A kind, blundering Czech engineer is pressured by the Nazi government to hand over his invention, which could be key to their military operations. He flees to Paris, hoping to sell his invention to the French government instead; yet when the Germans invade France, he is forced into hiding, and spends months in a dark, damp cellar. Alone, he dwells on his memories - of his troubled marriage, and his decision to leave his wife behind in Czechoslovakia. When he is given the unexpected chance to redeem himself, both to his wife and history, he seizes it with utter determination - even though this heroic act will be his last.
A powerful and moving novel about one man's final, fatal, heroic act of resistance in Nazi France.
Release date:
July 25, 2017
Publisher:
Pushkin Collection
Print pages:
128
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Dearest Hanichka: At last I can hope that some day you will learn the true facts of my strange story. The good people about whom I want to tell you promise me that they can take my notes somewhere to safety, somewhere beyond the ocean, perhaps, and give them to you after the war is over. You are still alive; I don’t doubt that for an instant, and you will be alive long after this awful storm of horror, madness and hunger has blown over. I am absolutely certain of it. I see you all the time; we’re together whenever I fall asleep; I know every new line that creases your face; I know that your hair is white and that you are bent now. Dear God, I know so many details about you—just as if we were together and saw each other day in and day out. You have been waiting, and not in vain, dear Hanichka! Some day you will read what I am writing now. Otherwise nothing would have any meaning, nothing at all—our life, our marriage, our worries and our mistakes. But I don’t believe that, and it is not so. Everything has its meaning, every event, every chance, every catastrophe, every slightest thing that happens. You must live to get this, because you and I have to understand each other. And it is only now that I am ready to understand you. I have come to know so much, so much has become clear, I have found so many words and thoughts that I never even knew of before. I don’t know if they will tell it to you after the war, or if they will write it to you. It may even be that you will learn of it only from these notes—from this paragraph. I, Hanichka, shall not live to know. It seems so silly to write that I want to die, or that I must die. I don’t really know how to tell you in just a few words that we can never meet again and live together and make up for all the things we did to hurt each other, and be happy together in the lives of our children. It would be ridiculous if I tried to make my death appear heroic. It isn’t altogether voluntary and perhaps it isn’t inevitable, but it is natural. Please keep on reading; don’t let yourself go. It truly means nothing at all that I shall no longer be living at the moment you read these lines. It’s so long since you’ve seen me; you’ve probably buried me and wept for me many times over in your imagination. Truly it is nothing, my darling! I am closer to you, and I shall be closer, than I was when I lived beside you. There, now I have written it. You know it and I feel much better. Look, until a short while ago, I had one fixed image. I saw my return and our meeting. I dreamed that we met again in Rokytnice, in the home of your parents. The door there still opens with difficulty and creaks; along the walls of the entry, casks and boxes are still piled, and it’s always cold twilight there. Of course you aren’t expecting me. I come back quite unannounced; you call from the kitchen: “Is that you, Father?” I don’t answer, because I can’t. You ask again and then you come out across the threshold; you come farther, you walk down several steps—and then you see me and recognize me. I see it all so plainly! You want to lift your arms, but you can’t; you want to cry out, but you only whisper. It is not my name that you whisper. For a while I am frozen to the spot. We are both deathly pale, and we feel as if we were dying. The air between us is not of this earth. You start to collapse, and that gives me strength. I am beside you in a bound and catch you in my arms. You don’t cry and you don’t smile. You only whisper that word, which is not my name. A hundred times, a thousand times, I have imagined, dreamed and lived our meeting. I could picture everything: the twilight of the passage, the smell of it, the sound of your steps on the stairs, myself and you. There is only one thing that I can not imagine: the pain that would close around our hearts and throats while our hands sought each other and met. Everything but that dizzy feeling of happiness, or unhappiness, or some deep feeling without a name. Would it be happiness, or would it be unhappiness? I don’t really know. I don’t know what my first words would be; I don’t know what I would ask about, whom I would look for; I don’t know where I would sit, what I would do with my hands and my memory and my will. And still I never longed for anything more than I have longed for our meeting and for that unimaginable something that would come after it. When I thought of my return, about that unredeemed miracle, I felt that I would be capable of doing anything to make it come true—capable of every sacrifice and every crime. Not from longing and not from exhaustion, but from a kind of burning curiosity, more burning than any longing or desire I ever knew. But today I know, Hanichka, that I was dreaming of the impossible—as I have done so many times before. I should bring you no happiness from far away. I should come back to you, old before my time (I’ll soon be fifty) a man whose story would seem like senseless gibberish to you. I should be a hindrance to you and our children. (Ah, I know nothing at all about them! Marta is twenty and Johanna eighteen, I believe? I think of them shamefully little, and I don’t see them even in my dreams. I lost them and they lost me.) Well, I should be returning to a life where something had been lacking while I lived it. I should be returning to it out of a bad fairy tale, without the golden key and the elixir of life. There would be an emptiness between us and I shouldn’t know how to fill it. All the love I am able to wring out of my desolate heart, all the feeling and devotion I may be putting into these lines, is released in me only because I know that I shall soon die. It is the knowledge that I have found the right ending for my ordinary life, and that happiness lies in renunciation, and peace where there is no fear of death. I wish I could say it in some other way; I wish that I could let you look into my thoughts which are so much clearer, so much less brittle than the sentences I have just written! But I believe that with all my clumsiness I shall still find words now and then that I should not have found before, and words that will find their way to your understanding. The most important thing of all is that you should know at the very beginning that I did not run away from you. I did not say good-bye to you and the children because I thought I should be coming back in a few days, but I was kept from doing that by events. Later on, as I write, I want to explain all that to you too, if I have time to do it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish this little notebook, and so I’m going to put down the most important things first and then come back to the details later.
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