Far to Go

Part Four

Kindertransport





Chapter Seven



THE TRAIN WAS LONG AND BLACK, and entering it was like being swallowed by a snake. The snake had dislocated its jaw to take Pepik in, and now he was being worked down into its body, deep, to the tip of its tail. Pepik made a little slithering motion; he put his hands on his stomach and imagined the way the snake felt, all the little bodies tumbling down inside it. There were so many children. His eyelashes were wet but he blinked and swallowed, swallowing himself, letting himself be swallowed.

The snake was getting full. Soon it would slither off through the grass.

The last car of the train was crammed full of children. Two sisters clung to each other, crying. The older girl had skin the colour of flour and hair like a Brillo pad. Every minute or so she would take a deep breath, wipe her cheeks, and say brightly, “We’ll get to go to the seaside!” or “The Fairweathers have kittens!” and then immediately dissolve back into sobs. Behind her was a little boy, barely old enough to stand, clutching a bottle of milk in the centre of the aisle. Someone bumped into him; he rocked back and forth on his heels like an inflatable clown and toppled in slow motion onto his bottom. The milk spilled down his front. The boy’s mouth opened, wider and wider, like a pupil dilating; it hit the end of its reach and he started to howl. An adolescent girl who had been put in charge of the carriage jumped to her feet. “Oh shoot,” she said. “You little rascals! Everyone into their seats!” She clapped her hands together. She picked the milk-soaked toddler up, struggling under his weight and trying to console him, but seemed at a loss when faced with the wet vest. A moment later she had put the crying child back on the floor and was flipping through a Film Fun magazine.

Pepik took a seat next to a fat boy whose cheeks looked like apples. The train had not yet started to move but the other boy had already taken out his lunch bag, had unfolded the newspaper wrapping, and was scarfing down chlebíčky. The girl in charge of the carriage had her face buried in her leather bag and was taking out its contents item by item. A comb, a bar of dark chocolate. She unfolded a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, placed them on her nose, and turned towards the window—looking not at her parents on the platform but at her own reflection in the glass.

Pepik wanted to take his sweater off—he was so hot—but it got tangled in the leather strap of his rucksack and he struggled, sweat pouring off him. His arm was stuck behind his back, and he twisted his torso and thought hard about the snake that could wiggle its way out of anything. His arm came free. When he turned back to sit down, the boy with the fat cheeks had taken his seat. “What’s in your lunch?”

“Nothing,” Pepik said. He drew his own brown paper bag protectively towards his stomach. The boy made a lunge for it; Pepik turned quickly, and his head reeled. The sound of his heart beating behind his eyes was the sound of a thousand stallions galloping through the Black Forest at night. He needed to get off the train. It came over him suddenly and urgently. It was as if his father’s words were water behind a blockage in a pipe: they burst through all at once. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.

He didn’t want to!

He put his rucksack down on the floor and the fat boy stuck his hand in and came out with one of the crabapples. Pepik didn’t stop. He pushed his way past two older boys who were making fart jokes in German and squiggled up under a wall of girls. When he came up, he was right in front of the window. The platform was packed with crying faces but he saw Marta immediately, her long, dark curls and dimple. She didn’t even need to smile: the dimple was always there. Pepik’s eyes locked on her like the clasp on his valise.

Marta was scanning the length of the train, looking for him too.

Pepik started screaming. It was a wordless scream, a blast of pure sound, and only after several seconds did the individual words begin to assert themselves, flinging out in every direction like silver balls in a pinball machine. “No! I don’t want to! I don’t want to go!” he shouted. “Tata, I don’t want to go, come and get me, I don’t want to, I don’t want to goooooo!” The words flew through the air, over the crowd, and pinged on the station floor unnoticed. His parents still couldn’t see him. Behind Pepik came an adult voice telling the children to move away from the windows and sit down so the train could start moving. Pepik had wedged himself halfway out of the train: the edge of the sill was digging into his stomach. The words kept coming, one after another: “Mamenka! Tata! I want to stay here with you! I want to, I want, Tata . . .” And then Marta caught his eye. A little look of surprise popped up on her face and she squeezed his father’s elbow and pointed to where Pepik was.

Pepik drew a big breath. He clung onto his nanny with his eyes, with all his might. She had seen him. She would take him off the train.

The adult voice behind him was getting louder. Children were being pulled away from the window, peeled off like leeches from sunburned skin. The train began to move. It lurched slowly, the sea of parents and grandparents lumbering awkwardly along with it. They couldn’t keep up. Pepik had to turn sideways to keep his family in view. Sweat was pouring down his back. He opened his mouth to scream again and felt a hand on his collar. A strong tug pulled him backwards into the train. “I don’t want to go!” he shouted. “I want to stay with Tata Nanny I don’t want I want—” But the adult, a woman with sturdy shoes and a pointed face like a beagle’s, had already moved on. She was making her way purposefully down the length of the car, plucking the children from the glass and snapping the windows closed and locking them. Pepik had fallen against an armrest and it took him a moment to straighten. By the time he did there were too many bodies; it was impossible to see over everyone’s heads. He ducked down and tried to crawl through the other children’s legs but got kicked in the jaw. He finally made it to the clear pane of glass, but the train was already gone from the station. Looking back he saw fields, soft and green in the June afternoon, and in the far distance the last few white handkerchiefs, rising up like fluttering doves.

The rocking of the train put Pepik to sleep. When he woke, the sun was going down. It was a dot of fire on the edge of the horizon and it burned a line towards him. It lit a small fire between his eyes.

He felt his lashes catching, the little lick of flame rising up into his brain.

There was a baby asleep in a bureau drawer balanced on the seat across from him; the drawer rocked precariously each time the train hit a bump, but nobody came to move it. Pepik leaned forward and vomited onto the floor beside it. Darkness fell like a suffocating blanket; it was hot in his head and tears slid down his face. Nobody came to put a cold cloth on the back of his neck. Sweat dripped off his face. The fat boy with the pink cheeks was asleep with his chin on his chest. Identical twin girls with blond pigtails pointed at Pepik and whispered. Their voices were like twigs snapping in a fire or snapping beneath his feet, he couldn’t tell which. When he looked down, though, he saw he was walking. He and the other children were being herded up a gangplank towards a big boat. The train had disappeared—a magician’s trick—along with everything that came before it. His mamenka and tata, his nanny. Pepik let himself be jostled forward. He was instantly devoted to the boat, its shiny silver propeller, the enormous hull that would shoulder its way through the rough waves of the English Channel. All those hours under the dining room table with his train might never have happened. The boat was his new love.

