Far to Go

by Alison Pick

  It was as if he’d opened up a part of her she hadn’t known existed. Marta heard a low moan and realized the sound had come from her own mouth. Pavel was gathering her in, all the lost pieces, drawing them up to the surface of her skin. Every bit of her tingled; when she opened her eyes, it was as if she were flying through a field full of shimmering stars. They were whizzing past her in all directions, little explosions of colour and light, filling her eyes and her face and her mouth until she was full everywhere, until every part of her was glimmer and heat.

  Marta herself was the star that Pavel wished on.

  And me? I was the answer to their wish.

  MY NAME, AS I’VE TOLD YOU, IS ANNELIESE.

  I didn’t tell you?

  Just Lisa, for short.

  I don’t know why my mother, Marta, chose to name me after Anneliese Bauer. After the woman who must have been, in some ways at least, her competition. Perhaps she felt guilty for the sins she’d committed against her. Or perhaps it was a gesture of love and respect towards someone who had just been deported to the east.

  I have no reason to think that my mother was a betrayer, except for a slight tendency in that direction I have noted in myself.

  I’ve taken some leaps in writing this tale. I’ve been fanciful, sure, as a writer is allowed to be. As she must be. And Pepik was a very generous collaborator. It was his idea for me to tell the story from Marta’s perspective. To have Pavel choose Marta over Anneliese, letting our father’s final love be for my mother, not his own. We were both aware that the opposite could have been true: that Pavel’s affair with Marta might have been a one-time, meaningless tryst, a mere distraction in the midst of encroaching desperation.

  After all, the Bauers had had two children together. The infant from the photo, whom Pepik didn’t remember, went to the gas chambers too. There must not have been room left for her on the children’s transports, or else her parents did not want to send such a young baby. I gave her a different death. It was just wishful thinking.

  Pepik’s cousin Tomáš got out from Vienna but died in the bombings in London.

  Here are the few other things I do know for certain:

  Pavel and Anneliese Bauer lived in a small town in Bohemia. Just after the Münich Agreement they relocated to Prague. There was a cook in their employ whom they left behind. They chose for some reason to bring the governess—my mother—along with them.

  There are documents showing that the Bauer family tried to leave the country prior to the Ides of March, just before the Nazis entered Prague. I don’t know what exactly happened that day, only that they did not make it out.

  Pavel and Marta had sex at least once. The proof—what is it they say?—is in the pudding.

  The next, and final, trace of my father Pavel’s existence is the date he was deported to Auschwitz.

  Ernst Anselm was a real man about whom a biography has been written. He lived in Moravia and had a wife and two teenaged daughters. A gentle man known especially for his love of animals, he was personally responsible for the betrayal of more than forty Jewish families. He seems to have made a sport of it: befriending them, engendering trust, and then, at the eleventh hour, turning them in. It’s a wonderful book, a perceptive study of the darker side of human nature—with which, in what are supposed to be my “golden years,” I am admittedly somewhat preoccupied. Ernst Anselm lived hours away from the Bauers, so it is unlikely that he knew them personally. He’s included here only to further expose him. It’s my own small way of holding him accountable.

  As for me, I’ve told you what I set out to tell you. My mother, Marta, died when I was very young, and the intervening time, between that terrible event and my arrival as a young adult in Canada, is nobody else’s business. You might think it strange, given that I’ve spent my entire professional life hearing and recording other people’s stories, that I have chosen to withhold the bulk of my own. Well, I’ve observed that there is healing in the telling, but there is also something that gets lost. The past is gone, and we cannot get it back. In setting it down in one particular way, the other versions slip through the cracks. All the possibilities lost to the sands of time.

  One thing I remember vividly: when I gave Pepik his mother’s diamond watch, he got a particular look in his eye. It was as though time had begun again, as though for him it was not too late.

  I don’t know much about Pepik’s childhood. He himself remembered very little about his life in Prague or about the journey that brought him from Scotland to here. By the time I found the letters in the archive in Glasgow, both of the Millings were dead. There is no official record of their ever having a son of their own; it was common enough for a childless couple to sign up to be foster parents. But there is still the question of the letter from Pavel, of the Arthur referred to within.

  Another thing we never figured out is why Pepik was moved to the orphanage. This again, unfortunately, was far from uncommon. It was wartime, money was scarce, people were displaced for all sorts of reasons. The memories Pepik had of the orphanage were few and far between, but they were clear, he said, even vivid. It is to protect his privacy that I have not included them here.

  What I’m telling you—haltingly, I realize—is that this is just one way it might have happened. Nothing is certain, save what meets us at the end. After Pepik died I learned the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. It doesn’t mention death but praises God and gives thanks. I marvel at this, at the faith woven into its words. I’m an old woman now and I can’t help but wonder. Who will pray for me when I’m gone?

