by Alison Pick
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.
I thank you a second time for your kindness.
Marianna Bruckner
(FILE UNDER: Bruckner, Marianna. Died Birkenau, 1943)
AT NIGHT I WALK BY THE RIVER and think about everything lost. It’s a cliché, sure, but for every decision that gets made, a billion other options are forsaken. This is true even of happy events. Take a wedding—one future chosen and an infinite number of others let go. Or conception: Think of all the sperm! Of all the people who now never will exist.
I wonder if this is how my mother thought of me. If she would have preferred me to arrive at another time. Or perhaps as a different child entirely.
I imagine her as a woman not particularly taken with motherhood. As a woman with other things on her mind.
“Lisa,” I tell myself, “don’t be so dramatic.”
The truth is I’m a little prone to wallowing.
After you stood me up at Schwartz’s I closed my file on you. I closed it the way I’ve tried to close the one on my mother, the one that nevertheless always finds its way to the top of the pile. The Freudians were wrong—about so many things!—but the influence of parents, that part at least they got right. There’s a feeling that comes over me, a feeling that has nothing to do with my mother and at the same time equals her absence. If I’m walking late at night through the quiet winter streets and the smell of someone’s laundry floats up from the vent in their basement. If there’s a light on in a living room, a table lamp or the TV’s blue glow. If there are people moving around behind a lace curtain. Their details are obscured; I pretend it could be her. The longing sharpens until I think I might pass out. I find some excuse to lean over, to tie up my bootlace; I catch my breath and straighten back up and crane my neck. Trying to get a glimpse. Once a man came to the front door. Snow boots pulled on over plaid pajama bottoms. He cleared his throat. “Can I help you?” he asked.
I realized I’d been standing there for probably half an hour. “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was just . . .” But I could not think of anything I might have been doing, so I turned away and kept walking.
One step. Two steps.
Hope, unanswered over a life as long as mine, becomes more of a curse than a blessing.
I don’t really know what to say about my mother. I wonder who she could have been as part of my adult life. When you don’t have something, it’s easy to idealize it. I understand that, I really do.
Still, I hate to hear people complain about their mothers. I always have to fight back the urge to tell them how lucky they are.
Which, of course, would make me sound like a mother myself.
There’s a park I sometimes pass when I’m walking late at night. The playground abandoned, ghostly. Sometimes I’ll wedge myself into one of the swings and drag my heels in the sand for a while. Once I happened by the park in the middle of the afternoon and the place was full of women and strollers. It was easy to pick out the parents from the nannies. The parents were the ones who were showing off their children, bragging about math scores and soccer goals, as though intelligence and good behaviour on the part of the child makes the parent herself worthwhile.
The nannies had enough detachment to give the kids room to breathe.
Still, it’s flesh and blood I wonder about. It’s hard for most people to imagine what it’s like to have absolutely nobody. No flesh of my flesh, no blood of my blood. For a while there was a glimmer of hope about my father, but that turned out to be a pipe dream. I go weeks, months, without anyone knowing where I am. Without anyone checking up on me, I mean.
I know what you’re thinking. I wonder, of course I do.
Is there a childless woman who doesn’t?
But I think it’s for the best. No, let me rephrase that. I’m sure it’s for the best. To have a child is to open yourself up to the greatest loss. All you have to do is think for two seconds about the camps, about the mothers in line for selection who had their children torn from their arms. About the children who were lured into trucks with the promise of chocolate. Herded like baby lambs into holding pens. Stripped and shorn. That’s all there was to it. They were gassed to death and burned. They drifted west, a thin scrap of cloud, from the mouths of the godlike chimneys.
And you too are gone from me now, Joseph. I wonder what would have happened if we had found each other earlier. If things might somehow have been different. If you might have lived a life less full of pain. I wonder if there was something more I could have done to make things better for you in the end.
Chapter Six
PAVEL DID IT WITH A BRIBE.
Nobody said as much, but Marta knew there was no other explanation for the sudden retraction of the secretary’s firm decision. Winton could use Pavel’s money to further finance his altruism; Pepik was on the list and some other child was off. The Bauers didn’t speak of this, or of the finite number of futures that could be secured, or about who might be lost because Pepik had been found. Marta’s fate was not mentioned either. There was no time for existential questions; the whole thing was so last-minute that they had to leap immediately into preparations.
A list arrived detailing the harsh British weather conditions, and Marta was sent to the tailor to have some new travelling trousers and an anorak made for Pepik. The sole of her left boot was wearing thin and she had to stop several times along the way to adjust her stocking inside it. When she got back to the flat, Anneliese was bent over her Czech-English dictionary. Marta looked around for Pavel or Pepik, but neither was anywhere to be seen. This was the first time the two women had been alone in quite some time—was Anneliese avoiding her? Anneliese lifted her head but kept her eyes on her dictionary. “I’ll have a cup of coffee,” she said. She was feigning disinterest, but Marta could tell from her voice that she too was nervous about the two of them being alone together.
Marta took off her boots and rubbed the round blister that had risen under the ill-fitting heel. She put the package from the tailor, wrapped in brown paper, on top of the breakfront and went into the kitchen; then she ground the coffee beans extra fine and cut an apple into thin slices the way she knew Anneliese liked it. Grateful to be able to do something—anything—for her. There was a mass of guilt churning around in Marta’s stomach all the time now. She’d prevented the Bauers from leaving; she’d sheltered Ernst’s agenda; and now she had this closeness with Pavel. She loved Anneliese. Adored her. Marta had always thought of herself as the passive victim, as the one ruled by the will of a foreign body, but she saw now, all at once, that Anneliese felt threatened. Pavel was a country Marta had occupied. And Anneliese was like the native Czechs. Forsaken.
