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black eagle with a wreath in its talons, a stylized swastika at its centre.
    On the walk back home Pepik was quiet. He didn’t want to be lifted onto the stone ledge at the edge of the square to balance with his arms out as he usually did. He declined Marta’s offer of a piggyback. When they entered the house, Anneliese was standing by the big window, wearing ruby high heels and a skirt cut on the bias, smoking a cigarette. Pepik dropped his satchel on the leather ottoman and ran into the dining room to lose himself in his empire.
    His mother inhaled from her cigarette and pitched her voice in his direction. “Pepik,” she said. “Come back and take off your shoes.” She touched her bottom lip with her forefinger.
    “It’s a lovely day,” said Marta, trying to keep her voice cheerful. She could see that Anneliese was in a mood, and wanted to shield Pepik after what had just happened at the station. But Anneliese would not be distracted.
    “Pepik. Tomáš. Bauer,” she said (the
Tomáš
, Marta remembered, was in honour of former president Masaryk. Many little boys had the name). “Come back here this moment and do as I say.”
    Pepik hesitated, weighing his options.
    “Pepik,” Marta said softly. “Listen to Mamenka.”
    The boy turned towards them, and Marta thought he was going to obey, but instead he ran towards her, burying his face in her skirt.
    Anneliese’s jaw clenched. She took another sharp drag on her cigarette. “Why isn’t he at school?” she asked, smoke coming out of her nostrils.
    “My cheek hurts,” Pepik mumbled into Marta’s leg.
    But Marta kept her eyes on Anneliese. “The school has been occupied by the young Czech reserves, Mrs. Bauer.” She tried to relay this information as though for the first time, although she had already told Anneliese, the previous evening as they fiddled with the radio dial waiting for the BBC broadcast to come on. The opening notes of the program’s theme, Beethoven’s Fifth “Fate” Symphony, always brought the whole house to silence and turned their ears to the radio. Pavel was the only one who understood English, though. It fell to him to translate.
    “So where have you been?”
    “We went down to the station to watch the trains.”
    Anneliese held her cigarette over her shoulder between two polished red fingernails. “Let’s have him doing something school-related, shall we? Not taking him somewhere that’s overrun with hooligans and indulging his every whim?”
    And then, in a ploy to win back her son’s affection, she softened her voice. “Did you see the trains,
miláčku
?”
    Marta knelt down in front of her young charge. She wrenched open the small hands. His chubby cheeks were flushed and the skin around the small wound was puffy and pink. She pulled him close and whispered in his ear, “Go and give Mamenka a big kiss.”
    It was a gamble. If Pepik didn’t obey she would appear willful, telling him secrets in front of Anneliese. Pepik was frozen, his doe eyes moving back and forth between the two women.
    “Go on,” Marta said. She raised her eyebrows to show she meant it.
    Pepik pulled from her grip and ran across the room to his mother, where he assumed the same position, burying his face between her legs. Anneliese crushed out her cigarette and ran her slender fingers through the boy’s curls. “There,” she said to Marta. “Poor thing, he just wanted his mother.”
    The comment took Marta by surprise, and she flushed with indignation. Two words flashed through her mind:
dirty Jew
. She flushed more, surprised at herself for thinking them, but she let the words hover behind her eyes, testing out their weight. She had just been the one to encourage the child to go to his mother; where did Anneliese get the nerve to make such a jab?
    But Marta took a deep breath, steeling herself. She reminded herself that she was the one who had really raised Pepik. She knew how much chocolate to sprinkle on his kashi and how long to warm his