A bunch of boys were throwing a ball of socks back and forth in the air. When Pepik looked more closely, the socks sprouted wings and flapped off into the morning.

The next time he woke he was shivering. The edges of his vision were hazy but a clear spot had opened in front of him, as though someone had breathed hotly on a pane of frost-covered glass. He saw two boys, knees drawn up to their chests, sleeping beneath a single wool jacket. And when he rolled over he saw that there was another boy curled up behind him, every inch of his face covered in freckles. He had a tag around his neck with a number on it. Pepik felt his own neck and realized he was wearing a tag as well. He tugged at the string, trying to pull it off, but the boy told him he must keep it. “For your family,” he whispered in Czech, as though conveying something top secret. “So they can meet you.”

“Today?”

The boy nodded.

“And Nanny?” He wanted them, immediately. His tata and mamenka. He wanted Marta to come and change him—he had wet himself in the night—and he started to whimper.

“It’s okay,” the freckled boy soothed, in the voice of a practised big brother. “They’ll be there to meet you.”

The children were herded onto the deck to eat sugar sandwiches while the sun rose. The bread was white and fluffy and tasted like cake. Pepik thought of the German soldiers, with their appetites for Czech desserts. He remembered Tata saying that only once every larder was bare would the Nazis go back where they came from. After the snack he and the others were herded down another gangplank and into a big glass-domed station, where a crowd of adults came down on them like an avalanche. There were mothers pushing prams and men in steel-toed workboots and couples with white hair leaning on canes. The freckled boy was whisked away by a woman with one arm in a sling. Pepik waved but his new friend didn’t see him, his face already buried in an ice-cream cone. Men were still unloading suitcases from the belly of the ship and heaping them in a big pile. A group of older boys were climbing on them; one made it all the way to the top and stood there, teetering dangerously, shouting, “Take that, Blaskowitz!” as he fired his imaginary rifle into the crowd.

A young woman arrived, in elbow-length gloves and a wide hat; she lifted the infant and left the empty drawer on the floor. She was smiling as though she’d won the lottery.

The station slowly emptied. Children went home with their new families. A slower trickle of adults was arriving now, more elderly people, a woman in a wasp-waisted bouffant dress and a garden-party hat, apologizing for being late. These adults squinted at the remaining boys and girls, trying to see which was theirs to take home. Pepik sat against the wall, wrapping the string of his rucksack around the tip of his finger, tighter and tighter, until the finger turned a violent red. He kept his eyes fixed on the station door. When it opened, he stood up, expectant. He was going to see his tata! And his mamenka! And Nanny.

Where were they?

Nobody came.

Pepik sat back down again.

There was an older girl who had not been fetched either. “I’m Inga,” she said.

Pepik looked at her blankly. She was the girl, he saw, with the Film Fun magazine, the one put in charge of the train carriage who’d been so excited to set off on such an adult journey.

“It’s Norse,” she said. “My name. I am guarded by Ing, the god of fertility and peace.”

She looked at Pepik, waiting for a reaction. She sat down beside him and started to cry into her hands.

It was a man with a briefcase, finally, who came over from a faraway table to where Pepik and Inga were sitting. He had droopy brown eyes and bushy sideburns. “What are your names?” he asked. Pepik didn’t understand the words. The man shook his head slowly, as though he had done something he was very sorry for. He had a long, thin loaf of the fluffy white bread in his hand, and he broke it in two and gave them each a piece. Inga stopped crying for just long enough to cram her portion into her mouth. The man motioned for them to get up and follow him; Inga smoothed down her green checked skirt, still chewing. She wiped her face and picked up her purse, digging in it for her tortoiseshell glasses.

The man led them out the station door and across a stretch of hot tarmac. He waddled a little, their two cases banging against his legs. His car was different from Tata’s, with two windshield wipers instead of one. A horse blanket covered the worn-out upholstery. Inside it was stifling hot, and the man leaned over and rolled down Inga’s window and then leaned into the back seat and rolled down Pepik’s. There was the sound of the engine turning over.

Pepik fell asleep the minute they started moving.

When he woke, Inga was looking over at him warily. “Kam jdeš?” she asked.

Pepik rubbed his eyes. “I’m going with you.”

Inga glared at him. “Now you are. But after. Where are you going?”

Pepik shrugged.

“I’m going to the Gillfords in the countryside,” Inga said. “I’m going to learn to ride a pony!” She fixed her gaze in the middle distance as though a pony had materialized in front of her and she could climb onto its back and ride away into the future. “There will be two other girls there,” she continued. “Sisters. They’ll be almost the same as my real sister, Hanna,” Inga said, but Pepik thought she sounded uncertain.

“We’re in Scotland,” he said, because he needed to say something.

“No we’re not. Don’t you know anything? This is Liverpool. We’re in England!” She looked down her snub nose at Pepik. “How old are you anyway? Six?”

Pepik nodded.

Inga looked surprised. “Well, that explains things.”

The car continued past open fields, through little towns with outdoor cafés and wrought-iron tables set up in the sun. The man looked over his shoulder and spoke to them and Pepik was surprised to hear Inga reply. Just a few halting words, but her ability to speak the funny language made her immediately desirable in his eyes. “I want Nanny,” Pepik whimpered.

Inga didn’t reply.

“Where are we going?” he tried again.

“To London,” Inga snapped, but the uncertainty had returned to her face. She turned away from Pepik and looked out the car window. “My father is a specialist in internal medicine. My real father. In Prague.”

From her shaking shoulders Pepik saw she had started to cry.

They drove for what seemed like days, past factories and warehouses, and finally the man pulled over and stopped in front of a long brick building. It was divided into many smaller houses attached side by side. They stood at attention like a row of lead soldiers. Pepik put his hand into his rucksack and felt around, first touching a sausage he had forgotten to eat and then landing on his own soldier, cool in his hand, readying both of them for battle. “Pow!” he muttered under his breath. They had arrived. The fight against the bad guys could begin.

Inside, the house was dark. The entire front room was filled with a big oak desk, but it didn’t have carved lion’s feet like his Uncle Max’s in Prague. It wasn’t as neatly organized either. There were stacks of notebooks and open folders piled on top of each other; in the centre of the desk was a big sheet of cardboard covered with photos of children’s faces, each one with writing underneath. Inga moved some books aside and sat down daintily on the edge of the sofa. She pursed her lips and took out a lipstick; she made several attempts before making contact with her mouth.

Where was Arthur?

There was a door at the back of the room, open just a crack; maybe Arthur was in there, sleeping.