  I have tried, all these years, to see their faces. Not the images frozen in photos but their faces, their gestures, who they were. I would give almost anything—I would give anything—for a single memory of my father. The way he held a pen, the backs of his hands. To summon the sound of his voice. And my mother—the smell of her hair, damp after her bath; the weight of her arms pulling me in. In the end, though, all I have is a list of names and dates. And so I inscribe them here, the family I never knew. It might seem morose to end with the dead, but I am thinking of posterity. I don’t have to tell you the reason for this. Soon there’ll be nobody left to remember.

  Rosa (Berman) Bauer 1885 – 1943

  Pavel Bauer 1907 – 1943

  Marta Meuller 1915 – 1946

  Anneliese (Bondy) Bauer 1912 – 1943

  Eliza Bauer 1939 – 1942

  Alžběta (Bondy) Stein 1914 – 1943

  Max Stein 1890 – 1943

  Eva Stein 1937 – 1943

  Vera Stein 1934 – 1943

  Misha Bauer 1905 – 1943

  Lore (Leverton) Bauer 1910 – 1943

  Tomáš Bauer 1935 – 1941

  Joseph (Pepik) Bauer 1933 – 2008

  Anneliese (Meuller) Bauer 1940 –

  THE TRAIN OF MEMORY SLEEPS ON ITS TRACKS. At night, in the station, the shadows gather around it, reaching out to touch its cool black sides. The train stretches back, far out of eyesight. Where it comes from is anyone’s guess.

  At dawn the ghosts retreat, take their place as shadows in the corners of the lofty-domed station. The train sighs on its tracks, a traveller hoisting very heavy bags. We roll over in our beds; we cough, stretch a little; the train of memory starts to move forward. Slowly at first, but gathering speed. The landscape drifts by like the last wisps of a dream. In the early morning hours the train begins to move into the opposite of memory. Into a future time when someone will look back at us now, wondering what our days were like and why we did the things we did. Or why we did not act, as the case might equally be.

  Someone will be unable to make our lives make sense.

  The train has no answers, only forward momentum. We open our eyes; it is moving very quickly now. Moving always ahead. It never arrives.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to:

  The Canada Council for the Arts

  The Ontario Arts Council

  The Toronto Arts Council

 
; The Hadassah–Brandeis Institute

  The EU’s Culture Programme and the Odyssey Program 2007

  Le Réseau Européen des Centres Culturels de Rencontre

  IMEC’s Abbaye d’Ardenne in Normandy, France

  Schloss Bröllin in Pasewalk, Germany

  The Milkwood Artist Residence in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic

  Michael Crummey

  Steven Heighton

  Lucy Pick

  Hanna Spencer

  Sarah MacLachlan and everyone at House of Anansi Press

  Mary-Anne Harrington at Headline in the UK

  Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins in the US

  Jacqueline Smit at Orlando/AW Bruna in the Netherlands

  Ornella Robbiati at Frassinelli/Sperling & Kupfer in Italy

  Zoë Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge, and White

  Anne McDermid, Martha Magor Webb, and Monica Pacheco

  The New Quarterly

  I read extensively on the Kindertransport and on the lives of the Czech Jews around the time of the Munich agreement. While my sources in their entirety are too numerous to mention here, I would like to acknowledge the following: The Jews of Bohemia & Moravia: A Historical Reader, edited by Wilma Iggers; Letters from Prague 1939–1941, edited by Raya Czerner Shapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg; Hanna’s Diary 1938–1941 by Hanna Spencer; Pearls of Childhood by Vera Gissing; and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer.

  Tommy Berman, one of the original Kindertransport children, shared with me his memoirs, as well as the letters written from his birth parents in Czechoslovakia to his adoptive parents in Scotland. While the story here is not his, he provided the inspiration.

  Many thanks, as always, to Thomas, Margot, and Emily Pick. I would also, and most especially, like to thank my partner Degan Davis, whose help on every level was invaluable, and my wonderful editor Lynn Henry, who I had the pleasure of working with for the third time. I couldn’t be more grateful.

  P. S.

  Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  Meet Alison Pick

  ALISON PICK was born in Toronto in 1975, the first child of Thomas and Margot Pick. She grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, and spent her summers as a child in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She attended Westmount Public School, the K-W Bilingual School, and Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School, and spent one miserable year at boarding school, an experience she was not eager to repeat. She earned a BA (Hons) in psychology from the University of Guelph, where she took a creative writing course as an elective in her final year. Soon after, she was devoting all her spare time to crafting similes and metaphors.

  In the fall of 2000, Alison participated in the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium under the leadership of Tim Lilburn, where she met her future life partner, Degan Davis. The two spent the first years of the century house-sitting across Canada while Alison wrote her first poetry collection, Question & Answer. The title section of the book won the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising unpublished writer under thirty-five in Canada and the 2005 National Magazine Award for Poetry. The publication of Question & Answer also marked the beginning of an editorial relationship with Lynn Henry, which went on to include both of Alison’s first two novels, The Sweet Edge (Raincoast Books, 2005) and Far to Go (House of Anansi Press, 2010).

