it had the opposite effect on Pavel. He seemed younger here, Marta thought, or smaller. He seemed defeated.
A night-letter arrived and Pavel left early the next morning to meet Max’s foreman, Hans, at the factory. Anneliese took Pepik and Marta out to see the city. Winter was just setting in, a dusting of snow over everything like confectioner’s sugar. Marta’s breath made puffy clouds in front of her face. She wiggled her toes to warm them in her stiff lace-up boots, and rubbed Pepik’s fingers in his mittens. They walked down Vinohradská, past Italská, Balbínova, and Španělská streets, past the Živnostenská banka and the Myslbek art gallery on Na Přikopě, which was showing an exhibition of Nazi paintings. They strolled the periphery of the broad tree-lined avenue, Marta looking around, trying to take it all in. She had never seen so many people in one place. Women in Chanel coats with silk scarves tied at their throats, groups of teenagers clustered together like grapes, old men riding bicycles. There was an Orthodox shop on a corner: through the boarded-up window she saw a calendar with a picture of a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn. The blue and white Zionist collection boxes abandoned.
Anneliese pointed out the bakery, still the same as when she was a girl. They passed the butcher shop and saw carcasses, pink and bloody, hanging on hooks in the front window. They looked, Marta thought, strangely human. At the Wagons-Litz Travel Agency there was a line snaking all the way out the front door, people trying desperately to leave the country. Red trolleys criss-crossed the square like fate lines on the palm of a hand.
Marta had had a picture in her mind of Prague, a picture she hadn’t even known was there and which she now realized was basically an enlarged version of their old town: two of each kind of shop instead of one. But Prague was something else altogether. “I feel like I’m in a completely different country,” she said.
Anneliese shrugged and smiled. “Welcome back to Czechoslovakia,” she said. A sign caught her eye over Marta’s right shoulder. “Look at what’s showing! Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s that American fellow, Walt something-or-other.”
Marta looked down at Pepik, his cheeks pink like apples. “Well?” She clasped her hands in front of her chest, beaming. And before she knew it she was about to see her first moving picture.
The cinema was dark, with seats ascending on an angle. It smelled stuffy, like dust and stale peppermints. They were plunged into blackness and Marta reached for Pepik’s hand. There was silence, someone sneezing, someone unzipping a coat. For a moment they heard the tick-tick-tick of the projector and then all at once the screen lit up. A girl with creamy skin, jet-black hair, huge eyes. A princess, Marta thought. It was like entering another dimension, the vastness of the girl’s face, the brightness. Marta didn’t know where to look. The scene changed to a forest, and everything in front of her had life in it: the trees, the stones, the animals. Her whole field of vision teemed with colour. She wanted to glance over at Pepik to see how he was taking it but found herself unable to peel her eyes from the screen.
After the film there was a newsreel that showed Hitler spouting off about the expansion of his Lebensraum, but even this couldn’t dampen Marta’s spirits. When she exited the cinema it was as if no time had passed, and at the same time as if a new era had begun. She could hardly speak. It had been, she realized, so long since she’d felt pleasure. Anneliese looked at Marta and Pepik and clapped her hands. “I told you you’d like the city,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
She too had a big smile plastered across her face, her tension with Pavel momentarily forgotten.
Pepik was hopping from foot to foot. “Dopey!” he shouted. “Sneezy!” And he began to make sneezing noises in the direction of his mother.
On the way back to the Vinohrady they passed the Havlíčkovy sady. Two German Jewish peddlers were sitting on a park bench selling pencils. It was a reminder of the hard times they were living in—but Marta didn’t want to be reminded. For now, even momentarily, the hard times seemed abstract. They had been shucked off like a pair of dirty trousers and dropped in a heap in the corner. The people, the automobiles, the vibrant pulse of the city: