by Alison Pick
He repeated it back to her, one syllable and then the second. “Mo-ther.”
Marta. Mo-ther.
His first English word.
Mother.
When Mrs. Milling was gone, Pepik picked up the photo. His head felt funny when he looked at Nanny’s face. He rested his hot cheek against the cool plaster of the wall. Then he propped up the photo beside the lead soldier and placed the beautiful diamond watch beside that. It was like a row of three charms. The soldier stood for Tata with his Winchester rifle, and the watch for Mamenka, dressed up for a night on the town. The photo was Nanny: mother. He arranged them in one way and then shifted them around, as though he believed that if he stumbled on the correct order, he might evoke their flesh-and-blood equivalents.
Five nights had passed. They still hadn’t arrived.
Pepik lay back. He let the three charms stand guard in his place.
He woke again a little later and opened one eye. Mrs. Milling was standing at the window, her grey hair straight to her shoulders. She held Pepik’s diamond watch in one hand. She was looking at it closely, running her finger over the stones, as though wondering if it could possibly be real. He saw her hesitate for a minute. He saw her slip the watch into her pocket.
Pepik had crawled into Arthur’s bed. He was so lonely; the other child’s presence helped him sleep. It had been hours, though, since he’d felt Arthur move. Mrs. Milling crossed the floorboards towards the two boys and Pepik closed his eyes tightly, as though to make himself disappear. She touched his shoulder and began to talk crossly, starting up a stream of English scolding. It was the third time this had happened, and she did not want Pepik giving Arthur any more germs.
Mrs. Milling lifted the covers briskly, like a waiter lifting a silver dome from a plate of food. Pepik saw her fingernails, bitten to the quick. She leaned forward to feel her son’s forehead, and paused with her palm an inch from his skin.
“Arthur?”
She said it like a question and waited for a reply. When none was forthcoming she said it again, sharply this time—Arthur—and a third time, and a fourth. She held his chin in her hand and moved his head from side to side, grasped his little shoulders and squeezed. She was repeating his name, her voice gaining strength like a siren.
Pepik saw the first tear appear, like the first star on a late summer evening.
It trembled in the bottom corner of her eye, hanging there for what seemed like an eternity. It grew and swelled and finally slipped off her bottom lashes, missing the bedspread and landing on the blue floorboards.
Pepik imagined he heard a little splash.
More tears followed, pouring from Mrs. Milling’s eyes. Pepik was pushed from the bed and went into the corner of the room and curled in a ball and covered his ears. Mrs. Milling was screaming. She was shouting for her husband and shaking Arthur’s body, her face bright red, her eyes wide. She collapsed over the bed, pressing her face into her son’s chest, her wide shoulders heaving. She shook Arthur again and again, as though she couldn’t believe it, as though if she shook him hard enough his pale eyelids would flutter open.
Arthur was still and white, his features carved out of wax.
Mrs. Milling screamed as if she were being torn to pieces. She pawed at her face and pulled at her hair, sobbing.
Hearing Mrs. Milling opened something in Pepik, punctured a raft made of twigs and balloons. Water rushed in. It covered his legs—he wet himself almost immediately, the urine seeping out around him in a circle on the floor—and rose past his chest, and then his shoulders. It filled his mouth and he choked and gagged; he put his hand to his face and found it soaking. He was crying so hard he could not get his breath. He doubled over, vomiting. Everything from the past year that he had managed to bury inside him was being pulled up through his body, ripped out of his mouth. The sharks were below him, his legs in their jaws. He let go. He was quickly pulled under.
Pepik was sent to a home full of boys. An orphanage run by the Catholic Church. At night the big room fell silent. It was a silence that filled up with deep breathing, the creak of springs as someone turned over, a fart followed by laughter. The boys fell asleep one by one, like candles being blown out on a birthday cake.
Pepik lay still, eyes wide open, picturing his hunger. He was an empty shell alone on a beach in the moonlight. The waves came and went; he was filled and then emptied. Emptied, and then emptied again.
He knew he had just arrived, but where had he come from? Arthur was hazy and vague around the edges. Pepik thought back to that long, quiet street. To the hours and days he had spent watching by the window.
For whom had he been waiting? The people in his photo?
Whoever they were, they would never find him now.
They would come from the east, looking for a ghost. Dragging their shadows behind them.
Part Five
Pavel and Anneliese
June 1939
Dear Pepik,
Mamenka and I send you a hug and a snuggle. We look at your photograph every day and pray to God for your safekeeping. But why have you not written, miláčku? How we long to hear from you. To hear any news from you at all.
Your Nanny Marta sends you many kisses as well.
I hope you have been receiving our letters, that Mrs. Milling has been able to find someone to translate them into Czech for you. I am sorry we did not have time to help you learn more English before you left. I know the Millings will teach you the language and will help you answer our requests.
Please tell us what you are doing every day, and what you are eating. And about your new friend Arthur. We know you will be very kind to him and help him get better.
