Far To Go (29 page)

“So,” I said, “tell me what you thought.”

I’ve learned to ask open-ended questions, and I thought this would get you started, but you just shook your head and walked over to the kitchen counter. You stood by the window over the sink, looking out at the tiny fenced-in yard. There was one letter you had removed from the file, a letter you had singled out from the others. With your back towards me you picked it up from the counter and began to read. Your voice was steady, with a kind of restraint in it, as if you were a tightrope walker and each word in front of you a step.

You had to focus very hard not to fall off.

“‘Dear Pepik,’” you read. “‘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
? We are desperate to hear from you. To hear any news from you at all.’”

It was the letter, of course, that I was intimately familiar with. But hearing it read by the grown child to whom it had been addressed . . . When you finished reading I tried to but could not look you in the face. It was too bare, too personal. I had never in my life felt so close to someone and at the same time so impossibly far away.

I didn’t meet your gaze, afraid of what would be revealed if I looked up.

“I want to thank you, Lisa,” you said finally, in that half-Czech, half-Scottish lilt of yours. “For getting in touch. You have changed—I don’t know how—”

You cleared your throat and looked down at the letter held loosely in your hand, the letter that had arrived so improbably across an ocean of time and grief. The file folder was still in the middle of the table, and you opened it and found the place where the letter belonged chronologically. You put it back in, closed the folder, and patted it just once. A gesture that said
There now, that’s finished
.

Then you got up and went over to a small desk in the corner of the room. “Now it’s my turn,” you said. “I have something to show you.”

You came back and placed a photograph in front of me on the table, the one you had told me about. It was obviously old, with a yellowing border and a big crease down the centre where it had been folded. There were two women in the photograph. One must have been Anneliese Bauer. The other I knew to be Marta.

There was also a man with a baby in his arms. Here was the sibling you’d always known about. She was swaddled in a blanket, her tiny face obscured. But it was the baby’s father who captured my attention. Pavel Bauer. I stared at his features, drinking him in. He was maybe 170 centimeters—175 maximum—with slight shoulders. But sure of himself. Even through the photograph I could feel his steady presence. And I wasn’t just seeing what I wanted to see.

I could have stared at him for hours, the dark hair and sloping brow, but you pointed to the fifth person, the boy in the picture. It was easy to see, even across the vast stretch of time, that the child was you. The same bright eyes, the stubborn jaw. Small, like your father. A scrawny child.

I refrained from saying this aloud.

You pointed next to Marta, who was standing behind you in a cardigan and a simple housedress. Her dark curls were pinned at the nape of her neck. She was just behind your right shoulder, holding herself a little stiffly for the camera.

“That’s my mother,” you said. You were proud, but trying to conceal it. You cleared your throat and pointed at her face again.

We stayed like that for a minute, looking down at the photo together.

When I finally spoke, it was as if someone else were animating me: the words seemed to come of their own free will. I turned towards you.

“Joseph,” I said—Joseph or Pepik: I never knew which to call you. “That wasn’t your mother,” I said.

You looked at me as if I’d given you two weeks to live. That same gape, the incomprehension.

“That’s my mother,” you said forcefully. This was the one thing you knew, the thing you remembered to be true, and you weren’t about to let me take it away so easily. You pointed again to Marta. Your finger covered her face. “Don’t you recognize me?” you said.

“Yes. The little boy is you. But the other woman”—I pointed at Anneliese—“she was your mother.”

In the photograph Anneliese was looking uneasily in the opposite direction. You flicked your eyes over her.

“That one?”

“Anneliese. Pavel’s wife.”

You tapped your fingernail on Marta. “What about her? The one touching my shoulder.”

“She wasn’t your mother.”

“Who was she?”

“Your nanny.”

“She wasn’t my mother?”

“No. She was mine.”

