Chapter 24: Snow Falls in Prague

Snow fell on Prague again in the last week of March, thick and late, and the whole of Žižkov went quiet under it.

I was twenty-six weeks along and I could no longer see my own shoes.

Hana stood on the pension step in her housecoat and pushed a wool hat down over my ears.

"You walk slowly," she said.

"I always walk slowly."

"You walk like a woman with a plan. Slowly."

"The tram stop is four minutes away."

"For you, it is twelve."

She stepped back and looked up at the sign over her door.

It was the one I had painted in the first week, on a board from the cellar.

PENSION MAREK, in blue and gold, with the cat sitting under the letters.

There was a second line under it now, in smaller paint.

ROOMS, DUMPLINGS, AND NO FORMS.

Hana had asked for that line herself.

"Go," she said. "Jakub's tram comes at four. He will complain if you are not on it."

"He never complains."

"He is learning," said Hana.

I went down the steps with one hand on the rail.

Past the corner shop, a newspaper stood in a rack outside the door with a color photograph on the front page, and I did not stop to read the print.

I knew the faces.

One was a man in a navy coat with an unshaven jaw and a bracelet on his wrist, going into a courtroom in Chicago.

The other was a woman in a gray prison jacket, with her hair cut short and her chin down.

I had read the numbers a week before, in the lawyer's letter.

Brecken had taken the plea, and the judge had given him what he had asked for.

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