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behind me as I walked through the rain gave me a feeling almost of shame. In this new world, I was a naked victim, my defenses confiscated. For a moment I almost resented Mother, who had freed the door behind which they were always waiting. And then I went back and sat on her bed.
    Of course, it was I who had freed that door, not Mother. During the days that followed, I viewed her with a kind of numbness. “Mom died today. Or yesterday maybe. I don’t know.” Such were the chilling words that open the English translation of Camus’s
L’Étranger
, which I had found in Dad’s trunk. And they express my state of mind during the days that followed, as I crawled with my burden of guilt, unable to examine it, and unable to put it down.
    I ate the scraps in the kitchen as a mouse would, without reference to time. Eventually, in the grey light of a December morning, I awoke to the ringing of the doorbell. I was lying on Mother’s bed. Images of hands were rummaging in my half-awoken mind: her hands in handcuffs, Rodin’s hands, the hands that held the plastic strap on the bus to Divoká Šárka, Dad’s hands, also in handcuffs, held before him like buffers as he was roughly pushed through the door. I looked at the alarm clock, which lay on its back in the middle of the room. It was 8:30, an hour and a half after the time I should report for work. Probably I had already missed a day. I went into the kitchen and looked down at the street: the rain had stopped now and the police car had gone. For a second, I believed that this was not happening to me; that the thing called “I” was elsewhere, and that the whole episode was a fiction in the mind of Comrade Underground.
    The doorbell rang again. Whoever it was had come for Mother and Mother was a non-person, whom it was a mistake to know.Better, therefore, to remain hidden. I went back to her bed and sat down as quietly as I could. Footsteps shuffled outside the door for a moment and then retreated to the stairs. But there they ceased; and in a moment they had changed direction, were approaching our door, and had stopped outside. The doorbell did not ring, but I felt the visitor standing there, breathing softly. I tiptoed across to the spyglass, in whose distorting eye I perceived the face of a young woman with brown hair and a long white neck bound in a rose-pink kerchief.
    I opened the door, and there she was, the girl from Divoká Šárka, looking at me from candid silver eyes, her wide pale forehead glinting in the light that entered the stairwell from our living room. Her lower lids were like mother-of-pearl, as though the eyes shone through them. Her cheeks were flushed and glowing with the December cold, so that the lips between them seemed unusually pale and soft. Her face had a childlike seriousness, and she wore no makeup, the brown hair shining like a crown above her brow. Her gloved hands clutched a canvas bag, and she was wearing a loose denim jacket and trousers, the unofficial uniform of the student class. She stood on straight legs, looking at me with a steady page-like poise, as though expecting a command.
    â€œI have something for Paní Reichlová,” she said. “My name is…”
    I stopped her short and pointed to the ceiling. She gave me a look, pinching in her nose so that tiny wrinkles lay like folds of white silk along its edges. She was so beautiful that I was afraid to speak. This was not a fiction; it was happening to
me
—and because I had lost myself to her I had also gained myself. For the first time in my life, I knew who I was: not Soudruh Androš, not even Jan Reichl, but the man facing
her
.
    â€œOne moment,” I said, and indicating that she stay on the threshold, I took a sheet of paper from the table by Mother’s bed. On it I wrote: “Meet you at the Chapel of the Holy Family, below the Nusle Steps, in fifteen minutes. Not safe to talk.”
    She took the