Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,92

to show you.”

You came back and placed a photograph in front of me on the table, the one you had told me about. It was obviously old, with a yellowing border and a big crease down the centre where it had been folded. There were two women in the photograph. One must have been Anneliese Bauer. The other I knew to be Marta.

There was also a man with a baby in his arms. Here was the sibling you’d always known about. She was swaddled in a blanket, her tiny face obscured. But it was the baby’s father who captured my attention. Pavel Bauer. I stared at his features, drinking him in. He was maybe 170 centimeters—175 maximum—with slight shoulders. But sure of himself. Even through the photograph I could feel his steady presence. And I wasn’t just seeing what I wanted to see.

I could have stared at him for hours, the dark hair and sloping brow, but you pointed to the fifth person, the boy in the picture. It was easy to see, even across the vast stretch of time, that the child was you. The same bright eyes, the stubborn jaw. Small, like your father. A scrawny child.

I refrained from saying this aloud.

You pointed next to Marta, who was standing behind you in a cardigan and a simple housedress. Her dark curls were pinned at the nape of her neck. She was just behind your right shoulder, holding herself a little stiffly for the camera.

“That’s my mother,” you said. You were proud, but trying to conceal it. You cleared your throat and pointed at her face again.

We stayed like that for a minute, looking down at the photo together.

When I finally spoke, it was as if someone else were animating me: the words seemed to come of their own free will. I turned towards you.

“Joseph,” I said—Joseph or Pepik: I never knew which to call you. “That wasn’t your mother,” I said.

You looked at me as if I’d given you two weeks to live. That same gape, the incomprehension.

“That’s my mother,” you said forcefully. This was the one thing you knew, the thing you remembered to be true, and you weren’t about to let me take it away so easily. You pointed again to Marta. Your finger covered her face. “Don’t you recognize me?” you said.

“Yes. The little boy is you. But the other woman”—I pointed at Anneliese—“she was your mother.”

In the photograph Anneliese was looking uneasily in the opposite direction. You flicked your eyes over her.

“That one?”

“Anneliese. Pavel’s wife.”

You tapped your fingernail on Marta. “What about her? The one touching my shoulder.”

“She wasn’t your mother.”

“Who was she?”

“Your nanny.”

“She wasn’t my mother?”

“No. She was mine.”

Anneliese Bauer disappeared entirely. It’s hard to make sense of this: someone exists and then doesn’t. Her diamond watch is all that’s left of her. I couldn’t believe it had survived all this time, something so valuable: the archivist who gave it to me said she’d found it after the Millings died. She knew by the inscription that it had not belonged to them, and figured the rest out via the letters in the safety deposit box. The watch had stopped, of course. I had it repaired. Time took up its post again, resumed the heavy lifting. Memory is a stone that is difficult to budge. Especially as it applies to family. To Pepik’s and mine.

We were half-siblings, you see. We shared a father. Pavel. In some ways we shared a mother too. Marta was—must have been—extremely close to Pepik. I was her only biological child, however. There’s part of her that only I can claim.

Pepik’s cancer had spread throughout his body by the time of our first meeting. I didn’t know it the day I visited him, but already nothing could be done. He was well enough at first though, and for the next few months I visited him regularly. I would take the bus across Montreal and we would walk on the mountain in the evenings. We imagined that the city spread out below us was Prague, the last city where our parents were alive. We wondered aloud about our father, Pavel Bauer. Did he ever stroll with Pepik’s mother, Anneliese, in the long hot summer of 1939? Did he stroll with Marta—with my mother? We were like gossipy teenagers, Pepik and I. We did everything together. Once I even went to church with him, although it pained me a little to rub up so closely against his loss of faith. I myself