Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,22
end of his first day back at school, that things were indeed very different. Classes had resumed, but under German control. Pepik was waiting for her outside his classroom, clutching his slate, the sponge dangling from its string. He looked so helpless, so vulnerable, she thought, in his cap and short pants with his little knees exposed.
“I had to sit at the back of the room,” he told her.
“In your usual seat?”
He shook his head. “Facing backwards. With Fiertig.”
Fiertig, she knew, was the only other Jewish child in the class.
Marta rushed towards Pepik and knelt in front of him, kissing his cheeks, right and left, back and forth at length, but she didn’t ask for more details. She couldn’t stand to hear them. As they were leaving the schoolhouse she saw that a large swastika had appeared in the front hall, along with three new photographs outside the principal’s office. The first showed Hitler, with his little moustache that reminded Marta of the snout on Pepik’s electric train. The second was of Heinlein, the leader of the Sudeten Nazi party. The third photo showed a man Marta didn’t recognize—there were round glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Maybe it was the bespectacled Himm-ler from Ernst’s joke about the perfect Aryan.
When they got home, Pepik ran upstairs to play with his train. Marta heard the sound of someone moving around in the pantry, a grunt as something heavy was lifted, and then the squeak of a chair being pushed across linoleum.
“Sophie?” she called. She fully expected Sophie to have changed her mind and returned—she was like that. Unreliable. Easily influenced. Marta took off her coat, wondering where the girl had been. Maybe serving strudel at the “soup kitchen” the Germans had set up for their poor starving countrymen who had been living so long under Czech rule. Talk about Greuelpropaganda! If Sophie wanted to discuss the spreading of false rumours of atrocities . . .
“Sophie?” she called again.
But it was a slimmer rear end that met Marta’s gaze when she stuck her head into the pantry, and narrower hips. Where Anneliese’s skirt had risen up at the back of her knees a creamy fringe of lace from her slip was visible. She twisted around, almost losing her balance. “Oh, Marta, for God’s sake. Don’t do that.”
Anneliese laid her palm over her heart and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. You scared me. I thought I was alone in the house.”
It was close and warm in the pantry. Marta undid the top two buttons of her cardigan. She looked around and saw several large crates of groceries and an oversized sack of potatoes. “Did you buy all of this?” she asked Mrs. Bauer.
Yom Kippur, Mr. Goldstein had told her, was supposed to be a day of fasting, and here they were surrounded by food. There was a huge stack of tinned sardines, piled on top of each other like Pepik’s wooden building blocks. An enormous piece of lard that Marta knew would never keep. There were fifteen or twenty jars of preserves—lindenberry, it looked like, and plum. The deep bluish purple was the same colour as the sapphires in the watch from Paris, the one she’d imagined herself wearing as she waltzed across a glamorous dance floor. The one, she saw now, that Anneliese was wearing.
Anneliese followed Marta’s gaze, then extended her arm to give Marta a better view. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” She nodded to show Marta could touch it. The diamonds were cool and neatly symmetrical, like a child’s milk teeth.
Marta wished for a moment that she was the one who owned it, the one with the privilege to show it off. But she had to pretend she’d never even seen it before. “Beautiful,” she said, her jaw tight. And then she thought how odd it was for Anneliese to be wearing the watch in the middle of the day, when it was clearly meant for dinners or balls. She looked at Anneliese closely—her complexion seemed suddenly pale. And she kept craning her neck to look over Marta’s shoulder, as though she suspected they were being watched.
“Is everything okay, Mrs. Bauer?” Marta asked.
Anneliese bristled. “Of course it’s not okay. Look at what’s happening all around us! The Germans are now claiming places that are purely Czech. They use some technical or strategic reason, like the railway line. They’re swallowing up everything other than—”
Marta cleared her throat. “What I’m asking is . . .” She cast around in her mind,