Free Far To Go by Alison Pick Page B

them like a siren.
    The two women looked at each other.
    Pepik.
    “I’ll go,” said Anneliese, but she didn’t move. Marta took her cue. “No, I’ll go,” she said, grateful to finally be of some use. “Mrs. Bauer, leave it to me.”
    Marta went upstairs and soothed Pepik and taped a piece of gauze over the almost invisible cut he had incurred; he’d overturned the lamp on his mother’s bedside table reaching for her peppermints. For such a small injury he was making a big fuss. He seemed, she thought, to be weeping for the crumbling order of the world around him. Marta held him and patted his back until the crying subsided, and then gave him a half-hearted talking-to about not going into his parents’ bedroom in their absence. She got him into his pajamas, settled him in his green bed with the painted yellow feet, and placed
Der Struwwelpeter
in front of him. It was like setting a needle down on a gramophone. Anyone who didn’t know better would think Pepik was actually reading.
    Marta moved around the room, tidying up. She gathered the lead soldiers together and put them in the playroom across the hall, the room that had been meant for the baby girl. It had been painted a beautiful buttercup yellow in the fifth month of Anneliese’s pregnancy, and curtains made with lace from the Weil factory in Nachod had been purchased. Marta remembered the earnestness with which Pavel and Anneliese had debated where to place the change table. Next to the door? Or beneath the window, so the little angel could look up at the clear blue sky from whence she’d come?
    The baby died at three weeks of age. The doctors couldn’t say what had happened; Anneliese had gone in to see if she needed a new diaper and discovered her face down in her crib. That was all. There was no need to repaint the room, but the frilly drapes were removed. Pavel must have done it himself in the middle of the night. They were there one evening and the next morning they were gone. So was the change table and the linen diapers with their safety pins and the butterfly mobile made of hand-carved ivory from Pavel’s safari in Kenya. Anneliese herself did not reappear for days. Dasha, the cook at the time, would leave a breakfast tray with an egg cup and toast outside the bedroom door and retrieve it when it reappeared several hours later, untouched. Pavel dealt with the death as if it were just another business deal gone bad. “We’ve lost Eliza,” was all he said to Marta, and Marta had nodded to show she understood.
    Marta’s memories of the baby were vivid. The knot of the umbilical cord turning black against her tiny belly. The cry that sounded so much like a kitten. And, just after her birth, a family photograph in which Marta had been included: the thrill of posing for the camera standing behind Pepik, and Pavel with the bundle in his arms. Pepik, though, had been too young to remember. As far as Marta could tell, he had no idea he’d once had a sister.
    There hadn’t even been a funeral, no sitting shiva. Marta hadn’t even seen the body.
    When Pepik was done reciting his story, she helped him wash his face and brush his teeth. “Measure me!” he said, and pressed his back against the tape on the inside of his closet door. “Am I bigger?”
    He was obsessed, after just one day back at school, with being a great big grown-up boy. Marta knew he thought that if he grew tall enough he could once again sit with his friend Villem, up near the front, instead of in the back corner next to Fiertig Goldberg.
    Marta couldn’t bear to tell him otherwise.
    “You’re bigger,” she said.
    “How much?”
    He was drawing himself up to his full height, chin tucked in, cheeks puffed out.
    “A little more than a centimeter.”
    She made a mark with the lead pencil and showed him. “Time for bed,
miláčku
.” She patted his bottom.
    He pouted for a moment. “My cut hurts,” he said, pointing to the gauze on his elbow.
    Marta raised her eyebrows to