by Alison Pick
“Would you like a menu?” The waitress looked fifteen years old max. Her halter top showed the delicate dot of her belly button. An outie.
“No, thank you.”
She took a step back. “If you don’t want to eat . . .” She gestured around at the busy tables. Two old men in sweater-vests were arguing in Yiddish.
“I’m waiting for someone,” I snapped. Which felt like a lie even though it was the truth.
I sat in my booth peeling at the plastic on the menu the teenager had left. Latkes, I saw, and Russian borscht. I told myself I would order as soon as you arrived. I was trying to be hopeful.
There are reasons for optimism. Reasons to have faith in humanity. There were righteous Gentiles whose behaviour during the war exemplified the best of the human spirit. But most people, of course, were not up to the task. And some even made it their purpose to turn Jews over to the authorities. The cases that are the hardest for me to imagine are the ones where the betrayer was known to the family. What could make a person turn against those whose daily lives they understood intimately?
Maybe those betrayers did not understand the full implications of their actions. Maybe they came from a background of betrayal themselves. This is one of the things the social sciences teach, one of the few things about which psychology is abundantly clear: we will re-inflict our own wounds on those in our care. And yet these factors don’t quite add up. There remain instances that give pause, that force us to consider the darker side of human nature: what the Jews call, I believe, the yetzer hara.
Speaking of which, I sat and waited for you for more than an hour. The deli was closing. People were getting up to leave, the women with their glossy mink coats, the men with their felt hats and spectacles. The couples looked happy, even the older ones, and I was reminded that tomorrow was the Sabbath, the day on which it is mitzvot for a couple to make love.
At first I felt angry—furious—that you’d stood me up. But under that was something softer, a tugging. I have to be honest: I was sad you didn’t come.
I wanted to have someone to belong to.
Chapter Five
AT NOON ON MARCH 14, 1939, the grandfather clock sounded, the front door swung open, and in walked the Bauers. They’d been gone only two nights but they looked like a band of Junák scouts back from the Krkonoše Mountains. Marta knew something terrible must have happened for Anneliese to let herself be seen in such a state, her hair loose around her face and not a trace of lipstick on her lips. Anneliese went straight to the parlour table and wept. Marta could see it was a continuation—she had been weeping before, then she had to carry her valise, and now she resumed weeping where she had left off.
Pepik disappeared immediately into his Uncle Max’s room, and it was Pavel, finally, who came to tell Marta what had happened. He steered her, a hand at the small of her back, out of the front room and into the kitchen. “A drink?”
“No, I—”
But he’d already brought in two little glasses from the breakfront and had filled his own to the rim.
“Neat?”
Marta looked at him blankly.
Pavel lifted a pitcher and added water to her glass. He squinted at Marta, opened his mouth, and closed it again. There was so much to say, and she could see he didn’t know where to begin.
“We got turned back at the border,” he said finally. “They saw that our documents were forged.” He emptied his glass in one smooth swallow. He was unshaven, and there were dark hollows under his eyes.
“The Gestapo came on the train. They took our passports—mine and Liesel’s. We were trying to leave the country. To get into Paris. From there Max had got us tickets to London.” He ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. “We’ve missed our chance now, of course. It’s too late.”
There was a moment of silence, during which they could hear Anneliese sobbing. Marta leaned her temple against her index and middle fingers. What did Pavel expect? If he was willing to forsake her like so much nothing, this is what he’d get in return. She pushed her untouched drink across the table. She cast around for somewhere to put her eyes and found the little wooden coffee mill. Her arms folded squarely across her chest.
“Marta,” Pavel said. But she refused to look up.
Pavel sighed deeply. “I owe you an apology. I’m sorry we had to . . . keep our plans secret from you.”
She looked again at the coffee mill; two loose beans were caught under the blade. Her stomach did a flip-flop, as though trying to get her attention. An apology? Had she heard correctly?
“Do you understand?” Pavel scrutinized her.
