Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,78

his eyes glassy. “Are you ready for your big adventure?” Marta asked him.

He clutched at his stomach and hiccupped loudly.

He was indeed able to walk on his own, though, steadied between his parents. Marta was relegated to picking up the rear. This was how it always was, she thought: she dressed, prepared, and comforted in the wings and then passed the child off to his mother before their grand entrance. The Bauers entered the full frenzy of the station with their son wedged firmly between them. “Your tie is crooked,” she heard Anneliese say to Pavel. And she watched as he obediently straightened it.

The first thing Marta thought when they entered the station was that all of their worrying had been for nothing. Pepik could have been covered with a bloody, oozing rash and nobody would have noticed. The platform was crammed with families immersed in their own version of what the Bauers were going through; nobody was paying the least bit of attention to anyone else. In every corner there were women weeping into hankies, fathers crouched down before their children, handing out last-minute advice, trying to make up for years of absence. One of the porters had started to stack some of the suitcases and a group of boys was racing around the pile at top speed, like puppies chasing each other’s tails. The shouting and crying and counselling combined to form a uniform din out of which only the occasional sentence could be discerned: from behind her Marta heard someone say, “We’ll see you again in a free Czechoslovakia!”

But the voice was hushed; there were Gestapo on the platform.

Marta had a sudden flash that there was something they’d forgotten. But she couldn’t think what it might be.

Three rough lines were forming at the doorways to the train. A whistle screamed through the morning sunlight. There was a pause in the bedlam, everyone united. The moment drew itself in, solidified, a glass sphere that hung suspended above them throwing off rainbows and sparkles of light, and then it shattered onto the station floor. The crying started up again, and the rapid instructions, and the shrill sound of women’s voices feigning cheer. Above it all now the conductors’ voices could be heard as they tried to herd the children into the passenger cars. The lines began to move forward slowly. At the front of each queue someone was ticking off a list and hanging a number around each small neck. There were plenty of children too young to know their own names.

Marta had a sudden inkling of what it meant to give up a child you had birthed. She wanted very badly to touch Pepik. She wanted very badly to touch Pavel.

Over the clamour she heard someone say, “I can’t believe everything we used to take for granted.” She saw Anneliese smile demurely at a uniformed soldier.

They were being swept forward now, by circumstance and time, by the great push of people moving towards the train. There was a commotion at the front of the line; Marta craned her neck, looking over the heads of a group of grey-haired ladies, and saw the Bauers’ friend Vaclav Baeck. He had put his two daughters, Magda and Clara, onto the train, but now it seemed he’d changed his mind. He was speaking rapidly to whomever was in charge, a young man who was shaking his head, No.

Vaclav tried to push past the conductor but was restrained. He tried a different tactic, walking several metres down the platform and speaking to a girl hanging out of the train window. There was some more jostling and Marta’s view was blocked by a tall man with a high black hat. When she looked again, both of Vaclav’s girls were at the window, Clara holding her baby sister Magda awkwardly in her arms. She passed the baby out the window to their father: Vaclav reached up and accepted his daughter as if he were accepting the gift of the rest of his life.

He stood with his wife, blowing kisses at their older daughter, Clara, who would now make her journey alone.

The Bauers too had seen Vaclav’s decision, and now Pavel bent down and took Pepik by the arm. “Do you want to go?” he asked, his voice calm. “To Scotland?”

Anneliese’s cheeks flushed. “Pavel! That isn’t fair.” She reached inside her jacket to adjust one of her shoulder pads.

“I didn’t have time to teach him any English. How will he manage?”

“The Millings will help him.”

But Pavel’s