by Alison Pick
A letter arrived from the family that was taking Pepik.
Scottish, it turned out, not British. The note was brief but generous, introducing themselves and saying they were looking forward to meeting Pepik. They had a son just around his age, a son named Arthur, who was bedridden. They hoped Pepik’s presence would help in Arthur’s recovery. This worried Marta but the Bauers didn’t mention it, so she didn’t either. The letter closed by saying that the fifty pounds was a sacrifice but they were firm believers in doing Christ’s good work. Pavel had been reading out loud; he stopped here and looked at his wife accusingly. “I’d like to have the rabbi come and bless Pepik,” he said. “Before he travels.” He pulled unconsciously at the skin under his chin, as though evoking a long beard.
“Of course, darling,” Anneliese said. Marta waited for her to qualify her remark, but nothing else came, and it was she who asked finally, cautiously, “What about the baptism?”
The Bauers turned towards her, one mind with two faces. Their shared expression told her to drop it.
Marta realized suddenly that there were many things she did not know about the Bauers’ relationship, things she didn’t understand and never would.
The packing for Pepik’s trip was now taken up in earnest. Anneliese had brought out his valise and measured it; finding it two centimetres smaller than the allotted size, she had sent Marta down to the Sborowitz department store to buy a larger one. It was red, with a beige plaid lining, and several centimetres bigger than what was permitted, but Anneliese said she was willing to take the risk. There would be more important things to be done on the platform than measuring children’s suitcases.
Anneliese began to tick off the items on the packing list. She replaced the short pants with longer wool trousers and substituted his well-worn buckled sandals with a pair of tiny galoshes. The tailor was at work on a jacket that could be worn over short sleeves in the summer and over a sweater in winter.
Anneliese said to Marta, “Of course, he’ll be back before the snow comes.”
In addition to clothes there was the matter of what the packing list referred to as “sentimental items.” In a small envelope in the valise’s side pocket Anneliese placed a photograph. It was the family portrait taken after the baby girl’s birth: Marta behind Pepik, touching his shoulders, Anneliese off to the side, her sunglasses lowered, and Pavel holding the bundle in his arms. Marta was surprised that this was the photo Anneliese had chosen to send. She thought it would be confusing for Pepik, who didn’t remember his sister. “It’s just for posterity,” Anneliese said, and Marta wondered what she meant. Anneliese kept repeating that the separation would be temporary and brief, but she was packing as though she expected never to see her son again. She attended to the suitcase as if it were a matter of life or death: it was like a body open on the operating table, the internal organs being removed and replaced at will. It was the second time Anneliese had packed a suitcase for Pepik in two short months, and Marta saw that this time she was determined to get it right; it was as if she thought that if she could only choose the right contents they would somehow ensure her son’s safe passage.
Pepik observed the packing and unpacking of the suitcase as if he were witnessing a complicated surgery: equal parts curiosity and repulsion. Marta had taken Anneliese at her word, that she would tell Pepik what was happening—children, after all, need to know what to expect—but five days before the departure date Marta found him peering into the depths of the suitcase. “Is Mamenka leaving?” He paused. “Are you leaving?” His earlier premonition had vanished from his mind like a nightmare forgotten on waking.
Marta swept him into her arms: his wonderful weight. The buckle on his suspender dug into her side, and she shifted him on her hip, took him into the bedroom, and pulled him onto her lap in the rocking chair. Before she could second-guess herself, she said, “I’ve got a big surprise. You, miláčku, are going on a trip!”
The little smile that had appeared when she picked Pepik up began to drain from his face.
Marta forged ahead: “You’ve seen all the soldiers in the street? The bad Nazis? You get to fight them. From Scotland. You’ll march away and help protect the good guys.” Pepik’s bottom lip was trembling but she blundered on. “You’ll stay with a wonderful family named the Millings. In a beautiful house! By the ocean.” The lies spilled from her mouth now as if someone else was speaking. “They have a dog!” she heard herself say—where that had come from she had no idea whatsoever. “And a boy just your age named Arthur. So you’ll have someone to play soldiers with.”
