Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,62

The deli was closing. People were getting up to leave, the women with their glossy mink coats, the men with their felt hats and spectacles. The couples looked happy, even the older ones, and I was reminded that tomorrow was the Sabbath, the day on which it is mitzvot for a couple to make love.

At first I felt angry—furious—that you’d stood me up. But under that was something softer, a tugging. I have to be honest: I was sad you didn’t come.

I wanted to have someone to belong to.

Chapter Five

AT NOON ON MARCH 14, 1939, the grandfather clock sounded, the front door swung open, and in walked the Bauers. They’d been gone only two nights but they looked like a band of Junák scouts back from the Krkonoše Mountains. Marta knew something terrible must have happened for Anneliese to let herself be seen in such a state, her hair loose around her face and not a trace of lipstick on her lips. Anneliese went straight to the parlour table and wept. Marta could see it was a continuation—she had been weeping before, then she had to carry her valise, and now she resumed weeping where she had left off.

Pepik disappeared immediately into his Uncle Max’s room, and it was Pavel, finally, who came to tell Marta what had happened. He steered her, a hand at the small of her back, out of the front room and into the kitchen. “A drink?”

“No, I—”

But he’d already brought in two little glasses from the breakfront and had filled his own to the rim.

“Neat?”

Marta looked at him blankly.

Pavel lifted a pitcher and added water to her glass. He squinted at Marta, opened his mouth, and closed it again. There was so much to say, and she could see he didn’t know where to begin.

“We got turned back at the border,” he said finally. “They saw that our documents were forged.” He emptied his glass in one smooth swallow. He was unshaven, and there were dark hollows under his eyes.

“The Gestapo came on the train. They took our passports—mine and Liesel’s. We were trying to leave the country. To get into Paris. From there Max had got us tickets to London.” He ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. “We’ve missed our chance now, of course. It’s too late.”

There was a moment of silence, during which they could hear Anneliese sobbing. Marta leaned her temple against her index and middle fingers. What did Pavel expect? If he was willing to forsake her like so much nothing, this is what he’d get in return. She pushed her untouched drink across the table. She cast around for somewhere to put her eyes and found the little wooden coffee mill. Her arms folded squarely across her chest.

“Marta,” Pavel said. But she refused to look up.

Pavel sighed deeply. “I owe you an apology. I’m sorry we had to . . . keep our plans secret from you.”

She looked again at the coffee mill; two loose beans were caught under the blade. Her stomach did a flip-flop, as though trying to get her attention. An apology? Had she heard correctly?

“Do you understand?” Pavel scrutinized her.

The hollows beneath his eyes might actually, she thought, have been bruises.

“It was to protect you,” Pavel said. “So if anyone came asking after us you wouldn’t be compromised. We had to keep it secret,” he explained. “From absolutely everybody.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We didn’t even tell my mother.”

He paused and frowned. “Which is why I can’t figure out who—” But he shook his head and stopped himself before finishing his sentence. “Regardless,” he said, “I want you to know that I planned to send for you. From France. I have your ticket.” He patted his breast pocket.

Marta looked up from the coffee mill. A ticket? For her?

“And a passport.”

He was bluffing, surely. Something inside her had hardened against him, like the pit at the centre of a piece of summer fruit, and she was not about to let her guard down again, to let herself be fooled a second time. But Pavel took the passport from his jacket pocket along with a green and white Wagons-Litz envelope and laid them in front of her on the table. She felt for a moment that she was going to be sick.

“Go on,” he said. “If you don’t believe me.”

She opened the envelope and saw the unpunched slip of paper. Her own name was there, last and first.

Pavel waited.

Marta picked it up as