Far to Go Read online

  Far to Go

  ALISON PICK

  For Ayla—Miláčku—

  And for the one we lost who carried her here.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One - The Sudetenland

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two - Prague

  Chapter Four

  Part Three - Occupation

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Four - Kindertransport

  Chapter Seven

  Part Five - Pavel and Anneliese

  Chapter Eight

  Acknowledgements

  P. S. - Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and to your children’s children.

  —Deuteronomy 4:9

  Monday’s child is fair of face,

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

  Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

  Thursday’s child has far to go.

  —Mother Goose

  Herman Bondy 1876 – 1942

  Ella Kafka 1886 – 1944

  Oskar Bauer 1880 – 1943

  Marianne (Grünfeld) Bauer 1894 – 1943

  Irma Pick 1904 – 1944

  Mary Pick 1908 – 1942

  Jan Lowenbach 1933 – 1943

  Eva Lowenbach 1938 – 1943

  Jan Pick 1909 – 1986

  Alžběta (Bauer) Pick 1917 – 2000

  Michael Pick 1937 – 1987

  Thomas Pick 1944 –

  THE TRAIN WILL NEVER ARRIVE.

  It winds into forever: shiny red cars, black cars, cattle cars, one after another. A red caboose and a Princess Elizabeth engine. The livestock cars, loosely linked, like the vertebrae of some long reptile’s spine. It reaches forward into the unknowable future, destined to move perpetually ahead, but with no destination in mind.

  From the sky it looks inconsequential, a worm burrowing into the ground. And all the tiny people aboard look insignificant too: the postal workers and pastry chefs. The mothers and children.

  The little ones.

  You.

  I saw your face for the first time in a dream. It was so clear and true that meeting you in the flesh, decades later, somehow paled against it. You trembled against your own ideal. A child in both eras. Here and there. Then and now.

  You loved that train. I don’t know how I know, but I do. The short loop of track, how it covered the same ground again and again. The whistle singing out the same old warning: The past is catching up. Get ready.

  You could not have been my child, but I loved you as if you were.

  Not my child, no.

  Someone else’s.

  Part One

  The Sudetenland

  07/12/1939

  Dear Mrs. Inverness,

  Although I could write a whole book, a short note will say what I need to say.

  Things are happening here—unimaginable things. And yet, our only child, our Tomáš, is safe in London with you.

  Dear Mrs. Inverness, I cannot tell you my gratitude. And your detailed writing about our boy has moved us to tears.

  As you are so extremely good as to be inclined to prepare his favourite dishes, I shall gladly tell you what Tomáš likes to eat. He is very fond of fruit, especially of bananas. His favourite soups are: vermicelli, mushroom, potato soup, lentil soup, cumin soup with vermicelli. As to the farinaceous food he ate little as well, but he mostly liked a chocolate tart minus cream. (First I should say to please excuse my English! It is a recent language for me.)

  We long for Tomáš, surely. He is only four years old! But if we bring the sacrifice of parting with the child to exempt him perhaps of great suffering, and know that he is so well kept safe by you, we master our pain.

  We will see him soon enough.

  We thank you still many thousand times & remain,

  Faithfully yours,

  Lore and Misha Bauer

  (FILE UNDER: Bauer, Lore. Died Birkenau, 1943)

  YOU CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD.

  It was just like you to pull such a trick. To give this world another run for its money. And to give yours truly another chance. You can’t imagine the relief I felt. I’d lost so many, but you wouldn’t leave me. You would stay.

  I knew, finally, that despite all the loss we were blessed. The end of this long and winding story was happy.

  You’d been gone thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. Eyes glazing, gaze immobile. The steady beeps from the heart monitor fell into one line of sound. A long quiet highway down which your ghost was walking. It was just like the movies—I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out. There was no one else to watch you die, your hospital room empty for once of interns, nurses, cleaning staff. I could not scream but I didn’t need to. Your eyes opened. You’d been gone, but you were back.

  I exhaled. Around me, the room had also popped back to life, latex gloves snapping, a doctor rushing past with her ponytail swaying, bending over the heart monitor as though it was the patient, not you. I kept my eyes on your face. Despite all the chemo, the chemicals that had been flooding your body for months, your skin still had the wonderful papery softness of old age. I reached out and laid a palm against your cheek. You were quiet, taking me in. It wasn’t quite a smile, but a look of recognition, after which I knew: you would live. The others were all dead, their bodies piled up at the edge of my awareness like logs by a cabin in the woods. They had gone up in smoke. But you’d come through.

  There were words. “Juice,” you said, and I held the small cup with the foil pulled back to your lips. You couldn’t manage. I turned the stiff crank on your hospital bed, raising you to sitting.

  “Straw,” you said. I reached behind me, without looking away from you, and some masked assistant obliged.