The house is so quiet without you. We miss your train tearing around its track. I am almost inclined to set it back up.
A train will always remind me of you.
I will sign off for now, but I promise to write again soon. And you do the same. We will all be most happy to receive some news from our darling big boy.
With love and kisses,
Tata
(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Pavel. Died Auschwitz, 1944)
I KNEW AS SOON AS I HEARD THE DOORBELL RING.
I had not given you my address, but deep down I’d been expecting you. A slight man with sloped shoulders and bushy grey eyebrows. Dandruff on your jacket. You were leaning on a cane. You wore that dour expression I’ve come to recognize, the resignation that is almost a kind of play-acting: choosing to go through the motions of living for the benefit of the outside world.
It’s a show badly acted, a small child’s charade.
And it’s true that, although you were in your seventies, there was still something of a child in your eyes.
“I’m Lisa,” I said.
You held out a hand: hair on the knuckles. “Joseph.”
Name changes are common, and translations into English. I didn’t miss a beat. “I know who you are.”
You looked almost as though you recognized me too—squinting, trying to place a vaguely familiar face.
When of course you didn’t know me from Adam. Or Eve.
“Will you come in for tea?”
I could see you taking in the dirty casserole dish in the sink, the towering stacks of periodicals against the walls. There was nothing I could offer you to eat: the fridge was empty save for some Chinese takeout mouldering in a Styrofoam container. From the way you looked around my apartment I gleaned you were the fastidious type, that your own small house was perfectly neat and organized. But instead of feeling self-conscious I experienced a kind of relief, the relief of being seen for myself, for who I really am. You made yourself at home, looking for somewhere to hang your coat.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
Our fingers touched as you passed the coat to me, and I felt a rush: here was the child from the letter I’d been carrying. Here, in front of me. In the flesh. The most important Jewish prayer—the first one I learned—ran through my head: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
&
nbsp; Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
When I looked up, you were moving a pile of blankets off the end of the sofa. You patted the space. “Come and sit.” I was jerked out of my spiritual reveries, irked that you thought the hospitality was yours to offer. But then I saw this was just your way of getting down to business.
People become nervous when they learn new things about their past.
“Tell me everything,” you said, before I could even sit down.
I thought to myself, If only. Because, of course, there is so little I know. And so much more that’s been lost.
“I’m Lisa,” I said again, and launched into my shtick, explaining my tenure in the Holocaust Studies department, the oral histories I’ve been taking from the Kindertransport children. You were nodding rapidly—this was all information I’d left on your answering machine—but I was reciting it mostly for myself, to ground myself in the facts of my own existence. Because I too feel displaced and uprooted. I too have very little to cling onto.
“You found . . . what? A letter?” you asked.
“Some letters. From your mother and father.”
“To me?”
“Just a minute.”
I went into the study and brought out the thick file. Written on the cover in blue magic marker were the words: “BAUER, PEPIK (PAVEL AND ANNELIESE).” An address followed. The sevens had dashes through them in the old-fashioned European style.
I could see you were unprepared. “I thought that nobody wrote to me,” you said, your eyes on the names.
“Yes,” I said. “I gathered that.”
I was ready to tell you the whole chain of events—the visit to the archive that had turned these up along with several other files from the area—but I saw then that the details would only muddle things. I looked at you, my gaze steady.
“I thought I had no parents,” you said.
“Everyone has parents.”
“You know what I mean.”
“What about the photo of your family? The one you told me about on the phone?”
“But I had no reason to believe they tried to contact me.”
“Shall I get our tea?” I asked.
But you weren’t interested in tea. “I thought—” you said. “What happened to them?”
I didn’t answer right away. About either what I knew or what I didn’t know. “You’re Jewish,” I said finally, thinking this would give you a clue.
You looked at me blankly. “I go to church,” was all you said.
So there it was. Someone else lost.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Of course.”
There was a look on your face that was almost but not quite indifference, as though we were talking about something with nothing whatsoever to do with you, something at a great remove. But I’ve learned not to be fooled by an apparent lack of interest. It is almost always the legacy of dashed hopes.
“So those are letters from my parents?” You raised your eyebrows at the thick file.
“Didn’t I already—?”
“From both of them?”
“And from your nanny.”
A look crossed your face then that I’ve not quite seen before. It was as if you had been slapped unexpectedly by someone you knew and trusted. “A nanny?” you asked. “I didn’t—I had no—” But you did remember; it was coming back into your body, sluicing through you like a tidal wave, complete and overpowering. “Her name was . . . ?”
“Marta,” I said.
You nodded, eyes upward. “Yes.”
What would it be like to know nothing of your origins, to spend decades craving and wondering, and then, at the end of your life, to be delivered an answer? To realize that all your misery was for nothing, that you’d been wanted after all.
Wasn’t that what I was hoping for too?
“Where did they come from?”
“Your family?”
“The letters.”
“From the estate of a family named Milling. Where you were placed, very briefly, before . . .”
I paused here, not wanting to name what had happened after that.
