain ranges and was—with his fingers—placing individual peas in a row behind them. The peas were soldiers taking refuge behind the potato peaks. “Those are the bad guys,” Marta whispered in his ear. “You’d better eat them all up!”

Sophie had left the house earlier that afternoon and was still not home by five o’clock, so Marta had taken it upon herself to braise a small red cabbage from the root cellar. Cooking was not her job, nor her strength, but she was willing, these days, to help in whatever way possible. Pavel was distracted and Anneliese kept repeating that her nerves were shot; Marta felt that it fell to her to preserve some semblance of normalcy. Along with the cabbage she’d prepared chicken with butter and seasoning salt, the way she knew Mrs. Bauer liked it. It was now 7:05 and there was still no sign of the young cook. Marta hoped there was still some strudel left over from last night that she could serve for dessert. She leaned over and moved Pepik’s hands away from his plate, showing him again how to properly hold his cutlery.

“But darling,” Anneliese was saying to her husband, “there’s no way for you to be indispensable.” She cleared her throat. “To the Germans,” she clarified. “Of course you’re indispensable—to me!” She laughed. “But there’s no way they will see that.”

“You’re right,” Pavel said. “Why can’t they see it? They need flax. They need cloth. If they convert the factory . . . Think of the area we supply. Think of all the smaller factories that will grind to a halt. Lipna and Trebelice and Marsponova and . . .”

He stabbed at a piece of chicken with his fork. “Pepik, I said stop.”

“Not to mention Krumlov,” added Anneliese.

“But what should I do? Am I supposed to just walk away? From what it took my father fifty years to build?”

Anneliese nodded her chin at her son. “There are more important things to worry about now than money.”

Pavel Bauer sighed. “I didn’t say it was about money.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “of course it’s about money. You have no idea—thank God Ernst suggested—” Then he said, forcefully, “It isn’t about money. It’s about family.”

The implication was that Pavel would teach his son about the business in the same way his own father had done with him, that to give it up would be to forsake not only the factory but Pepik’s own future.

“Pepik is a child,” Anneliese said.

“Children grow up.”

Marta considered how hard it was, at the moment, to imagine. She had resorted to spoon-feeding Pepik his peas, a hand cupped under his chin as if he were an infant. She agreed with Anneliese. It was difficult to picture him at the helm of such an industry. He was too sensitive, too introverted. It would only mean disappointment for everyone.

Anneliese said, “There was a telegram from—”

But Pavel knew about the telegram and interrupted. “Liesel, we are not leaving. Give me some time!” He began to speak rapidly in German—it was Anneliese’s mother tongue and the language the Bauers reverted to when they fought. Marta did not understand the words, but she understood the way Pavel jabbed his fork in the air, the chicken dangling precariously.

Pepik had left the battle between potatoes and peas to wage on his plate. His eyes were now moving from one parent to the other, as though watching strikes being exchanged between the famous Italian fencer Aldo Nadi and his brother Nedo. Marta tried to remove herself from the Bauer’s argument by focusing on their son. “Miláčku,” she said, hunching over him, “try one more bite,” but Pepik was saved by a knock at the front door.

The family fell silent and waited one heartbeat for Sophie to answer it, before remembering that Sophie was not there. Marta jumped up and smoothed down her apron.

“Shall I, Mrs. Bauer?”

Pavel straightened his tie and put down his fork. He was working to rearrange his facial features, to hide his frustration.

At the door, Ernst handed Marta his coat. He looked over her shoulder to make sure they were alone, then reached forward and pinched her nipple.

Marta winced, and then giggled. “What are you doing here?” she whispered. Up close, Ernst’s pockmarks appeared even deeper than usual, but there was something about them that she considered vaguely handsome.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You’re here all the time,” she said.

“And so?”

“I thought you felt . . . Mr. Bauer is—”

She had been about to remind Ernst of Pavel’s religion, but Ernst interrupted her. “Pavel is my dear old friend.” He looked at her intently, as though this should explain things, but Marta was still perplexed. It must have shown on her face, because Ernst spoke again. “My dear old wealthy friend.” He held his earlobe briefly between thumb and forefinger.

