that the arrogant, noisy man had come to ask for Betty’s hand in marriage, even though he was the same age as her mother. They had looked all over the park for her so that she could meet her future husband. Where had she been?
“At Pepinka’s house. Mama, I saw that man. I don’t want him for a husband.”
“Nonsense, Betty! You have to want him, because I like him. He’s highly eligible.”
“I don’t want him and that’s that.”
“Betty, we’re packed like sardines here, eight people in a small flat. Don’t you understand?”
“I want to earn my own money. I’ll work as a maid or a cook.”
“Have I made such an effort to turn you into Fräulein Betty, just for that? No, little lady. You will marry Officer Josef Němec.”
“Mama, I would much rather be a laundrywoman like you!”
“You will be Josef Němec’s wife. End of story.”
“No Mama, please, no! Anything, but not that! Please, I beg of you, please!”
“Don’t beg, it won’t get you anywhere. I have thought everything out. And you know perfectly well that I never go back on my word. Now, go to bed.”
On the morning of September the twelfth, four carriages with uniformed coachmen belonging to Duchess von Sagan waited in front of Betty’s house. A swarm of curious bystanders surrounded all this aristocratic splendor as they tried to guess the color of the bride’s dress, how the maids of honor would be dressed, who would stand as the witnesses for the bride and who for the bridegroom. The witnesses were already climbing the staircase from the basement apartment and behind them walked the bridesmaids, Helena and Josefa, in pink dresses, with their escorts. Betty’s father, the elegant Josef Pankl, climbed the staircase and turned to see Betty, his Betty, whom he had tried to liberate from the bridegroom, but could not override his wife. Betty walked slowly, making an effort and lowering her veil to conceal her tear-stained face. She stoped at each step; at the top of the staircase she turned, as if wanting to go back home. Her mother grabbed her by the arm and lead her to one of the carriages.
The bystanders gossiped about it all; some said the bride, in her sky-blue dress and white veil, looked like an angel, while others repeated that blue was not a suitable color for a bride. One woman, who noticed the aversion to the bridegroom stamped on the bride’s face, concluded the debate with an old superstition: “A blue dress will never bring happiness to a marriage.”
These words were passed on in a trice. Everybody was now convinced of this truth, which sounded like nothing so much as a curse.
The carriage Betty was sitting in moved forward on the path lined with plane trees; she knew it like the back of her hand. She felt weary, having spent almost the entire night and the early morning crying. She would never have believed herself capable of crying for such a long time. She looked out at the scenery; now, in such changed circumstances, deep in a kind of desperation previously unknown to her, the familiar spots seemed strange to her. Some trees have begun to go yellow, which made her think of the crown of green branches that, according to custom, she had crafted with the help of her friend Josefa. As she made it, she said farewell to those ideals that she had been weaving together for seventeen years. Once the crown was ready, she threw it into the waters of the Úpa, together with her hopes. Now at this moment, she had just one tiny hope left: that some kind of miracle would take place that could separate her from the future, from that terrible time to be, lived by the side of the man to whom she had been allocated, from the future that she saw as an endless grey and windy November day.
They were now approaching the church. When walking from school to home she always used to think that this cheerful church looked splendid, with its steeple that had a huge onion on its top. Betty loved to look at the clock hung under the belfry, how its golden hands shone even on overcast days, and she liked to imagine that the saint in front of the church was making that gesture with his arm to say, “Goodbye for now, girl, see you tomorrow!” Now it was just the opposite: everything struck her as alien and hostile. The church was