Far to Go

Chapter Five



AT NOON ON MARCH 14, 1939, the grandfather clock sounded, the front door swung open, and in walked the Bauers. They’d been gone only two nights but they looked like a band of Junák scouts back from the Krkonoše Mountains. Marta knew something terrible must have happened for Anneliese to let herself be seen in such a state, her hair loose around her face and not a trace of lipstick on her lips. Anneliese went straight to the parlour table and wept. Marta could see it was a continuation—she had been weeping before, then she had to carry her valise, and now she resumed weeping where she had left off.

Pepik disappeared immediately into his Uncle Max’s room, and it was Pavel, finally, who came to tell Marta what had happened. He steered her, a hand at the small of her back, out of the front room and into the kitchen. “A drink?”

“No, I—”

But he’d already brought in two little glasses from the breakfront and had filled his own to the rim.

“Neat?”

Marta looked at him blankly.

Pavel lifted a pitcher and added water to her glass. He squinted at Marta, opened his mouth, and closed it again. There was so much to say, and she could see he didn’t know where to begin.

“We got turned back at the border,” he said finally. “They saw that our documents were forged.” He emptied his glass in one smooth swallow. He was unshaven, and there were dark hollows under his eyes.

“The Gestapo came on the train. They took our passports—mine and Liesel’s. We were trying to leave the country. To get into Paris. From there Max had got us tickets to London.” He ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. “We’ve missed our chance now, of course. It’s too late.”

There was a moment of silence, during which they could hear Anneliese sobbing. Marta leaned her temple against her index and middle fingers. What did Pavel expect? If he was willing to forsake her like so much nothing, this is what he’d get in return. She pushed her untouched drink across the table. She cast around for somewhere to put her eyes and found the little wooden coffee mill. Her arms folded squarely across her chest.

“Marta,” Pavel said. But she refused to look up.

Pavel sighed deeply. “I owe you an apology. I’m sorry we had to . . . keep our plans secret from you.”

She looked again at the coffee mill; two loose beans were caught under the blade. Her stomach did a flip-flop, as though trying to get her attention. An apology? Had she heard correctly?

“Do you understand?” Pavel scrutinized her.

The hollows beneath his eyes might actually, she thought, have been bruises.

“It was to protect you,” Pavel said. “So if anyone came asking after us you wouldn’t be compromised. We had to keep it secret,” he explained. “From absolutely everybody.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We didn’t even tell my mother.”

He paused and frowned. “Which is why I can’t figure out who—” But he shook his head and stopped himself before finishing his sentence. “Regardless,” he said, “I want you to know that I planned to send for you. From France. I have your ticket.” He patted his breast pocket.

Marta looked up from the coffee mill. A ticket? For her?

“And a passport.”

He was bluffing, surely. Something inside her had hardened against him, like the pit at the centre of a piece of summer fruit, and she was not about to let her guard down again, to let herself be fooled a second time. But Pavel took the passport from his jacket pocket along with a green and white Wagons-Litz envelope and laid them in front of her on the table. She felt for a moment that she was going to be sick.

“Go on,” he said. “If you don’t believe me.”

She opened the envelope and saw the unpunched slip of paper. Her own name was there, last and first.

Pavel waited.

Marta picked it up as though to verify its physical presence. She was sweating, but her hands were cold. It seemed still that this must be some sort of trick, a way to secure her loyalty again now that things had not gone as planned. But the ticket was very real in her palm, and it had been purchased, she saw, several weeks earlier. If she had not told Ernst what she had told him, would she now be with the Bauers, in Paris? She had never been to France. It made her think of expensive red wine and those delicious pains au chocolat.

If she had not told Ernst what she had told him, would the Bauers now be free?

“We thought it would seem suspicious,” Pavel said, “to be crossing with a maid . . .” He cleared his throat and said, “—with a Gentile governess in our employment. So I was going to send for you after.”

Marta met his eye finally. “Really?” she asked. Her voice sounded meek in her own ears, the voice of a scared child, but she did not look away. She needed to be certain. And Pavel jumped at the chance to reassure her. “Really,” he said. “I promise.”

The way he spoke made her remember, suddenly, the fullness of his mouth on hers, how he’d pulled her back into his arms one last time. The glimmer of tongue that had set her stomach quivering.

Pavel pushed a thumb into his forehead, between his eyes, and looked down at the unpunched ticket in her hand. Then he lifted his head and looked at her again, the same piercing expression on his face. “I’m sorry, Marta,” he repeated.

Marta could not tell exactly what he was sorry for—the lie, his failure to get his family out, or some combination of the two—but the sincerity of his look absolved him completely. She would have forgiven him, just then, for anything.

