Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,89

really am. You made yourself at home, looking for somewhere to hang your coat.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Our fingers touched as you passed the coat to me, and I felt a rush: here was the child from the letter I’d been carrying. Here, in front of me. In the flesh. The most important Jewish prayer—the first one I learned—ran through my head: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.

Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

When I looked up, you were moving a pile of blankets off the end of the sofa. You patted the space. “Come and sit.” I was jerked out of my spiritual reveries, irked that you thought the hospitality was yours to offer. But then I saw this was just your way of getting down to business.

People become nervous when they learn new things about their past.

“Tell me everything,” you said, before I could even sit down.

I thought to myself, If only. Because, of course, there is so little I know. And so much more that’s been lost.

“I’m Lisa,” I said again, and launched into my shtick, explaining my tenure in the Holocaust Studies department, the oral histories I’ve been taking from the Kindertransport children. You were nodding rapidly—this was all information I’d left on your answering machine—but I was reciting it mostly for myself, to ground myself in the facts of my own existence. Because I too feel displaced and uprooted. I too have very little to cling onto.

“You found . . . what? A letter?” you asked.

“Some letters. From your mother and father.”

“To me?”

“Just a minute.”

I went into the study and brought out the thick file. Written on the cover in blue magic marker were the words: “BAUER, PEPIK (PAVEL AND ANNELIESE).” An address followed. The sevens had dashes through them in the old-fashioned European style.

I could see you were unprepared. “I thought that nobody wrote to me,” you said, your eyes on the names.

“Yes,” I said. “I gathered that.”

I was ready to tell you the whole chain of events—the visit to the archive that had turned these up along with several other files from the area—but I saw then that the details would only muddle things. I looked at you, my gaze steady.

“I thought I had no parents,” you said.

“Everyone has parents.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What about the photo of your family? The one you told me about on the phone?”

“But I had no reason to believe they tried to contact me.”

“Shall I get our tea?” I asked.

But you weren’t interested in tea. “I thought—” you said. “What happened to them?”

I didn’t answer right away. About either what I knew or what I didn’t know. “You’re Jewish,” I said finally, thinking this would give you a clue.

You looked at me blankly. “I go to church,” was all you said.

So there it was. Someone else lost.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Of course.”

There was a look on your face that was almost but not quite indifference, as though we were talking about something with nothing whatsoever to do with you, something at a great remove. But I’ve learned not to be fooled by an apparent lack of interest. It is almost always the legacy of dashed hopes.

“So those are letters from my parents?” You raised your eyebrows at the thick file.

“Didn’t I already—?”

“From both of them?”

“And from your nanny.”

A look crossed your face then that I’ve not quite seen before. It was as if you had been slapped unexpectedly by someone you knew and trusted. “A nanny?” you asked. “I didn’t—I had no—” But you did remember; it was coming back into your body, sluicing through you like a tidal wave, complete and overpowering. “Her name was . . . ?”

“Marta,” I said.

You nodded, eyes upward. “Yes.”

What would it be like to know nothing of your origins, to spend decades craving and wondering, and then, at the end of your life, to be delivered an answer? To realize that all your misery was for nothing, that you’d been wanted after all.

Wasn’t that what I was hoping for too?

“Where did they come from?”

“Your family?”

“The letters.”

“From the estate of a family named Milling. Where you were placed, very briefly, before . . .”

I paused here, not wanting to name what had happened after that.

Your eyes bugged out a little and you looked as though you were drowning. “I have no recollection of anyone named Milling,” you said stiffly. But you were holding your temples in the palms of your hands and your eyes