The man sat down behind the massive desk with the briefcase open in front of him. He began writing things down, checking off a list. Lifting stacks of paper and peering underneath them. Inga had moved on from her lips and was taking down her hair—the length of it was surprising to Pepik. She tipped her head to one side and began braiding, her fingers working swiftly.

“Where’s Artoor?” Pepik asked.

Inga looked cross. “Who’s Artoor?”

“The sick little boy.”

“The only sick boy here is you.”

She crossed her legs and started braiding the other side of her head.

“The other boy, with . . .” Pepik started, but he faltered. He needed to fight back. He clutched the little soldier in his fist.

Inga wrinkled her nose in his direction. She concentrated harder on her hair, her fingers whizzing.

Several minutes later the doorbell rang.

“Come in!” the man called, but the door was locked. He fumbled with a bundle of keys. More English adults appeared; there was more babbling. Inga stood up as though she understood the conversation, which turned out to be true: she was leaving. “ Čekat!” Pepik said. “Wait for me!”

But it was too late. Inga was gone. She didn’t turn around to say goodbye.

When Pepik woke, there was light streaming in the window. He was in a big feather bed. The man with the briefcase was moving around the main room like Tata, in a clean suit and tie. Pepik crawled out from under the covers and padded over to him. “ Činit ne dovoleno,” he said.

He grabbed onto the man’s trouser leg and clung there. The man laughed and lifted Pepik up, making a groaning noise to show what a big boy he was. He pretended he was about to throw Pepik onto the couch, and Pepik squealed. The man repeated the motion, swinging Pepik into the air again and again and then finally letting him fall into a big pile of laundry. It was warm and smelled like soap. Pepik wondered if the man’s soap came with the same pictures of steam engines as theirs did at home.

Home.

Sunlight knifed through the window and made him squint and close his eyes. He would stay here with this man. Sleep in the big bed and eat the fluffy white bread, and Nanny and Mamenka would come to meet him.

Today would be the day.

The man with the briefcase had gone back behind the desk and was rustling his papers again. Every now and then he would peer over at Pepik and speak to him with the funny words. Pepik let them wash over him like bubbles in a bath. He let himself drift. A feeling of moistness was gathering in him, rising up from his toes, through his legs, a gush of heat that rushed through his stomach to his throat and his mouth.

He turned and threw up onto the floor.

The man looked up sharply from his folders. He sighed heavily and let his chin fall to his chest. When he looked up, there was an expression on his face that Pepik recognized, one he had seen on the faces of adults so frequently over the past months. Disapproval? Disappointment. Something to do with water on his forehead. The thing he had accepted that had ended in his being sent away. What was it? He couldn’t quite remember.

But he knew it was his own fault that he was here.

The sun piercing the windowpane had sharpened to a point, all its heat focused on Pepik’s head. He was a little bug under a magnifying glass, about to catch fire. He wriggled, trying to move away from the glare, but his body was too heavy. The man came over to pick him up and he went limp at the adult touch. He felt soft, like chocolate left out in the sun. But he would be safe here. This man would love him and keep him.

When he opened his eyes next, though, he was back on a train.

There was a woman waiting on the platform, and Pepik loved her at first sight. Her eyes were soft and warm like melted caramel. She crouched down in front of him—he could see the glint of hairpins in her hair. This was Mrs. Milling, this beautiful woman the same age as Nanny who would take him home and help him fight the Germans.

“Jsem hladový,” Pepik said. He clung to her with his eyes.

The woman put a hand over her heart, as though taking an oath. “Look at you,” she said. “Precious thing. I wonder what you’re saying.”

Pepik leaned his head on her shoulder. The woman laughed. “What’s this?” She pointed to his chest.

Pepik looked down and saw a number pinned there. From upside down he could make out a two and two fives.

“Jsem hladový,” he repeated. Something in him was reaching up towards her—not his arms but something in his chest. Something small in the very centre of him was straining up towards her. Mrs. Milling’s eyes were full of tears.

“Who do you belong to, I wonder? What’s that language you speak?”

She smelled of talcum and of roses left to dry in the sun. Pepik waited for Mrs. Milling to pick him up, but she didn’t. The porter had placed Pepik’s red suitcase on the platform and he tried to drag it towards her so she could take him home. He was tired and hungry; he wanted a bowl of kashi sprinkled with chocolate, the way Nanny made it. His suitcase made an awful sound, like a prison door scraping open. It reminded him of something that he pushed to the bottom of his mind. Of a night he did not want to remember. Why was Mrs. Milling just sitting there? Perhaps he hadn’t been polite enough. Hadn’t Tata taught him to introduce himself properly? “Pepik,” he said, and extended his small hand. But someone gripped his shoulder from behind, and he turned to see a round man shaped very much like an egg, with skinny limbs sticking out from his body. The man’s arms and legs made Pepik think of Tata’s pipe cleaners.

Mrs. Milling stood up from her crouch. A blond wave had fallen from her hairpin; she tucked it behind her ear. “Is this your son?” she asked. “What a darling little—” But the man had a task to accomplish. He spoke to Pepik in the funny language and tried to pick him up. Pepik squirmed away and managed to drag his suitcase a few more feet towards Mrs. Milling.

He was going with her; she would feed him sweets for dinner and teach him to read, once and for all.

“Excuse me,” Mrs. Milling said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

The egg-shaped man lifted Pepik’s suitcase. He put it under one arm and lifted Pepik up under the other, gripping him firmly so his little legs were sticking out sideways and his face was looking down at the ground. Pepik’s stomach lurched. He craned his neck, looking for Mrs. Milling. Where had she gone?

“Mamenka!” he shouted.

The man kept walking, carrying Pepik like a bundle of wood. He climbed some stairs up to a tram and set Pepik down in the seat beside him. The man didn’t speak to Pepik for the next forty minutes.

They arrived at a house and a woman came out to greet them and usher them in. She was older and greyer than Mrs. Milling. A face like a slice of bloody roast beef.

“So here you are.”

“Jsem hladový,” Pepik said. He sat down on the floor cross-legged.

The egg man shrugged at the woman. “Blimey.” It was the first word Pepik had heard from his mouth.

The woman bent down and inspected Pepik as if he were a cabbage at the grocer’s, picking through his hair, looking behind his ears for dirt. The procedure continued for several minutes; she seemed to be finding him deficient. Her voice was kind though, and for a moment the little songbird stirred inside Pepik’s chest, the one that had sung for Mrs. Milling. But the woman stood back up and crossed over to the kitchen. There was a black line of soot running up the wall from the stove to the ceiling. She took a cloth and rubbed at it vigorously. Then she looked back at the round man, as though surprised to still find him there. “Go on,” she said.