The events of the previous days came out slowly. The telling of the story had a ritual quality; the Bauers were telling her, ostensibly, but Marta could see that they needed to recount it for each other, for themselves, to try to make some sense of it. The conductor had taken their passports, squinted at them, and squinted down at a clipboard he was carrying against his gleaming buttons. “Ah,” he said. “Pavel Bauer. Off to buy some flax?”

“We knew right then,” Anneliese said, “that someone had betrayed us.”

Marta made a discreet gesture to show Mrs. Bauer where her eye makeup had smeared. Anneliese dabbed at her eye with the back of her hand.

“He hauled us off the train immediately,” Pavel was saying. “He didn’t even look at Pepik’s passport. We spent the night in prison.”

Anneliese started to cry again. Her cheeks were the bright pink of one of little Vera Stein’s china dolls.

“In prison? Why in prison?”

Anneliese looked at Marta, exasperated. “Because they were forged documents. They saw we were trying to get out of the country.” She wiped her eyes again. “There was an announcement . . . A man called out as we were leaving that this train would be the last allowed through.” She blew her nose on her sister’s handkerchief. It was monogrammed with a swirly blue A, Alžběta’s first initial, as well as Anneliese’s own. “The borders have closed,” she said. “We’re officially stuck. The country will be occupied.”

“The borders have closed? Really?” Marta paused, taking this in. Then, because she could not quite fathom the terrible implications, she asked again, “You spent the night in prison?”

Marta waited for Pavel to say “Not in prison exactly,” but he only nodded. His simple gesture suggested just the opposite, that the word prison was woefully inadequate to conjure the night they had suffered.

“Even Pepik?”

“They took Pepik somewhere else. He won’t say where.”

“The borders are being patrolled. We’re stuck,” said Anneliese. But Marta was trying hard not to hear this. She thought instead of her young charge, held against his will. “Why did they keep Pepik? He’s just a baby!”

“Things are changing. The world we live in is not fair anymore,” said Anneliese.

“All of the Sudeten Jews have been sent to a camp,” Pavel added.

“A camp? What do you mean?” asked Marta.

But Pavel knew nothing about the camps beyond the rumours. “I do know that we’re lucky to have gotten off so easily,” he said. “They could have kept us.”

“And they did keep our things. The passports, our money, my jewellery.”

Marta wanted to ask about the watch sewn into Mrs. Bauer’s coat, but that would betray her clandestine listening.

A feeling came over her then, like when she’d had scarlet fever as a little girl. Vertigo, crawling skin, a sense that the world around her was not quite real. Because it couldn’t be so—what they were telling her couldn’t be true. Her grievance had melted away entirely, and what was left was love for the Bauers, righteous and pure. Like a mother’s love, she thought. She would fight for them, protect them at all costs. But were the borders really closing? Would people really be held inside the country against their wills, like animals in a cage? If this was the case, it was slowly dawning on her, then she had done something terribly, irrevocably wrong.

Marta forced herself to take a deep breath. She rearranged the unthinkable thought to make the Bauers the ones who were overreacting. They would see: all this was easily fixable. Tomorrow she would go down to the station with her savings and buy them new tickets out.

But when Pavel turned on the radio in the middle of the following afternoon, it was announced that Jozef Tiso had just returned from a conference with Adolf Hitler and had proclaimed a separate Slovak state.

“A separate what?” Marta asked. With the Sudetenland already gone there would be nothing left of their country whatsoever.

The Bauers stood by the radio as though it were a dear friend on a deathbed. The Czech foreign minister, František Chvalkovský, and President Hácha, they heard, had been ordered to Berlin. Finally, later in the day, it was reported that the German army had crossed the border and occupied the frontier town of Ostrava. Pavel was translating the radio broadcast, but he added the last detail himself. “Ostrava,” he said to Marta. “The town where you were born.”

Marta crossed the room to the fireplace and stood facing the ornate mantelpiece. She had always thought of money as the great protector and of the Bauers as all-powerful. In the past she had suffered because she was poor, this was true, and did not have the resources to leave her home when she needed to. But it now seemed that no amount of money could save the Bauers from what was happening around them. Hitler, she realized with a shock, was serious. She’d read Mein Kampf, and Ernst had explained to her Hitler’s thoughts on the “Jewish peril.” Perhaps, she thought, by telling Ernst about Pavel’s plans to leave, she really had foiled the Bauers’ only chance for escape.

Perhaps, because of her, the course of the Bauers’ lives would now change.

But deep down Marta did not believe she had this kind of power; she didn’t believe she could alter fate. Fate doled itself out according to action, according to how people behaved. The Bauers had proven themselves to be good after all. So things would work out for them in the end.