“Another little boy?” Pepik’s face brightened. It had been so long since he’d had a playmate of any kind.
“Yes,” she said, “but.” She stopped and held up a forefinger, about to reveal a top-secret piece of intelligence. “Arthur is sick. He can’t leave his bed. So you have a very important job. You’ll be responsible for helping him get better.”
“That’s my job?”
“It’s your duty. Can you do it?”
He nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
She thought later that she should not have taken this approach. She had not meant to unnecessarily burden little Pepik. But, by the time she realized, it was too late.
Pepik was dead. Marta was sure of it.
She went into his room in the morning and opened the wooden venetian blinds; slats of sun slapped on the floor. She said his name once and then said it again, louder. She crouched down and blew softly on his forehead, which usually woke him laughing, but he didn’t stir. Finally she had to take hold of his face and almost yell directly into his ear; he opened his eyes and looked at her, confused, his cheeks flushed.
He didn’t recognize her.
She held the back of her palm to his forehead. He was burning up.
Marta assumed he must be upset about their conversation the previous night, and that if she could just take his mind off his impending departure he would be fine, but as soon as he was able to stand, which he could do only clutching her elbow, he leaned over and threw up into his slippers.
“Oh,” Marta said. “You’re a sick bunny.”
Pepik’s knees buckled and he collapsed on the bed, banging his temple against the ladder between the bunks.
He slept for the rest of the morning. It was as though hearing about bedridden Arthur had given Pepik ideas of his own. Marta spent the day in the rocking chair next to Pepik, watching him drift in and out, a loose piece of driftwood by the shore. She felt terribly responsible, as though he would not have fallen ill had she done a better job telling him about Scotland. He was soaking through nightshirts faster than she could change them. In the end she decided to leave him naked, with cold cloths on his forehead and neck and just above his tiny, circumcised penis. His sleep was punctuated with little grunts and moans. He woke around midnight and looked at her blankly and asked for a rope ladder. Marta didn’t know how to respond and said nothing, thinking he would slip back into unconsciousness, but he furrowed his forehead and repeated the request with force, adding the name Vera at the end. “My rope ladder! Vera!”
He fell back onto the pillow but the moaning got louder. Was he referring to his little cousin Vera, whom he’d not seen for ages? And a rope ladder! Where had he come up with it?
By the second day the fever showed no signs of letting up. Pavel came in to check on the two of them; he crossed the room and stood very close to Marta. She could smell his aftershave. Something sharp and sugary, like cedars in the sun. “Is he any better?”
“Maybe a little.”
“I wanted to teach him some English before he goes.”
“Hello?” Marta had recently learned the word.
“Good morning.”
“And Where is the toilet?”
“Good one.”
“I’m hungry.”
“And what about I love you?”
Pavel turned away from her, averting his eyes.
Pepik’s sick stomach had reasserted itself
and Pavel wanted to prop his son up to be sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit. Pepik’s body was difficult to manipulate, as if its owner had vacated and left a heavy lead dummy in his place. It took Pavel and Marta several minutes to arrange him, leaning him sideways against the oversized pillows. Their hands touched twice during the operation, sending little sparks up Marta’s arm.
The fever burned between them.
“Should we call the pediatrician?” Marta asked.
“We already did.”
Marta waited.
“The summons was ignored.”
It was the Jewish thing. Pavel didn’t say so, but Marta knew.
There was still no improvement by the third night, and the whole family gathered round Pepik’s bed. He was flat on his back with the thermometer sticking out of his mouth at a ninety-degree angle, as though from a pork roast. His fever had reached 103 degrees, and Marta had a feeling that they were gathered around a campfire, something hot and dangerous, crackling and spitting. Pepik seemed to sense their presence: his hallucinations came fast and strong as if he were up on stage before them, an actor charged with holding a vast audience’s attention. He spat out the thermometer and pulled at the flesh on his cheeks and puffed them out. He began to recite Der Struwwelpeter in a high, whiny voice. He pushed back his sheets and made to stand up on the bed, and when Pavel tried to move him back under the covers, he bit his father’s hand.