She motioned with her chin in the direction of a set of stairs. The man picked up the suitcase in one arm and Pepik in the other as though he were a pile of lumber. Pepik went limp and submitted.

The room at the top of the stairs had wallpaper that was dotted with red and blue sailboats. The floorboards were blue, like the sea. Two beds that smelled of mothballs were pushed up against opposite walls: Pepik would sleep by the window. The man plopped his suitcase down and looked at the second bed, uncertain. There was someone in it, someone so small that he barely made a bump beneath the covers. Pepik tiptoed over and peered into the other boy’s face. He had pale sandy hair and a light dusting of freckles across his nose. Clear, almost translucent skin. As though the little stove inside him that kept him alive was having trouble reaching all the way up to the surface.

“Artoor?”

The boy was still as stone.

“Haló?”

The boy gave a low moan. If this was Arthur, then the people downstairs were the Millings. It was Arthur’s noise of pain that welcomed Pepik, that told him he’d reached his new home.

Several hours later Mrs. Milling—the real Mrs. Milling—came upstairs. She opened the gold clasps on Pepik’s red suitcase. “Pro boha, co je tohle?” he said.

He had not seen its contents since leaving Prague; it was like a box of trinkets or magical charms, each one possessing a secret power.

The beautiful diamond watch could transport him back in time. And the little galoshes were for walking on water. He would cross the ocean on foot if he had to.

But he would not have to. His family would come and meet him. Nanny Marta had promised.

Mrs. Milling dug through the suitcase. She lifted the newly sewn little dress pants. “Well, aren’t you the posh one,” she said. “You come from money? Do you?”

She held up his nightshirt, which she changed him into quickly and efficiently, despite the fact that he was a big boy and able to do this by himself. Pepik realized he was not going to be made to brush his teeth. The sheets looked smooth but were rough to the touch, and he felt very high off the ground after sleeping for months in the bottom bunk in Prague. Mrs. Milling tucked him in tightly, so he could barely move his limbs. He felt like a letter sealed into an envelope.

“Chci napsat dopis,” he said. “Pani. Potřebuji pero. Můžeš mi podat pero, prosím?”

Mrs. Milling looked at Pepik. Her face was a blank sheet of paper.

There was no bedtime story. Mrs. Milling left the room briefly and came back with a thermometer. Pepik opened wide and stuck out his tongue, but it was her son Arthur’s temperature she was interested in. She gave the thermometer a vigorous shake after pulling it from Arthur’s mouth, as though she hoped to change the number she saw there. Then she flicked off the light and the room was plunged into blackness.

“Sladký sen,” Pepik said to nobody, and nobody answered him back.

He leaned back on his pillow. He could see out the window from his bed: the sky was slowly ticking down into a cool cobalt blue. There were a few stars out, messengers arrived too early. Down the length of the block there were long rows of brick houses, and warehouses with their gates closed and locked. The front windows were lit, small squares of yellow against the blackness, so that the street looked like a filmstrip. He thought of Snow White, of the Happy dwarf and his own Happy face, but he didn’t feel happy; he felt terribly alone. If he crushed his head up against the wall he could see all the way down the street. He needed to keep watch for his family walking up the long road towards him.

Tata would be in the middle, with Mamenka and Nanny on each of his arms.

Pepik had smuggled his lead soldier into bed with him, and as his eyes adjusted he pushed the covers back and set the soldier on the windowsill. He sat up and crossed his legs, watching. He and his soldier standing guard together. How impressed Tata would be to see him up so late, defending the house, his gun at the ready.

“At ease,” he commanded the soldier, roughly.

He didn’t want anyone getting shot by mistake.

Across the room Arthur’s breathing was raspy and irregular, like someone tuning a radio, stations coming in and out of range. There were long stretches between breaths. Only now, in the darkness, did Nanny’s words come back: it was Pepik’s job to help Arthur get better.

“Artoor?” he whispered.

There was phlegmy gasping from the other bed. Finally Arthur spoke. “I need help. Call my mother.”

It was like hearing a dead body come suddenly back to life. Pepik imagined Arthur reaching out a clammy hand to touch him.

He didn’t understand Arthur’s words, and didn’t answer.

Morning was a needle plunged into his arm. He woke to a chill draft of air. The covers had been pulled back and Mrs. Milling was standing over him. Her eyes were small and black and her lips were pressed into a perfectly straight line. Pepik tried to pull his knees up to cover himself, but it was too late. He’d wet the bed. She had seen.

“Zarmoucený,” Pepik said.

Mrs. Milling held her breath.

She worked quickly, matter-of-factly, pulling off Pepik’s nightshirt and underpants. She managed to strip the sheets without moving him from the bed, manoeuvring his body into different positions and cradling his head under her arm. She bundled the offending sheets into her arms and left him there, naked and uncovered.

Pepik was cold, and the skin of his bottom was red and sore. The pain in his stomach reasserted itself, and he turned his head to the side and threw up on the blue floorboards.

Two minutes later Mrs. Milling returned carrying a pile of clean sheets. She was humming under her breath, but when she saw the vomit she stopped, her song breaking off mid-note. “What . . .” She leaned down and sniffed at the little pile of regurgitation, the white jelly of last night’s boiled cauliflower flecked with yellow. Then she shouted something in the direction of the hall; the round man emerged eventually at the top of the stairs, out of breath, a bottle of tomato ketchup in his hand.

“Look, Frank! He’s ill!” Mrs. Milling motioned her husband over and showed him the vomit. “More germs for . . . Doctor Travers said . . .” She was talking quickly and gesturing at her son; she sounded like she might burst into tears.

Pepik rolled over and cradled his head in his hands. It dawned on him suddenly that morning had arrived. He’d fallen asleep at his post. Nanny hadn’t come in the night, and Arthur was still sick. He had failed them. He had failed all of them.

By mid-morning Pepik was feeling a little better and half expected Mrs. Milling would make him go outside to play, but she preferred to treat him as a second sick son, bringing glasses of flat ginger ale to both boys, sterilizing the thermometer between uses. Later in the afternoon she came in to finish unpacking Pepik’s suitcase, and found the unsealed envelope containing the photo. She took out the family portrait and looked at it closely, taking her time.

Mrs. Milling looked up at Pepik. “You poor darling,” she said softly, as though she had just now realized that Pepik, too, had a family that loved him desperately. She pulled him against her in a kind of awkward squeeze.

