Far To Go (31 page)

But Pavel only shook his head. He was too loyal, Marta thought. An optimist. Even with what he’d just learned about his wife, it was still in his nature to give people the benefit of the doubt. Marta admired this, as she admired so much about him.

“I met a man who was in Dachau,” Pavel said instead. “The rumours are true.”

Marta set her cup down on her saucer. The china made a small tinkling sound.

“Dachau. The camp,” Pavel said.

“There’s sugar,” Marta said, for she’d heard enough about camps in the past weeks to last her a lifetime. Nobody seemed to know exactly what went on in them, and she couldn’t help but picture the row of little fishing cabins she’d once seen in a sporting magazine. But she knew that the truth was something more ominous. She wanted to speak about something else, but Pavel wouldn’t be dissuaded. “The man I know who was in Dachau. He’s a Sudeten Jew.” He looked at her. “Like us,” he said. He paused. “Like me,” he corrected, and looked away.

“What did he say?” Marta asked. “About the camp.”

“He wouldn’t say anything. Nothing of substance.” Pavel scratched his forehead and looked up at the chandelier. “He was released under oath.”

“But they let him out?”

“Business reasons, probably. His children are still in there. They know he won’t talk. They’ve got hostages.”

“So he wouldn’t say anything?”

“Only that he’s seen the worst.”

They were quiet then. Marta wondered what exactly
the worst
might mean.

Pavel cracked his knuckles. “I was wrong?” he asked. “About all of this? Getting out, being Jewish? Anneliese was right and I was wrong?” He was looking at Marta, wide-eyed. “My life’s fallen apart. Should I have seen it coming?” he asked.

Something rose up then in Marta, a fierce desire to protect, not unlike what she’d felt at the train station months earlier, when the Ackerman boy had hit Pepik with the stone.

“You were brave,” she said gently. “You did what you thought was best.”

Pavel laid his hand palm down on the desk.

“I did,” he said forcefully. “I did do what I thought was best. I simply could not have imagined . . .” His words were loud, and then quiet again. “I miss my son,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

Marta looked up at Pavel. She covered his hand with her own.

A rumour was going around that Adolf Hitler was compiling a list of all the Jews. Strange as it was, the image had weight to it in Marta’s imagination: a long piece of paper stuck in an Underwood typewriter, unscrolling down the back of a card table, across a polished office floor, and out into the reaches of eternity.

Pavel in the end had registered his assets, so if such a list existed he was on it.

“But what would the Nazis do with that list?” Marta ventured.

Pavel looked up. He didn’t answer.

It was August 1939. The only thing anyone talked about was what would happen when the Germans invaded Poland. Marta remembered Anneliese’s words:
Just wait a bit longer. Something will happen.
But nothing did. Marta waited for Mrs. Bauer to explain, to reveal the exact way in which officer Axmann would come to the rescue. Anneliese had been promised that her officer would help. If Axmann had been sincere, though, he had obviously come up short. No visas materialized, no affidavits—her man had failed her. There was nothing Anneliese could say, so she didn’t defend herself; it was useless. Pavel would never believe her.

Marta understood that Anneliese really had been trying to save them, that a beautiful woman had very few options. She’d been trying in the best way she knew how. But still the Bauers’ empire crumbled under Marta’s eyes. There would never be peace in their time.

Pavel was cordial with his wife, as though she were a houseguest. In another era, Marta thought, they might have kept up more of a pretense, fooling those around them into thinking that their marriage was still solid. But now, with the country falling to pieces and their only son lost to them, there was no point. The stakes of their life together had been torn up. Anneliese stayed in the bedroom smoking cigarettes and painting her face. Pavel moved his things into the guest room: his cotton nightshirts, his robe. His shirts loose and empty on their hangers like the shirts of men gone to their execution.

One evening he took Marta for a stroll.

“What about the curfew?”

“What about it?” Pavel said.

They avoided Vinohradská Square, sticking to the side streets, the leafy avenues and parks. Marta saw that Pavel had been holding back for the sake of appearances. But now that he knew his wife had strayed, he would permit himself the same.

“It’s not as though I’ve behaved perfectly,” Marta said. But Pavel only laughed. “You couldn’t be more perfect if you tried.”

Pavel still didn’t know about the grave mistakes she’d made with Ernst, and Marta pretended that his love equalled forgiveness. She pushed back her unease about Anneliese at home alone, with nobody. Here, finally, was the acceptance Marta had longed for all her life. The love she’d so craved. She let Pavel guide her through the breezy evening under the full moon and told herself she had no choice, told herself she wasn’t responsible for whatever had gone on between the Bauers. She knew this wasn’t entirely right, but the truth was that something had been torn open inside her and something even more powerful released. Something swift and warm between herself and Pavel that she was helpless to resist.

Marta wanted to lay herself down in it. She had a very strong urge to submerge, to submit. Were there words for this feeling?

“I’m happy,” she said.

It seemed improbable in the face of her guilt, in the face of what was happening all around them, but Pavel just squeezed her arm. “I’m glad.”

He leaned over and touched her dimple with his nose.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He eyed her.

“I’m sure.”

He said, “Follow me.”

Max and Alžběta’s flat was on the top floor of the building. Pavel led Marta up the staircase to the roof. She stepped on the heel of his shoe and he winced but didn’t let go of her hand. When they got to the top there was a little door, like in a fairy tale: you could squeeze through it and come out in another world entirely.

They stood up on the top of the building; the air smelled like rubber, or asphalt, and the perfume from the magnolia blossoms was almost oppressive. Darkness had fallen; the flowers were huge and pink, like planets orbiting the blackness. From far away came the sound of a siren. The lights of Prague were spread out beneath them, and above them, the sky’s fireflies. This was what they had been waiting for, this particular night, this place. Pavel took off his coat and Marta lay down on it without speaking.

There was no talk, no foreplay, and yet he was so gentle. He kneeled down and pulled up her dress; he pulled her stockings down as if he was unwrapping a most precious package. He looked at her lying there, exposed, with a kind of longing on his face that scared her. Then he undid his fly. She saw him for the first time, fully erect, above her. He knelt down with his pants still on and spread her legs and entered her.

It didn’t hurt—not like it had with other men—or rather, the brief pain was more like unbearable pleasure. He covered her face in kisses. There had been so much waiting, so much building; he could not move swiftly enough now. He thrust into her again and again, as though he too was trying to absolve himself of something, or push himself into a future he couldn’t imagine.

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