Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,81
. .” And then Marta caught his eye. A little look of surprise popped up on her face and she squeezed his father’s elbow and pointed to where Pepik was.
Pepik drew a big breath. He clung onto his nanny with his eyes, with all his might. She had seen him. She would take him off the train.
The adult voice behind him was getting louder. Children were being pulled away from the window, peeled off like leeches from sunburned skin. The train began to move. It lurched slowly, the sea of parents and grandparents lumbering awkwardly along with it. They couldn’t keep up. Pepik had to turn sideways to keep his family in view. Sweat was pouring down his back. He opened his mouth to scream again and felt a hand on his collar. A strong tug pulled him backwards into the train. “I don’t want to go!” he shouted. “I want to stay with Tata Nanny I don’t want I want—” But the adult, a woman with sturdy shoes and a pointed face like a beagle’s, had already moved on. She was making her way purposefully down the length of the car, plucking the children from the glass and snapping the windows closed and locking them. Pepik had fallen against an armrest and it took him a moment to straighten. By the time he did there were too many bodies; it was impossible to see over everyone’s heads. He ducked down and tried to crawl through the other children’s legs but got kicked in the jaw. He finally made it to the clear pane of glass, but the train was already gone from the station. Looking back he saw fields, soft and green in the June afternoon, and in the far distance the last few white handkerchiefs, rising up like fluttering doves.
The rocking of the train put Pepik to sleep. When he woke, the sun was going down. It was a dot of fire on the edge of the horizon and it burned a line towards him. It lit a small fire between his eyes.
He felt his lashes catching, the little lick of flame rising up into his brain.
There was a baby asleep in a bureau drawer balanced on the seat across from him; the drawer rocked precariously each time the train hit a bump, but nobody came to move it. Pepik leaned forward and vomited onto the floor beside it. Darkness fell like a suffocating blanket; it was hot in his head and tears slid down his face. Nobody came to put a cold cloth on the back of his neck. Sweat dripped off his face. The fat boy with the pink cheeks was asleep with his chin on his chest. Identical twin girls with blond pigtails pointed at Pepik and whispered. Their voices were like twigs snapping in a fire or snapping beneath his feet, he couldn’t tell which. When he looked down, though, he saw he was walking. He and the other children were being herded up a gangplank towards a big boat. The train had disappeared—a magician’s trick—along with everything that came before it. His mamenka and tata, his nanny. Pepik let himself be jostled forward. He was instantly devoted to the boat, its shiny silver propeller, the enormous hull that would shoulder its way through the rough waves of the English Channel. All those hours under the dining room table with his train might never have happened. The boat was his new love.
A bunch of boys were throwing a ball of socks back and forth in the air. When Pepik looked more closely, the socks sprouted wings and flapped off into the morning.
The next time he woke he was shivering. The edges of his vision were hazy but a clear spot had opened in front of him, as though someone had breathed hotly on a pane of frost-covered glass. He saw two boys, knees drawn up to their chests, sleeping beneath a single wool jacket. And when he rolled over he saw that there was another boy curled up behind him, every inch of his face covered in freckles. He had a tag around his neck with a number on it. Pepik felt his own neck and realized he was wearing a tag as well. He tugged at the string, trying to pull it off, but the boy told him he must keep it. “For your family,” he whispered in Czech, as though conveying something top secret. “So they can meet you.”
“Today?”
The boy nodded.
“And Nanny?”