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28—the feast day of Saint Wenceslas, patron saint of the Czechs—had passed with none of the usual fanfare. Like the flare of a match, she thought: a brief light, the fall back to darkness.
    Marta pulled the covers up under Pepik’s chin, kissed him, and left him to sleep. She went downstairs to grind the Bauers’ coffee beans; it was Sophie’s job, but Marta didn’t mind doing it. When she came into the parlour, though, the radio was on, and Pavel was standing with his back to her, facing the big window. He was wearing only his thin white cotton nightshirt, through which she could see the muscled contours of his behind.
    She couldn’t think what he was doing up so early, and she began to back slowly up the stairs. He heard her move, though, and turned towards her.
    He said her name, just once. “Marta.”
    On his face was a look that Marta had never seen before. The word that popped into her mind was
stricken
.
    “Mr. Bauer? I was just going to—” But Pavel cleared his throat loudly. He seemed not to notice that she was barely decent herself, wearing only her thin robe and slippers, her curls still messy with sleep.
    “He’s betrayed us,” Pavel said.
    Marta pulled her robe tight around her. “Who has?”
    She had a sudden sinking feeling that Pavel had found out about Ernst—what had she been thinking, taking his factory keys right out from under his nose?—but Pavel said instead, “Good old
J’aime Berlin
.”
    “Pardon me?”
    “
J’aime Berlin
,” he repeated. He waited, but Marta didn’t understand the French pun. “
Cham-berlain
,” he said finally. “Chamberlain. Britain. And France.”
    She blinked. “I was just going to make your coffee,” she said.
    “We had a pact. And now they have gone to meet with Hitler and have given us up to Germany. The entire Sudetenland. As if we were theirs to give up!” Pavel took a slow, deep breath. “They didn’t even ask us to the table,” he said. “They peeled us off Czechoslovakia like so much nothing.”
    Marta pictured the thick peel of a Christmas orange.
    The Bauers celebrated Christmas along with almost everyone else, as a kind of folk holiday, the chance to gather with family. She would have to remind Ernst of this.
    Pavel was looking at her directly for the first time since she’d come into the room, and she saw now that this was serious—he had tears in his eyes. “Hitler convinced them. Daladier, Mussolini. Chamberlain is saying it will be ‘peace in our time.’”
    He touched his face, as though to make sure he was still there.
    Marta cast around, wondering what she should say. Perhaps Ernst could help? But that was a silly idea, considering his recent comments; she snorted. Pavel looked up sharply. “What?”
    “Nothing,” Marta said. “I just can’t believe this has happened.”
    And it was true, she couldn’t. There had been so much talk of Austria and the
Anschluss
; months and months of Hitler on the radio, singing the praises of his Nuremberg Laws. The thought that the Sudetenland would belong to him, that he would now come here, seemed impossible. Life happened in the big cities, in Frankfurt and Milan, in Prague, where the Bauers attended symphonies and business meetings. Nothing would ever happen here in their small town. Not now, not ever.
    The radio was babbling on like a kettle on low boil. Pavel nodded in its direction. “It’s an actor from the National Theatre reading a script. President Beneš didn’t have the guts to tell us the news himself. Nobody from the government did.”
    He was standing a foot away from her in his nightclothes. But Marta realized she could forget about what she was wearing, about what he was wearing; he was not going to notice.
    “Cowards,” he said, and she could not tell if he was referring to their own Czech government or to the British and French who had betrayed them.
    The room was slowly gathering light as a small child gathers cornflowers in a field. It would be another