by Alison Pick
When he woke, Inga was looking over at him warily. “Kam jdeš?” she asked.
Pepik rubbed his eyes. “I’m going with you.”
Inga glared at him. “Now you are. But after. Where are you going?”
Pepik shrugged.
“I’m going to the Gillfords in the countryside,” Inga said. “I’m going to learn to ride a pony!” She fixed her gaze in the middle distance as though a pony had materialized in front of her and she could climb onto its back and ride away into the future. “There will be two other girls there,” she continued. “Sisters. They’ll be almost the same as my real sister, Hanna,” Inga said, but Pepik thought she sounded uncertain.
“We’re in Scotland,” he said, because he needed to say something.
“No we’re not. Don’t you know anything? This is Liverpool. We’re in England!” She looked down her snub nose at Pepik. “How old are you anyway? Six?”
Pepik nodded.
Inga looked surprised. “Well, that explains things.”
The car continued past open fields, through little towns with outdoor cafés and wrought-iron tables set up in the sun. The man looked over his shoulder and spoke to them and Pepik was surprised to hear Inga reply. Just a few halting words, but her ability to speak the funny language made her immediately desirable in his eyes. “I want Nanny,” Pepik whimpered.
Inga didn’t reply.
“Where are we going?” he tried again.
“To London,” Inga snapped, but the uncertainty had returned to her face. She turned away from Pepik and looked out the car window. “My father is a specialist in internal medicine. My real father. In Prague.”
From her shaking shoulders Pepik saw she had started to cry.
They drove for what seemed like days, past factories and warehouses, and finally the man pulled over and stopped in front of a long brick building. It was divided into many smaller houses attached side by side. They stood at attention like a row of lead soldiers. Pepik put his hand into his rucksack and felt around, first touching a sausage he had forgotten to eat and then landing on his own soldier, cool in his hand, readying both of them for battle. “Pow!” he muttered under his breath. They had arrived. The fight against the bad guys could begin.
Inside, the house was dark. The entire front room was filled with a big oak desk, but it didn’t have carved lion’s feet like his Uncle Max’s in Prague. It wasn’t as neatly organized either. There were stacks of notebooks and open folders piled on top of each other; in the centre of the desk was a big sheet of cardboard covered with photos of children’s faces, each one with writing underneath. Inga moved some books aside and sat down daintily on the edge of the sofa. She pursed her lips and took out a lipstick; she made several attempts before making contact with her mouth.
Where was Arthur?
There was a door at the back of the room, open just a crack; maybe Arthur was in there, sleeping.
The man sat down behind the massive desk with the briefcase open in front of him. He began writing things down, checking off a list. Lifting stacks of paper and peering underneath them. Inga had moved on from her lips and was taking down her hair—the length of it was surprising to Pepik. She tipped her head to one side and began braiding, her fingers working swiftly.
“Where’s Artoor?” Pepik asked.
Inga looked cross. “Who’s Artoor?”
“The sick little boy.”
“The only sick boy here is you.”
She crossed her legs and started braiding the other side of her head.
“The other boy, with . . .” Pepik started, but he faltered. He needed to fight back. He clutched the little soldier in his fist.
Inga wrinkled her nose in his direction. She concentrated harder on her hair, her fingers whizzing.
Several minutes later the doorbell rang.
“Come in!” the man called, but the door was locked. He fumbled with a bundle of keys. More English adults appeared; there was more babbling. Inga stood up as though she understood the conversation, which turned out to be true: she was leaving. “ Čekat!” Pepik said. “Wait for me!”
But it was too late. Inga was gone. She didn’t turn around to say goodbye.
When Pepik woke, there was light streaming in the window. He was in a big feather bed. The man with the briefcase was moving around the main room like Tata, in a clean suit and tie. Pepik crawled out from under the covers and padded over to him. “ Činit ne dovoleno,” he said.
