Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,25

said, and pressed his back against the tape on the inside of his closet door. “Am I bigger?”

He was obsessed, after just one day back at school, with being a great big grown-up boy. Marta knew he thought that if he grew tall enough he could once again sit with his friend Villem, up near the front, instead of in the back corner next to Fiertig Goldberg.

Marta couldn’t bear to tell him otherwise.

“You’re bigger,” she said.

“How much?”

He was drawing himself up to his full height, chin tucked in, cheeks puffed out.

“A little more than a centimeter.”

She made a mark with the lead pencil and showed him. “Time for bed, miláčku.” She patted his bottom.

He pouted for a moment. “My cut hurts,” he said, pointing to the gauze on his elbow.

Marta raised her eyebrows to show that she meant it.

“Okay,” he said, relenting. “Time for bed.” And he nuzzled his face into her arm.

Marta tucked Pepik in and went downstairs. Anneliese had abandoned the unpacking of the potatoes. There was a note in her deep blue fountain pen ink that said I’ve gone up to bed, would you mind unpacking the rest of the food? It was signed with a large flourish of an A. Marta was slightly insulted. Of course she would unpack the food; she had expected to.

The thick of the heat had gone out of the day and left a cool that was both pleasurable and ominous. A little taste of the colder evenings to come. The window had been left open an inch and Marta could hear the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs over cobblestones. Somewhere far away a young girl laughed. Marta’s arms were bare in her short-sleeved dress and she shivered. She was so seldom alone, and she was suddenly aware of herself in a different way, as though the self she thought of as solid was instead a million little fragments. As though all of the pieces could fall off their string at any moment and scatter across the pantry floor.

It was odd, really, the way humans went about their days so boldly, ordering coffee, weighing out exactly a quarter kilo of potatoes on the greengrocer’s scale, as though their lives were something that could be controlled, portioned out as desired. When really, all it took was one little upset to reveal the . . . imbalance of things. Marta thought of how unnerved Anneliese had become earlier, and she wondered about other people’s inner lives; if, despite their polished exteriors, people’s insides were as full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese. She shivered again—she didn’t like to think of it. If the politicians, the councilmen, Ernst, even the Bauers were as uncertain as she herself was—

She had a sudden sensation of being watched and she turned around to see Pavel. His necktie was undone and his shirtsleeves pushed up. His arms crossed in front of him. Marta flushed, ashamed to have been caught daydreaming. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m almost finished.” She gestured at Anneliese’s stockpile, the potatoes and the soup cubes she was arranging on top of the preserves.

Pavel took a step into the pantry. He was close enough that she could see a spot on his chin he had missed shaving. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Marta.”

He said her name as though testing the water at the edge of a lake, dipping his big toe in to get a feel for the temperature.

“I wanted to tell you myself,” Pavel said.

“Mr. Bauer?”

He hesitated, as if he wished to protect her from what it was he had to say.

“It’s President Beneš.”

Marta held her breath, her uncertainty rushing back. Had the president been shot? But Pavel said instead, “He’s resigned.”

Marta exhaled. This was better by far than an assassination. Still, her face fell along with her breath. She knew what this would mean to the Bauers: their last hopes to save their homeland swept away like flax dust from the factory floor. Pavel saw her dismay and mistook it for something different. He reached over and touched her bare wrist.

Marta looked down at Pavel’s hand. His fingernails were neatly clipped and clean. Fine dark hair on the back of the knuckles. It was hair that must also travel, she thought, up the backs of his forearms and onto his chest. She flushed more intensely. She tried to focus on something else—the pile of potatoes, dirt still caked on their skins—but she couldn’t make herself stop; she must look as if she were