Marta came back into the parlour and set the coffee down gingerly on the table.
“Do you think it’s good that Pepik is going?” she asked. Trying to make conversation. And Anneliese looked unsure how to answer. Whether to address Marta as her help or as her equal.
“It’s just for a while,” she finally said. “Just until all of this blows over.”
“Do you think the Allies might still come to our rescue?”
“Just until all this Jewish business blows over.” Anneliese ran a finger around the rim of her china cup.
“He’s such a little boy,” Marta said. But then she thought this might seem unworldly and provincial. “Did you travel as a child, Mrs. Bauer?”
“Certainly I travelled,” Anneliese said. “With my parents, as a family. As a five-year-old? Alone? Of course not!” She spoke harshly but Marta knew it was out of worry and she chose not to correct Anneliese, not to remind her that her son had recently turned six. “How will you tell him?” she asked instead.
Anneliese leaned her head on her hand and then lifted it again: she had been to the salon and was trying not to ruin her finger wave. She looked up at Marta, an odd mixture of vulnerability and defiance on her face. “I hadn’t thought about telling Pepik,” she said. She paused. “Perhaps you could do it.”
Marta should have expected as much. The difficult tasks were always left to her, and in a way it pleased her to be given the responsibility. Still, something about it seemed not quite right. She touched her dimple. “Of course, Mrs. Bauer,” she said. “I’d be happy to. But I wonder if he shouldn’t be told by . . .”
The words his mother hung in the air between the women.
Anneliese nodded yes. “But you introduce the idea. Warm him to it.” She blew on her coffee.
“Certainly, Mrs. Bauer.”
“But don’t actually tell him. Leave that part to me.”
“To his mother,” she added.
As though the idea had been hers in the first place.
Evening had fallen while the two women spoke, and Marta imagined how they would look from the street, silhouettes in a small pool of lamplight, sisters perhaps, confiding in each other. Twenty-three and maybe twenty-six years old, their whole lives ahead of them. She liked to think of her life as a story, of herself as the heroine: a bad start, some stumbling blocks, but she’d make good on her natural promise. She owed that much to Anneliese. She owed it to herself.
“There’s something else,” Mrs. Bauer said. Her cup rattled when she set it on the saucer. “Would you stay on as cook? Once Pepik is gone?”
“Of course!”
Marta spoke quickly and then hesitated, smoothed down the front of her dress.
“That is, if you’ll have me.”
How, she wondered, could Anneliese be so gracious? It was the perfect excuse for her to let Marta go, no explanation required, and yet she was choosing not to. Perhaps, Marta thought, it was because everything was topsy-turvy with the occupation. Things were shifting and dissolving, reconfiguring. Who did Anneliese have to lean on?
Marta got up to clear the coffee. “Would you like anything else, Mrs. Bauer?”
“I suppose there is one other thing . . .” Anneliese touched her dictionary with a perfectly shaped scarlet nail. “The English word for betrayal. I can’t find it in here.”
Marta flushed. “That one I can’t help you with.”
Anneliese shook her head sadly. “I didn’t think so,” she said.
Marta made her way down the long corridor. The hardwood floor smelled of wax. There was no sound from Pepik’s room, and when she opened the door, she saw he had fallen asleep in the middle of the carpet, the loop of his train track surrounding him. His suspenders had been pushed off and several lead soldiers lay scattered around his shoul
ders. Marta put the package from the tailor on the dresser and looked down at him. His head was thrown back and there was a slight film of perspiration on his brow. He looked as if he was following some epic battle, his eyes moving back and forth rapidly under his lids. She crouched down and tried to pick him up without waking him, but he stirred and opened his eyes.
“I’m sorry, miláčku,” she whispered.
Pepik squinted and rubbed his face; it was pink and creased with sleep. She pulled back the patchwork quilt on the bottom bunk, propped him up against the feather pillow, and bent down to unbuckle his shoes.
“I don’t want to,” Pepik said.
“I’m sorry, my darling, but it’s already past your bedtime.”
“No,” he mumbled; he was still half asleep. “I don’t want to go on the train.”
Marta looked up from his shoes. “You don’t want to play with it?”
“I don’t want to go on it.”
His eyes had fallen shut again, his lashes dark against his face. Marta shook his leg gently. “On this train?” she said, pointing to the Hornby cars stalled on their short loop of track. “That’s good, because you’re such a big boy you’d never fit in it!”
Pepik kicked his foot away from her. “I don’t want to go on a real train,” he said. There was a waver in his voice; he was caught between throwing a tantrum and falling back into oblivion. How did he know? Had he heard them talking? He couldn’t have . . .
Marta lifted his limp arms one at a time and pulled off his little sweater. There were patches on the elbows she herself had sewn. She buttoned up his nightshirt quickly so the draft wouldn’t further wake him. He had almost drifted off completely when Anneliese came into the room. “Good night, Pepik,” she said, her voice bright, and Pepik’s eyes flew back open.
“I don’t want to go on a train!” he shouted.
Anneliese shot Marta a questioning look, not angry so much as hurt that Marta would act so explicitly against her wishes. Later that night Marta tried to explain that Pepik had somehow divined what they were planning, that she hadn’t told him anything. She could see that Anneliese didn’t believe her though. A second, auxiliary betrayal. Which worked against them both in the end.