He grabbed onto the man’s trouser leg and clung there. The man laughed and lifted Pepik up, making a groaning noise to show what a big boy he was. He pretended he was about to throw Pepik onto the couch, and Pepik squealed. The man repeated the motion, swinging Pepik into the air again and again and then finally letting him fall into a big pile of laundry. It was warm and smelled like soap. Pepik wondered if the man’s soap came with the same pictures of steam engines as theirs did at home.
Home.
Sunlight knifed through the window and made him squint and close his eyes. He would stay here with this man. Sleep in the big bed and eat the fluffy white bread, and Nanny and Mamenka would come to meet him.
Today would be the day.
The man with the briefcase had gone back behind the desk and was rustling his papers again. Every now and then he would peer over at Pepik and speak to him with the funny words. Pepik let them wash over him like bubbles in a bath. He let himself drift. A feeling of moistness was gathering in him, rising up from his toes, through his legs, a gush of heat that rushed through his stomach to his throat and his mouth.
He turned and threw up onto the floor.
The man looked up sharply from his folders. He sighed heavily and let his chin fall to his chest. When he looked up, there was an expression on his face that Pepik recognized, one he had seen on the faces of adults so frequently over the past months. Disapproval? Disappointment. Something to do with water on his forehead. The thing he had accepted that had ended in his being sent away. What was it? He couldn’t quite remember.
But he knew it was his own fault that he was here.
The sun piercing the windowpane had sharpened to a point, all its heat focused on Pepik’s head. He was a little bug under a magnifying glass, about to catch fire. He wriggled, trying to move away from the glare, but his body was too heavy. The man came over to pick him up and he went limp at the adult touch. He felt soft, like chocolate left out in the sun. But he would be safe here. This man would love him and keep him.
When he opened his eyes next, though, he was back on a train.
There was a woman waiting on the platform, and Pepik loved her at first sight. Her eyes were soft and warm like melted caramel. She crouched down in front of him—he could see the glint of hairpins in her hair. This was Mrs. Milling, this beautiful woman the same age as Nanny who would take him home and help him fight the Germans.
“Jsem hladový,” Pepik said. He clung to her with his eyes.
The woman put a hand over her heart, as though taking an oath. “Look at you,” she said. “Precious thing. I wonder what you’re saying.”
Pepik leaned his head on her shoulder. The woman laughed. “What’s this?” She pointed to his chest.
Pepik looked down and saw a number pinned there. From upside down he could make out a two and two fives.
“Jsem hladový,” he repeated. Something in him was reaching up towards her—not his arms but something in his chest. Something small in the very centre of him was straining up towards her. Mrs. Milling’s eyes were full of tears.
“Who do you belong to, I wonder? What’s that language you speak?”
She smelled of talcum and of roses left to dry in the sun. Pepik waited for Mrs. Milling to pick him up, but she didn’t. The porter had placed Pepik’s red suitcase on the platform and he tried to drag it towards her so she could take him home. He was tired and hungry; he wanted a bowl of kashi sprinkled with chocolate, the way Nanny made it. His suitcase made an awful sound, like a prison door scraping
open. It reminded him of something that he pushed to the bottom of his mind. Of a night he did not want to remember. Why was Mrs. Milling just sitting there? Perhaps he hadn’t been polite enough. Hadn’t Tata taught him to introduce himself properly? “Pepik,” he said, and extended his small hand. But someone gripped his shoulder from behind, and he turned to see a round man shaped very much like an egg, with skinny limbs sticking out from his body. The man’s arms and legs made Pepik think of Tata’s pipe cleaners.
Mrs. Milling stood up from her crouch. A blond wave had fallen from her hairpin; she tucked it behind her ear. “Is this your son?” she asked. “What a darling little—” But the man had a task to accomplish. He spoke to Pepik in the funny language and tried to pick him up. Pepik squirmed away and managed to drag his suitcase a few more feet towards Mrs. Milling.
He was going with her; she would feed him sweets for dinner and teach him to read, once and for all.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Milling said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
The egg-shaped man lifted Pepik’s suitcase. He put it under one arm and lifted Pepik up under the other, gripping him firmly so his little legs were sticking out sideways and his face was looking down at the ground. Pepik’s stomach lurched. He craned his neck, looking for Mrs. Milling. Where had she gone?