When Marta woke, it was snowing. She could feel it without having to look; the air was different, muffled in the silence that only winter brings. She fought the urge to fall back into the thick blankets of sleep; instead she got up and put on her slippers and robe and opened the shutters of the little window in the hall.

It was still dark, the barest hint of light on the horizon. Like a premonition, like the last dream before waking.

She picked a bit of sleep from the corner of her eye and stood in front of the window looking down. Her ankles cold beneath her housecoat. The street below was empty; then there was a bicycle. Afterwards she would think back to this lone rider and imagine he’d worn a cape and carried a sword. The Angel of Death entering the city. But it was an officer’s peaked cap, a Schirmmütze, that he wore, and a feldgrau wool tunic with epaulettes and glinting buttons. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air, like a villain from a storybook. Marta closed her eyes to try to make the officer disappear, but when she opened them again he was still there, and behind him the whole street was full of soldiers, the Angel’s army streaming up the steep hill from the glimmering city below. The snow was falling heavily, making a fairy tale of Prague. The swirling white against miles of black and grey made it seem as if they had come from the world of an old photograph, a world from which all the colour had been drained. And there was something else that made her think they were part of a dream: they were driving on the wrong side of the road.

Marta turned her back to the window. The Bauers could have got out, she said to herself. And you could have been with them. She spoke to herself in the third person, as someone separate from her real self. Someone else would now have to cope with the crippling guilt—because there was no way she could manage it.

She went to wake the Bauers but saw there was already a light on in the parlour. It was five in the morning but they were already dressed, Anneliese in a knitted skirt and pearls, Pavel in a charcoal suit, his briefcase open on the table. Inside was a fat stack of American dollars held together by a rubber band. The first thing she heard when she came into the room was the Czech radio station: “German army infantry and aircraft are beginning the occupation of the territory of the republic at six o’clock. The slightest resistance will cause the most unforeseen consequences and lead to the intervention becoming utterly brutal. All commanders have to obey the orders of the occupying army. The various units of the Czech army are being disarmed . . . Prague will be occupied at six-thirty.”

She continued to listen: the message was being repeated.

Pavel turned to look at Marta, his face pink, as though the knot on his silk tie had been tied too tight.

“We had a phone call from the police chief.”

Marta pulled her robe around her body.

“The chief said that we are responsible for opening the factory as usual.”

“Can you believe it?” Anneliese asked.

“Then I got another call, from Hans. Offering to blow the factory up.”

“It’s the ides of March,” Anneliese said.

“Blow it up! Why?” Marta looked at Pavel.

“There has been an ordinance issued to install Czech trustees in Jewish businesses.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Bauer?”

“They’re taking our companies.”

Marta looked away. Ernst had been right. Pavel would lose what was his, one way or another. The unfairness of this washed over her. The indignity.

“Hácha’s daughter is married to a Jew,” Anneliese was saying. “He’s supposed to be a moderate.”

Pavel snorted. If he had not been so dignified, Marta thought, he would have spat.

“Did you hear about the conversation between Hitler and Chamberlain?” Marta asked. She wanted suddenly, desperately, to cheer the Bauers up; a joke was the only thing she could think of.

“Tell me.” Pavel leaned forward, eager to be entertained, distracted.

“Hitler and Chamberlain met in the street. And Hitler said, ‘Chamberlain, give me Czechoslovakia.’ And Chamberlain said, ‘Okay.’”

Marta paused for effect.

“The next day, Hitler ran into Chamberlain again. And he said, ‘Chamberlain, give me your umbrella.’ But Chamberlain said, ‘My umbrella?! Why, that belongs to me!’”

The Bauers laughed briefly, but Marta could see she hadn’t succeeded in lifting their moods. They turned back towards each other right away, faces solemn.

“Did you try to reach your mother?” Anneliese asked.

“I couldn’t,” Pavel said.

“It’s unbelievable. That Hácha signed that piece of paper.”

“If he didn’t sign we would have been bombed. Right now we would all be a big pile of smoking ashes.”

By the time Pepik woke, Messerschmitts were swooping low over the Vltava River, their shadows skimming across the choppy water. They rose steeply to clear the bridges, then plunged back down like hawks heading for the kill. Pepik, still in his blue flannel nightshirt, began to narrate the aircrafts’ movements. “Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen . . . an attack like the world has never known . . .” There was something blasé about his tone, though, as if he were a bored field correspondent, a newsman who had seen what the world had to offer and was no longer easily impressed.

Pavel left shortly after seven to go down to the factory. None of the workers had telephones, he said; someone would have to be sent house to house to tell them to report for work. He opened the door to leave; the wind blew in and lifted the edge of his scarf out sideways, like a child’s drawing of a snowman. “I’m late,” he said. He looked over at Marta then and held her eye for a moment before closing the door. She had a sudden, forcible feeling she would never see him again.

