Far To Go (11 page)

She thought of Anneliese in the tub, the water crimson red.

“Water or papers?” the priest asked, looking at the watch he wore on a gold chain around his neck. Anneliese was eyeing the font warily. Marta could tell she was worried that without the water the ceremony wouldn’t take. Not the actual baptism, but whatever protection it was supposed to eventually summon.

“Let’s do it properly.” Anneliese’s tone implied that she knew she was being superstitious but was willing to take the risk.

“
Ganz richtig
,” the priest said. “Come here, Pepik.”

Pepik stepped forward gravely, a young Isaac about to be forsaken.

Marta was half expecting something elaborate: a choir of angels emerging from on high, complete with white robes and tarnished halos. Or maybe Father Wilhelm would pull back a velvet curtain to reveal a galvanized tub in which the naked Pepik would be entirely submerged—even held down for a minute or two, just until he began to struggle. But Father Wilhelm only took Pepik by his shoulders and said, “Close your eyes,” as though he was going to give him a surprise for his birthday.

He dipped his fingers in the font and touched Pepik’s forehead and mumbled some words that Marta could not catch. Pepik’s eyes were clenched shut as though he were steeling himself against a terrible vision. Father Wilhelm had to give him a little shake. “It’s okay. It’s all over!”

Pepik opened his eyes and wiped the drops of water from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He looked around tentatively, as though expecting to see something marvellous—his mother turned into Saint Nicholas, or the priest turned into a frog. Pepik lifted his arm and looked at it closely, inspecting the sleeve of his shirt. The priest laughed. “You’re just the same,
mein Kind
,” he said. “You’re just as before.” And he shook his head—in satisfaction or in regret, it was hard to say.

Father Wilhelm brought his hands to his chest and folded them, his long, bony fingers interlaced. Marta thought he was about to start praying, but instead he said to Anneliese, “I’ll see you out now, Mrs. Bauer.” He paused, as though he might have forgotten something, and looked at the font slantwise. “Unless you’d like . . .” He made a sound in the back of his throat.

“I’m sorry?”

“Unless you’d like the same for yourself.”

Anneliese opened her mouth and then closed it again. Did she want to be baptized as well? It was obvious to Marta that the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “I see we’re not the only ones . . . ,” Anneliese started, but her words trailed off. She looked at the font intently, as though an answer might somehow bubble to the surface, like a dumpling in the
hovězí polévka
. Then she looked back at Marta. “Do you think . . . ?”

Marta paused; she wanted to help, but the situation was beyond her. She knew how Pavel felt. Then again, look at what was happening all around them. “I don’t—” she started. “I’m not—”

But her fumbling had settled it. “No thank you, Father,” Anneliese said, smiling briskly. And she turned away, looking anxiously for Pepik as though he might have been spirited away by some evil demon.

The day was bright as they stood outside on the church steps, blinking. “I can’t see!” Pepik giggled. “I’m blind!”

He took one of his mother’s hands and one of Marta’s, letting them guide him down the steep stone stairs. He walked between them as if he belonged to both, and Marta felt for a moment as though it was possible to share him after all.

Anneliese led them home the roundabout way, sticking to the edges of town. She’d put her dark glasses back on to shield her eyes from the sun, but from the side Marta could see her glancing back and forth nervously. Anneliese looked perplexed, as if she was wondering what to say about what had just happened. “It’s how my sister Alžběta and her daughters got out,” she said finally. “They managed to leave the country. With passports saying they’re Catholic. And the papers to back them up just in case.”

She glanced over at Marta.

“Even the baby?” Marta asked.

“Yes.” Anneliese pushed her dark glasses up on her forehead to look Marta in the face. “Even Eva.”

“How did they get their
Uebertrittschein
?”

“I don’t know. They must have bribed someone.”

Pepik had broken away from them, run ahead and climbed up onto the stone wall. He was balancing along it with his arms outstretched; he looked like he was about to take off into flight.

“You know something?” Anneliese said. “I feel better. I’m glad to have done it. If it doesn’t help—well, it hasn’t hurt him.” She paused and brought a cupped hand to her forehead. “You’re not to tell Mr. Bauer about this,” she said. There was a pained expression on her face, as though she wished she did not have to be so explicit but wasn’t sure if she could trust Marta otherwise. It was, Marta knew, an indirect reference to their earlier conversation about the suicide attempt, another topic she’d been instructed to ignore and that she’d stirred up nonetheless.

