Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,2

her mouth and closed it again. The day was losing shape, like a worn-out undergarment. Time coming loose, a thread at the cuff. Marta twirled a strand of hair around her forefinger. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, but the blanket of fog in her mind had now closed in, and something inside her dismissed the threat entirely. Mr. Bauer clearly had his details confused. Even if—even if this unthinkable thing had actually happened to his brother—well, that was Vienna. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—Hitler had made clear his intent to annex Austria, and then he’d done it. Whereas Pavel and Marta’s native Czechoslovakia was still free.

A final starling dived down through the September dark, descending at the exact speed of a clock’s second hand. Its body compact, black as a bullet. And then, as though it had reached its target, there was a loud explosion close by.

She straightened. “What was that?”

“A gun,” Pavel said.

“Mr. Bauer?”

Marta crossed the room to the window. Sure enough, a row of soldiers was firing a dummy round into the late afternoon sky. Pavel had a Winchester and a Steyr that he took on hunting expeditions to Hungary, so it wasn’t that Marta was unfamiliar with rifles. But this was different. Another kind of fight altogether. She was twenty-three years old. Born during the Great War but too young to remember it. All she’d really known her whole life was peace.

“Do we actually need gas masks?” She found herself wanting to giggle—the whole thing was so absurd—and she cleared her throat and brought a hand to her face to conceal her expression. Why was she behaving like this? It must be nerves. She removed her hand and said, straight-faced, “The gas masks remind me of Pepik’s Botanisierbuchse.”

Pavel smiled at the reference to his son’s botanical specimen can, but now he was staring off into the distance. “The Germans want us next,” he said. “But the Wehrmacht tanks are built for the plains.” He squinted as if he could see into the future. “When they move into the Šumava mountain pass, we’ll get them. We’ve got thirty-five divisions, and forts all along the border of the Sudetenland.”

Marta still couldn’t reconcile the rallying gunfire with their sleepy Bohemian town. It could claim the tallest church spire in the region—fifty-five feet precisely—but there was nothing else remarkable about it. A Gentile butcher, a Jewish tailor, two hundred families grouped together on the east bank of a river with nowhere in particular to go. It was quiet and safe; she knew that’s why Pavel loved it. He loved a week in London, a month on the Adriatic coast in the summer, but beneath it he was a vlastenecký, a Czech nationalist. The thing he loved best was coming home.

Marta could see her reflection in the parlour window. Her hair was dark and curly; she had a dimple in the middle of her left cheek that seemed to drive her innocence home. Pavel got up from his chair, and he stood next to her for a moment, looking down at the town square. There was a woman trying to cram an enormous valise into the boot of a Tatra, and several more detachments of Czech soldiers. A young girl cried openly as she watched a uniformed back retreat across the square. Her man going off to fight. She held a single rose in her hand, the petals pointed towards the ground like a magic wand that had lost its power. And Marta felt suddenly the same helpless dread. The fog inside her lifted and the old familiar feeling came back. Things were about to happen, she knew. Things she would be powerless to stop.

That night she snuck out of the Bauer house. Crossed the cobbled square, passed the grocer’s and the tailor’s shop, her bare feet cold in her sandals. Mist lifted off the river in wisps. Little plumes of anticipation rose inside her as well. An hour ago she’d been soundly asleep, but now she felt alert, wide awake. She heard the quiet burble of water over rocks and, somewhere not far off, the sound of a window being opened. The keys to Mr. Bauer’s factory were clutched in her palm. He always left them hanging from a loop of leather on a hook by the back door; she had learned to pick them up by their long metal ends to avoid the sound of them jingling together.

There was a half-moon edging out from a length of grey cloud.