So Marta’s suspicion was confirmed: Ernst was taking advantage of the occupation to try to get hold of Pavel’s money. A wave rose within her—guilt, and shame, and something even darker she couldn’t name. Part of her wanted to extricate herself; another part wouldn’t allow it. She moved to press herself against Ernst, trying to blot out her feelings, to forget what he’d said. She turned her face up to his, waiting to be kissed. The Bauers were right there in the next room, but something in her suddenly wished to get caught, wished to have the whole thing out in the open. The liaison was exhausting, not to mention the secrecy—and this new information about Ernst’s motivation. But Ernst raised his eyebrows to show a kiss was too risky.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Marta shrugged, pretending indifference.

“Don’t be like that,” he said. “I need you on my side. Don’t you know that?”

Marta didn’t answer but she saw all at once that he meant it. He was more uncertain than he was letting on, about his feelings towards the Jews and how his old friend Pavel might fit in with them. He wanted to be bolstered, reassured. Ernst too, Marta realized, felt guilty. Even if he himself was unaware of it.

He winked at her but moved away towards the parlour, towards the sound of the Bauers’ voices. Partway across the hall, though, he turned back to her. She thought he was going to kiss her after all, but he only drew her close, rather roughly, and pressed his mouth to her ear. “Did you hear me?” he whispered. “I need you on my side. You’d better decide whose side you’re on.”

In the dining room Pavel and Anneliese had successfully transformed into a tableau of a happy couple. Ernst said, “No, no, don’t get up,” but Pavel stood anyway, the embodiment of perfect manners. He leaned across the table and shook his friend’s hand.

“What’s going on at the factory?” he asked, as quickly as it was polite to do so. Pavel had been let go because of his religion, but Ernst, his Gentile plant manager, still had to report to work each day. “What’s Herrick doing down there? Any news?”

“Would you like some chicken?” Anneliese asked.

Ernst took Pavel’s cue to sit. “Herrick is bumbling around like the idiot that he is. He wants to know about the jute cartel. He wants to know about the accounting system, and the American Fraser investment. I told him he’ll have to ask you, that if they would only bring you back in . . .”

Ernst paused and shook his head again. “No,” he said. “No news.”

But he had removed a piece of folded paper from his pocket, which he now pushed across the table in Pavel’s direction.

Marta wondered at the extent of the deception. First the joke making fun of the Nazis, and now this. Ernst was presenting his usual face to Pavel—a kind one, the face of a friend. He seemed willing to go to extraordinary lengths to present himself as other than he really was.

It was, she realized, a trait she recognized in herself.

Anneliese was fussing with the silver pepper mill. “We are living in a very historic time,” she said, laying her cutlery down to peer up into its mechanics. “When has it happened—I mean, when in the history of the world has it happened—that a state has voluntarily given up part of its territory?”

She looked at her husband enquiringly. Then she turned to Marta. “I think this needs refilling,” she said, holding up the pepper mill like a hammer.

Marta nodded and moved to stand.

“After dinner will be fine,” Anneliese said.

“You’re right,” Pavel answered his wife. “But we have a good army. We have—” He stopped and swiped at the edge of his mouth with his linen napkin. “We had the Skoda works and the munitions. Think what we’ve given up. What they’ve taken. The industry.”

“The industry, yes, and seventy percent of our steel,” agreed Anneliese. She turned to Ernst. “Did you know we’ve lost seventy percent of our steel? And seventy percent of our electrical power? And three and a half million citizens!”

“Well,” said Pavel, “they mightn’t see it that way.” He was referring, Marta knew, to the many German Czechs who saw Hitler’s arrival as something that would reunite them finally with their Vaterland.

“It was President Beneš who was betrayed,” Pavel continued. “But he’ll come through for us. How, exactly, I don’t know. But I believe—”

“You believe what?” challenged Anneliese.

“Pepik, please.”

“Beneš couldn’t help if—”

“Masaryk would not have let this happen, it’s true. But mark my words, there’ll be hell to pay from Beneš when it is all over.”

Ernst had been sitting silent, with his elbows on his knees and his fingers pressed against each other in front of his face. Now he straightened. He touched his necktie and said, “I don’t know that Beneš . . .”

Pavel looked at his friend. “You don’t know that Beneš what?”

But Ernst, Marta thought, seemed to realize that responding might expose his allegiance. “No,” he said quickly. “Never mind.” He cleared his throat; the edges of his mouth turned up in the faintest of smiles. “What does Marta think of all this?” he asked.

Anneliese lifted her head sharply, looking from one to the other. Marta cursed Ernst internally, and her desire to be discovered completely vanished. It was all well and good for Ernst to make fun—he had a family to go home to. She felt Anneliese’s eyes on her and didn’t speak, her own eyes lowered and her hands in her lap. Eventually the moment passed and the Bauers kept talking.