The following afternoon Marta returned from the greengrocer and saw two pairs of men’s leather shoes in the hall. Two well-tailored overcoats. There was something else too, a kind of hush in the flat. It was the silence of nothing at all being said, a silence that had come to signify over the past months that the opposite was true, that things of great consequence were being said, only behind locked doors.

She went into the parlour and found Pepik beneath the oak table, holding Der Struwwelpeter. “I’m busy,” he said.

She crouched down and kissed his forehead. “What time is it, miláčku?”

“Tick tock,” he said.

He wrinkled his brow and pretended to be reading, but he was, she saw, holding the book upside down. She kissed him again and turned it right side up. He made a little humph and turned it upside down again.

Stubborn, like his father. She heard Pavel come into the dining room behind them.

The light bulb of happiness flicked on inside her. She stood to move towards him, then saw the man behind Pavel. Ernst. She backed up quickly to behind the wall, out of view. Crouched down and leaned her cheek against the cool plaster. She could hear her heart in her ears. What was Ernst doing here? He had obviously not yet succeeded in getting hold of all of Pavel’s assets; Marta surmised that Ernst knew there was more money hidden away. He would need to work quickly now that Prague had been taken. He was doubling his efforts.

Ernst had already visited the Steins’ flat, of course, the day he came to ask Marta where the Bauers had gone. But from her hiding place she could see he was letting Pavel give him the tour, show him around as though he’d never seen the place before.

He stood at the mantel and looked at the photo of tiny Eva Stein.

He picked up the heavy silver menorah as though for the first time. There must have been something in its weight he found compelling.

Pavel sat down on a dining room chair, crossed one leg over the other, and got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco. “Now that we’re done our business,” he said, “are you on your way to the town square to salute Blaskowitz’s honour guard?”

Ernst was reaching for his own pipe. Marta saw lines in his hair where the comb had been pulled through. She shifted on her haunches; her leg was falling asleep, but if she stood, she knew, they would hear her.

“I suppose all the German soldiers will be required to stop and salute,” Pavel said. “And Blaskowitz’s proclamation—that the Germans are here not as conquerors but to create ‘conditions for the peaceful collaboration of the two peoples’! How inane! Does he think we’re completely blind?”

Marta recalled the most recent sad radio broadcast by President Hácha. He had defined independence as a short period in Czechoslovakia’s national history that had come to an end.

Ernst tapped down his tobacco; the two men sucked their pipes in silence, their cheeks moving in and out like codfish.

“There will be lots of Germans at the ceremony tomorrow,” Ernst said mildly.

“Because of von Neurath?”

Baron Konstantin von Neurath, even Marta knew, would be appointed the new leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Ernst nodded. “They’re sending in special trains from the Sudetenland to greet him.”

“They’re worried the new Reichsprotektor won’t be welcomed by us Czechs?” Pavel’s voice was gleeful. “There must be fewer Nazis in our midst than we think.”

Quite the contrary, Marta thought as she crouched behind the wall. Ernst kept quiet too, and she understood this was his strategy: let his silence be taken as agreement and he would not have to lie outright.

“And what about you?” Pavel asked his friend again. “The powers that be at the factory have sent you up with the schoolchildren to greet the former foreign minister?” He was trying to keep his voice light but he clearly wanted to know what, exactly, Ernst was doing in Prague.

Ernst had a leg crossed over his knee and was bobbing it slightly, like an old lady. “That’s right. I’m here to welcome the Reichsprotektor.”

It was obvious that Pavel wasn’t satisfied, but he could not press the matter any further. Ernst must have sensed his friend’s uncertainty though, because he said quickly, “Herrick needed someone to do damage control with our supplier in London, and it’s easier from Prague. At least, that’s what I told him.”

He winked at Pavel—Marta couldn’t see it but she felt the gesture inhabiting the moment of silence. “I wonder what Masaryk would think if he could see Hácha,” Ernst continued.

“They say he fainted and had to be revived by Hitler’s doctor. And I heard he was forced to enter Prague Castle by the servant’s entrance.”

Ernst turned his head sharply. “Hitler? The servant’s entrance?”

“Not Hitler!” Pavel said. “Hácha.”

Marta’s leg was almost completely numb. She willed herself to forget it, to focus instead on the talk in the next room. But when she shifted on her haunches, she found she could not feel the limb at all. There was no choice but to stand; otherwise she would fall over. She rose as quietly as she could and hobbled forward briefly; it was as though her leg was made of wood. She went to skirt the edge of the room and go up the stairs behind the men’s backs, but she was too awkward and unsteady on her feet, too noisy, and they both turned to look at her as she entered.

Ernst stood. He and Marta were frozen, two feet apart, their eyes locked.