  There was a Viennese waltz playing in the background. It was the exact recording you’d wanted, on tape, the old-fashioned way. I’d had considerable difficulty locating a cassette player. I’d gone to several enormous and abominable technology depots where I was told repeatedly that they’re not made anymore. The sales people—children—spoke with disdain. One—I’m not lying—did not know what a tape was. “Like Scotch tape?” she asked. “Or masking tape?”

  I finally realized I already had what I needed, in the back of my closet in my office at the University, a small machine I used to use in my interviews. So I brought it to the hospital. I thought of the voices it had recorded, of the futility of those stories. For years, decades, I’d had faith in letters, in words. But now I realized that you had it right: a simple waltz was more comforting. Music held more meaning than language ever could. The tape player would finally be of real use after all these years.

  The waltz was playing quietly in the background. It made me think of a candle in a window, of softly falling snow. What happened next was equally slow. There was nothing dramatic, no close-up of the beautiful doctor’s face as she applied the paddles to your chest. That’s not how life is. The happy ending arrived unadorned, and left just as quickly. I took the plastic cup away from your mouth and wiped the spittle from your lips. I turned to throw the cup into the bin, and looked back.

  Your eyes had closed. The last person I loved. You were gone.

  Chapter One

  SEPTEMBER 1938

  It was Friday afternoon, the end of a long week. Misha Bauer made one last telephone call; the operator told h
im there was a line through Berlin.

  “Our calls don’t go through Berlin,” he said. She of all people should know that. But he didn’t want to be angry—not at the start of the Sabbath. He was looking forward to getting home to his wife and his little boy, Tomáš.

  “My mistake.”

  “Could you book me a line for Monday?” he asked.

  “Next Monday?”

  “Four o’clock.” He paused. “No, four thirty.”

  “Sicher. Ja.”

  “Danke. Guten tag.” Misha replaced the black horn on the side of the box on the wall. Pushed back his heavy oak chair and took the pince-nez off the bridge of his nose.

  His secretary stood up as he passed her desk on his way out. “Good Shabbos, Mr. Bauer,” she said. Which she need not say, given the times, and which he appreciated all the more because of it.

  He had parked the car next to the city-square market where the fresh flowers and root vegetables were sold. Nearby were two blinkered horses and a milkman’s cart, the white cans ready for delivery. Misha was planning to buy Lore a bouquet. He passed the post office—in the window he saw a clerk in a blue uniform bent over a bookkeeper’s ledger. Four or five young men were walking towards him on the other side of the avenue. One, a redhead, was carrying a bucket of water. They were, he knew, going to offer to wash his car. Even the least expensive Opel was a novelty, and an American Studebaker like his—well, people wanted to get close to it. Misha nodded at the redhead, smiling to show that the young man was welcome to take a look. The next thing he felt was a blow to his gut. His back smacked against the cobblestones and his teeth clamped down on his tongue.

  Misha lay there for several minutes, the sky a dirty rag above him, the metallic bite of blood in his mouth. When he managed to turn his head sideways, he saw the redhead’s shins, the long white woollen knee socks. What exactly was about to happen remained obscure, but the socks meant it would not be good.

  The boy with the sideburns used a saw to cut the tailpipe off his car. Misha heard him shouting, and then the severing of the metal. One by one, the windows of his car were smashed in. Then they kicked Misha onto his hands and knees and made him scrub the sidewalk. The redhead stood above him, brandishing the tailpipe like a club. “Augen unten, Schwein,” he said. Misha could not see if anyone had noticed what was happening; if they did, nobody stopped to help. He was at it for an hour, the hoodlums standing guard. When he asked for a drink of water—

  Here Pavel stopped talking. Marta was sitting next to him in front of the large parlour window, trying not to meet his eye. She watched a splatter of starlings swoop out from under the eaves, ten or twelve black blips on the radar of evening.

  “When he asked for some water,” Pavel continued, “they made him drink the soapy slop from the pail.”

  Marta’s gaze was fixed on the middle distance. “They made him drink it?” she asked, hoping she’d misheard him.

  “It was full of shards of glass.”

  “And then?”

  “They beat him with the tailpipe.”

  Marta didn’t answer. She felt as though his words were coming from very far away or from a long ago time. There was a blankness in her head that reminded her of when she was young, and she had to force herself to focus in order to hear what he was saying.

  Pavel straightened his tie. He paused, as though he too was having difficulty believing what he was about to tell her. “And then?” he said finally. “They knocked him unconscious and left him. For dead.”

  Marta turned towards Pavel finally, looking to her trusted employer to explain how this was possible, but he was a quiet man and seemed to have said all he was prepared to say. She opened her mouth and closed it again. The day was losing shape, like a worn-out undergarment. Time coming loose, a thread at the cuff. Marta twirled a strand of hair around her forefinger. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, but the blanket of fog in her mind had now closed in, and something inside her dismissed the threat entirely. Mr. Bauer clearly had his details confused. Even if—even if this unthinkable thing had actually happened to his brother—well, that was Vienna. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—Hitler had made clear his intent to annex Austria, and then he’d done it. Whereas Pavel and Marta’s native Czechoslovakia was still free.

