Free Far To Go by Alison Pick Page A

She inhaled, holding the smoke in her lungs for a long moment. Then she exhaled. “The baby,” she said.
    Marta saw Anneliese’s hands were trembling, and realized she had really unnerved her. And for no reason at all. “Of course, Mrs. Bauer. I understand. I’m sorry.” But Anneliese still looked pale, and Marta knew she was now thinking of the lost baby girl, was slowly being sucked into the tide pool of grief. Now look what she’d done! Anneliese already had enough to worry about without being reminded of the greatest tragedy of her life. Marta had the sudden thought of repenting even further, to distract Anneliese by letting her in on another secret. “I know someone else who tried to kill herself,” she said. As soon as she’d spoken, though, Anneliese’s face fell, and Marta cursed herself for her bad judgement. Why didn’t she just stop talking already?
    “Who?” Anneliese asked, a weariness in her voice. She didn’t really want to know, Marta saw, but she had no choice now but to pursue the conversation. “Hella Anselm,” she said.
    Anneliese looked up sharply. “Ernst’s wife? When?”
    “A long time ago.”
    “She didn’t succeed?” Anneliese laughed at her own question. “Obviously not!”
    “I don’t think she wanted to.”
    “Most people don’t.”
    “She’s not the most stable person,” Marta said, cautious.
    “I won’t ask how you know that.”
    The silences lined up between them, a row of children with blank faces.
    “How did she—” Anneliese started, but she stopped herself mid-sentence. “No, don’t tell me.”
    Marta exhaled, relieved. They could finally drop it. “Here, Mrs. Bauer,” she said eagerly. “Let me help you unpack this.” She reached out to lift the sack of potatoes, but Anneliese blocked her path. “I’ll do it,” she said. “I need to be doing something.” She hoisted the burlap bag onto the shelf, clearly as relieved as Marta to have something else to focus on.
    “I apologize again,” Marta said under her breath. But Anne-liese didn’t hear her or else chose to ignore the comment. “I’m going crazy inside all day,” she said instead. “Like a little scared rabbit in its hole.”
    She looked up and saw Marta smiling. “What?”
    “Nothing. I understand what you mean.”
    Anneliese held her cigarette away from her face in her left hand and swabbed at her eyes with her right. “Do you?” she asked. She touched her eye again. “I simply can’t keep living like this. And I don’t know why Pavel can’t see it. It’s dangerous to stay, because you get used to it. You accommodate. You think, well, it isn’t so bad if the Herrings don’t want to associate with us. And it isn’t so bad if the Reichstag Company won’t sell to us. It isn’t so bad if—” Here she looked up at Marta. “But it is bad, isn’t it. We should leave, don’t you think?”
    Marta paused with her hand on a jar of preserves. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I suppose that I . . .”
    “Shouldn’t we leave?” Anneliese asked. “Doesn’t it make sense for us to get out ‘as fast as our little feet will carry us’?”
    This was a line from
Der Struwwelpeter
, a line Pepik especially liked to repeat. Marta smiled nervously but she could see Anneliese was frustrated, that she would have to produce an opinion or risk displeasing her benefactor for a second time. Did she think they should leave?
    It was a question that had so many other questions attached to it, one linked to the next like the butcher’s strings of sausages.
    Where would they go?
    What would happen to the house?
    What about Ernst?
    And at the end of this string, the final question, the one that for Marta gave all the others weight: if the Bauers left, what would happen to her?
    She opened her mouth to speak, and as she did there was a loud crash above their heads. It was followed by a moment of silence, and then a slow wail that gained in momentum until it filled the air around