When she went to put the picture back in the envelope, she paused, thinking better of it, and propped it up on Pepik’s bedside table instead. There was Mamenka, looking off to the side; Nanny was behind Pepik, her hands on his shoulders, her eyes cast down at him, proud.

Mrs. Milling pointed to Nanny. “Mother,” she said, enunciating clearly.

Pepik looked at her blankly; she said it a second time.

He repeated it back to her, one syllable and then the second. “Mo-ther.”

Marta. Mo-ther.

His first English word.

Mother.

When Mrs. Milling was gone, Pepik picked up the photo. His head felt funny when he looked at Nanny’s face. He rested his hot cheek against the cool plaster of the wall. Then he propped up the photo beside the lead soldier and placed the beautiful diamond watch beside that. It was like a row of three charms. The soldier stood for Tata with his Winchester rifle, and the watch for Mamenka, dressed up for a night on the town. The photo was Nanny: mother. He arranged them in one way and then shifted them around, as though he believed that if he stumbled on the correct order, he might evoke their flesh-and-blood equivalents.

Five nights had passed. They still hadn’t arrived.

Pepik lay back. He let the three charms stand guard in his place.

He woke again a little later and opened one eye. Mrs. Milling was standing at the window, her grey hair straight to her shoulders. She held Pepik’s diamond watch in one hand. She was looking at it closely, running her finger over the stones, as though wondering if it could possibly be real. He saw her hesitate for a minute. He saw her slip the watch into her pocket.

Pepik had crawled into Arthur’s bed. He was so lonely; the other child’s presence helped him sleep. It had been hours, though, since he’d felt Arthur move. Mrs. Milling crossed the floorboards towards the two boys and Pepik closed his eyes tightly, as though to make himself disappear. She touched his shoulder and began to talk crossly, starting up a stream of English scolding. It was the third time this had happened, and she did not want Pepik giving Arthur any more germs.

Mrs. Milling lifted the covers briskly, like a waiter lifting a silver dome from a plate of food. Pepik saw her fingernails, bitten to the quick. She leaned forward to feel her son’s forehead, and paused with her palm an inch from his skin.

“Arthur?”

She said it like a question and waited for a reply. When none was forthcoming she said it again, sharply this time—Arthur—and a third time, and a fourth. She held his chin in her hand and moved his head from side to side, grasped his little shoulders and squeezed. She was repeating his name, her voice gaining strength like a siren.

Pepik saw the first tear appear, like the first star on a late summer evening.

It trembled in the bottom corner of her eye, hanging there for what seemed like an eternity. It grew and swelled and finally slipped off her bottom lashes, missing the bedspread and landing on the blue floorboards.

Pepik imagined he heard a little splash.

More tears followed, pouring from Mrs. Milling’s eyes. Pepik was pushed from the bed and went into the corner of the room and curled in a ball and covered his ears. Mrs. Milling was screaming. She was shouting for her husband and shaking Arthur’s body, her face bright red, her eyes wide. She collapsed over the bed, pressing her face into her son’s chest, her wide shoulders heaving. She shook Arthur again and again, as though she couldn’t believe it, as though if she shook him hard enough his pale eyelids would flutter open.

Arthur was still and white, his features carved out of wax.

Mrs. Milling screamed as if she were being torn to pieces. She pawed at her face and pulled at her hair, sobbing.

Hearing Mrs. Milling opened something in Pepik, punctured a raft made of twigs and balloons. Water rushed in. It covered his legs—he wet himself almost immediately, the urine seeping out around him in a circle on the floor—and rose past his chest, and then his shoulders. It filled his mouth and he choked and gagged; he put his hand to his face and found it soaking. He was crying so hard he could not get his breath. He doubled over, vomiting. Everything from the past year that he had managed to bury inside him was being pulled up through his body, ripped out of his mouth. The sharks were below him, his legs in their jaws. He let go. He was quickly pulled under.

Pepik was sent to a home full of boys. An orphanage run by the Catholic Church. At night the big room fell silent. It was a silence that filled up with deep breathing, the creak of springs as someone turned over, a fart followed by laughter. The boys fell asleep one by one, like candles being blown out on a birthday cake.

Pepik lay still, eyes wide open, picturing his hunger. He was an empty shell alone on a beach in the moonlight. The waves came and went; he was filled and then emptied. Emptied, and then emptied again.

He knew he had just arrived, but where had he come from? Arthur was hazy and vague around the edges. Pepik thought back to that long, quiet street. To the hours and days he had spent watching by the window.

For whom had he been waiting? The people in his photo?

Whoever they were, they would never find him now.

They would come from the east, looking for a ghost. Dragging their shadows behind them.





Part Five

Pavel and Anneliese





June 1939

Dear Pepik,

Mamenka and I send you a hug and a snuggle. We look at your photograph every day and pray to God for your safekeeping. But why have you not written, miláčku? How we long to hear from you. To hear any news from you at all.

Your Nanny Marta sends you many kisses as well.

I hope you have been receiving our letters, that Mrs. Milling has been able to find someone to translate them into Czech for you. I am sorry we did not have time to help you learn more English before you left. I know the Millings will teach you the language and will help you answer our requests.

Please tell us what you are doing every day, and what you are eating. And about your new friend Arthur. We know you will be very kind to him and help him get better.

The house is so quiet without you. We miss your train tearing around its track. I am almost inclined to set it back up.

A train will always remind me of you.

I will sign off for now, but I promise to write again soon. And you do the same. We will all be most happy to receive some news from our darling big boy.

With love and kisses,

Tata

(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Pavel. Died Auschwitz, 1944)





I KNEW AS SOON AS I HEARD THE DOORBELL RING.

I had not given you my address, but deep down I’d been expecting you. A slight man with sloped shoulders and bushy grey eyebrows. Dandruff on your jacket. You were leaning on a cane. You wore that dour expression I’ve come to recognize, the resignation that is almost a kind of play-acting: choosing to go through the motions of living for the benefit of the outside world.

It’s a show badly acted, a small child’s charade.

And it’s true that, although you were in your seventies, there was still something of a child in your eyes.

“I’m Lisa,” I said.

You held out a hand: hair on the knuckles. “Joseph.”

Name changes are common, and translations into English. I didn’t miss a beat. “I know who you are.”

You looked almost as though you recognized me too—squinting, trying to place a vaguely familiar face.

When of course you didn’t know me from Adam. Or Eve.

“Will you come in for tea?”

