Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,52

further. “Remarkable,” he said to Marta, “isn’t it?” His eyes shining.

Marta nodded: Yes, remarkable.

They got out of the car and were met with a wall of sound. Everyone was talking excitedly, it seemed, in families, in little groups of three and four. Marta heard a man in a general’s uniform—the Czech colours in his buttonhole—quoting Hitler: “The Czechs are a miserable little race of pygmies.”

“He said that?” another man asked.

“Prague will be occupied. There’s no getting out of it.”

“It’s a done deal in his mind,” the general answered. “He’s already moved on to Danzig.”

“Do you know what else he says about us Czechs? That we’re like bicycle racers: we bow from the waist but down below we never stop kicking.”

“That’s true,” said a man with skin like crumpled tissue paper. “It was true in the Great War.”

“The Brits modelled their Bren guns on our ZGB 33. The ones made in Brno.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Bren—Brno and Enfield,” the general said proudly.

“If only we’d had the chance to use them!”

The men were like little boys with their hands tied behind their backs, Marta thought, denied the chance to stand up to the schoolyard bully. They longed to fight the Germans, longed desperately, and she knew Pavel thought it still might happen. He believed there was still a chance, however remote, that France and England would come to their senses.

Pepik’s face was pressed into Marta’s hip. He tugged at her arm and she lifted him up, then thought better of it and put him back down. He couldn’t depend on her forever. “Why don’t you go play with those children?” she said, pointing to a group of boys racing around the perimeter of the field. But Pepik just whimpered and pulled at her arm again.

“You’re too big,” she said. But she let him rest against her and kept a hand lightly on the top of his head.

They waited in line for their turn to pay respects at the grave. Then they ate the ham-and-swiss chlebíčky. Pepik fell asleep in the car on the way home, a line of cocoa dried above his lip. Marta thought that he looked a little like the Führer himself—the small moustache, the thin shoulders—but she figured it was best not to point this out to Pavel. The automobile sped through the countryside. A short gust of snow turned to sleet—later she would think it had been a sign of things to come—and Pavel turned on the car’s single wiper. They rode for a while in silence with the steady thwack of it like a heartbeat, just there in front of them. Marta leaned her head back, letting her eyes close, luxuriating in the time with nothing to do but be carried along. The road whizzed past beneath them, the tires making a rhythmic thumping. She had almost dozed off when Pavel looked over at her and said, “I know very little about you.”

Marta’s eyes snapped open. There was a slight tone of accusation in his voice: how could she have worked for him for so long and managed to stay opaque?

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said. For some reason she felt herself flushing.

Pavel was looking at her, smiling. “A woman of mystery,” he said.

She looked back at him, at both his hands on the wheel.

“No, it’s just . . .” She faltered. Why did she want to keep quiet? It was not quite true that she had nothing to hide, but suddenly she felt that she might tell him anything at all. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

Pavel nodded, satisfied she’d acquiesced. “What do I want to know. Let’s see. You were born in Moravia?”

“Ostrava.”

“A textile town. Did your father work at the factory?”

She shook her head. “Farm.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Your father owned a farm?”

“No. He was the farmhand.”

He nodded, understanding.

“We slept in the . . . there was a loft over the stable.”

Pavel made a face as if he’d just bitten down on something distasteful, or maybe, she thought, he did not want to think of her there.

“Sisters? Brothers?” he asked.

“One sister.” Marta paused. “She died.”

Pavel cocked his head to one side. “Oh?” he said. “I’m sorry.” He seemed to be considering. “So you and Pepik have something in common,” he said finally.

Marta hadn’t thought of it in this way before. “We also both love trains,” she said, and was surprised by the confession, by the fact that she kept confessing. It was true. She took Pepik to the train station for her own pleasure as