Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,6

the little piece on the front—what was it called?—the fan shape that stuck out like a dustpan. It reminded Marta of Hitler’s moustache.

Vermin, Hitler had called the Jews. But he spoke with compelling confidence.

Pavel gave up on his son and turned away and opened his leather briefcase on the oak table. He was wearing not his usual business suit and tie but informal soldier’s clothes: corduroy pants and a sweater with leather patches on the elbows. He pulled several manila dossiers out of the case, each neatly labelled, and smiled at Marta. “I’ll have a cup of coffee, please,” he said. He considered for a moment, then slid the files back into the case, snapping the clasps shut. “No,” he said. “I’ll have a whiskey.”

The decanter was chiselled crystal with a stopper shaped like the Eiffel Tower. Pavel placed two small glasses close together on a round silver platter.

“Care to join me?”

“Me?”

But there was nobody else in the room. “To what occasion?” asked Marta.

“To victory!” Pavel responded with gusto, but didn’t yet raise his glass. He looked at her, challenging, his jaw square. For a moment she saw what he must have been like as a child: stubborn, impulsive. Something else he’d passed on to Pepik.

“To beating the bastards down,” Pavel said, gesturing with his drink to the window and the implied enemy beyond it. “The Russians are on their way with support . . .” He railed on about fortifications, about the Maginot Line. Marta had never heard him so energized about anything. She wondered vaguely whether he knew that tomorrow was the first day of Rosh Hashanah. How did she herself know this? Someone must have told her—Mr. Goldstein? Yes. Who else could it have been? There was no Judaism in her family, of course—none as far as she knew—but she found the religion’s customs curious, the candles and skullcaps, the prohibitions against various foods. Marta thought about the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, which would follow—the Day of Atonement, Goldstein had said, the day of repenting for sins.

Could she ask forgiveness for her own sins? If only, she thought, it was that simple.

“Either Hitler gives in,” Pavel was saying, “or there will be a war.” He paused, and Marta was suddenly aware that he had asked something of her, that he was soliciting her opinion. She blurted out the first thing she thought of. “Those white woollen knee socks,” she said. “Are they worn by Nazis?”

She was remembering Pavel’s story about his brother Misha, how he’d been knocked to the ground by the gang of boys and had seen their socks and known.

But Pavel ignored her. “Even if the government yields,” he said, “the army would never listen.” And the truth of this seemed confirmed for him in the act of speaking it aloud. “You,” he said to Marta, “have no idea how lucky we are now. Compared to the way it was before.”

Before, she knew, meant before Tomáš Masaryk, before 1918, when Czechoslovakia did not exist. He was right, she thought; it was hard for her to imagine. She told him as much.

“That’s the peril of youth,” Pavel said. “The lack of experience against which to compare.”

He was thirty. There were only seven years between them, but he chose to assert them now.

“You old man,” Marta said, smiling.

“And you are a lovely young lady.” Pavel raised his glass. “To beating those Germans,” he said, holding her eye, just as they heard his wife coming up the stairs.

Anneliese Bauer’s fingernails were painted a deep shade of scarlet. She was carrying a flat white box tied with a blue ribbon, the signature of the Hruska patisserie. What she was doing buying the medovnik herself Marta couldn’t imagine, and for a moment she felt guilty, or neglectful, as though this somehow reflected on her own job as hired help. There was something wrong about it, something out of order. Then again, Marta thought, everything was topsy-turvy these days. And Anneliese, she reminded herself, was not one to do anything she didn’t want to do.

“Am I to be included in cocktails?” Anneliese asked now, stepping into the parlour and fanning her face with an open hand, as though her nail polish were not quite dry. Her brown hair was set in a finger wave, the wide curls clinging to the sides of her head. She looked like a model from an ad for the alpine spas where Pavel’s mother went to convalesce in the summers. Marta imagined herself sashaying