Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,100

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