Pavel cleared his throat and said, slightly puzzled, “Ernst, you must remember Marta, Pepik’s governess?”

“Yes,” Ernst said. “Of course I do. Hello again, Marta.”

He reached over to kiss the back of her hand. It was a gesture appropriate only for a lady—and therefore there was something mocking in it—but Marta had no choice but to submit. Ernst’s lips were dry and cold.

Marta thought: Judas and Jesus. A kiss of betrayal.

Her leg was on fire as the blood rushed back through it.

She and Ernst looked at each other again in a contest of wills. All at once it came to her: she would confess. She would tell Pavel everything—that Ernst was against him, that he was the one who had thwarted their escape. If she implicated herself, so be it—she could not bear to keep the secret for a single second longer. But the grandfather clock ticked loudly in her ear and no sound came from her mouth. She willed herself to speak—it was just a matter of getting started, she knew—but the truth was, she did not have the courage. And Ernst had guessed as much. There was a smirk on his face, subtle but undeniable.

If Ernst was outed, Marta would go down with him. And Marta, they both knew, had more to lose.

The moment passed; Ernst said he really should be going. He had business to attend to, he said, and looked over at Marta and winked.

The two men clapped each other on the back and Pavel thanked Ernst for his offer.

“Do let me know,” Ernst said casually, “if you’d like further protection for your investment in the manner we discussed.”

Pavel cleared his throat, noncommittal. “Did you hear the one about Hitler’s conversation with Chamberlain?”

Ernst said yes, he’d already heard it.

“Marta told me that one,” Pavel said, pleased to be able to credit her. And Ernst said lightly, “Did she? I’m not surprised. She’s a clever girl, isn’t she. Your Marta.”

On April 5 Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the new Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, arrived in Prague. The powers that be had arranged for sausage vendors and old-fashioned minstrels; from down on the street Marta could hear a big brass band pumping out “Das Lied der Deutschen” and the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi anthem. A national holiday had been proclaimed.

“Will we hang the swastika?” Marta asked Anneliese. All citizens had been ordered to do so, but Anneliese looked at her as though she were crazy. “Are you joking?” she asked. “We’ll pay the fine.”

When Marta leaned out the window into the bright spring morning she saw that the bulk of Czech householders obviously felt the same. Despite the supposed celebration, she could count only five flags along Vinohradská Street. The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, had reported that all schools and associations would be sending delegations to greet the German diplomat, but the crowd looked thin along the sidewalks, and only a few people followed the brigade as it proceeded down to Václavské náměstí for the military parade. Marta saw a group of adolescent boys with Nazi armbands running alongside the procession, their mouths wide open, screaming their enthusiasm into the roar of the wind. But on the opposite side of the street a woman in a red kerchief couldn’t help but cry, tears streaming down her fat cheeks as she gave the Nazi salute.

Pavel was sitting behind the big oak desk in the study, sharpening pencils to exactly the same length and placing them, tips up, in a Bavarian beer mug. The sharpener made a sound like an automobile out of gear. Marta went into the room, willing herself to speak. She had lost her nerve on the day of Ernst’s visit but perhaps it wasn’t too late. Perhaps, if she at least revealed Ernst’s agenda now, further harm might be prevented. It was gnawing at her, knowing what she knew. It woke her in the middle of the night, her heart racing. The awful dreams of her father had returned. But now when her father turned to look at her, he wore Ernst’s face.

“Mr. Bauer,” she started, before she could second-guess herself, but Pavel interrupted.

“I’ve been suspended,” he said.

“Mr. Bauer?”

“Call me Pavel.”

Marta looked at him more closely then, and saw how he’d changed. It wasn’t just that he looked older—which he did—but also that he’d been worn down in some vague yet undeniable way. He was softer, more humble. He was afraid.

“One of von Neurath’s minions arrived at the factory,” he was saying, “to tell us that we must have a ninety-two percent Aryan workforce, and no Jews in management or upper-level ownership.” Pavel pulled a pencil from the sharpener’s blade and blew the graphite dust from the tip. “Of course there is no choice but to comply.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I don’t understand why the factory has not been taken away completely.”

Marta was still standing on the opposite side of the room. From outside came the sound of someone shouting: a single high-pitched shriek, then silence. There was a second chair on the opposite side of Max’s desk; Pavel motioned with his chin for her to sit down. Now was her chance. She didn’t let herself stop to reconsider. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” she said.

Pavel touched the tip of his finger to a newly sharpened pencil lead and brought it away—a small black dent remained in the flesh. “Ninety-two percent,” he said. “But he seemed to pull the number from thin air.” He ran the back of his hand over the stubble on his cheek and then realized she’d spoken. “Sorry?” he said, looking up.

