Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,64

that would betray her clandestine listening.

A feeling came over her then, like when she’d had scarlet fever as a little girl. Vertigo, crawling skin, a sense that the world around her was not quite real. Because it couldn’t be so—what they were telling her couldn’t be true. Her grievance had melted away entirely, and what was left was love for the Bauers, righteous and pure. Like a mother’s love, she thought. She would fight for them, protect them at all costs. But were the borders really closing? Would people really be held inside the country against their wills, like animals in a cage? If this was the case, it was slowly dawning on her, then she had done something terribly, irrevocably wrong.

Marta forced herself to take a deep breath. She rearranged the unthinkable thought to make the Bauers the ones who were overreacting. They would see: all this was easily fixable. Tomorrow she would go down to the station with her savings and buy them new tickets out.

But when Pavel turned on the radio in the middle of the following afternoon, it was announced that Jozef Tiso had just returned from a conference with Adolf Hitler and had proclaimed a separate Slovak state.

“A separate what?” Marta asked. With the Sudetenland already gone there would be nothing left of their country whatsoever.

The Bauers stood by the radio as though it were a dear friend on a deathbed. The Czech foreign minister, František Chvalkovský, and President Hácha, they heard, had been ordered to Berlin. Finally, later in the day, it was reported that the German army had crossed the border and occupied the frontier town of Ostrava. Pavel was translating the radio broadcast, but he added the last detail himself. “Ostrava,” he said to Marta. “The town where you were born.”

Marta crossed the room to the fireplace and stood facing the ornate mantelpiece. She had always thought of money as the great protector and of the Bauers as all-powerful. In the past she had suffered because she was poor, this was true, and did not have the resources to leave her home when she needed to. But it now seemed that no amount of money could save the Bauers from what was happening around them. Hitler, she realized with a shock, was serious. She’d read Mein Kampf, and Ernst had explained to her Hitler’s thoughts on the “Jewish peril.” Perhaps, she thought, by telling Ernst about Pavel’s plans to leave, she really had foiled the Bauers’ only chance for escape.

Perhaps, because of her, the course of the Bauers’ lives would now change.

But deep down Marta did not believe she had this kind of power; she didn’t believe she could alter fate. Fate doled itself out according to action, according to how people behaved. The Bauers had proven themselves to be good after all. So things would work out for them in the end.

When Marta woke, it was snowing. She could feel it without having to look; the air was different, muffled in the silence that only winter brings. She fought the urge to fall back into the thick blankets of sleep; instead she got up and put on her slippers and robe and opened the shutters of the little window in the hall.

It was still dark, the barest hint of light on the horizon. Like a premonition, like the last dream before waking.

She picked a bit of sleep from the corner of her eye and stood in front of the window looking down. Her ankles cold beneath her housecoat. The street below was empty; then there was a bicycle. Afterwards she would think back to this lone rider and imagine he’d worn a cape and carried a sword. The Angel of Death entering the city. But it was an officer’s peaked cap, a Schirmmütze, that he wore, and a feldgrau wool tunic with epaulettes and glinting buttons. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air, like a villain from a storybook. Marta closed her eyes to try to make the officer disappear, but when she opened them again he was still there, and behind him the whole street was full of soldiers, the Angel’s army streaming up the steep hill from the glimmering city below. The snow was falling heavily, making a fairy tale of Prague. The swirling white against miles of black and grey made it seem as if they had come from the world of an old photograph, a world from which all the colour had been drained. And