I could see you taking in the dirty casserole dish in the sink, the towering stacks of periodicals against the walls. There was nothing I could offer you to eat: the fridge was empty save for some Chinese takeout mouldering in a Styrofoam container. From the way you looked around my apartment I gleaned you were the fastidious type, that your own small house was perfectly neat and organized. But instead of feeling self-conscious I experienced a kind of relief, the relief of being seen for myself, for who I really am. You made yourself at home, looking for somewhere to hang your coat.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Our fingers touched as you passed the coat to me, and I felt a rush: here was the child from the letter I’d been carrying. Here, in front of me. In the flesh. The most important Jewish prayer—the first one I learned—ran through my head: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

When I looked up, you were moving a pile of blankets off the end of the sofa. You patted the space. “Come and sit.” I was jerked out of my spiritual reveries, irked that you thought the hospitality was yours to offer. But then I saw this was just your way of getting down to business.

People become nervous when they learn new things about their past.

“Tell me everything,” you said, before I could even sit down.

I thought to myself, If only. Because, of course, there is so little I know. And so much more that’s been lost.

“I’m Lisa,” I said again, and launched into my shtick, explaining my tenure in the Holocaust Studies department, the oral histories I’ve been taking from the Kindertransport children. You were nodding rapidly—this was all information I’d left on your answering machine—but I was reciting it mostly for myself, to ground myself in the facts of my own existence. Because I too feel displaced and uprooted. I too have very little to cling onto.

“You found . . . what? A letter?” you asked.

“Some letters. From your mother and father.”

“To me?”

“Just a minute.”

I went into the study and brought out the thick file. Written on the cover in blue magic marker were the words: “BAUER, PEPIK (PAVEL AND ANNELIESE).” An address followed. The sevens had dashes through them in the old-fashioned European style.

I could see you were unprepared. “I thought that nobody wrote to me,” you said, your eyes on the names.

“Yes,” I said. “I gathered that.”

I was ready to tell you the whole chain of events—the visit to the archive that had turned these up along with several other files from the area—but I saw then that the details would only muddle things. I looked at you, my gaze steady.

“I thought I had no parents,” you said.

“Everyone has parents.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What about the photo of your family? The one you told me about on the phone?”

“But I had no reason to believe they tried to contact me.”

“Shall I get our tea?” I asked.

But you weren’t interested in tea. “I thought—” you said. “What happened to them?”

I didn’t answer right away. About either what I knew or what I didn’t know. “You’re Jewish,” I said finally, thinking this would give you a clue.

You looked at me blankly. “I go to church,” was all you said.

So there it was. Someone else lost.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Of course.”

There was a look on your face that was almost but not quite indifference, as though we were talking about something with nothing whatsoever to do with you, something at a great remove. But I’ve learned not to be fooled by an apparent lack of interest. It is almost always the legacy of dashed hopes.

“So those are letters from my parents?” You raised your eyebrows at the thick file.

“Didn’t I already—?”

“From both of them?”

“And from your nanny.”

A look crossed your face then that I’ve not quite seen before. It was as if you had been slapped unexpectedly by someone you knew and trusted. “A nanny?” you asked. “I didn’t—I had no—” But you did remember; it was coming back into your body, sluicing through you like a tidal wave, complete and overpowering. “Her name was . . . ?”

“Marta,” I said.

You nodded, eyes upward. “Yes.”

What would it be like to know nothing of your origins, to spend decades craving and wondering, and then, at the end of your life, to be delivered an answer? To realize that all your misery was for nothing, that you’d been wanted after all.

Wasn’t that what I was hoping for too?

“Where did they come from?”

“Your family?”

“The letters.”

“From the estate of a family named Milling. Where you were placed, very briefly, before . . .”

I paused here, not wanting to name what had happened after that.

Your eyes bugged out a little and you looked as though you were drowning. “I have no recollection of anyone named Milling,” you said stiffly. But you were holding your temples in the palms of your hands and your eyes were darting from side to side.

“Why don’t I give you a moment.”

You nodded, grateful, and I headed for the door. When I reached the threshold, I looked back. You were still holding your head in your hands.

The distance you’d travelled was hard to imagine. The train trips, the boat rides. Later, the airplanes. And those, of course, were only the geographical trips. I don’t have to mention the other kinds of displacements, the other leaps you’d made. When I looked at you that day, you seemed so overwhelmed, a jet-lagged, bedraggled voyageur.

I left you alone to read your family’s letters. Went into my office and checked my email. I politely but firmly declined a request from a doctoral student looking for a supervisor in the field. Perhaps I was not polite. I was certainly firm. I could see you through the open door: you had leaned your cane against the wall, its handle stooped like your own shoulders. You sat down in front of the letters. “And so,” you said. When you finally flipped the file open, the action was fast and decisive, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

I forced my gaze back to the computer, where I read a notice about a department meeting three times, not registering anything. I don’t know why the secretary—Marsha? Melinda?—still sends me these things. She knows I’ve retired. When I looked back up, I saw two letters on the table in front of you, laid out one beside the other. I’d had the letters translated, and I could tell you were suspicious, lining the English up against the Czech, as if some mistake might be revealed in the space between. I called out, “Pepik!” You didn’t lift your head. “Joseph,” I said, remembering. “Are you . . . okay in there?”

You waved your hand in the air without looking up, as if you were shooing away a dog.

It pleased me a little, this offhand gesture, as though you knew me well, had known me forever.

When I came in half an hour later, your cheeks were wet with tears. I pretended not to notice.

“You can keep the file if you want,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself offer this; usually I just give out photocopies.

“Yes,” you said. “Please.” And then, “I have so many questions.”

“Shoot,” I said. But you only sat there with the thick manila file in your hands. You took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “These are just—” You looked up at me weakly.

“Heartbreaking?”

“Yes.”

I lifted my hand to brush a hair off your jacket but lowered it again, not wanting to seem patronizing.

“They loved me,” you said.

“Yes.”

“And they ended up . . .” Your voice trailed off. You gripped your cane as though it could support you even from your seated position. “What happened to the baby?” you asked. “The one from my photo.”

I hesitated, hating to be the bearer of more bad news.

“I don’t know for certain.”

You nodded. “Okay.”

We looked at each other for a long moment.

“You think she . . . ?” you began.

“I think—” But again I lost my nerve. I’ve had this conversation many times, but the cliché is true: it doesn’t get easier.

“Lisa,” you said. My head snapped up at my name. You were looking at me steadily, as though to reassure me—to reassure both of us—that whatever I had to say could not be that bad. “That baby—Is she you?”