Anneliese Bauer disappeared entirely. It’s hard to make sense of this: someone exists and then doesn’t. Her diamond watch is all that’s left of her. I couldn’t believe it had survived all this time, something so valuable: the archivist who gave it to me said she’d found it after the Millings died. She knew by the inscription that it had not belonged to them, and figured the rest out via the letters in the safety deposit box. The watch had stopped, of course. I had it repaired. Time took up its post again, resumed the heavy lifting. Memory is a stone that is difficult to budge. Especially as it applies to family. To Pepik’s and mine.

We were half-siblings, you see. We shared a father. Pavel. In some ways we shared a mother too. Marta was—must have been—extremely close to Pepik. I was her only biological child, however. There’s part of her that only I can claim.

Pepik’s cancer had spread throughout his body by the time of our first meeting. I didn’t know it the day I visited him, but already nothing could be done. He was well enough at first though, and for the next few months I visited him regularly. I would take the bus across Montreal and we would walk on the mountain in the evenings. We imagined that the city spread out below us was Prague, the last city where our parents were alive. We wondered aloud about our father, Pavel Bauer. Did he ever stroll with Pepik’s mother, Anneliese, in the long hot summer of 1939? Did he stroll with Marta—with
my
mother? We were like gossipy teenagers, Pepik and I. We did everything together. Once I even went to church with him, although it pained me a little to rub up so closely against his loss of faith. I myself do not believe in god, so it isn’t the Jewish religion that I grieve but the culture embedded in it.

Or maybe it is the other way around.

Either way, when I think of the human potential stolen, of the millions of little lights snuffed out, I can’t help but wish for a kind of redemption. I can’t help but wish that the living, at least, would embrace what was taken from the dead.

Not that I am one to talk.

But then again, since Marta wasn’t Jewish, I feel myself not especially welcome. Judaism is passed down on the mother’s side, so I don’t officially count.

I would, of course, have been Jewish enough for Hitler. I assume that is part of the reason my mother left the Bauers when Pavel got her pregnant. Or perhaps the Bauers sent her away themselves. There was Anneliese to think about. Still, I grieve the Jewish half of myself I grew up not knowing, and I try in my own way to honour it. I have a Star of David that belonged to my father, Pavel—my mother passed it on to me before her death. I wear it under my sweater, next to my heart. I even keep the Sabbath in a manner of speaking. Joseph—Pepik—refused to join me: he said it felt unnatural. So I would eat by myself, fumble my way through the blessings over the bread and wine. I still do this most Friday nights. I could seek out other people, but I have no real desire. It’s the time of the week I feel most acutely alone. And I feel a kind of perverse enjoyment in it.

I did, as I’ve said, once have a lover—a woman, yes—but that was so long ago now.

The list of those lost grows.

“Was I right about your baby sister? She was killed?” I asked Pepik that day when I first visited his home. We had gone out into the small fenced-in yard. The clouds were low and grey. “Your full sister,” I clarified.

He turned his face towards me. “Why do you ask me?”

“I thought you might have done some research.”

And it turned out he had. In the week since I’d delivered the letters he’d put the other pieces in place.

“Yes, you were right,” he said. “Theresienstadt. Auschwitz.” The rubber tip of his cane was sinking into the dark earth. “I thought it was you. The baby in my photo.”

I told him again that it couldn’t have been. The date on the back of the photo said 1937, and I didn’t come along until several years later. Until Pepik had already been sent away to Scotland. So the baby in the picture was a second sibling he’d never known.

It was also hard at first to make him believe that Marta wasn’t his mother. I pointed repeatedly at Anneliese: he spent a long time looking at her face.

Yes, he said, he did remember something. Yes, there was a flicker.

But when he looked at Marta, her hand on his young shoulder, the word
mother
flashed across his mind.

I can see what he was thinking. In the photo, Anneliese is holding herself slightly apart and her eyes are to the side, as though something else has caught her attention, something slightly fearsome that is moving towards her. Marta is the one who is leaning into Pepik, whose gaze is cast down in his direction. If I had to pick the mother of the pair I would pick Marta too. There’s a tenderness to her, a warmth that makes me know I was lucky to be her child, even for the short time we lived together on this earth. There was also a particular naïveté about her, something close to childlike. She didn’t know what was coming.

