by Alison Pick
“To keep the filthy odours away?”
He hesitated; she felt his muscles tighten behind her. “Do you find . . .” he said.
“Do I find what?”
“The Jews. Do you find that they smell?”
Marta stiffened. “Of course not! What a thing to say.” She tried to pull away, to look Ernst in the face, but he held her firmly.
“I’m not the only one saying it.” He paused, as though suddenly aware of himself. “I’m not saying it,” he said quickly. “I’m not saying it at all.”
She could tell he was ashamed, and felt a rush of sympathy. He was only repeating what people on the streets were saying, after all. And who was she to judge whether these statements were true? The Jews she knew best—Mr. Bauer, for example—they weren’t really Jewish, at least not in the way she knew was meant by the word. She tried to think if she knew anyone Jewish who was actually practising. There was Mr. Goldstein, of course, but he was perhaps the only one.
“Mr. Bauer says we will need a gas mask,” she said.
Ernst’s thumb was tracing her jawline.
“Perhaps he’ll prove right.”
“Do you think so?” This surprised her, and part of her started to panic. “I have no family,” she said suddenly, although she’d told herself she would not, and pivoted in Ernst’s arms so that her face was directly in front of his: the square jaw, the pockmarks, the faint pebbling of stubble. The thought of war terrified her, and she clung to him tightly. “What will I do? If the fighting starts in earnest?”
“Pavel will protect you,” Ernst said mildly.
She lifted her chin to hold his eye. “He isn’t obliged.”
“But he will.” She could see Ernst wanted to give Pavel the benefit of the doubt, to paint his friend in the best possible light, as though in apology for his earlier comment.
“You have your wife,” Marta heard herself say in the petulant voice of a child.
Ernst’s gaze softened; he ran the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip. “And you have your beauty,” he said, as though that would solve anything. Marta had noticed this about the few men she interacted with on a daily basis; they thought a woman’s good looks could protect her, like some kind of shield.
He drew her to him, then kissed her softly, holding her bottom lip between his teeth ever so briefly. He cupped her breast lightly, and then more firmly, his touch getting rough. The hand was back over her mouth, but she yielded, her body giving in to his command. She was not about to scream. This was part of it, part of their game, and if she was honest, it was the part she most enjoyed.
She was caught now. He would not let her go.
From the kitchen came the sound of the cook chopping beets, the running of water followed by scrubbing, then the thwack, thwack of a knife against the board. It was the sound of Marta’s pulse, of the ache in her temples. It had been another night without any sleep.
“Dinner is at seven, Mr. Bauer,” she said.
Pavel, she saw, had moved to the hall and was pulling on a green wool cloak, the one he usually wore mushrooming. He held his pipe away from his face. “Off to enlist,” he grinned.
She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment; she could actually feel the tired pouches of flesh beneath them. “You can finally take action,” she said.
All summer Pavel had been enraged by the Völkischer Beobachter’s headlines: “Czech Police Burn Sudeten Farms”; “German Peddler Killed by Czech Mob.” Lies, he said, every word. For months Sudeten Germans had been under orders to provoke Czechs, and the Czechs were under orders not to be provoked. But now, finally, Pavel would have the chance to stand up for what he believed.
Marta paused and shut her eyes again briefly. She took a half-step towards Pavel and inhaled deeply. Did he smell? Like tobacco, certainly, but beneath that?
“What about the factory?” she asked. “If you enlist?” It was a bold question on her part, but Pavel didn’t seem to notice.
“We need men to fight,” Pavel said. “We need men, and we need boys!” He punctuated with his pipe, jabbing at the air with its stem. Pleased, she thought, to have her as an audience.
“And your workers?”
“The workers will fight.”
“Even Ernst?” She tasted the plant manager’s name.
“I’m halting production tomorrow,” Pavel said, not answering her question.
“Really? Are you certain?”
But who was she to ask? Mr. Bauer obviously had a vision: it had pulled him out of the depths of himself. She’d heard him speak more in the past day than in the thirty days before that combined.
