by Alison Pick
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 alread
y 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.
Pavel was transfixed. “Liesel,” he said, without moving his eyes from the scene. Anneliese crossed the room to her husband in time to watch the young man bring the bat down, just once, into the window.
Marta could not see this—the distance across the square was too great—but she imagined lines spreading out across the glass of Mr. Goldstein’s storefront like a map of Adolf Hitler’s ever expanding Lebensraum.
A chunk of glass fell to the cobblestones. Then a second chunk. The boy with the bat kicked at what was left with his steel-toed boot, and it too fell out of the frame. Where before there had been a surface that looked like nothing, now nothing itself took its place. Anneliese gasped. “What—?” she said. “What are they—?”
She leaned her chest into Pavel’s back for protection, resting her chin on his shoulder.
The Hitlerjugend entered Mr. Goldstein’s shop via the now windowless storefront. Six or eight of them, eighteen or nineteen years old. The last of the light was draining from the day like dirty water down a drain. Marta squinted hard but the young men had all disappeared into the shop. Several minutes passed before they emerged again, their facial features now completely blurred by the November night. The Bauers stood at the window together, not speaking. There was a lick of flame. Perhaps Mr. Goldstein had seen what was coming and kindled a small fire in his hearth. A small blot of light against the darkness.
Except the flame was getting higher in the night.
The storefront was again crowded with the gang of Jugend; there was more pushing and shoving amongst them. The light from the fire reflecting across the shards of broken glass made it easier to see now. The tallest boy appeared dragging Mr. Goldstein by his ear. Until now it had seemed to Marta that she was watching some kind of macabre spectacle put on as entertainment, but now, seeing the old man, it was suddenly real. She panicked, wanting to protect Mr. Goldstein and knowing there was nothing she could do, that to attempt to intervene would be to risk her own life. The tailor looked small in his nightshirt, his beard reaching almost down to his waist. He was doing a kind of sideways crab-walk, leading with the earlobe that was pinched firmly between the gang leader’s fingers. If it hadn’t been so terrifying there might have been something comical about the sight, the old man’s eyes darting in confusion, his nightcap slipping off the side of his head. The next thing Marta saw was Mr. Goldstein on his knees surrounded by the ring of young people. The fire was roaring now, eating up the store, making long shadows of the scene.
She was caught behind her own pane of glass; it was like watching a film, she imagined, with the volume turned all the way down.
For the second time Marta saw the bat rising and falling.
She put a hand over one eye, as if she were reading an eye chart.
She covered both eyes, disbelieving.
When she looked again, the street was clear. Except for a single person—a body—crumpled on the cobblestones.
The following night at supper, nobody spoke. Pepik was free to mass his knedlíky into mountain ranges as he desired. He seemed to think he had done something to provoke the silence at the table and began guessing what he was supposed to apologize for. “I’m sorry for playing with my food like a baby?”
The Bauers kept eating.
“I’m sorry I wet my bed last night?”
Anneliese looked at Marta with raised eyebrows, and Marta nodded to show this was true. Pavel got up and kissed the crown of his wife’s head. He turned on the Telefunken. They heard static, and then a voice flared like a struck match. Pavel lowered the volume. He fiddled with the dial until a different voice, with a British accent, came through. “I don’t doubt that the orders came from above,” it said.
“How can you be so certain?” another man asked. Marta didn’t understand the words but his voice was slightly different; she had heard that in England you could place a person within thirty kilometers of their birthplace based on speech. Here there were only four or five accents. A slightly different pitch if one came from Brno. And the singsongy lilt adrift on the voices of Prague.
Marta wondered what was being said, but it wasn’t her place to ask. She waited patiently until Anneliese said, “Can you help us out, darling?” She
was holding her husband’s wrist loosely in her hand.
Pavel translated the first man’s answer: “Because of the coordination. The timing was so precise, with the shops being vandalized not just in one town but all across Germany.” He paused, working to catch up. “And indeed across Austria, and the Sudetenland. Both of which, of course, now belong to Hitler’s Reich. The—what’s that word? coordinated?—No, the synchronized nature of the pogroms leaves little doubt—I myself would say that it leaves no doubt—that they were planned by a central body.”
The first voice interrupted and Pavel looked at the ceiling, concentrating. “He’s asking if it could just have been a series of lootings by thugs,” he summarized. “And now the other man is answering.” Pavel resumed the direct translation: “Certainly the so-called thugs and low-lifes may have jumped on board without any urging. But the timing of the attacks, in so many different towns and cities, leads us to believe—leads us to conclude that they were coordinated. Also, the violent nature of so many of the . . .” The man speaking searched for the words, and Pavel paused along with him. “. . . of so many of the bodily attacks.”
Pavel snapped the radio off. He tipped his head back so his chin was pointed directly at the copper Art Deco chandelier; he took a deep breath, which he let out slowly. He crossed the room to his rack of pipes, chose one, and began to tap tobacco down into the bowl. The match he took off the mantelpiece was long, meant to reach into the back of the massive stone fireplace, and he misjudged its reach and nearly singed his eyebrows.
Pepik was mashing his dumplings with the back of his spoon.
“Goldstein,” Pavel said, his pipe clamped between his teeth. “They’re talking about what happened to Mr. Goldstein.” He held the pipe away from his face. “It could have been us, darling,” he said to Anneliese.
