Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,94

he grew too feeble to walk on the mountain, we would go to the parkette across from the depanneur, sit on the cold bench, and watch the pigeons pick potato-chip bags off the sidewalk. There was not joy, exactly, in finding each other—we were too old, too set in our ways—but our pain was dulled. What we felt was not quite pleasure, but contentment. We had each finished our searching.

The truth is I know almost nothing about what happened in the Bauer household in the fall of 1938 and the spring and summer of 1939. The events I have put down here seem as likely as any others—that’s all. It was my hope, in the last year of my half-brother’s life, to construct some kind of narrative, a story for him to hang on to. In the final months he reminded me so very much of a child, lost under the sheets of his sickbed. Like a small boy waiting for a bedtime story, as though he had been waiting all his long life for someone to come and tuck him in.

And so I did. I wrote during the days: the story of Pavel and Anneliese Bauer, the story of their child’s governess, Marta. Then, in the evenings, I went to Pepik’s house and relieved the home-care nurse I’d hired. I sat by Pepik’s bedside and read him the story, one chapter at a time, as I wrote it. I used the letters in my possession to cobble together a version of events, arranging disparate pieces into something that seemed whole. Pepik would comment when his gut told him something had been different, and I made notes in the margins and typed in the changes at my desk the following day. A few things we put down with a high degree of certainty. The rest we made up, taking scraps from our dreams, setting them on paper to make them make sense.

As I said before, though, this isn’t a story with a happy ending.

They’re all dead now.

Pavel, my father.

Marta, my mother.

Pepik’s mother, Anneliese.

Pepik himself died a year and four months after I met him. The cancer was everywhere; he was in so much pain that I couldn’t fault him for refusing treatment at the end. My only regret is that he died before I could finish writing the story. I wanted so much for him to have some sense of completion, some resolution—even imagined—to the tragedy that opened his life.

Instead I was left to write the final chapter as a tribute. I’ve put it down here in memoriam. For Pepik.

Chapter Eight

SUMMER SOLSTICE ARRIVED LIKE A slap across the face. The Jews were officially expelled from the economic life of Prague. The whole Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia would be Aryanized: this was the word the Nazis were using. The singing of “Má Vlast,” the patriotic song that had caused such an uproar at the National Theatre the previous winter, was banned in pubs and cafés. It was against the law to boo during German newsreels. Cutting German telephone lines was punishable by death. And Reichsprotektor von Neurath could now make laws on his own. No confirmation needed from the courts; his whims would become part of the Czech criminal code, just like that.

Karl Frank had given a speech: “Where once the swastika flies, there it will fly forever.”

By law—as Ernst had predicted to Marta—the Bauers were forced to register all their assets.

“I’m a respectable citizen,” Pavel said sadly as he sat in the dining room one evening. “A factory owner. Kind to my workers.” He held a paper clip in his hand, bending it into a straight line. “I even supported the land reform,” he said. “Which meant giving up land out of principle.”

His papers were spread over every piece of furniture. Marta was in the kitchen, chopping onions. She wondered how she was supposed to set the table for their meal when it was covered with carbon paper and pencil shavings. “What if I just don’t do it?” Pavel asked. “What if I don’t register my assets?”

Marta saw Anneliese look up from the Prager tagblatt.

“You’ll get us killed,” she said evenly. She was wearing a new navy blue dress, her dark curls pinned in two buns on either side of her head.

“But how will they know?” Marta heard Pavel ask. “The company, fine. But the other . . .” He cleared his throat. Marta wasn’t sure if he was referring to the Canadian railway bonds or to his mother’s