Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,1

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 him 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