“You understand,” said Anneliese to her husband, “that if we lived in Germany right now we would not be allowed to attend the theatre. We would not be allowed to attend a concert. Or the cinema.” She paused, tapping the polished tabletop with a perfectly filed red nail. “We would not be allowed to sit on a public bench!”

She gave a little chuckle. “What we would be doing sitting on a public bench I have no idea—but you get my drift.”

“That’s just in Germany,” Pavel said, stubborn.

Anneliese spread her hands open in front of her. “Welcome to Germany,” she said.

School resumed a few days later, on October 5—Marta knew better than to mention the fact that it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Mr. Goldstein had told her so. She also didn’t say anything to the Bauers about the note she’d found from Sophie, tucked under her pillow: Sophie was leaving for good; she refused to demean herself by working for Jews. Marta thought that Sophie must have left a similar note for Pavel and Anneliese, but they didn’t bring it up, and neither did she. They were all, Marta knew, trying to pretend that nothing had changed.

It was clear, though, when she went to pick up Pepik at the end of his first day back at school, that things were indeed very different. Classes had resumed, but under German control. Pepik was waiting for her outside his classroom, clutching his slate, the sponge dangling from its string. He looked so helpless, so vulnerable, she thought, in his cap and short pants with his little knees exposed.

“I had to sit at the back of the room,” he told her.

“In your usual seat?”

He shook his head. “Facing backwards. With Fiertig.”

Fiertig, she knew, was the only other Jewish child in the class.

Marta rushed towards Pepik and knelt in front of him, kissing his cheeks, right and left, back and forth at length, but she didn’t ask for more details. She couldn’t stand to hear them. As they were leaving the schoolhouse she saw that a large swastika had appeared in the front hall, along with three new photographs outside the principal’s office. The first showed Hitler, with his little moustache that reminded Marta of the snout on Pepik’s electric train. The second was of Heinlein, the leader of the Sudeten Nazi party. The third photo showed a man Marta didn’t recognize—there were round glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Maybe it was the bespectacled Himm-ler from Ernst’s joke about the perfect Aryan.

When they got home, Pepik ran upstairs to play with his train. Marta heard the sound of someone moving around in the pantry, a grunt as something heavy was lifted, and then the squeak of a chair being pushed across linoleum.

“Sophie?” she called. She fully expected Sophie to have changed her mind and returned—she was like that. Unreliable. Easily influenced. Marta took off her coat, wondering where the girl had been. Maybe serving strudel at the “soup kitchen” the Germans had set up for their poor starving countrymen who had been living so long under Czech rule. Talk about Greuelpropaganda! If Sophie wanted to discuss the spreading of false rumours of atrocities . . .

“Sophie?” she called again.

But it was a slimmer rear end that met Marta’s gaze when she stuck her head into the pantry, and narrower hips. Where Anneliese’s skirt had risen up at the back of her knees a creamy fringe of lace from her slip was visible. She twisted around, almost losing her balance. “Oh, Marta, for God’s sake. Don’t do that.”

Anneliese laid her palm over her heart and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. You scared me. I thought I was alone in the house.”

It was close and warm in the pantry. Marta undid the top two buttons of her cardigan. She looked around and saw several large crates of groceries and an oversized sack of potatoes. “Did you buy all of this?” she asked Mrs. Bauer.

Yom Kippur, Mr. Goldstein had told her, was supposed to be a day of fasting, and here they were surrounded by food. There was a huge stack of tinned sardines, piled on top of each other like Pepik’s wooden building blocks. An enormous piece of lard that Marta knew would never keep. There were fifteen or twenty jars of preserves—lindenberry, it looked like, and plum. The deep bluish purple was the same colour as the sapphires in the watch from Paris, the one she’d imagined herself wearing as she waltzed across a glamorous dance floor. The one, she saw now, that Anneliese was wearing.

Anneliese followed Marta’s gaze, then extended her arm to give Marta a better view. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” She nodded to show Marta could touch it. The diamonds were cool and neatly symmetrical, like a child’s milk teeth.

Marta wished for a moment that she was the one who owned it, the one with the privilege to show it off. But she had to pretend she’d never even seen it before. “Beautiful,” she said, her jaw tight. And then she thought how odd it was for Anneliese to be wearing the watch in the middle of the day, when it was clearly meant for dinners or balls. She looked at Anneliese closely—her complexion seemed suddenly pale. And she kept craning her neck to look over Marta’s shoulder, as though she suspected they were being watched.