Time had seemed elastic to Marta during the worst of the illness, but with only two days left until Pepik’s departure it snapped firmly back into place. Anneliese had to settle on the final contents of the suitcase—she would send the winter pajamas with the feet attached but leave the suspendered bathing costume and cap. She also slipped her diamond watch down into the side pocket of the valise. Marta saw the note: For my boy who knows how to tell the time. A lovely gesture. Still, she thought, it was a large gift for such a small child. Perhaps Anneliese had other reasons for wanting to be rid of it.
Marta was responsible for putting a picnic into Pepik’s rucksack: two crabapples, some sausage, a small loaf of dark Czech bread. She taped a note to a bottle of Aspirin with instructions that Pepik should take one every three hours. The note was addressed to nobody in particular, and there would be nobody on the train to administer it, but it seemed to comfort Anneliese to include it, and Marta had to admit she felt the same way. Maybe there would be some older girl who would see that Pepik was sick and take him under her wing. It was like putting a message in a bottle: they had no idea if it would arrive.
“Marta.” Anneliese drew the strings on the rucksack. “There’s something I think I should tell you.”
“Those Aspirin have expired?”
Anneliese paused, leaned in closer. Marta saw new wrinkles in the corners of her eyes. “It’s just that—” Anneliese started, but stopped when Pavel came in with the suitcase. He fiddled with its lock for several minutes before laying it on the parlour table. It stayed there overnight, like a body before burial.
It was Marta who spent the last evening with Pepik, up in the room that had belonged to his Uncle Max. In the pantry she found a white tray patterned with blue windmills and brought him up a bowl of chicken soup and a little dish of cherry preserves for dessert. “Are you hungry, darling?” she asked.
She didn’t wait for him to answer. “You’re leaving in the morning! What a lucky boy,” she said. “And we will come and meet you in Scotland.”
Pepik nodded gravely. His eyes had cleared and he was eating the soup quickly, like a starving man.
“You’ll meet me?” he asked, the spoon halfway to his mouth.
“Your mamenka and tata will come as quickly as they can.”
“And you too?”
“And me too,” she promised. “And me too, miláčku.” She didn’t want to think about the fact that Pepik was leaving—leaving for real—but nor did she want to miss her chance to say goodbye. In the morning there would be parents and crowds of children and train crew. As much as she didn’t want it to be true, she knew that this might be their last time together, just the two of them, for quite some time. For weeks, most certainly. Possibly for months.
“Show me your Sneezy face,” she said.
Pepik put down his soup spoon, his bowl empty. He made four rapid achoo’s into his elbow. Marta clapped her hands together under her chin. “Well done!” she said. “Goodbye, Sneezy.”
She thought for a minute. “Your Bashful face.”
Pepik fluttered his eyelids shyly. He covered his face with his hands and peeked out at her from between them. She kissed his forehead and both of his ears and said, “Goodbye, Bashful. Travel safely!”
She asked for his Dopey face and his Happy face and his Grumpy face and kissed them all at length.
When the ritual was complete, Pepik lay back on the big feather pillow. He looked pale and sweaty and Marta felt badly for exciting him. She touched his brow: he was still running a fever.
She sat beside him for a while, stroking his hair and wondering what to tell him. It wasn’t clear how much he understood about what was happening, and she didn’t want to upset him further. She looked down at his soft, round face; his little eyelids fluttered shut. She bent down to his level. “I love you very much,” she whispered into the curl of his ear. But somehow this didn’t seem enough. There was something else, she thought, something else she should say. “Open your eyes, miláčku.”
Tears were running down Marta’s face now. She blinked, trying to hide them from Pepik, but they came hot and fast. He looked at her, searching, and lifted a little hand to touch her cheek. “My darling,” she whispered, “may you live to be a wise old man.”
