Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,88
made of twigs and balloons. Water rushed in. It covered his legs—he wet himself almost immediately, the urine seeping out around him in a circle on the floor—and rose past his chest, and then his shoulders. It filled his mouth and he choked and gagged; he put his hand to his face and found it soaking. He was crying so hard he could not get his breath. He doubled over, vomiting. Everything from the past year that he had managed to bury inside him was being pulled up through his body, ripped out of his mouth. The sharks were below him, his legs in their jaws. He let go. He was quickly pulled under.
Pepik was sent to a home full of boys. An orphanage run by the Catholic Church. At night the big room fell silent. It was a silence that filled up with deep breathing, the creak of springs as someone turned over, a fart followed by laughter. The boys fell asleep one by one, like candles being blown out on a birthday cake.
Pepik lay still, eyes wide open, picturing his hunger. He was an empty shell alone on a beach in the moonlight. The waves came and went; he was filled and then emptied. Emptied, and then emptied again.
He knew he had just arrived, but where had he come from? Arthur was hazy and vague around the edges. Pepik thought back to that long, quiet street. To the hours and days he had spent watching by the window.
For whom had he been waiting? The people in his photo?
Whoever they were, they would never find him now.
They would come from the east, looking for a ghost. Dragging their shadows behind them.
Part Five
Pavel and Anneliese
June 1939
Dear Pepik,
Mamenka and I send you a hug and a snuggle. We look at your photograph every day and pray to God for your safekeeping. But why have you not written, miláčku? How we long to hear from you. To hear any news from you at all.
Your Nanny Marta sends you many kisses as well.
I hope you have been receiving our letters, that Mrs. Milling has been able to find someone to translate them into Czech for you. I am sorry we did not have time to help you learn more English before you left. I know the Millings will teach you the language and will help you answer our requests.
Please tell us what you are doing every day, and what you are eating. And about your new friend Arthur. We know you will be very kind to him and help him get better.
The house is so quiet without you. We miss your train tearing around its track. I am almost inclined to set it back up.
A train will always remind me of you.
I will sign off for now, but I promise to write again soon. And you do the same. We will all be most happy to receive some news from our darling big boy.
With love and kisses,
Tata
(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Pavel. Died Auschwitz, 1944)
I KNEW AS SOON AS I HEARD THE DOORBELL RING.
I had not given you my address, but deep down I’d been expecting you. A slight man with sloped shoulders and bushy grey eyebrows. Dandruff on your jacket. You were leaning on a cane. You wore that dour expression I’ve come to recognize, the resignation that is almost a kind of play-acting: choosing to go through the motions of living for the benefit of the outside world.
It’s a show badly acted, a small child’s charade.
And it’s true that, although you were in your seventies, there was still something of a child in your eyes.
“I’m Lisa,” I said.
You held out a hand: hair on the knuckles. “Joseph.”
Name changes are common, and translations into English. I didn’t miss a beat. “I know who you are.”
You looked almost as though you recognized me too—squinting, trying to place a vaguely familiar face.
When of course you didn’t know me from Adam. Or Eve.
“Will you come in for tea?”
I could see you taking in the dirty casserole dish in the sink, the towering stacks of periodicals against the walls. There was nothing I could offer you to eat: the fridge was empty save for some Chinese takeout mouldering in a Styrofoam container. From the way you looked around my apartment I gleaned you were the fastidious type, that your own small house was perfectly neat and organized. But instead of feeling self-conscious I experienced a kind of relief, the relief of being seen for myself, for who I