“If Germany takes us, there will be nothing left for the workers at all,” Pavel said.
There was a sharp knock at the door. It was Ernst—she’d known it would be. He’d shaved since the night before, she saw, and his sweater had been replaced with an Austrian cloak like Pavel’s. An ostrich feather stuck out from the side of his cap. He seemed a different man from the one she’d just been with, remote and apart from her. To think of the intimacies they had so recently shared made her flush.
“We were just talking about you,” Pavel smiled, and clapped his friend on the shoulder.
“Good things?” Ernst looked at Marta.
“Of course!” Pavel said. “I was telling Marta how the whole factory will enlist . . .”
Ernst made a noise in the back of his throat that seemed, to Marta, noncommittal. But Pavel didn’t appear to notice. “We’re late,” he said. Then, “See you shortly, Marta.”
She lowered her eyes and fiddled with the string of her apron, then slipped out of the hallway. “It’s a great day,” she heard Pavel announce to Ernst. “A great day for us. A bad day for the Germans!”
Ernst’s voice was muffled; Marta couldn’t hear his reply.
When the men were gone, Marta walked slowly around the parlour, running a palm over the polished oak table, touching the throne-like wooden chairs with the hunting scenes carved into their backs. A crystal candy dish held a bag of Pepik’s chocolate-covered cherries.
Upstairs, the door to the master bedroom was open. There was an ornate Victorian sofa in the corner, the kind that would stay in the room forever because it was too heavy and awkward to move, and French doors that gave way to a little balcony with a wrought-iron table where nobody ever sat. Books were stacked up on Pavel’s side of the bed: Talks with Tomáš Masaryk by Karel Čapek, his favourite Czech author, a boy from his hometown of Hronov who had made good. And Das Unbehagen in der Kultur by Sigmund Freud, the famous doctor who had just died of cancer.
Marta went over to the bed and fluffed up the goose-down pillows. There was a silver boar’s-hair brush on the vanity, and the watch was beside it, left there casually, as though it was not worth a small fortune. Its case made a sound like a door that needed oil. She held the watch tentatively to her wrist; she imagined herself in a silk dress and elbow-length gloves, being twirled by Ernst across a glimmering ballroom floor. How glamorous she’d appear, how worldly. Pavel had brought the watch back from Paris; the band was made completely of diamonds, with a thin blue line of sapphires down the centre. He was trying, she knew, to convert his wealth into solid assets. If war broke out the currency would be useless.
Engraved on the underside of the band was a woman’s name: Anneliese.
Marta shut the watch case. She closed the bedroom door behind her.
Downstairs Pepik was on his stomach, splayed out in front of his train with his buckled shoes crossed behind him. Two clothespin people clutched in his fists. “All aboard!” she heard him whisper forcefully. A shy boy usually, but in charge of this domain.
She got down on her hands and knees and whispered in his ear: “Pepik. Kolik je hodin?”
He started as though waking from a long and feverish dream. The blush of pleasure on his face at seeing her never ceased to amaze her. That she gave someone such comfort. That she could be so needed. He squinted up at the grandfather clock in the corner of
the room, taller than him by half, with its regal stature and chimes.
“Two o’clock.” He tugged at his suspender.
“Two o’clock minus . . . ?”
“Where’s my little man?” Pepik asked.
She passed him the clothespin doll. “Minus?”
“Some minutes!”
Marta laughed. “Minus ten minutes,” she said. “Look at the long hand.”
Pepik wiggled his fist, causing the tiny man to run away and hide behind the caboose.
“Would you like one of your chocolates?” she asked.
She knew he would say no: he was saving them to share with his friends. It was a magnanimous approach for such a small child, but she also knew where it came from—Pavel was equally generous.
Marta suddenly remembered Pepik’s first weeks home from the hospital, how hard he had cried in the evenings, and the thrill she felt as the cloudy newborn eyes slowly clarified to the same bright blue as hers. A stranger might see them together and remark on how the child took after his mother.