“She isn’t,” I said. “I’m not.”

“What happened to her then?” you asked again.

There was no choice but to tell you the truth.

I answered. “That baby was killed.”

Most often they come looking for me.

Everyone has a story to tell, and the children of the Diaspora are no different. They want to be heard, like everyone else. Heard and understood. Even more so.

Years ago I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the second official Kindertransport reunion. At the opening banquet I gave my usual spiel, and when I got down from the podium I was practically mobbed. At a certain age we all become aware of our mortality, and suffice it to say that these people were already well past that age. Blue hair and dentures. Sour breath.

I know, I know—who am I to talk?

I booked enough interviews that weekend to fill my entire next book. It would be relatively easy to write—a summary of the transcriptions, a qualitative analysis using variables of selfhood and self-concept. And yet, as I gathered names and email addresses—or phone numbers, because many of my would-be subjects didn’t have email—I was aware that something was missing, that the most important piece of the puzzle had not yet fallen into place.

I began to fear I’d been on the wrong path. That I should have been writing something else altogether.

And so it was that I showed up at your place seven days after our first meeting. Your home was a bungalow in the west end of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, red brick with a wire fence enclosing the small backyard. Inside, the house was organized and clean, sparsely furnished. Cream-coloured carpet covered every square inch of the floor, kitchen included. I thought this was odd. Perhaps you didn’t want your feet ever to get cold.

You had spent the entire intervening week reading and rereading the letters from your parents and Marta. I don’t know how I knew this, since you didn’t mention it and the letters were stacked neatly in the folder, which was itself placed neatly in the centre of the dining room table. But I got a flash, as if in a horror movie, of the table’s gleaming surface scattered with the papers and you, late at night, half mad, with your head in your hands.

You looked at me directly, composed. You were wearing a worn grey sweater with leather patches on the elbows. There was a pot in a tea cozy and a plate of store-bought cookies, the variety pack: rectangular chocolate, round vanilla with cherry jelly in the centre. Despite the table’s being set for tea I saw you were not interested in small talk. “How long have you had these?” you asked, pointing at the folder of letters.

I needed a moment to compose myself. I pulled back a chair and sat down. Then I nodded at the cups and saucers. “Shall we?”

“How long?” you repeated.

“Six months.”

You were still standing, your knuckles gnarled against the handle of your cane. “Then why didn’t you—” But you stopped, remembering that it was you who had stood me up at the deli and not the other way around. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” you said at last. “Something else. Not this.” And you spread your free hand in front of you, as though presenting me with the letters yourself. I recognized the helplessness inherent in the gesture.

“So,” I said, “tell me what you thought.”

I’ve learned to ask open-ended questions, and I thought this would get you started, but you just shook your head and walked over to the kitchen counter. You stood by the window over the sink, looking out at the tiny fenced-in yard. There was one letter you had removed from the file, a letter you had singled out from the others. With your back towards me you picked it up from the counter and began to read. Your voice was steady, with a kind of restraint in it, as if you were a tightrope walker and each word in front of you a step.

You had to focus very hard not to fall off.

“‘Dear Pepik,’” you read. “‘Mamenka and I send you a hug and a snuggle. We look at your photograph every day and pray to God for your safekeeping. But why have you not written, miláčku? We are desperate to hear from you. To hear any news from you at all.’”

It was the letter, of course, that I was intimately familiar with. But hearing it read by the grown child to whom it had been addressed . . . When you finished reading I tried to but could not look you in the face. It was too bare, too personal. I had never in my life felt so close to someone and at the same time so impossibly far away.

I didn’t meet your gaze, afraid of what would be revealed if I looked up.

“I want to thank you, Lisa,” you said finally, in that half-Czech, half-Scottish lilt of yours. “For getting in touch. You have changed—I don’t know how—”

You cleared your throat and looked down at the letter held loosely in your hand, the letter that had arrived so improbably across an ocean of time and grief. The file folder was still in the middle of the table, and you opened it and found the place where the letter belonged chronologically. You put it back in, closed the folder, and patted it just once. A gesture that said There now, that’s finished.

Then you got up and went over to a small desk in the corner of the room. “Now it’s my turn,” you said. “I have something to show you.”

You came back and placed a photograph in front of me on the table, the one you had told me about. It was obviously old, with a yellowing border and a big crease down the centre where it had been folded. There were two women in the photograph. One must have been Anneliese Bauer. The other I knew to be Marta.

There was also a man with a baby in his arms. Here was the sibling you’d always known about. She was swaddled in a blanket, her tiny face obscured. But it was the baby’s father who captured my attention. Pavel Bauer. I stared at his features, drinking him in. He was maybe 170 centimeters—175 maximum—with slight shoulders. But sure of himself. Even through the photograph I could feel his steady presence. And I wasn’t just seeing what I wanted to see.

I could have stared at him for hours, the dark hair and sloping brow, but you pointed to the fifth person, the boy in the picture. It was easy to see, even across the vast stretch of time, that the child was you. The same bright eyes, the stubborn jaw. Small, like your father. A scrawny child.

I refrained from saying this aloud.

You pointed next to Marta, who was standing behind you in a cardigan and a simple housedress. Her dark curls were pinned at the nape of her neck. She was just behind your right shoulder, holding herself a little stiffly for the camera.

“That’s my mother,” you said. You were proud, but trying to conceal it. You cleared your throat and pointed at her face again.

We stayed like that for a minute, looking down at the photo together.

When I finally spoke, it was as if someone else were animating me: the words seemed to come of their own free will. I turned towards you.

“Joseph,” I said—Joseph or Pepik: I never knew which to call you. “That wasn’t your mother,” I said.

You looked at me as if I’d given you two weeks to live. That same gape, the incomprehension.

“That’s my mother,” you said forcefully. This was the one thing you knew, the thing you remembered to be true, and you weren’t about to let me take it away so easily. You pointed again to Marta. Your finger covered her face. “Don’t you recognize me?” you said.

“Yes. The little boy is you. But the other woman”—I pointed at Anneliese—“she was your mother.”

In the photograph Anneliese was looking uneasily in the opposite direction. You flicked your eyes over her.

“That one?”

“Anneliese. Pavel’s wife.”

You tapped your fingernail on Marta. “What about her? The one touching my shoulder.”

“She wasn’t your mother.”

“Who was she?”

“Your nanny.”

“She wasn’t my mother?”

“No. She was mine.”