My mother, Marta, died in a DP camp in 1946. She had nobody left to help her. She got sick, and she perished.

What did you expect? A happy ending?

Sometimes I am envious of the Kindertransport children I study, who often have no memory of their childhoods. This oblivion seems to have passed me by. There are things from my childhood I remember in near-perfect detail, from the years both before and after my mother’s death. Things that haven’t helped me live a happy life. Oh no, quite the opposite has been true.

Meeting Pepik was a bit of goodness, though. We had a small window of time in which to enjoy the gift we’d found. We’d been alone all our lives, and suddenly we each had family. When he grew too feeble to walk on the mountain, we would go to the parkette across from the depanneur, sit on the cold bench, and watch the pigeons pick potato-chip bags off the sidewalk. There was not joy, exactly, in finding each other—we were too old, too set in our ways—but our pain was dulled. What we felt was not quite pleasure, but contentment. We had each finished our searching.

The truth is I know almost nothing about what happened in the Bauer household in the fall of 1938 and the spring and summer of 1939. The events I have put down here seem as likely as any others—that’s all. It was my hope, in the last year of my half-brother’s life, to construct some kind of narrative, a story for him to hang on to. In the final months he reminded me so very much of a child, lost under the sheets of his sickbed. Like a small boy waiting for a bedtime story, as though he had been waiting all his long life for someone to come and tuck him in.

And so I did. I wrote during the days: the story of Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, the story of their child’s governess, Marta. Then, in the evenings, I went to Pepik’s house and relieved the home-care nurse I’d hired. I sat by Pepik’s bedside and read him the story, one chapter at a time, as I wrote it. I used the letters in my possession to cobble together a version of events, arranging disparate pieces into something that seemed whole. Pepik would comment when his gut told him something had been different, and I made notes in the margins and typed in the changes at my desk the following day. A few things we put down with a high degree of certainty. The rest we made up, taking scraps from our dreams, setting them on paper to make them make sense.

As I said before, though, this isn’t a story with a happy ending.

They’re all dead now.

Pavel, my father.

Marta, my mother.

Pepik’s mother, Anneliese.

Pepik himself died a year and four months after I met him. The cancer was everywhere; he was in so much pain that I couldn’t fault him for refusing treatment at the end. My only regret is that he died before I could finish writing the story. I wanted so much for him to have some sense of completion, some resolution—even imagined—to the tragedy that opened his life.

Instead I was left to write the final chapter as a tribute. I’ve put it down here in memoriam. For Pepik.

SUMMER
SOLSTICE
ARRIVED
LIKE
A slap across the face. The Jews were officially expelled from the economic life of Prague. The whole Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia would be
Aryanized
: this was the word the Nazis were using. The singing of “Má Vlast,” the patriotic song that had caused such an uproar at the National Theatre the previous winter, was banned in pubs and cafés. It was against the law to boo during German newsreels. Cutting German telephone lines was punishable by death. And Reichsprotektor von Neurath could now make laws on his own. No confirmation needed from the courts; his whims would become part of the Czech criminal code, just like that.

Karl Frank had given a speech: “Where once the swastika flies, there it will fly forever.”

By law—as Ernst had predicted to Marta—the Bauers were forced to register all their assets.

“I’m a respectable citizen,” Pavel said sadly as he sat in the dining room one evening. “A factory owner. Kind to my workers.” He held a paper clip in his hand, bending it into a straight line. “I even supported the land reform,” he said. “Which meant giving up land out of principle.”

His papers were spread over every piece of furniture. Marta was in the kitchen, chopping onions. She wondered how she was supposed to set the table for their meal when it was covered with carbon paper and pencil shavings. “What if I just don’t do it?” Pavel asked. “What if I don’t register my assets?”

Marta saw Anneliese look up from the
Prager tagblatt
.