The hollows beneath his eyes might actually, she thought, have been bruises.
“It was to protect you,” Pavel said. “So if anyone came asking after us you wouldn’t be compromised. We had to keep it secret,” he explained. “From absolutely everybody.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We didn’t even tell my mother.”
He paused and frowned. “Which is why I can’t figure out who—” But he shook his head and stopped himself before finishing his sentence. “Regardless,” he said, “I want you to know that I planned to send for you. From France. I have your ticket.” He patted his breast pocket.
Marta looked up from the coffee mill. A ticket? For her?
“And a passport.”
He was bluffing, surely. Something inside her had hardened against him, like the pit at the centre of a piece of summer fruit, and she was not about to let her guard down again, to let herself be fooled a second time. But Pavel took the passport from his jacket pocket along with a green and white Wagons-Litz envelope and laid them in front of her on the table. She felt for a moment that she was going to be sick.
“Go on,” he said. “If you don’t believe me.”
She opened the envelope and saw the unpunched slip of paper. Her own name was there, last and first.
Pavel waited.
Marta picked it up as though to verify its physical presence. She was sweating, but her hands were cold. It seemed still that this must be some sort of trick, a way to secure her loyalty again now that things had not gone as planned. But the ticket was very real in her palm, and it had been purchased, she saw, several weeks earlier. If she had not told Ernst what she had told him, would she now be with the Bauers, in Paris? She had never been to France. It made her think of expensive red wine and those delicious pains au chocolat.
If she had not told Ernst what she had told him, would the Bauers now be free?
“We thought it would seem suspicious,” Pavel said, “to be crossing with a maid . . .” He cleared his throat and said, “—with a Gentile governess in our employment. So I was going to send for you after.”
Marta met his eye finally. “Really?” she asked. Her voice sounded meek in her own ears, the voice of a scared child, but she did not look away. She needed to be certain. And Pavel jumped at the chance to reassure her. “Really,” he said. “I promise.”
The way he spoke made her remember, suddenly, the fullness of his mouth on hers, how he’d pulled her back into his arms one last time. The glimmer of tongue that had set her stomach quivering.
Pavel pushed a thumb into his forehead, between his eyes, and looked down at the unpunched ticket in her hand. Then he lifted his head and looked at her again, the same piercing expression on his face. “I’m sorry, Marta,” he repeated.
Marta could not tell exactly what he was sorry for—the lie, his failure to get his family out, or some combination of the two—but the sincerity of his look absolved him completely. She would have forgiven him, just then, for anything.
The events of the previous days came out slowly. The telling of the story had a ritual quality; the Bauers were telling her, ostensibly, but Marta could see that they needed to recount it for each other, for themselves, to try to make some sense of it. The conductor had taken their passports, squinted at them, and squinted down at a clipboard he was carrying against his gleaming buttons. “Ah,” he said. “Pa
vel Bauer. Off to buy some flax?”
“We knew right then,” Anneliese said, “that someone had betrayed us.”
Marta made a discreet gesture to show Mrs. Bauer where her eye makeup had smeared. Anneliese dabbed at her eye with the back of her hand.
“He hauled us off the train immediately,” Pavel was saying. “He didn’t even look at Pepik’s passport. We spent the night in prison.”
Anneliese started to cry again. Her cheeks were the bright pink of one of little Vera Stein’s china dolls.
“In prison? Why in prison?”
Anneliese looked at Marta, exasperated. “Because they were forged documents. They saw we were trying to get out of the country.” She wiped her eyes again. “There was an announcement . . . A man called out as we were leaving that this train would be the last allowed through.” She blew her nose on her sister’s handkerchief. It was monogrammed with a swirly blue A, Alžběta’s first initial, as well as Anneliese’s own. “The borders have closed,” she said. “We’re officially stuck. The country will be occupied.”
“The borders have closed? Really?” Marta paused, taking this in. Then, because she could not quite fathom the terrible implications, she asked again, “You spent the night in prison?”