“Mamenka!” he shouted.
The man kept walking, carrying Pepik like a bundle of wood. He climbed some stairs up to a tram and set Pepik down in the seat beside him. The man didn’t speak to Pepik for the next forty minutes.
They arrived at a house and a woman came out to greet them and usher them in. She was older and greyer than Mrs. Milling. A face like a slice of bloody roast beef.
“So here you are.”
“Jsem hladový,” Pepik said. He sat down on the floor cross-legged.
The egg man shrugged at the woman. “Blimey.” It was the first word Pepik had heard from his mouth.
The woman bent down and inspected Pepik as if he were a cabbage at the grocer’s, picking through his hair, looking behind his ears for dirt. The procedure continued for several minutes; she seemed to be finding him deficient. Her voice was kind though, and for a moment the little songbird stirred inside Pepik’s chest, the one that had sung for Mrs. Milling. But the woman stood back up and crossed over to the kitchen. There was a black line of soot running up the wall from the stove to the ceiling. She took a cloth and rubbed at it vigorously. Then she looked back at the round man, as though surprised to still find him there. “Go on,” she said.
She motioned with her chin in the direction of a set of stairs. The man picked up the suitcase in one arm and Pepik in the other as though he were a pile of lumber. Pepik went limp and submitted.
The room at the top of the stairs had wallpaper that was dotted with red and blue sailboats. The floorboards were blue, like the sea. Two beds that smelled of mothballs were pushed up against opposite walls: Pepik would sleep by the window. The man plopped his suitcase down and looked at the second bed, uncertain. There was someone in it, someone so small that he barely made a bump beneath the covers. Pepik tiptoed over and peered into the other boy’s face. He had pale sandy hair and a light dusting of freckles across his nose. Clear, almost translucent skin. As though the little stove inside him that kept him alive was having trouble reaching all the way up to the surface.
“Artoor?”
The boy was still as stone.
“Haló?”
The boy gave a low moan. If this was Arthur, then the people downstairs were the Millings. It was Arthur’s noise of pain that welcomed Pepik, that told him he’d reached his new home.
Several hours later Mrs. Milling—the real Mrs. Milling—came upstairs. She opened the gold clasps on Pepik’s red suitcase. “Pro boha, co je tohle?” he said.
He had not seen its contents since leaving Prague; it was like a box of trinkets or magical charms, each one possessing a secret power.
The beautiful diamond watch could transport him back in time. And the little galoshes were for walking on water. He would cross the ocean on foot if he had to.
But he would not have to. His family would come and meet him. Nanny Marta had promised.
Mrs. Milling dug through the suitcase. She lifted the newly sewn little dress pants. “Well, aren’t you the posh one,” she said. “You come from money? Do you?”
She held up his nightshirt, which she changed him into quickly and efficiently, despite the fact that he was a big boy and able to do this by himself. Pepik realized he was not going to be made to brush his teeth. The sheets looked smooth but were rough to the touch, and he felt very high off the ground after sleeping for months in the bottom bunk in Prague. Mrs. Milling tucked him in tightly, so he could barely move his limbs. He felt like a letter sealed into an envelope.
“Chci napsat dopis,” he said. “Pani. Potřebuji pero. Můžeš mi podat pero, prosím?”
Mrs. Milling looked at Pepik. Her face was a blank sheet of paper.
There was no bedtime story. Mrs. Milling left the room briefly and came back with a thermometer. Pepik opened wide and stuck out his tongue, but it was her son Arthur’s temperature she was interested in. She gave the thermometer a vigorous shake after pulling it from Arthur’s mouth, as though she hoped to change the number she saw there. Then she flicked off the light and the room was plunged into blackness.
“Sladký sen,” Pepik said to nobody, and nobody answered him back.