“Is everything okay, Mrs. Bauer?” Marta asked.

Anneliese bristled. “Of course it’s not okay. Look at what’s happening all around us! The Germans are now claiming places that are purely Czech. They use some technical or strategic reason, like the railway line. They’re swallowing up everything other than—”

Marta cleared her throat. “What I’m asking is . . .” She cast around in her mind, trying to put it delicately. “Are you okay, Mrs. Bauer?”

Anneliese got out her compact and rouged her cheeks, looking at Marta slantwise. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” She snapped the compact closed and reached for her cigarettes.

Marta passed her the silver Zippo, flipping back the catch with her thumb. “I was worried you might . . . I was thinking of the time . . .”

“What time?”

There was reproach in Anneliese’s voice, a kind of warning, and Marta knew she should drop it. Instead she said, “I was remembering when you—”

Anneliese flicked the lighter closed before Marta could finish the sentence. “I know what you’re thinking, Marta. And I’ve asked you not to bring up the subject.”

Marta felt herself flush. “Certainly, Mrs. Bauer. It was only out of concern for your well-being.” As she said this, though, she knew it was only partially true. She didn’t want what had happened to ever be repeated, but also—if she was honest—part of her enjoyed the fact that she could either keep or tell Anneliese’s secret. The power she held in this one single arena. She was, she realized, still upset about the other day, when Anneliese had diminished her role as Pepik’s governess. She hadn’t forgotten about the jab after all; she hadn’t forgotten about any of the jabs, but rather had let them build up inside her like a big pile of palacinky. And now, to top it off, she found herself jealous of the watch. Which, she realized, was ridiculous. What had she ever done to deserve something so beautiful? Not to mention that she’d have nowhere to wear it . . .

“As I’ve said to you before,” Anneliese said, “those were special circumstances.” She inhaled, holding the smoke in her lungs for a long moment. Then she exhaled. “The baby,” she said.

Marta saw Anneliese’s hands were trembling, and realized she had really unnerved her. And for no reason at all. “Of course, Mrs. Bauer. I understand. I’m sorry.” But Anneliese still looked pale, and Marta knew she was now thinking of the lost baby girl, was slowly being sucked into the tide pool of grief. Now look what she’d done! Anneliese already had enough to worry about without being reminded of the greatest tragedy of her life. Marta had the sudden thought of repenting even further, to distract Anneliese by letting her in on another secret. “I know someone else who tried to kill herself,” she said. As soon as she’d spoken, though, Anneliese’s face fell, and Marta cursed herself for her bad judgement. Why didn’t she just stop talking already?

“Who?” Anneliese asked, a weariness in her voice. She didn’t really want to know, Marta saw, but she had no choice now but to pursue the conversation. “Hella Anselm,” she said.

Anneliese looked up sharply. “Ernst’s wife? When?”

“A long time ago.”

“She didn’t succeed?” Anneliese laughed at her own question. “Obviously not!”

“I don’t think she wanted to.”

“Most people don’t.”

“She’s not the most stable person,” Marta said, cautious.

“I won’t ask how you know that.”

The silences lined up between them, a row of children with blank faces.

“How did she—” Anneliese started, but she stopped herself mid-sentence. “No, don’t tell me.”

Marta exhaled, relieved. They could finally drop it. “Here, Mrs. Bauer,” she said eagerly. “Let me help you unpack this.” She reached out to lift the sack of potatoes, but Anneliese blocked her path. “I’ll do it,” she said. “I need to be doing something.” She hoisted the burlap bag onto the shelf, clearly as relieved as Marta to have something else to focus on.

“I apologize again,” Marta said under her breath. But Anne-liese didn’t hear her or else chose to ignore the comment. “I’m going crazy inside all day,” she said instead. “Like a little scared rabbit in its hole.”

She looked up and saw Marta smiling. “What?”

“Nothing. I understand what you mean.”

Anneliese held her cigarette away from her face in her left hand and swabbed at her eyes with her right. “Do you?” she asked. She touched her eye again. “I simply can’t keep living like this. And I don’t know why Pavel can’t see it. It’s dangerous to stay, because you get used to it. You accommodate. You think, well, it isn’t so bad if the Herrings don’t want to associate with us. And it isn’t so bad if the Reichstag Company won’t sell to us. It isn’t so bad if—” Here she looked up at Marta. “But it is bad, isn’t it. We should leave, don’t you think?”

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.