Marta waited for Pavel to say “Not in prison exactly,” but he only nodded. His simple gesture suggested just the opposite, that the word prison was woefully inadequate to conjure the night they had suffered.
“Even Pepik?”
“They took Pepik somewhere else. He won’t say where.”
“The borders are being patrolled. We’re stuck,” said Anneliese. But Marta was trying hard not to hear this. She thought instead of her young charge, held against his will. “Why did they keep Pepik? He’s just a baby!”
“Things are changing. The world we live in is not fair anymore,” said Anneliese.
“All of the Sudeten Jews have been sent to a camp,” Pavel added.
“A camp? What do you mean?” asked Marta.
But Pavel knew nothing about the camps beyond the rumours. “I do know that we’re lucky to have gotten off so easily,” he said. “They could have kept us.”
“And they did keep our things. The passports, our money, my jewellery.”
Marta wanted to ask about the watch sewn into Mrs. Bauer’s coat, but that would betray her clandestine listening.
A feeling came over her then, like when she’d had scarlet fever as a little girl. Vertigo, crawling skin, a sense that the world around her was not quite real. Because it couldn’t be so—what they were telling her couldn’t be true. Her grievance had melted away entirely, and what was left was love for the Bauers, righteous and pure. Like a mother’s love, she thought. She would fight for them, protect them at all costs. But were the borders really closing? Would people really be held inside the country against their wills, like animals in a cage? If this was the case, it was slowly dawning on her, then she had done something terribly, irrevocably wrong.
Marta forced herself to take a deep breath. She rearranged the unthinkable thought to make the Bauers the ones who were overreacting. They would see: all this was easily fixable. Tomorrow she would go down to the station with her savings and buy them new tickets out.
But when Pavel turned on the radio in the middle of the following afternoon, it was announced that Jozef Tiso had just returned from a conference with Adolf Hitler and had proclaimed a separate Slovak state.
“A separate what?” Marta asked. With the Sudetenland already gone there would be nothing left of their country whatsoever.
The Bauers stood by the radio as though it were a dear friend on a deathbed. The Czech foreign minister, František Chvalkovský, and President Hácha, they heard, had been ordered to Berlin. Finally, later in the day, it was reported that the German army had crossed the border and occupied the frontier town of Ostrava. Pavel was translating the radio broadcast, but he added the last detail himself. “Ostrava,” he said to Marta. “The town where you were born.”
Marta crossed the room to the fireplace and stood facing the ornate mantelpiece. She had always thought of money as the great protector and of the Bauers as all-powerful. In the past she had suffered because she was poor, this was true, and did not have the resources to leave her home when she needed to. But it now seemed that no amount of money could save the Bauers from what was happening around them. Hitler, she realized with a shock, was serious. She’d read Mein Kampf, and Ernst had explained to her Hitler’s thoughts on the “Jewish peril.” Perhaps, she thought, by telling Ernst about Pavel’s plans to leave, she really had foiled the Bauers’ only chance for escape.
Perhaps, because of her, the course of the Bauers’ lives would now change.
But deep down Marta did not believe she had this kind of power; she didn’t believe she could alter fate. Fate doled itself out according to action, according to how people behaved. The Bauers had proven themselves to be good after all. So things would work out for them in the end.
When Marta woke, it was snowing. She could feel it without having to look; the air was different, muffled in the silence that only winter brings. She fought the urge to fall back into the thick blankets of sleep; instead she got up and put on her slippers and robe and opened the shutters of the little window in the hall.
It was still dark, the barest hint of light on the horizon. Like a premonition, like the last dream before waking.
