Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,58
gone from sight. She flung herself across her blue quilt and began to sob.
It was afternoon when she woke. She came down and set the kettle to boil and made herself a cup of linden tea. She and Pepik had gathered the leaves the previous autumn, had dried them and put them in a glass Mason jar labelled “APRIL 1938.” Pepik had drawn a smiling sun on the label beside the date. They had brought the jar along with them from their old town. Marta sat for a long time at the kitchen table watching the steam rise off her tea. Her hands resting, palms down, in front of her.
She looked around, at Pepik’s half-finished bowl of porridge, the spoon sticking straight out of it like a Nazi flag claiming yet another territory, and at the wooden mill with coffee grounds spilled beneath it. The pan from last night’s goose was still soaking in the sink; a skim of yellow fat had hardened on the surface. There was an ashtray on the table, filled with cigarette butts stained by Anneliese’s red lipstick. Marta thought she’d better get cleaning—and then she realized she was in no hurry. No hurry at all.
The Bauers were gone. They weren’t coming back.
She left the mess and took her tea into the pantry, where she made a quick inventory of food. The big pot of soup would last several days if she needed it to. And before the Steins had fled, Alžběta had stocked up on those trendy new soup cubes. How, Marta wondered, could something so tiny produce a real soup with hunks of sausage and dumplings or with curled potato peelings? But maybe it was possible. They were able to do the strangest things these days. The Baecks, Anneliese had told her, had a machine to dry their laundry.
Marta lit the stove and scraped the fat off the roasting pan. She was getting angry now, going over the details of her abandonment. The pilgrimage to Lány had obviously been Pavel’s last patriotic nod to Masaryk. She’d been dragged along, an oblivious accomplice. And Pavel’s advance had not been so different from Ernst’s after all: he had taken advantage of her, knowing he would never see her again. Last night’s dinner table conversation seemed different too—Pavel’s nerves, the way he’d kept moving the knot of his tie back and forth below his Adam’s apple. It was not about the kiss after all. He was ashamed to be telling her a bald-faced lie.
The thought of what had happened seemed suddenly unbearable to Marta. She ran downstairs and quickly filled a galvanized pail with water and Helada soap—it was the brand she bought for Pepik’s benefit, because of the pictures of locomotives that came in every box. She started to work vigorously on the inlaid hardwood floors. The flat was large and the panels were wide and knotted: it was a big job. Marta worked, not thinking. When the truth of her predicament threatened to crash over her, she held her breath and scrubbed harder, as though she could use the rising flood of pain against itself, to scrub away her own terror. To scrub away the image of Pepik’s small face, staring up at her from the automobile’s window.
She didn’t stop for lunch or even for a cup of tea. When she finished with the floors, she moved on to the silver. It needed polishing; whoever worked for the Steins had been lazy, doing the cutlery but leaving the big, intricate pieces that were used less frequently, like the Passover Seder plate. As Marta polished, some Hebrew script came clear. They were cowards, she thought. All of them. To run away so easily from who they were.
When she was finished, she went down the hall and looked at the empty crib. In the Steins’ bedroom—which she had already come to think of as the Bauers’—she rifled through the drawers but found nothing other than some lacy undergarments she hadn’t seen before and a half-emptied jewellery box. The diamond watch was gone. She left the drawer open—because she could, because nobody was going to return home and catch her. She went into Pepik’s room and looked at his small jackets hanging from the antlers of Max’s prize stag. Anneliese had forgotten to pack her son’s nightshirt: it was still folded in the bottom drawer.
Marta slept badly that night. The empty flat was full of noise: creakings and a ticking that was too uneven to be the grandfather