Your eyes bugged out a little and you looked as though you were drowning. “I have no recollection of anyone named Milling,” you said stiffly. But you were holding your temples in the palms of your hands and your eyes were darting from side to side.
“Why don’t I give you a moment.”
You nodded, grateful, and I headed for the door. When I reached the threshold, I looked back. You were still holding your head in your hands.
The distance you’d travelled was hard to imagine. The train trips, the boat rides. Later, the airplanes. And those, of course, were only the geographical trips. I don’t have to mention the other kinds of displacements, the other leaps you’d made. When I looked at you that day, you seemed so overwhelmed, a jet-lagged, bedraggled voyageur.
I left you alone to read your family’s letters. Went into my office and checked my email. I politely but firmly declined a request from a doctoral student looking for a supervisor in the field. Perhaps I was not polite. I was certainly firm. I could see you through the open door: you had leaned your cane against the wall, its handle stooped like your own shoulders. You sat down in front of the letters. “And so,” you said. When you finally flipped the file open, the action was fast and decisive, like ripping off a Band-Aid.
I forced my gaze back to the computer, where I read a notice about a department meeting three times, not registering anything. I don’t know why the secretary—Marsha? Melinda?—still sends me these things. She knows I’ve retired. When I looked back up, I saw two letters on the table in front of you, laid out one beside the other. I’d had the letters translated, and I could tell you were suspicious, lining the English up against the Czech, as if some mistake might be revealed in the space between. I called out, “Pepik!” You didn’t lift your head. “Joseph,” I said, remembering. “Are you . . . okay in there?”
You waved your hand in the air without looking up, as if you were shooing away a dog.
It pleased me a little, this offhand gesture, as though you knew me well, had known me forever.
When I came in half an hour later, your cheeks were wet with tears. I pretended not to notice.
“You can keep the file if you want,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself offer this; usually I just give out photocopies.
“Yes,” you said. “Please.” And then, “I have so many questions.”
“Shoot,” I said. But you only sat there with the thick manila file in your hands. You took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “These are just—” You looked up at me weakly.
“Heartbreaking?”
“Yes.”
I lifted my hand to brush a hair off your jacket but lowered it again, not wanting to seem patronizing.
“They loved me,” you said.
“Yes.”
“And they ended up . . .” Your voice trailed off. You gripped your cane as though it could support you even from your seated position. “What happened to the baby?” you asked. “The one from my photo.”
I hesitated, hating to be the bearer of more bad news.
“I don’t know for certain.”
You nodded. “Okay.”
We looked at each other for a long moment.
“You think she . . . ?” you began.
“I think—” But again I lost my nerve. I’ve had this conversation many times, but the cliché is true: it doesn’t get easier.
“Lisa,” you said. My head snapped up at my name. You were looking at me steadily, as though to reassure me—to reassure both of us—that whatever I had to say could not be that bad. “That baby—Is she you?”
“She isn’t,” I said. “I’m not.”
“What happened to her then?” you asked again.
There was no choice but to tell you the truth.
I answered. “That baby was killed.”
Most often they come looking for me.
&nb
sp; Everyone has a story to tell, and the children of the Diaspora are no different. They want to be heard, like everyone else. Heard and understood. Even more so.
Years ago I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the second official Kindertransport reunion. At the opening banquet I gave my usual spiel, and when I got down from the podium I was practically mobbed. At a certain age we all become aware of our mortality, and suffice it to say that these people were already well past that age. Blue hair and dentures. Sour breath.
I know, I know—who am I to talk?
I booked enough interviews that weekend to fill my entire next book. It would be relatively easy to write—a summary of the transcriptions, a qualitative analysis using variables of selfhood and self-concept. And yet, as I gathered names and email addresses—or phone numbers, because many of my would-be subjects didn’t have email—I was aware that something was missing, that the most important piece of the puzzle had not yet fallen into place.
I began to fear I’d been on the wrong path. That I should have been writing something else altogether.
And so it was that I showed up at your place seven days after our first meeting. Your home was a bungalow in the west end of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, red brick with a wire fence enclosing the small backyard. Inside, the house was organized and clean, sparsely furnished. Cream-coloured carpet covered every square inch of the floor, kitchen included. I thought this was odd. Perhaps you didn’t want your feet ever to get cold.
You had spent the entire intervening week reading and rereading the letters from your parents and Marta. I don’t know how I knew this, since you didn’t mention it and the letters were stacked neatly in the folder, which was itself placed neatly in the centre of the dining room table. But I got a flash, as if in a horror movie, of the table’s gleaming surface scattered with the papers and you, late at night, half mad, with your head in your hands.
You looked at me directly, composed. You were wearing a worn grey sweater with leather patches on the elbows. There was a pot in a tea cozy and a plate of store-bought cookies, the variety pack: rectangular chocolate, round vanilla with cherry jelly in the centre. Despite the table’s being set for tea I saw you were not interested in small talk. “How long have you had these?” you asked, pointing at the folder of letters.