She finally had his attention. She opened her mouth, prepared to tell Pavel everything.

“Marta?” he said.

She closed her mouth again. He was eyeing her curiously now, but all at once she had changed her mind. What had she been thinking? She could no more reveal herself than she could shoot herself in the head. Pavel had been going over and over their failed attempt at escape, worrying it like a loose tooth. Who had betrayed them? He suspected Kurt Hofstader, Max’s first manager, the one who had lost his job to Pavel. But how had he known? Someone from the floor, one of the German workers? He and Anneliese had been so careful. Pavel had never once suggested anyone in their old town, and Marta knew it hadn’t crossed his mind that Ernst might have betrayed him—any more than it had crossed his mind that she might have. His implicit trust in her sharpened her regret. To confess would mean the end of her life, or at least the end of the life she wanted to live, the one at the centre of the Bauer family.

Pavel cleared his throat and Marta realized she had to say something. “It’s Pepik,” she said. “He hasn’t been himself. He’s so withdrawn. I’m terribly concerned about him.”

It was odd. As Marta spoke she realized that what she was saying was true. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to address with Pavel—at least, it wasn’t what she had thought she’d wanted to address—but another part of her, she realized, had been waiting all along for the chance to ask for advice about Pepik. She couldn’t stand her own incompetence with the boy lately, her inability to protect him. She pictured him closed up in his room, staring at his train, his face slack. “The occupation hasn’t been good for Pepik,” she started, and then chastised herself; it wasn’t as if the occupation were something that could be corrected for the sake of the child’s well-being. But the truth of what she was saying came over her again, and she forged ahead.

“Do you remember when we arrived, in January?” she asked Pavel. “And you mentioned the man who is sending the Jewish children out of the country?”

Pavel gave a little laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“You and I. We think alike.”

“Perhaps we should try to get Pepik on one of those trains.” Marta looked at Pavel. He had inserted another pencil into the sharpener. She corrected herself: “Perhaps you should try to put Pepik on one of those trains.”

Pavel turned the crank; there was the terrible grinding. “Yes,” he said, without looking up. “I think you’re right.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “You do?”

“On a Winton transport.” He raised his gaze then, evaluating her. He blew some pencil shavings off the pointed tip and placed it in the beer mug next to the others. “It’s already done,” he said finally. “I just heard from Winton’s secretary. Pepik is on the list. It’s not safe for him here.”

Marta blinked, taking this in. It seemed like too much of a coincidence. All the fighting with Anneliese, all Pavel’s resisting—was this all that had been required? For someone to ask him pleasantly?

For her to ask him?

But that was wishful thinking. Pavel had come up with the idea on his own.

She cleared her throat. It was real, then? It seemed impossible, suddenly, and she almost wished she’d never broached the subject. She told herself Pepik was too young to travel, but in truth she was also worried about what it would mean for her.

“When does the train leave, Mr. Bauer?”

“Call me Pavel!” he snapped. But he repented immediately. “I’m sorry, Marta, I didn’t mean to raise my voice. It’s just that it makes me feel so . . . old.” He tapped the side of the beer mug with his finger. “June 5. Soon.”

Marta nodded.

“So you think it’s the right thing to do?” he asked, suddenly uncertain.

She was still unused to having her opinion solicited and felt caught out, as if a roving white searchlight had zeroed in on her and revealed her to have an inner life after all. But she thought of Mr. Goldstein and the Kristallnacht beatings, and of little Pepik forced to sit in the back of the class in their old town. She thought of his big, bewildered eyes. What kind of person was she to be worrying so much about herself? She did want to protect Pepik. Above all else. “It’s the right thing,” she said confidently. And then: “Does Mrs. Bauer agree?”

Pavel nodded tersely and then changed the subject. He too couldn’t stand the thought of Pepik leaving. “Did you see the parade?”

Marta told him about the woman crying while giving the Nazi salute.

“Were they tears of joy?”

“Sadness.”

“Yes,” Pavel said.

“But she could have stayed home!”

Pavel shrugged. “People are driven by things they don’t understand.”

“I suppose that’s true . . .”

“It’s true,” Pavel said. “Do you know your own motives? Why you act the way you do?”

Marta was silent.

“There’s something else I want to tell you,” Pavel said.

Spring arrived like a peddler selling flowers. The last of the snow melted and the lilacs came out, defiant. Tulips and daffodils were laid on various monuments, gracing first one side of the political spectrum and then the other. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday the citizens of Prague mourned their lost sovereignty by laying lilies on the Jan Hus statue in Old Town Square, alongside a wreath emblazoned with the Czech motto: Pravda vítězí—truth shall prevail. And on the fifth of May several bouquets were laid on the monument to Woodrow Wilson outside the train station. The former U.S. president, Pavel told Marta, had helped to create Czechoslovakia after the Great War.

