grace is mechanical, not moral, puppets never experience self-doubt, while humans have to think before they act, and then it’s too late, the appropriate moment for action has been lost. You know how it is. You lie awake at night worrying: Did I make the right decision? And at three in the morning, you know it was completely the wrong decision. Marionettes are never indecisive; they simply exist, while our humanity undermines us, in a sense.”
“I don’t think you can talk about marionettes and robots in the same breath as human beings,” Anna’s mother said. “We have a choice; they don’t. Listen to me—now I’m talking as if they were real.”
“Yes, but in a way they are real,” Franz said. “They are what we project on them, don’t you think?”
“May I interrupt to ask a simple, not at all intellectual question?” Aunt Vivian said. “Marta, tell me, have you decided on an outfit for your wedding day?”
“Yes, I think so. A blue tweed suit and a cape in the same fabric, because it’s cold in February.”
“Don’t you want a wedding dress?” Reina said. “With flowers and a veil? I would, if I were getting married.”
“Yes, but this will be more practical, I think,” Marta said. “Besides, the way things are these days . . .”
“Do you have a hat? I’ll make you one,” Aunt Vivian said. “Bring your wedding suit to my shop, so that I can match it with a nice fabric. Do you have pearls? Pearls look good with tweed. They set it off. I can lend you a pearl necklace and earrings.”
“Your turn next,” Ivan said to Franz.
“Oh, I don’t think so. I’m not old like you, my friend,” Franz said.
“Time goes quickly.”
“Franz gave his heart away when he was a child,” Anna’s mother said, smiling.
“Not this old story again,” Franz said.
“We were on the train from Berlin to Prague,” Anna’s mother said. “We had visited Julius’s parents in Heidelberg, and I had been at a conference at the Berlin University. Anyway, on the train a passenger was taken ill, and while I couldn’t have been the only medical doctor on board, I was the one who was asked to examine him. A young woman looked after Franz for me. Was her name Natasha, Franz? Do you remember?”
“Natalia, I think.”
“He talked about her for weeks,” Aunt Vivian said. “He would watch for her from the window.”
“She talked about boats and fishing and cats,” Franz said.
“Whoever she was, she’ll be old and ugly by now and the mother of ten children,” Reina said.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Anna’s mother said. “She’d be twenty-nine, or thirty at the most, which isn’t old.”
“It’s not young,” Reina said.
* * *
On Saint Valentine’s Day, Ivan Lazar and Marta Hempel were married. After the ceremony, the wedding guests walked behind the bride and groom across the Charles Bridge to the apartment where Marta lived with her father. Sora had set out plates of bread and real butter, obtained on the black market, and sausages and cheese.
Reina read a few lines of a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer: “For this was Valentine’s Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.” She said the poem had been written to commemorate the marriage of Anne, daughter of Charles IV, king of Bohemia, to Richard II of England. She held out her wineglass to be refilled.
“Are you drunk?” Franz said.
“On happiness only,” Reina said sourly.
Ivan’s mother had brought with her from Český Krumlov a china plate, which, at the appropriate moment, she smashed on the floor, and Marta had to kneel and pick up the pieces, to demonstrate her willingness to be an industrious and thrifty wife. Reina poured herself another glass of wine.
“You don’t want to go back to work drunk, do you?” Franz said.
“Maybe,” Reina said.
Everyone over the age of sixteen had to work sixty hours a week for the Nazi war effort. Franz worked at the armament factory on the other side of the Vltava, where, he said, the workers drew turtles on the walls in green ink, a reminder to go slow on the production line, as a way of sabotaging Germany’s war machine. Reina had continued working at the bookshop until last summer, when the Nazis had assigned her to a printing press operated by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. She said she’d drawn a turtle on the wall too. “I didn’t care if I was caught, but I did mind that everyone said my turtle looked like an