  Alison first embarked on her fiction-writing career as a participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio, where she was paired with novelist and short story writer Anne Fleming. After penning a number of short stories (the thought of which now makes the author cringe), the idea for a novel presented itself and Alison ran with it. Based partially on a fifty-day Arctic canoe trip she took in 1997, The Sweet Edge was published to rave reviews across the country, became a Globe and Mail Top 100 book, and was optioned for film.

  Alison was accepted into the MPhil program at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2004. The degree offered a creative option, and in lieu of academic papers Alison submitted poems written in response to the program’s extensive reading requirements. These poems eventually became her 2008 poetry collection, The Dream World, Alison’s favourite of her own books. The title poem was included in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and another series from the book won the CBC Literary Award for Poetry.

  In the winter of 2007, Alison began research for the novel that would become Far to Go. Originally titled Thursday’s Child (from “Thursday’s child has far to go”), it explores a similar historical circumstance to the one Alison’s own grandparents experienced when leaving Czechoslovakia. Far to Go sold in five countries before publication.

  Alison’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in every major literary journal in Canada, and in magazines and newspapers including the Globe and Mail, the National Post, The Walrus magazine, enRoute magazine, and Toronto Life. She is on the faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Wired Writing Studio, and currently lives in Toronto, where she is at work on a memoir.

  About the book

  Questions and Answers with Alison Pick

  Originally published on Torontoist.com in a somewhat different format. Interview by Erin Balser. Reprinted with permission.

  Torontoist: Describe Far to Go in one sentence.

  Alison Pick: Part mystery, part love story, Far to Go tells the tale of one family’s struggle with war and with the legacy of secrecy as it unfolds down the generations.

  TO: How long did you work on Far to Go? Did the process differ from previous projects?

  AP: I started working on Far to Go in January of 2007. I spent four months reading and planning, and then headed to Europe for residencies in France, Germany, and the Czech Republic. So, right away the process was different in that I knew I needed to be “on location” to get a feel for the place I was writing about. My first novel, The Sweet Edge, was contemporary, and Far to Go is historical, so I also had to do much more extensive research into the little details of daily life. That said, by setting the book against a dramatic backdrop such as the lead-up to the Second World War, part of my work was already done. I had a series of actual events and preexisting political tensions. All I had to do was drop my characters into the scene and see how they’d react.

  TO: You’ve written both poetry collections and fiction. Is your creative process different for these different projects?

  AP: Yes, very different. A poem is a short burst of inspiration, written in maybe one morning, then honed and sharpened over weeks or, more often, months. Since a novel has a much larger canvas, I have to pace myself differently. With long fiction, I use the creative burst to write an outline, maybe twenty or thirty pages. Then begins the slower and more deliberate process of colouring in the outline (actually writing the scenes). The final result deviates wildly from the original plan, but having a plan in place gives me confidence to keep writing. Alistair MacLeod once said to me, regarding novel-writing, that a carpenter trying to build a house wouldn’t just grab a bunch of nails and two-by-fours and start banging. That got me thinking! Once I’d given myself permission to “plan,” fiction became a whole lot more manageable. And, of course, with a poem, there’s no plan.

  There are those who think it’s impossible to write both good poetry and fiction, whereas I find that each genre feeds the other. It’s like exercising the same muscle in different ways. Writing both makes me stronger.

  TO: What was the editorial process like with Far to Go?

  AP: It was a pleasure. I worked with Lynn Henry, who edited both my first collection of poetry, Question & Answer, and my novel The Sweet Edge. We knew each other well at the start of the editorial process, which makes everything so much easier. It’s like the difference between going on a first date and being married. I knew from past experience that I could trust her—both her judgment and her aesthetic—and that she understood where the book was trying to go as well as, if not better than, I did.

  TO: Were yo
u tempted to make major changes when the galleys arrived, or is this novel truly finished? If it is, when did you know it was truly finished?

  AP: I wasn’t tempted to make any major changes, no. Being a bit of a perfectionist—at least where my writing is involved—there are always little niggles about sentences I might have tweaked differently or punctuation I might have altered. Silly things. In the big picture, though, I knew the book was finished because I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. My energy for it was completely gone. I’ve learned that this is the way to tell that I’ve taken a book as far as I’m able.

  TO: Anything you wish you’d done differently?

  AP: Far to Go is partially about the Kindertransport, a series of trains that left Czechoslovakia in 1938 and ’39, taking young Jewish children to safety. In 2009, a special “Winton train” traveled to London via the original Kindertransport route, and in an ideal world my book would have been published to coincide with that event. On board the 2009 train were some surviving (now elderly) “Winton children” and their descendants. Their trip marked the seventieth anniversary of the original Kindertransports. So, from a marketing and publicity perspective, as well as from an emotional one, it would have been nice if the book had been out. That said, there’s no hurrying the creative process. I needed that extra year to finish Far to Go, and I’m glad that I took it.

  TO: What do you think of the cover?

  AP: I love the cover. It’s by Alysia Shewchuk—her first effort!—she really nailed the ethos of the book.

  TO: Are you working on anything new?