He leaned back on his pillow. He could see out the window from his bed: the sky was slowly ticking down into a cool cobalt blue. There were a few stars out, messengers arrived too early. Down the length of the block there were long rows of brick houses, and warehouses with their gates closed and locked. The front windows were lit, small squares of yellow against the blackness, so that the street looked like a filmstrip. He thought of Snow White, of the Happy dwarf and his own Happy face, but he didn’t feel happy; he felt terribly alone. If he crushed his head up against the wall he could see all the way down the street. He needed to keep watch for his family walking up the long road towards him.
Tata would be in the middle, with Mamenka and Nanny on each of his arms.
Pepik had smuggled his lead soldier into bed with him, and as his eyes adjusted he pushed the covers back and set the soldier on the windowsill. He sat up and crossed his legs, watching. He and his soldier standing guard together. How impressed Tata would be to see him up so late, defending the house, his gun at the ready.
“At ease,” he commanded the soldier, roughly.
He didn’t want anyone getting shot by mistake.
Across the room Arthur’s breathing was raspy and irregular, like someone tuning a radio, stations coming in and out of range. There were long stretches between breaths. Only now, in the darkness, did Nanny’s words come back: it was Pepik’s job to help Arthur get better.
“Artoor?” he whispered.
There was phlegmy gasping from the other bed. Finally Arthur spoke. “I need help. Call my mother.”
It was like hearing a dead body come suddenly back to life. Pepik imagined Arthur reaching out a clammy hand to touch him.
He didn’t understand Arthur’s words, and didn’t answer.
Morning was a needle plunged into his arm. He woke to a chill draft of air. The covers had been pulled back and Mrs. Milling was standing over him. Her eyes were small and black and her lips were pressed into a perfectly straight line. Pepik tried to pull his knees up to cover himself, but it was too late. He’d wet the bed. She had seen.
“Zarmoucený,” Pepik said.
Mrs. Milling held her breath.
She worked quickly, matter-of-factly, pulling off Pepik’s nightshirt and underpants. She managed to strip the sheets without moving him from the bed, manoeuvring his body into different positions and cradling his head under her arm. She bundled the offending sheets into her arms and left him there, naked and uncovered.
Pepik was cold, and the skin of his bottom was red and sore. The pain in his
stomach reasserted itself, and he turned his head to the side and threw up on the blue floorboards.
Two minutes later Mrs. Milling returned carrying a pile of clean sheets. She was humming under her breath, but when she saw the vomit she stopped, her song breaking off mid-note. “What . . .” She leaned down and sniffed at the little pile of regurgitation, the white jelly of last night’s boiled cauliflower flecked with yellow. Then she shouted something in the direction of the hall; the round man emerged eventually at the top of the stairs, out of breath, a bottle of tomato ketchup in his hand.
“Look, Frank! He’s ill!” Mrs. Milling motioned her husband over and showed him the vomit. “More germs for . . . Doctor Travers said . . .” She was talking quickly and gesturing at her son; she sounded like she might burst into tears.
Pepik rolled over and cradled his head in his hands. It dawned on him suddenly that morning had arrived. He’d fallen asleep at his post. Nanny hadn’t come in the night, and Arthur was still sick. He had failed them. He had failed all of them.
By mid-morning Pepik was feeling a little better and half expected Mrs. Milling would make him go outside to play, but she preferred to treat him as a second sick son, bringing glasses of flat ginger ale to both boys, sterilizing the thermometer between uses. Later in the afternoon she came in to finish unpacking Pepik’s suitcase, and found the unsealed envelope containing the photo. She took out the family portrait and looked at it closely, taking her time.
Mrs. Milling looked up at Pepik. “You poor darling,” she said softly, as though she had just now realized that Pepik, too, had a family that loved him desperately. She pulled him against her in a kind of awkward squeeze.
When she went to put the picture back in the envelope, she paused, thinking better of it, and propped it up on Pepik’s bedside table instead. There was Mamenka, looking off to the side; Nanny was behind Pepik, her hands on his shoulders, her eyes cast down at him, proud.
Mrs. Milling pointed to Nanny. “Mother,” she said, enunciating clearly.
Pepik looked at her blankly; she said it a second time.