Anneliese Bauer disappeared entirely. It’s hard to make sense of this: someone exists and then doesn’t. Her diamond watch is all that’s left of her. I couldn’t believe it had survived all this time, something so valuable: the archivist who gave it to me said she’d found it after the Millings died. She knew by the inscription that it had not belonged to them, and figured the rest out via the letters in the safety deposit box. The watch had stopped, of course. I had it repaired. Time took up its post again, resumed the heavy lifting. Memory is a stone that is difficult to budge. Especially as it applies to family. To Pepik’s and mine.

We were half-siblings, you see. We shared a father. Pavel. In some ways we shared a mother too. Marta was—must have been—extremely close to Pepik. I was her only biological child, however. There’s part of her that only I can claim.

Pepik’s cancer had spread throughout his body by the time of our first meeting. I didn’t know it the day I visited him, but already nothing could be done. He was well enough at first though, and for the next few months I visited him regularly. I would take the bus across Montreal and we would walk on the mountain in the evenings. We imagined that the city spread out below us was Prague, the last city where our parents were alive. We wondered aloud about our father, Pavel Bauer. Did he ever stroll with Pepik’s mother, Anneliese, in the long hot summer of 1939? Did he stroll with Marta—with my mother? We were like gossipy teenagers, Pepik and I. We did everything together. Once I even went to church with him, although it pained me a little to rub up so closely against his loss of faith. I myself do not believe in god, so it isn’t the Jewish religion that I grieve but the culture embedded in it.

Or maybe it is the other way around.

Either way, when I think of the human potential stolen, of the millions of little lights snuffed out, I can’t help but wish for a kind of redemption. I can’t help but wish that the living, at least, would embrace what was taken from the dead.

Not that I am one to talk.

But then again, since Marta wasn’t Jewish, I feel myself not especially welcome. Judaism is passed down on the mother’s side, so I don’t officially count.

I would, of course, have been Jewish enough for Hitler. I assume that is part of the reason my mother left the Bauers when Pavel got her pregnant. Or perhaps the Bauers sent her away themselves. There was Anneliese to think about. Still, I grieve the Jewish half of myself I grew up not knowing, and I try in my own way to honour it. I have a Star of David that belonged to my father, Pavel—my mother passed it on to me before her death. I wear it under my sweater, next to my heart. I even keep the Sabbath in a manner of speaking. Joseph—Pepik—refused to join me: he said it felt unnatural. So I would eat by myself, fumble my way through the blessings over the bread and wine. I still do this most Friday nights. I could seek out other people, but I have no real desire. It’s the time of the week I feel most acutely alone. And I feel a kind of perverse enjoyment in it.

I did, as I’ve said, once have a lover—a woman, yes—but that was so long ago now.

The list of those lost grows.

“Was I right about your baby sister? She was killed?” I asked Pepik that day when I first visited his home. We had gone out into the small fenced-in yard. The clouds were low and grey. “Your full sister,” I clarified.

He turned his face towards me. “Why do you ask me?”

“I thought you might have done some research.”

And it turned out he had. In the week since I’d delivered the letters he’d put the other pieces in place.

“Yes, you were right,” he said. “Theresienstadt. Auschwitz.” The rubber tip of his cane was sinking into the dark earth. “I thought it was you. The baby in my photo.”

I told him again that it couldn’t have been. The date on the back of the photo said 1937, and I didn’t come along until several years later. Until Pepik had already been sent away to Scotland. So the baby in the picture was a second sibling he’d never known.

It was also hard at first to make him believe that Marta wasn’t his mother. I pointed repeatedly at Anneliese: he spent a long time looking at her face.

Yes, he said, he did remember something. Yes, there was a flicker.

But when he looked at Marta, her hand on his young shoulder, the word mother flashed across his mind.

I can see what he was thinking. In the photo, Anneliese is holding herself slightly apart and her eyes are to the side, as though something else has caught her attention, something slightly fearsome that is moving towards her. Marta is the one who is leaning into Pepik, whose gaze is cast down in his direction. If I had to pick the mother of the pair I would pick Marta too. There’s a tenderness to her, a warmth that makes me know I was lucky to be her child, even for the short time we lived together on this earth. There was also a particular naïveté about her, something close to childlike. She didn’t know what was coming.

My mother, Marta, died in a DP camp in 1946. She had nobody left to help her. She got sick, and she perished.

What did you expect? A happy ending?

Sometimes I am envious of the Kindertransport children I study, who often have no memory of their childhoods. This oblivion seems to have passed me by. There are things from my childhood I remember in near-perfect detail, from the years both before and after my mother’s death. Things that haven’t helped me live a happy life. Oh no, quite the opposite has been true.

Meeting Pepik was a bit of goodness, though. We had a small window of time in which to enjoy the gift we’d found. We’d been alone all our lives, and suddenly we each had family. When he grew too feeble to walk on the mountain, we would go to the parkette across from the depanneur, sit on the cold bench, and watch the pigeons pick potato-chip bags off the sidewalk. There was not joy, exactly, in finding each other—we were too old, too set in our ways—but our pain was dulled. What we felt was not quite pleasure, but contentment. We had each finished our searching.

The truth is I know almost nothing about what happened in the Bauer household in the fall of 1938 and the spring and summer of 1939. The events I have put down here seem as likely as any others—that’s all. It was my hope, in the last year of my half-brother’s life, to construct some kind of narrative, a story for him to hang on to. In the final months he reminded me so very much of a child, lost under the sheets of his sickbed. Like a small boy waiting for a bedtime story, as though he had been waiting all his long life for someone to come and tuck him in.

And so I did. I wrote during the days: the story of Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, the story of their child’s governess, Marta. Then, in the evenings, I went to Pepik’s house and relieved the home-care nurse I’d hired. I sat by Pepik’s bedside and read him the story, one chapter at a time, as I wrote it. I used the letters in my possession to cobble together a version of events, arranging disparate pieces into something that seemed whole. Pepik would comment when his gut told him something had been different, and I made notes in the margins and typed in the changes at my desk the following day. A few things we put down with a high degree of certainty. The rest we made up, taking scraps from our dreams, setting them on paper to make them make sense.

As I said before, though, this isn’t a story with a happy ending.

They’re all dead now.

Pavel, my father.

Marta, my mother.

Pepik’s mother, Anneliese.

Pepik himself died a year and four months after I met him. The cancer was everywhere; he was in so much pain that I couldn’t fault him for refusing treatment at the end. My only regret is that he died before I could finish writing the story. I wanted so much for him to have some sense of completion, some resolution—even imagined—to the tragedy that opened his life.

Instead I was left to write the final chapter as a tribute. I’ve put it down here in memoriam. For Pepik.