Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,4

of a knife against the board. It was the sound of Marta’s pulse, of the ache in her temples. It had been another night without any sleep.

“Dinner is at seven, Mr. Bauer,” she said.

Pavel, she saw, had moved to the hall and was pulling on a green wool cloak, the one he usually wore mushrooming. He held his pipe away from his face. “Off to enlist,” he grinned.

She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment; she could actually feel the tired pouches of flesh beneath them. “You can finally take action,” she said.

All summer Pavel had been enraged by the Völkischer Beobachter’s headlines: “Czech Police Burn Sudeten Farms”; “German Peddler Killed by Czech Mob.” Lies, he said, every word. For months Sudeten Germans had been under orders to provoke Czechs, and the Czechs were under orders not to be provoked. But now, finally, Pavel would have the chance to stand up for what he believed.

Marta paused and shut her eyes again briefly. She took a half-step towards Pavel and inhaled deeply. Did he smell? Like tobacco, certainly, but beneath that?

“What about the factory?” she asked. “If you enlist?” It was a bold question on her part, but Pavel didn’t seem to notice.

“We need men to fight,” Pavel said. “We need men, and we need boys!” He punctuated with his pipe, jabbing at the air with its stem. Pleased, she thought, to have her as an audience.

“And your workers?”

“The workers will fight.”

“Even Ernst?” She tasted the plant manager’s name.

“I’m halting production tomorrow,” Pavel said, not answering her question.

“Really? Are you certain?”

But who was she to ask? Mr. Bauer obviously had a vision: it had pulled him out of the depths of himself. She’d heard him speak more in the past day than in the thirty days before that combined.

“If Germany takes us, there will be nothing left for the workers at all,” Pavel said.

There was a sharp knock at the door. It was Ernst—she’d known it would be. He’d shaved since the night before, she saw, and his sweater had been replaced with an Austrian cloak like Pavel’s. An ostrich feather stuck out from the side of his cap. He seemed a different man from the one she’d just been with, remote and apart from her. To think of the intimacies they had so recently shared made her flush.

“We were just talking about you,” Pavel smiled, and clapped his friend on the shoulder.

“Good things?” Ernst looked at Marta.

“Of course!” Pavel said. “I was telling Marta how the whole factory will enlist . . .”

Ernst made a noise in the back of his throat that seemed, to Marta, noncommittal. But Pavel didn’t appear to notice. “We’re late,” he said. Then, “See you shortly, Marta.”

She lowered her eyes and fiddled with the string of her apron, then slipped out of the hallway. “It’s a great day,” she heard Pavel announce to Ernst. “A great day for us. A bad day for the Germans!”

Ernst’s voice was muffled; Marta couldn’t hear his reply.

When the men were gone, Marta walked slowly around the parlour, running a palm over the polished oak table, touching the throne-like wooden chairs with the hunting scenes carved into their backs. A crystal candy dish held a bag of Pepik’s chocolate-covered cherries.

Upstairs, the door to the master bedroom was open. There was an ornate Victorian sofa in the corner, the kind that would stay in the room forever because it was too heavy and awkward to move, and French doors that gave way to a little balcony with a wrought-iron table where nobody ever sat. Books were stacked up on Pavel’s side of the bed: Talks with Tomáš Masaryk by Karel Čapek, his favourite Czech author, a boy from his hometown of Hronov who had made good. And Das Unbehagen in der Kultur by Sigmund Freud, the famous doctor who had just died of cancer.

Marta went over to the bed and fluffed up the goose-down pillows. There was a silver boar’s-hair brush on the vanity, and the watch was beside it, left there casually, as though it was not worth a small fortune. Its case made a sound like a door that needed oil. She held the watch tentatively to her wrist; she imagined herself in a silk dress and elbow-length gloves, being twirled by Ernst across a glimmering ballroom floor. How glamorous she’d appear, how worldly. Pavel had brought the watch back from Paris; the band was made completely of diamonds, with a thin blue line of sapphires down the centre.