Far To Go (25 page)

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 the 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.

Marta had a sudden inkling of what it meant to give up a child you had birthed. She wanted very badly to touch Pepik. She wanted very badly to touch Pavel.

Over the clamour she heard someone say, “I can’t believe everything we used to take for granted.” She saw Anneliese smile demurely at a uniformed soldier.

They were being swept forward now, by circumstance and time, by the great push of people moving towards the train. There was a commotion at the front of the line; Marta craned her neck, looking over the heads of a group of grey-haired ladies, and saw the Bauers’ friend Vaclav Baeck. He had put his two daughters, Magda and Clara, onto the train, but now it seemed he’d changed his mind. He was speaking rapidly to whomever was in charge, a young man who was shaking his head,
No
.

Vaclav tried to push past the conductor but was restrained. He tried a different tactic, walking several metres down the platform and speaking to a girl hanging out of the train window. There was some more jostling and Marta’s view was blocked by a tall man with a high black hat. When she looked again, both of Vaclav’s girls were at the window, Clara holding her baby sister Magda awkwardly in her arms. She passed the baby out the window to their father: Vaclav reached up and accepted his daughter as if he were accepting the gift of the rest of his life.

He stood with his wife, blowing kisses at their older daughter, Clara, who would now make her journey alone.

The Bauers too had seen Vaclav’s decision, and now Pavel bent down and took Pepik by the arm. “Do you want to go?” he asked, his voice calm. “To Scotland?”

Anneliese’s cheeks flushed. “Pavel! That isn’t fair.” She reached inside her jacket to adjust one of her shoulder pads.

“I didn’t have time to teach him any English. How will he manage?”

“The Millings will help him.”

But Pavel’s eyes were fixed on his son’s face as though he were trying to read the future from a cup of muddy tea leaves. “
Miláčku
,” he said, “tell me. Do you want to go? Or do you want to stay here with Mamenka and Tata?”

Pepik looked bewildered: the train was shiny and alluring; he was hot and wet with fever.

“Stop it,” Anneliese said again, her voice rising. She grasped her husband’s shoulder but he shook her off roughly. “I want to know,” Pavel said. “I want to do the right thing, the thing that
he
wants.”

“Pavel, he’s a child. He has no idea what he wants.”

Pepik’s eyes were darting, panicked. There was shoving behind the Bauers and several people pushed ahead. They were holding things up: the line began to flow past them. Suitcases banged against each other and children hopped back and forth in excitement. But Pepik would not be going: Pavel had changed his mind.

There was a loud hiss from the train, the release of a long-held breath.

Marta had been silent throughout the conversation, a slow wall of unease rising inside her. Now she snapped into action. “Pavel,” she said. It was the first time she had called him by his first name out loud, but nobody seemed to notice. “Mrs. Bauer is right. We’ve told Pepik he’s going. We should put him on the train.”

She was thinking now of her earlier transgression: she had prevented Pavel and Anneliese from getting out of the country. But could redeem herself still, with their child.

Anneliese folded her arms across her chest. “Exactly,” she said.

Pavel looked not at his wife but at Marta. He was still uncertain, but her confidence settled it.

“If you’re sure,” he said. He looked down at his son, whose chin had fallen down on his chest. “You’ll go,
miláčku
?”

Marta could see Pepik was not following what was being said, but he nodded weakly, and that was enough.

The Bauers re-entered the line and were pushed quickly forward. Everyone was crying; the organizers had assigned a woman whose job it was to physically remove each child from the parents’ arms. It was like asking them to chop off their own limb: you couldn’t expect them to do it themselves. Pepik was gone from them before they realized what was happening. His little back was swallowed up by the train. Marta and the Bauers shoved their way down the platform, through the dense crowd of bodies, trying to follow from outside his progress through the cars. Marta could smell the rank body odour of an elderly man behind her; he shifted and she was elbowed in the ribs. She angled her body away, trying to see Pepik, but there were so many parents with their faces pushed up against the window that she couldn’t get close to him. “Where is he?” Anneliese asked, desperate. “You’ll see him soon,” Marta consoled her. “He’ll be back before we know it.”

The train gave a low moan; it began to move slowly down the tracks. The crowd shuffled along next to it; the air filled suddenly with a hundred white handkerchiefs.

It was Marta who spotted Pepik finally—he’d made his way quite far down the train and was hanging out the window, calling to them. His little cheeks pink with effort, or with fever. She suddenly remembered what it was they had forgotten: the blessing from the rabbi, for safe travels.

Pepik looked as if he’d just realized the same thing. Someone must have jostled him or pushed him from behind, because his expression changed, as if he had looked into the future, as if he had suddenly remembered something that he desperately needed to tell them.

This was the last thing—the thing Marta would remember: his little mouth wide open, that O of surprise.

THE
TRAIN
WAS
LONG
AND
BLACK
, and entering it was like being swallowed by a snake. The snake had dislocated its jaw to take Pepik in, and now he was being worked down into its body, deep, to the tip of its tail. Pepik made a little slithering motion; he put his hands on his stomach and imagined the way the snake felt, all the little bodies tumbling down inside it. There were so many children. His eyelashes were wet but he blinked and swallowed, swallowing himself, letting himself be swallowed.