It had happened after the baby died. Not immediately, but several months later. It wasn’t that Anneliese’s hope had withered or that she felt a large of part of herself had died along with her child, although those things were certainly true, she’d told Marta. It was that someone had taken an axe and hacked a hole in the centre of Anneliese’s chest. Only nobody could see it; the hole was invisible, as was the pain, the excruciating near-physical pain she was in. By comparison, she’d told Marta, the birth had been nothing, a tickle between her legs, a trickle of blood. Whereas after the baby died she could not turn over in bed or her severed heart would fall out of her chest cavity. She lay on her back with her breast ripped open while the wolves bloodied their snouts in her grieving.

Dasha brought her toast. Marta kept Pepik away. Pavel tried to carry on as if nothing were wrong. Anneliese was alone with the weight of her baby’s death, and it was simply too much. She couldn’t bear it.

It was Marta who’d found Anneliese unconscious in the tub. Marta still shuddered to think of it, Anneliese’s skin sallow, as though she was made of wax, her small breasts loose and exposed. Her neck had lolled back at a terrible angle that Marta had trouble forgetting. And there, on her wrist . . .

Marta had been the one who’d turned the spigot off, who’d stopped the bleeding, wrapped the gash in gauze. She’d been the one who’d stayed with Anneliese, nursing her back to health, telling Pavel that his wife was sick with influenza. This was when the bond between the women had formed.

Put another way, Anneliese owed Marta her life. The two of them never mentioned this but Marta felt it was always there between them, asserting itself, as the unspoken tends to. And it would change things in ways neither one could imagine.

Pepik had run back towards them and was leaping about like a little leprechaun, making whirring and clicking noises and flapping his arms. Then he stood still on one foot, his arm aloft holding an imaginary bayonet, pretending to be the statue at the centre of the town square. He said to Marta, gravely, “I got baptized. But it’s a secret from Tata. We made a pact.” And he made a motion of tying his top lip to his bottom, as he had recently learned to do with his shoelaces.

Marta saluted. “Yes, sir!” she said. “I will eat the secret and swallow the key,
sir
.” This was as much for Anneliese’s benefit as it was for Pepik’s, but she pretended all her attention was on the boy. She took her house key from the folds of her skirt and tipped her head back as though to swallow it, sliding the key at the last moment down her sleeve.

“Where did it go?” Pepik gaped at her, wide-eyed.

Anneliese kneaded her own shoulder and said to herself absently, “I had no idea how tense I was in there. I’m exhausted!”

“I gobbled it up,” Marta told Pepik. She patted her belly.

Pepik said, “Yum.”

The afternoon was waning, the long light lending everything a hint of heaven. They turned the corner and saw Mr. Goldstein coming out of his tailor’s shop. He smiled at Pepik. “How’s the
lamed vovnik
?”

“Fine-thank-you-and-how-are-you?”

Mr. Goldstein laughed. “Remember? A
lamed vovnik
is someone very important to the world. Someone on whom the world depends.” He cupped Pepik’s head with his palm, rocked it gently back and forth. “Remember I told you?”

Mr. Goldstein crinkled the corners of his eyes, but Marta thought he seemed tired, worn down. Despite his sunny nature the occupation must be getting to him. He raised his hand to show he was in a hurry, but before he rushed off he let Pepik twist the point of his long beard.

Marta looked at Pepik’s face, the flush of pure gladness. This was the gift of childhood, she thought. To be thoroughly delighted by small things. He was throwing himself into the air, making birdlike chirping noises, happy for the first time in weeks. It was like something in that bit of holy water had actually bought him time, had worked to hold some demon at bay. He looked as though he really had been saved.

Now that Sophie was gone, the shopping and cooking fell to Marta. Anneliese said they would hire someone new as soon as things were back to normal. Marta didn’t mind helping out, but coupled with her duties with Pepik, it meant she had twice as much work and often fell behind schedule. So it was that on November 9 it was late afternoon by the time she returned from the grocer. Dusk was already falling. She cooked hurriedly—
česneková polévka
using leftover garlic,
vepřové
for Anneliese—and ate alongside the Bauers, but she got up from the table before they did to start the dishes. The Bauers finished their cutlets leisurely and laid their knives and forks parallel on their plates. Then Pavel, who understood that no families would let their children play with the Jewish boy anymore, rolled up his sleeves and crawled under the table with his son.