Now that Pavel was home all day he had become a tutor of sorts for Marta. He filled her in on bits of history and geography, on facts she was ashamed to think most children learned in their first years of school. He also told her about the new things he was learning about his religion: the famous rabbi Rashi, born of a pearl thrown into the Seine, and the symbolism of the long beards and sideburns like those of Mr. Goldstein. He told her about the bar mitzvah ritual—which she already knew—and that Pepik would have one even though he himself hadn’t. In exchange Marta shared the minutiae of her days, telling him about the zelná polévka she planned to cook the following evening, or a joke about von Neurath she’d heard from the boy who delivered the coal. It was hard to believe Pavel could be interested, but Marta saw it distracted him. “They give me pleasure,” he said. “Your details.”

She was flattered, but beneath that she never stopped feeling anxious: there was only a little time left before Pepik was to be sent away. Before Marta would be sent away from the Bauers as well. What good was a governess without a child? She tried not to think about where she would go. About the fate that was sure to befall her.

Anneliese was barely ever home. Only once that month did she and Pavel go out together, to the National Theatre. They returned to the flat after curfew, cheeks flushed pink with the cold. The Prague Symphony’s rendition of Bedřich Smetana’s patriotic suite, “Má Vlast,” had been followed by a standing ovation, Pavel said, that lasted a full quarter of an hour. His eyes shone as he told Marta about the tears in the audience, the cheers and whistles from the otherwise refined European elite. The applause stopped only when the conductor actually kissed the score and held it above his head, like an Olympic athlete with a medal.

Anneliese, who had been rifling through her purse for her cigarettes, said, “It was amazing, really. To be part of that crowd, to stand up together for one thing.” She stamped her high-heeled boots to get rid of the snow.

“An army of symphony-goers,” Pavel agreed.

“An illusion, of course,” Anneliese said. “That we all stand together.”

“How so?” Pavel helped his wife off with her fur coat and passed it to Marta to hang in the wardrobe.

“The fellow in the street afterwards, for just one example.”

“He was only a little Nazi urchin.”

“And the Meyers won’t speak to us.”

“Do you think I need to be reminded?”

The telephone rang, a shrill brrrring that echoed through the flat. Pavel crossed the parlour in his snowy galoshes, leaving a line of puddles behind him.

“Yes,” he said. “Speaking.” His face was uncertain. He waited, then said, “He’s been on the list for a month.”

Marta pressed her face into the cold, smooth fur of Anneliese’s coat and inhaled deeply: the smell of snowy winter woods and, beneath it, perfume and cigarettes. She hung the coat up and turned the little key in the wardrobe door.

“We received the letter last week,” Pavel was saying into the phone. He waited again, listening, and then said loudly, “No, I assure you he is Jewish. As are both his mother and I.”

Marta turned and saw Pavel take the Star of David from his pocket and grip it tightly in his palm. There was another long pause before he said, “Yes, that’s correct. But it was just a precaution. My wife thought it might help.”

He held the horn to his ear and glared at Anneliese.

“No, no,” he said again. “I assure you—” Whoever was on the other end interrupted, talking at length. Pavel’s face was pinched with the effort to hold his tongue, to hear the other speaker out. “He’s Jewish,” he said, when it was finally his turn. “If you require documentation I will certainly be able . . . He’s—” But the other party had hung up; there was a long silence before Pavel too put down the receiver. His cheeks were bright red. “Well done,” he said, without meeting his wife’s eye.

Anneliese didn’t answer.

“You wanted to protect him? Look what your protection has done. Now he can’t get out of the country at all.”

Anneliese covered her mouth and spoke into her palm, as though trying to muffle her own words. “Who was it? The secretary?”

“Yes, the secretary. And you can guess what he said.”

She lowered her head to her hands. “Perhaps if we speak to Winton directly?”

“No,” Pavel said. “He made it very clear. The decision was Winton’s, in fact. Because, you see, there are so many Jewish children desperate to get out that it simply doesn’t make sense to send those with a Christian baptismal certificate.”

He paused. “Does it?”

“Oh Pavel, I’m so . . .” Anneliese shook her head and massaged her scalp with her fingers. “Hitler has started killing the Jews. Killing Jewish children. I heard it but I didn’t . . .” She blinked, and a single tear rolled down her left cheek. “He can’t go? Really?”

“No.”

“Can’t we—”

“I told you. It’s done.”

“It’s done?”

“It’s over,” Pavel said.