  A final starling dived down through the September dark, descending at the exact speed of a clock’s second hand. Its body compact, black as a bullet. And then, as though it had reached its target, there was a loud explosion close by.

  She straightened. “What was that?”

  “A gun,” Pavel said.

  “Mr. Bauer?”

  Marta crossed the room to the window. Sure enough, a row of soldiers was firing a dummy round into the late afternoon sky. Pavel had a Winchester and a Steyr that he took on hunting expeditions to Hungary, so it wasn’t that Marta was unfamiliar with rifles. But this was different. Another kind of fight altogether. She was twenty-three years old. Born during the Great War but too young to remember it. All she’d really known her whole life was peace.

  “Do we actually need gas masks?” She found herself wanting to giggle—the whole thing was so absurd—and she cleared her throat and brought a hand to her face to conceal her expression. Why was she behaving like this? It must be nerves. She removed her hand and said, straight-faced, “The gas masks remind me of Pepik’s Botanisierbuchse.”

  Pavel smiled at the reference to his son’s botanical specimen can, but now he was staring off into the distance. “The Germans want us next,” he said. “But the Wehrmacht tanks are built for the plains.” He squinted as if he could see into the future. “When they move into the Šumava mountain pass, we’ll get them. We’ve got thirty-five divisions, and forts all along the border of the Sudetenland.”

  Marta still couldn’t reconcile the rallying gunfire with their sleepy Bohemian town. It could claim the tallest church spire in the region—fifty-five feet precisely—but there was nothing else remarkable about it. A Gentile butcher, a Jewish tailor, two hundred families grouped together on the east bank of a river with nowhere in particular to go. It was quiet and safe; she knew that’s why Pavel loved it. He loved a week in London, a month on the Adriatic coast in the summer, but beneath it he was a vlastenecký, a Czech nationalist. The thing he loved best was coming home.

  Marta could see her reflection in the parlour window. Her hair was dark and curly; she had a dimple in the middle of her left cheek that seemed to drive her innocence home. Pavel got up from his chair, and he stood next to her for a moment, looking down at the town square. There was a woman trying to cram an enormous valise into the boot of a Tatra, and several more detachments of Czech soldiers. A young girl cried openly as she watched a uniformed back retreat across the square. Her man going off to fight. She held a single rose in her hand, the petals pointed towards the ground like a magic wand that had lost its power. And Marta felt suddenly the same helpless dread. The fog inside her lifted and the old familiar feeling came back. Things were about to happen, she knew. Things she would be powerless to stop.

  That night she snuck out of the Bauer house. Crossed the cobbled square, passed the grocer’s and the tailor’s shop, her bare feet cold in her sandals. Mist lifted off the river in wisps. Little plumes of anticipation rose inside her as well. An hour ago she’d been soundly asleep, but now she felt alert, wide awake. She heard the quiet burble of water over rocks and, somewhere not far off, the sound of a window being opened. The keys to Mr. Bauer’s factory were clutched in her palm. He always left them hanging from a loop of leather on a hook by the back door; she had learned to pick them up by their long metal ends to avoid the sound of them jingling together.

  There was a half-moon edging out from a length of grey cloud. Mr. Goldstein’s beard, she thought.

  The moon rubbed the river’s back. She crossed the footbridge, her sandals clacking on the wood, taking the same path she’d taken for several weeks now. Her body moved unthinkingly. The factory was enclosed by heavy iron bars
but the gate had been left open an inch. Ernst had arrived before her; he’d be waiting inside.

  The rusted latch fell shut behind her like the end of a morality tale.

  She went in through the front hall. The secretary’s desk had been cleared for the day, the typewriter covered with a thick canvas sheath. There was a framed swatch of lace on the wall from the textile factory’s first day of production. She had a brief uneasy feeling, remembering Pavel’s story: What had become of his brother Misha’s factory? And what of brother Misha himself? She pushed the thought away, anticipating instead what awaited her. Crossed the foyer and stood next to the elevator, a wooden platform that was operated by pulling a rope. Her nipples were stiff under her sweater. She moved towards the door to the factory floor and slowly twisted the handle.

  Inside, everything was dark. An industrial-sized broom had been leaned up against the wall. The giant machines were like sleeping mammals, their silvery flanks fallen still.

  She didn’t hear Ernst’s approach. He had her from behind before she saw his face. She laughed, trying to turn in his arms to see him, but he held her firmly, pulling her against his chest. A hand held loosely over her mouth.

  “You’re my gas mask,” she said.

  “I’m here to protect you,” Ernst whispered into her curls.