The snake was getting full. Soon it would slither off through the grass.

The last car of the train was crammed full of children. Two sisters clung to each other, crying. The older girl had skin the colour of flour and hair like a Brillo pad. Every minute or so she would take a deep breath, wipe her cheeks, and say brightly, “We’ll get to go to the seaside!” or “The Fairweathers have kittens!” and then immediately dissolve back into sobs. Behind her was a little boy, barely old enough to stand, clutching a bottle of milk in the centre of the aisle. Someone bumped into him; he rocked back and forth on his heels like an inflatable clown and toppled in slow motion onto his bottom. The milk spilled down his front. The boy’s mouth opened, wider and wider, like a pupil dilating; it hit the end of its reach and he started to howl. An adolescent girl who had been put in charge of the carriage jumped to her feet. “Oh shoot,” she said. “You little rascals! Everyone into their seats!” She clapped her hands together. She picked the milk-soaked toddler up, struggling under his weight and trying to console him, but seemed at a loss when faced with the wet vest. A moment later she had put the crying child back on the floor and was flipping through a
Film Fun
magazine.

Pepik took a seat next to a fat boy whose cheeks looked like apples. The train had not yet started to move but the other boy had already taken out his lunch bag, had unfolded the newspaper wrapping, and was scarfing down
chlebíčky
. The girl in charge of the carriage had her face buried in her leather bag and was taking out its contents item by item. A comb, a bar of dark chocolate. She unfolded a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles, placed them on her nose, and turned towards the window—looking not at her parents on the platform but at her own reflection in the glass.

Pepik wanted to take his sweater off—he was so hot—but it got tangled in the leather strap of his rucksack and he struggled, sweat pouring off him. His arm was stuck behind his back, and he twisted his torso and thought hard about the snake that could wiggle its way out of anything. His arm came free. When he turned back to sit down, the boy with the fat cheeks had taken his seat. “What’s in your lunch?”

“Nothing,” Pepik said. He drew his own brown paper bag protectively towards his stomach. The boy made a lunge for it; Pepik turned quickly, and his head reeled. The sound of his heart beating behind his eyes was the sound of a thousand stallions galloping through the Black Forest at night. He needed to get off the train. It came over him suddenly and urgently. It was as if his father’s words were water behind a blockage in a pipe: they burst through all at once.
You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.

He didn’t want to!

He put his rucksack down on the floor and the fat boy stuck his hand in and came out with one of the crabapples. Pepik didn’t stop. He pushed his way past two older boys who were making fart jokes in German and squiggled up under a wall of girls. When he came up, he was right in front of the window. The platform was packed with crying faces but he saw Marta immediately, her long, dark curls and dimple. She didn’t even need to smile: the dimple was always there. Pepik’s eyes locked on her like the clasp on his valise.

Marta was scanning the length of the train, looking for him too.

Pepik started screaming. It was a wordless scream, a blast of pure sound, and only after several seconds did the individual words begin to assert themselves, flinging out in every direction like silver balls in a pinball machine. “No! I don’t want to! I don’t want to go!” he shouted. “Tata, I don’t want to go, come and get me, I don’t want to, I don’t want to goooooo!” The words flew through the air, over the crowd, and pinged on the station floor unnoticed. His parents still couldn’t see him. Behind Pepik came an adult voice telling the children to move away from the windows and sit down so the train could start moving. Pepik had wedged himself halfway out of the train: the edge of the sill was digging into his stomach. The words kept coming, one after another: “Mamenka! Tata! I want to stay here with you! I want to, I want, Tata . . .” And then Marta caught his eye. A little look of surprise popped up on her face and she squeezed his father’s elbow and pointed to where Pepik was.

Pepik drew a big breath. He clung onto his nanny with his eyes, with all his might. She had seen him. She would take him off the train.

The adult voice behind him was getting louder. Children were being pulled away from the window, peeled off like leeches from sunburned skin. The train began to move. It lurched slowly, the sea of parents and grandparents lumbering awkwardly along with it. They couldn’t keep up. Pepik had to turn sideways to keep his family in view. Sweat was pouring down his back. He opened his mouth to scream again and felt a hand on his collar. A strong tug pulled him backwards into the train. “I don’t want to go!” he shouted. “I want to stay with Tata Nanny I don’t want I want—” But the adult, a woman with sturdy shoes and a pointed face like a beagle’s, had already moved on. She was making her way purposefully down the length of the car, plucking the children from the glass and snapping the windows closed and locking them. Pepik had fallen against an armrest and it took him a moment to straighten. By the time he did there were too many bodies; it was impossible to see over everyone’s heads. He ducked down and tried to crawl through the other children’s legs but got kicked in the jaw. He finally made it to the clear pane of glass, but the train was already gone from the station. Looking back he saw fields, soft and green in the June afternoon, and in the far distance the last few white handkerchiefs, rising up like fluttering doves.