She picked a bit of sleep from the corner of her eye and stood in front of the window looking down. Her ankles cold beneath her housecoat. The street below was empty; then there was a bicycle. Afterwards she would think back to this lone rider and imagine he’d worn a cape and carried a sword. The Angel of Death entering the city. But it was an officer’s peaked cap, a Schirmmütze, that he wore, and a feldgrau wool tunic with epaulettes and glinting buttons. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air, like a villain from a storybook. Marta closed her eyes to try to make the officer disappear, but when she opened them again he was still there, and behind him the whole street was full of soldiers, the Angel’s army streaming up the steep hill from the glimmering city below. The snow was falling heavily, making a fairy tale of Prague. The swirling white against miles of black and grey made it seem as if they had come from the world of an old photograph, a world from which all the colour had been drained. And there was something else that made her think they were part of a dream: they were driving on the wrong side of the road.
Marta turned her back to the window. The Bauers could have got out, she said to herself. And you could have been with them. She spoke to herself in the third person, as someone separate from her real self. Someone else would now have to cope with the crippling guilt—because there was no way she could manage it.
She went to wake the Bauers but saw there was already a light on in the parlour. It was five in the morning but they were already dressed, Anneliese in a knitted skirt and pearls, Pavel in a charcoal suit, his briefcase open on the table. Inside was a fat stack of American dollars held together by a rubber band. The first thing she heard when she came into the room was the Czech radio station: “German army infantry and aircraft are beginning the occupation of the territory of the republic at six o’clock. The slightest resistance will cause the most unforeseen consequences and lead to the intervention becoming utterly brutal. All commanders have to obey the orders of the occupying army. The various units of the Czech army are being disarmed . . . Prague will be occupied at six-thirty.”
She continued to listen: the message was being repeated.
Pavel turned to look at Marta, his face pink, as though the knot on his silk tie had been tied too tight.
“We had a phone call from the police chief.”
Marta pulled her robe around her body.
“The chief said that we are responsible for opening the factory as usual.”
“Can you believe it?” Anneliese asked.
“Then I got another call, from Hans. Offering to blow the factory up.”
&
nbsp; “It’s the ides of March,” Anneliese said.
“Blow it up! Why?” Marta looked at Pavel.
“There has been an ordinance issued to install Czech trustees in Jewish businesses.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Bauer?”
“They’re taking our companies.”
Marta looked away. Ernst had been right. Pavel would lose what was his, one way or another. The unfairness of this washed over her. The indignity.
“Hácha’s daughter is married to a Jew,” Anneliese was saying. “He’s supposed to be a moderate.”
Pavel snorted. If he had not been so dignified, Marta thought, he would have spat.
“Did you hear about the conversation between Hitler and Chamberlain?” Marta asked. She wanted suddenly, desperately, to cheer the Bauers up; a joke was the only thing she could think of.
“Tell me.” Pavel leaned forward, eager to be entertained, distracted.
“Hitler and Chamberlain met in the street. And Hitler said, ‘Chamberlain, give me Czechoslovakia.’ And Chamberlain said, ‘Okay.’”
Marta paused for effect.
“The next day, Hitler ran into Chamberlain again. And he said, ‘Chamberlain, give me your umbrella.’ But Chamberlain said, ‘My umbrella?! Why, that belongs to me!’”
The Bauers laughed briefly, but Marta could see she hadn’t succeeded in lifting their moods. They turned back towards each other right away, faces solemn.
“Did you try to reach your mother?” Anneliese asked.
“I couldn’t,” Pavel said.
“It’s unbelievable. That Hácha signed that piece of paper.”
“If he didn’t sign we would have been bombed. Right now we would all be a big pile of smoking ashes.”
By the time Pepik woke, Messerschmitts were swooping low over the Vltava River, their shadows skimming across the choppy water. They rose steeply to clear the bridges, then plunged back down like hawks heading for the kill. Pepik, still in his blue flannel nightshirt, began to narrate the aircrafts’ movements. “Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen . . . an attack like the world has never known . . .” There was something blasé about his tone, though, as if he were a bored field correspondent, a newsman who had seen what the world had to offer and was no longer easily impressed.
