Far To Go (22 page)

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.