Marta came back into the dining room to remove the serving dish from the marble-topped credenza. “What are you building under there?” she asked. Pepik’s train track snaked between the legs of the chairs; the clothespin people were grouped together at one end of the carpet and the lead soldiers at the other, protecting them.

“Only a kingdom,” Pavel said lightly. “We’ve already got the Crown Prince.” He gave Pepik’s bottom a little slap. “We’re looking for a princess. Do you know anyone?”

She moved the silver salt and pepper shakers back to the credenza.

“I don’t believe I do.”

“Are you certain? I think you yourself might—”

“What about me?” Anneliese called from the parlour, where she was leafing through the pages of a fashion magazine. She was warm towards her husband again now that her son was taken care of.

Pavel looked up, surprised and pleased by her tone. “Why, darling,” he said, “you’re already the Queen!”

Pepik was dinging the silver bell on the train’s engine over and over. He looked up and said, “Where’s that key?”

Marta paused, serving dish in hand. “What key,
miláčku
?” But right away she remembered the baptism and said, “Oh, that key. I swallowed it, of course.” She brought a finger to her lips to remind Pepik he was not to tell his father. Then she said quickly, “Your train has become so long! How did you make it so long?”

But Pepik was not diverted. “She swallowed the key,” he said to his father. He cupped a hand around his mouth and said, in a stage whisper, “The key to our secret.”

Pavel peered up at Marta from under the table, his eyebrows raised. “Secret? What’s the secret?”

Marta pretended she hadn’t heard his question; she squinted at the credenza, frowning, then picked an invisible bit of food off its surface with her fingernail. She heard Anneliese come into the room behind her.

“I’d like some port,” she said.

“Liesel? What secret?”

“Never mind. Don’t be foolish.”

“Liesel . . .” Pavel said, half warning, half teasing.

Anneliese crouched down so she was eye-level with her husband under the table; Marta saw her instep and the shine of her silk stocking where her heel lifted out of the back of her shoe. “It wouldn’t be a secret if we told you now, would it?”

Pavel paused. “I suppose not.” He smiled at his wife. “A queen has her secrets.”

“Now you’ve got it, darling.”

“You get a lot past me?”

“I’m sneaky with my king.”

“You’re sly.”

“I don’t deny it.”

She winked and Pavel blushed. Marta thought the moment had passed, that Anneliese had been successful in diverting Pavel’s attention. She picked up the serving dish in one hand and the salt and pepper shakers in the other, moving towards the kitchen, but she paused in the doorway when she heard Pavel ask, “What do you think about your mother’s secrets, buster?”

She turned in time to see Pepik make the motion of tying his lips together. He looked at his father meaningfully. “I can’t tell you.”

Pavel lunged and tickled his son again. “Tell me!”

Anneliese stood up, unsteady on her heel. “Careful with him,” she said lightly. There was a hint of panic in her voice. Marta knew this would egg Pavel on.

“Mamenka knows!” Pepik shrieked, gleeful. He was trying to squirm away from his father’s grasp.

“Does she?”

“Yes! Mamenka! And Nanny! And Pepik!” he shouted. He began to act out the baptismal scene, putting two fingers to his forehead and closing his eyes and muttering something unintelligible that nevertheless sounded to Marta quite a bit like Latin.

Anneliese was frozen in place; someone had to do something. “Pepik!” Marta shouted, as though about to scold him for some unspeakable transgression. He looked up, startled—she never, ever yelled. She couldn’t think what to say next, but before she was forced to speak a loud crash came from outside. Pavel jerked his head up, banging it on the bottom of the table. “
Hovno
,” he swore, rubbing his temple.

He crawled out from beneath the table, his son forgotten, went to the window and pulled back the drapes. It was as if he’d opened the curtain on a play, mid-act. They could all see, across the square, a group of Hitlerjugend crowded around the entrance to the Goldstein Tailor Shop. Night was falling but Marta could make out the armbands, the tall lace-up boots. The boys were shoving each other, a knot of pent-up anger, or perhaps, she thought, they were just drunk. One of them, the tallest, had a bat in his hands. He pushed the others aside and stood in front of the storefront, the bat held straight above his head as if reaching up to strike a piñata.