Was this what every governess secretly hoped for?
A sharp gust of wind squealed down the chimney. In the silence that followed another shot rang out; the soldiers across the square were hard at work at target practice. Pepik didn’t seem to notice but Marta shivered involuntarily; she kept expecting the whole situation would blow over, but instead it seemed to be escalating. She got back down beside Pepik and crossed her legs and looked at him closely. “Miláčku,” she said. “Did you hear that gun? Do you remember the big trucks yesterday?”
He looked at her blankly. Blinked his long lashes.
“That was the Czech army. They’re here to protect us.”
Pepik turned back to the train, focused on his goal. “All aboard,” he muttered again. But Marta took his face by the chin and turned it towards her. This was important.
“Your tata,” she said, “and all of his workers—everyone is ready to fight.”
She paused, wondering if this was really true.
Would Ernst fight? On which side?
And which side was she herself on?
“Come here, Pepik,” she whispered. She wanted, suddenly, to hold him. But Pepik seemed to have forgotten her entirely. He turned back to the scene in front of him, the Princess Elizabeth engine, the livestock cars loosely linked like the vertebrae of some long reptile’s spine.
Pepik flicked the switch.
The electric train seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then it sighed on its tracks, a traveller hoisting very heavy bags.
Pavel wasn’t home until eight o’clock that evening. Marta heard him say thank you to Sophie the cook as he passed her his felt hat. He came into the parlour, his jacket thrown over his shoulder and a copy of Lidové noviny tucked under his arm. Whistling. He was off-key but she recognized the first few notes of Smetana’s patriotic “Má Vlast.”
“Where is your train headed?” he asked his son. “Is it off to fight the Germans?”
Pepik was in his blue flannel nightcap. He nodded mutely, pleased with his father’s attention and suspicious of it at the same time. Marta could tell he knew something strange was astir. He sensed his environment, she thought, in the same way an animal could sense rain. She remembered the farm where she had grown up, how the chickens would fuss on a hot July evening. As the air thickened there was an increasing sense of panic. Or maybe that was just how she’d felt; hot weather meant her father would be restless.
“How’s the Crown Prince?” Pavel asked his son, trying again to engage him. But Pepik was allowed only a few more minutes of play before bed, and he ignored his father, focused on his train. He was fiddling with the little piece on the front—what was it called?—the fan shape that stuck out like a dustpan. It reminded Marta of Hitler’s moustache.
Vermin, Hitler had called the Jews. But he spoke with compelling confidence.
Pavel gave up on his son and turned away and opened his leather briefcase on the oak table. He was wearing not his usual business suit and tie but informal soldier’s clothes: corduroy pants and a sweater with leather patches on the elbows. He pulled several manila dossiers out of the case, each neatly labelled, and smiled at Marta. “I’ll have a cup of coffee, please,” he said. He considered for a moment, then slid the files back into the case, snapping the clasps shut. “No,” he said. “I’ll have a whiskey.”
The decanter was chiselled crystal with a stopper shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Pavel placed two small glasses close together on a round silver platter.
“Care to join me?”
“Me?”
But there was nobody else in the room. “To what occasion?” asked Marta.
“To victory!” Pavel responded with gusto, but didn’t yet raise his glass. He looked at her, challenging, his jaw square. For a moment she saw what he must have been like as a child: stubborn, impulsive. Something else he’d passed on to Pepik.
“To beating the bastards down,” Pavel said, gesturing with his drink to the window and the implied enemy beyond it. “The Russians are on their way with support . . .” He railed on about fortifications, about the Maginot Line. Marta had never heard him so energized about anything. She wondered vaguely whether he knew that tomorrow was the first day of Rosh Hashanah. How did she herself know this? Someone must have told her—Mr. Goldstein? Yes. Who else could it have been? There was no Judaism in her family, of course—none as far as she knew—but she found the religion’s customs curious, the candles and skullcaps, the prohibitions against various foods. Marta thought about the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, which would follow—the Day of Atonement, Goldstein had said, the day of repenting for sins.
