Far To Go (26 page)

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.