Dita points to the book and then at herself. He understands that she wants to borrow it. He gives her a smile and gets up. From the back pocket of his pants, he removes two more novels with similar features: small, flexible, with yellowish paper and brilliantly colored front covers. One is a Western and the other a crime novel. He gives them to Dita, and she walks off with them. And then something suddenly clicks in his mind, and he calls out to her,
“Hey, sweetie! They’re in English!” And then he translates what he’s said into clumsy German: “M?dchen! Sind auf Englisch!”
Dita turns around and without stopping, gives him a smile. She doesn’t care. While her mother sleeps, she sits down on an empty bed and inhales the smell of paper, fans the pages quickly with her thumb, and smiles at the way it sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. She opens a page, and the paper rustles. She runs her hand up and down the spine again and notices the blobs of glue on the covers. She likes the names of the authors—English names that sound exotic to her. As she holds the books in her hands, her life begins to fall into place again. Doing this helps her slowly put the pieces of the puzzle back where they belong.
But there is one piece that doesn’t fit: Her mother isn’t improving. The days pass by, and Liesl keeps getting worse. The fever is taking its toll, and her body is becoming more and more transparent. The doctor in attendance doesn’t speak German, but he gesticulates in such a way that Dita knows perfectly how things are going—not very well.
One night, Liesl deteriorates: Her breathing is intermittent, and she flails around in the bed. Dita decides to give it one last go, to play her final hand. She goes outside and walks until she’s well away from the blinking lights powered by the hospital generators. She is looking for darkness and discovers it in an area of level ground a few hundred meters from the hospital. When she finds herself totally alone, she lifts her face to the cloudy night sky in which there is no moon and there are no stars. She falls on her knees and asks God to save her mother. After everything that’s happened, he can’t let her die without even being able to return to Prague. He can’t do this to her. He owes it to her. This woman has never hurt anyone, never offended or annoyed anyone, never stolen even a crumb of bread. Why punish her like this? Dita reproaches God, she begs him, she humbly implores him not to let her mother die. She makes all sorts of promises in exchange: becoming the most devoted of the devout, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, dedicating her entire life to praising God’s infinite glory and generosity.
As she’s returning, she sees a tall, thin figure standing in the illuminated doorway of the hospital, looking out into the night. It’s Francis. He’s waiting for her. Looking very serious, he takes a step toward her and puts an affectionate hand on her shoulder. A heavy hand. He looks at Dita and shakes his head slowly to tell her that no, it wasn’t possible.
Dita runs to her mother’s bed, and the doctor is there closing his bag. Her mother has gone. All that remains is her tiny human form, the body of a little bird. Nothing else.
Broken, Dita sits down on a bed. The freckle-faced nurse comes over.
“Are you okay?” And he raises his thumb so she understands that he’s asking if she’s all right.
How can she be all right? Destiny, or God, or the devil, or whatever it might be, hasn’t relieved her mother of a single minute of suffering during six years of war, and at the same time, hasn’t allowed her to enjoy even one day of peace. The nurse continues to look at her as if he is waiting for an answer.
“Scheisse,” she replies.
The nurse makes that funny face the English make when there’s something they don’t understand—he stretches his neck and raises his eyebrows as high as they’ll go.
“Shit … Scheisse,” says Dita, who has learned the English word over the past few days.
And then the nurse agrees.
“Shit,” he repeats, and sits down beside her in silence.
Dita is left with the consolation that her mother took her last breath as a free woman—though it seems very small for such a lot of pain. But she turns to the nurse, who is watching her with some concern, and gives him the thumbs-up to tell him she’s fine. The young health worker feels somewhat relieved and gets up to give some water to a patient in another bed who’s asking for it.
Why did I tell him I’m fine if I’m feeling dreadful, if I couldn’t be worse? Dita asks herself. And she knows the answer before she finishes the question: Because he’s my friend, and I don’t want him to be worried.
I’m starting to behave like my mother.…
It’s as if she’s taken over that role.
Next day, the doctor tells her that they’re going to speed up her paperwork so she can go home right away. He hopes this will cheer her up, but Dita listens to him as if she were sleepwalking.
Go home? she asks herself. To where?
She has no parents, no home, no ID. Is there any place to go back to?
32.
The window of the Hedva department store in Na P?íkopé reflects a stranger: a young woman wearing a long blue dress and a modest gray felt hat with a ribbon. Dita examines her carefully but still doesn’t recognize her. She can’t accept that she is the stranger, her reflection in the glass.
The day the Germans entered Prague, she was a nine-year-old girl walking along the street holding her mother’s hand; now she’s a woman of sixteen on her own. She still shakes when she remembers the shudder of the tanks crossing the city. It’s all over, but in her head, nothing has finished. It will never end.
After the jubilation of victory and the celebrations marking the end of the war, after the dances organized by the Allied forces and the pompous speeches, postwar reality shows itself for what it is: mute, harsh, and without fanfare. The bands have gone, the parades are over, and the grand speeches have been reduced to silence. The reality behind peace is that in front of her is a country in ruins. She has no parents or siblings, no home, no studies, no belongings apart from the clothes they gave her in the Civilian Assistance Society, and no way to survive beyond the little ration card she was able to get after a great deal of cumbersome paperwork. On this, her first night in Prague, she’ll sleep in a hostel set up for the repatriated.