Could she ask forgiveness for her own sins? If only, she thought, it was that simple.
“Either Hitler gives in,” Pavel was saying, “or there will be a war.” He paused, and Marta was suddenly aware that he had asked something of her, that he was soliciting her opinion. She blurted out the first thing she thought of. “Those white woollen knee socks,” she said. “Are they worn by Nazis?”
She was remembering Pavel’s story about his brother Misha, how he’d been knocked to the ground by the gang of boys and had seen their socks and known.
But Pavel ignored her. “Even if the government yields,” he said, “the army would never listen.” And the truth of this seemed confirmed for him in the act of speaking it aloud. “You,” he said to Marta, “have no idea how lucky we are now. Compared to the way it was before.”
Before, she knew, meant before Tomáš Masaryk, before 1918, when Czechoslovakia did not exist. He was right, she thought; it was hard for her to imagine. She told him as much.
“That’s the peril of youth,” Pavel said. “The lack of experience against which to compare.”
He was thirty. There were only seven years between them, but he chose to assert them now.
“You old man,” Marta said, smiling.
“And you are a lovely young lady.” Pavel raised his glass. “To beating those Germans,” he said, holding her eye, just as they heard his wife coming up the stairs.
Anneliese Bauer’s fingernails were painted a deep shade of scarlet. She was carrying a flat white box tied with a blue ribbon, the signature of the Hruska patisserie. What she was doing buying the medovnik herself Marta couldn’t imagine, and for a moment she felt guilty, or neglectful, as though this somehow reflected on her own job as hired help. There was something wrong about it, something out of order. Then again, Marta thought, everything was topsy-turvy these days. And Anneliese, she reminded herself, was not one to do anything she didn’t want to do.
“Am I to be included in cocktails?” Anneliese asked now, stepping into the parlour and fanning her face with an open hand, as though her nail polish were not quite dry. Her brown hair was set in a finger wave, the wide curls clinging to the sides of her head. She looked like a model from an ad for the alpine spas where Pavel’s mother went to convalesce in the summers. Marta imagined herself sashaying across the Persia
n carpets, mingling with the men with gold-tipped walking sticks and women in hats with veils. The European elite gossiping over their wineglasses, shifting effortlessly between languages to get across the exact nuance of what they meant.
She curtsied, and Anneliese turned and acknowledged her, passing her the cake. “Put this in the icebox, please?”
“Of course,” Marta answered, part of her relieved that the natural order of things had not been eclipsed by the mobilization after all. Anneliese would still make requests and Marta would still carry them out.
Pavel had gone to the sideboard and was bringing down a third glass. “To what do we owe the pleasure?” Anneliese asked her husband.
“To war,” he said. He could barely keep the smile off his face.
From the corner of the room came the tick-tick-tick of Pepik’s electric train rounding its track.
Anneliese grasped her earlobes and pulled off her clip-on earrings one at a time. She snapped open her small Chanel purse and deposited them inside. “Let’s hope it’s over fast.” She dug around for her silver cigarette case. “The Fischls are leaving,” she announced to her husband.
Pavel was being generous with the whiskey; he did not turn to face her. “Bon voyage to the Fischls.” Now he turned and passed the glass to his wife. “Just goes to show. One bit of trouble and they’re out of here as fast as Jesse Owens.” He paused, pleased with his comparison.
“They’re leaving tomorrow. Hanna Fischl got an international phone call—from her mother in England,” Anneliese said.
Marta remembered the box of cake in her hand. She put down her whiskey and went to the kitchen, wondering if she’d understood correctly. An international phone call—but England was an ocean away. How was it possible to speak across such a distance? She pictured a thin wire high above the clouds, and then she pictured tiny men running back and forth through the hollowed-out centre of the wire to deliver their messages into the waiting ears of their listeners.
She put the cake in the icebox, just as Mrs. Bauer had asked.
“They’re all going,” she heard Anneliese say to Pavel. “Even Dagmar and Erna.”