As soon as she’d spoken she wished to take the words back—she would see him very soon, after all, and she’d not meant to alarm him. But he pushed his head into her chest now, clinging to her tightly, and then he lifted his eyes and nodded. He’d understood her wish for him: a long and happy life. And it seemed—although she might have been imagining it—it seemed he was wishing the same for her.
In the car on the way to the station Anneliese looked out the window, hands in her lap, tearing the packing list into smaller and smaller pieces. It was a short drive, but Pepik put his head in Marta’s lap and fell asleep as soon as the car started moving. He woke when they arrived, looked around weakly, and vomited his porridge onto the floor of the automobile. Anneliese pretended she hadn’t seen it. It was left to Marta to wipe up the mess with her handkerchief.
Pavel applied the parking brake and turned the key to turn off the car. He had pulled up beside the Hlavní nádraží with its stained glass windows and the carved faces of women representing Prague as the Mother of Cities. There was already lots of activity on the platform: a long queue of adults in front of a table, and children racing around the entrance to the public toilets. Pavel leaned sideways against the car door so he could see his wife in the seat beside him and Marta behind them. He was grouping them together, corralling them. “Let’s make a plan,” he said to the women.
“What do you mean?” Anneliese asked. She was dressed in a little velvet Greta Garbo hat, a new jacket with shoulder pads, and leather gloves.
“How will we do this?” asked Pavel.
“Oh, it’s revolting.” Anneliese rolled down her window against the smell of vomit.
Pavel nodded towards Pepik, who had fallen immediately back to sleep in Marta’s lap. “Should we carry him?”
“Of course not. If they know he’s sick they’ll never let him on.”
“I’ll get the suitcase.”
“He can walk,” Anneliese said.
Pavel scoffed. “The Crown Prince doesn’t look in great shape for walking.” Marta could feel Pepik breathing against her, the low heat from his head like a flanker.
There was an hour left before departure but already the train had pulled into the station. It stood on the track in the morning sunlight, steaming, a mirage. Pavel got out of the front seat and Marta heard t
he trunk door slam and the sound of the suitcase falling over on the pavement. Pepik sat up, his eyes glassy. “Are you ready for your big adventure?” Marta asked him.
He clutched at his stomach and hiccupped loudly.
He was indeed able to walk on his own, though, steadied between his parents. Marta was relegated to picking up the rear. This was how it always was, she thought: she dressed, prepared, and comforted in the wings and then passed the child off to his mother before their grand entrance. The Bauers entered the full frenzy of the station with their son wedged firmly between them. “Your tie is crooked,” she heard Anneliese say to Pavel. And she watched as he obediently straightened it.
The first thing Marta thought when they entered the station was that all of their worrying had been for nothing. Pepik could have been covered with a bloody, oozing rash and nobody would have noticed. The platform was crammed with families immersed in their own version of what the Bauers were going through; nobody was paying the least bit of attention to anyone else. In every corner there were women weeping into hankies, fathers crouched down before their children, handing out last-minute advice, trying to make up for years of absence. One of the porters had started to stack some of the suitcases and a group of boys was racing around the pile at top speed, like puppies chasing each other’s tails. The shouting and crying and counselling combined to form a uniform din out of which only the occasional sentence could be discerned: from behind her Marta heard someone say, “We’ll see you again in a free Czechoslovakia!”
But the voice was hushed; there were Gestapo on the platform.
Marta had a sudden flash that there was something they’d forgotten. But she couldn’t think what it might be.
Three rough lines were forming at the doorways to the train. A whistle screamed through the morning sunlight. There was a pause in the bedlam, everyone united. The moment drew itself in, solidified, a glass sphere that hung suspended above them throwing off rainbows and sparkles of light, and then it shattered onto the station floor. The crying started up again, and the rapid instructions, and the shrill sound of women’s voices feigning cheer. Above it all now the conductors’ voices could be heard as they tried to herd the children into the passenger cars. The lines began to move forward slowly. At the front of each queue someone was ticking off a list and hanging a number around each small neck. There were plenty of children too young to know their own names.