Brno, 10 June 1939

Dear Mr. Nicholas Winton,

I am addressing you as the mother of Helga Bruckner, who was supposed to be on your children’s transport last week, June 3. We received your secretary’s correspondence, and understand, of course, that it was necessary to remove Helga from your list due to unforeseen circumstances. I can only imagine the logistical details you are coping with and am well aware that there are only so many spots for a much larger number of deserving children.

I would like to tell you at this time, however, that our Helga was born with a withered leg. I apologize for not notifying you of this earlier. You see, we are accustomed to people judging her for this flaw, which of course is no fault of her own, and we did not want her condition to hinder her chance of leaving the country. Dear Mr. Winton, I am telling you this now in hopes that you will be able to find room for her on your next train. The truth of the matter is, she is very vulnerable, unable to defend herself, and unable to run should the need arise. She walks only slowly, and with a crutch. I do not need to inform you of the political situation here at the moment—you are obviously acutely aware of it, to have embarked on such a noble project as yours is. So I beg you, please, to help our Helga. She is an only child, and exceptionally kind and gentle, and I know she would make any British family happy.

I thank you a second time for your kindness.

Marianna Bruckner

(FILE UNDER: Bruckner, Marianna. Died Birkenau, 1943)





AT NIGHT I WALK BY THE RIVER and think about everything lost. It’s a cliché, sure, but for every decision that gets made, a billion other options are forsaken. This is true even of happy events. Take a wedding—one future chosen and an infinite number of others let go. Or conception: Think of all the sperm! Of all the people who now never will exist.

I wonder if this is how my mother thought of me. If she would have preferred me to arrive at another time. Or perhaps as a different child entirely.

I imagine her as a woman not particularly taken with motherhood. As a woman with other things on her mind.

“Lisa,” I tell myself, “don’t be so dramatic.”

The truth is I’m a little prone to wallowing.

After you stood me up at Schwartz’s I closed my file on you. I closed it the way I’ve tried to close the one on my mother, the one that nevertheless always finds its way to the top of the pile. The Freudians were wrong—about so many things!—but the influence of parents, that part at least they got right. There’s a feeling that comes over me, a feeling that has nothing to do with my mother and at the same time equals her absence. If I’m walking late at night through the quiet winter streets and the smell of someone’s laundry floats up from the vent in their basement. If there’s a light on in a living room, a table lamp or the TV’s blue glow. If there are people moving around behind a lace curtain. Their details are obscured; I pretend it could be her. The longing sharpens until I think I might pass out. I find some excuse to lean over, to tie up my bootlace; I catch my breath and straighten back up and crane my neck. Trying to get a glimpse. Once a man came to the front door. Snow boots pulled on over plaid pajama bottoms. He cleared his throat. “Can I help you?” he asked.

I realized I’d been standing there for probably half an hour. “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was just . . .” But I could not think of anything I might have been doing, so I turned away and kept walking.

One step. Two steps.

Hope, unanswered over a life as long as mine, becomes more of a curse than a blessing.

I don’t really know what to say about my mother. I wonder who she could have been as part of my adult life. When you don’t have something, it’s easy to idealize it. I understand that, I really do. Still, I hate to hear people complain about their mothers. I always have to fight back the urge to tell them how lucky they are.

Which, of course, would make me sound like a mother myself.

There’s a park I sometimes pass when I’m walking late at night. The playground abandoned, ghostly. Sometimes I’ll wedge myself into one of the swings and drag my heels in the sand for a while. Once I happened by the park in the middle of the afternoon and the place was full of women and strollers. It was easy to pick out the parents from the nannies. The parents were the ones who were showing off their children, bragging about math scores and soccer goals, as though intelligence and good behaviour on the part of the child makes the parent herself worthwhile.

The nannies had enough detachment to give the kids room to breathe.

Still, it’s flesh and blood I wonder about. It’s hard for most people to imagine what it’s like to have absolutely nobody. No flesh of my flesh, no blood of my blood. For a while there was a glimmer of hope about my father, but that turned out to be a pipe dream. I go weeks, months, without anyone knowing where I am. Without anyone checking up on me, I mean.

I know what you’re thinking. I wonder, of course I do.

Is there a childless woman who doesn’t?

But I think it’s for the best. No, let me rephrase that. I’m sure it’s for the best. To have a child is to open yourself up to the greatest loss. All you have to do is think for two seconds about the camps, about the mothers in line for selection who had their children torn from their arms. About the children who were lured into trucks with the promise of chocolate. Herded like baby lambs into holding pens. Stripped and shorn. That’s all there was to it. They were gassed to death and burned. They drifted west, a thin scrap of cloud, from the mouths of the godlike chimneys.

And you too are gone from me now, Joseph. I wonder what would have happened if we had found each other earlier. If things might somehow have been different. If you might have lived a life less full of pain. I wonder if there was something more I could have done to make things better for you in the end.