The Journey From Prague Street: A Novel

by Hanna Demetz

Overview

Hana Demet'z The House on Prague Street, published in 1980 was a classic novel of the Eastern European experience in the early days of Nazi aggression; Chaim Potok called it "a lovely, poignant jewel." Now, exactly ten years later, comes The Journey from Prague Street, a novel that brings the story to America, where Demetz's richly portrayed characters find both new challenges, and renewed courage.

The Journey from Prague Street follows the life of Helene, who flees wartime Czechoslovakia with her husband Paul to find freedom and a home in America. Yet, after years of comfortable domesticity, Helene's life is shattered when Paul decides to ask for a divorce. Helene must start anew one more time, and she does so with a survivor's courage and tenacity. It is a test of will and faith as strong, in its way, as anything she has ever known; finally, though, she closes a sort of magic circle, finding contentment with a man whose family came, generations ago, from the same world as her own. Their life together rings with echoes of a Bohemian past that seems ever more distant, but that will never fade away.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250117151
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/29/2016
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	247 KB

About the Author

Born in Czechoslovakia, Hana Demetz today lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Hana Demetz was born in Czechoslovakia in 1928 and was educated in Prague. She lived through the Holocaust and in 1949 became an editor for Radio Free Europe in Germany. The author of several successful novels published in Germany, Demetz is best known for The House on Prague Street, a classic novel of the Eastern European experience in the early days of Nazi aggression. Demetz now lives in Connecticut and is a Lector in Czech at Yale University.

Read an Excerpt

The Journey from Prague Street

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By Hana Demetz

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1990 Hana Demetz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-11715-1

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CHAPTER 1

Breaking and entering. She would never have thought herself capable of it. She had, days before, carefully and unobtrusively listened to her daughters' casual mention of Daddy going away for the weekend. Then she had silently, shamefaced, plotted to get hold of the apartment keys. She had smirked, to herself, about the fact that even though there would be "entering" involved, there at least would be no "breaking," since she had the keys safely in her purse.

She had left the house without saying where she was going or when she would be back, which was not her custom. She parked her car in the well-remembered street (her older daughter had been born on the same block, twenty-two years ago), where graduate students still lived in two-family houses, where the landlords were still mostly absentee, coming over once a month to collect the rent. She noticed the car in front; guessed that they had probably taken the train. The porch steps needed painting. The glass in the entrance door had a crack. The inside stairs, covered with faded and dusty plush, creaked under her steps. What will you say if the people downstairs are home, she asked herself, her heart pounding loudly, if they hear you, if they ask —

But the house seemed silent, empty.

The key needed turning twice. She stood for a moment, staring inside, listening, then entered. Carefully closed the door behind herself. She didn't know exactly why she was doing this, why she had come, what she wanted to see. She was fifty years old. They had been divorced almost two years now. She had heard stories of enraged wives ramming their former husbands' cars, of slaps exchanged in the street. She had felt fury herself, but not now.

She noted with interest that the living room was quite messy, with cushions on the floor. The bed in the bedroom unmade, dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. Paul's clothes hung neatly. Jennifer's were strewn on the floor; Jennifer was her older daughter's age. She resisted the impulse to pick them up. She checked out the bookshelf made of pine boards and bricks, student fashion, and pulled out a small volume. It was a collection of letters by Hilda Doolittle, the poet H.D., translated years ago by Paul and herself. She put it in her handbag. Then she spat on the dining room table.

She carefully turned the key twice again, carefully made her way down again over the faded and dusty plush. Outside, the bright sunshine surprised her. She had expected it to be dark already.

* * *

I have had too many lives. Sometimes my past overwhelms me. The many layers often merge and make me feel disoriented. There is no chronology. Events overlap, reference points disappear, people who belong to one life suddenly appear out of context, in another.

But recently, there is a change. Recently, there is this need, this urge, to put things in order, to leave nothing entangled, unexplored, unresolved. The need makes me straighten drawers, weed out closets, finish quilting the patchwork quilts unknown American women started a long time ago. The simple symmetry of a sampler, with my named added at the bottom and the year, calms me, pleases me. I have managed, silently mocking myself, to arrange my books in my shelves, in alphabetical order. And for months now I have diligently listed, in a small notebook I bought for this specific purpose, every book I read.

All this probably has something to do with the fact that I will be sixty this summer, a fact that amazes me, for I still get ecstatic driving fast, with the roof down. A Mozart sonata on the stereo, even Neil Diamond on the radio, still "send" me, as my daughters would say. I suspect that the neatened drawers, the finished quilts, the books arranged according to author, they all serve a purpose. They protect me, they make me feel that I can cope with chaos, with the many layers, with the memories of many places: Moravia, Prague, Cambridge, Lisbon. By making external order, I try to put an outline to the many lives of my past. There still is no chronology, but at least they are contained, they no longer threaten to spill one over the other. I can take them out, singly, and put them back again.

There is, of course, another reason for this need for external order. It has to do with my living with Bernard. Bernard is blind, and any thing that is not in its place, a book forgotten under a chair, the newspaper not in its usual spot, a half-emptied grocery bag left on the kitchen floor, will puzzle him, even make him stumble. I used to wait for angry outbursts in the beginning, holding my breath: I had, for thirty years, lived with Paul, who would lose his temper at the slightest irregularity, the smallest mishap. But Bernard, I found, is blessed with an almost angelic patience. And, at one very precise moment it was that patient good nature that convinced me to marry him: when his Seeing Eye dog, confused and made playful by my new presence, forgot to move out of the way and Bernard, losing his balance, crashed to the floor. There he sat, laughing, with the huge black Labrador, terribly upset, poking him with his paw. That was seven years ago.

At that time I was still living in Cambridge, still smarting from the divorce. My fall, if you want to call it that, had been swift and spectacular: one day I was the generally respected wife of a senior member of the department, a sought-after hostess, a pillar of society, and the next —

But no, it didn't happen that fast. It is only my memory compressing the contrast.

But a contrast there certainly was. I had to start looking for a job, because the teaching position I had held for twenty years, five hours a week, would not feed me, and I could not stand the thought of grudgingly offered handouts from Paul, who had dropped me with such haste. I took typing tests ("Oh dear, only thirty-eight words per minute," said the girl in personnel, "and two typos!") and found that the world had changed since I had last worked in an office. Also, I was much too old for the lowly jobs I could apply for. I was forty-eight. It took a small scene, which I staged in the personnel director's office ("Look, I have worked for this university for a quarter century, don't tell me now that I'm unemployable!" I shouted), to get me a job as secretary. The large white house in the suburbs, which Paul had so coveted and which I had never really liked, was sold. The ultimate irony of the situation only became clear to me many years later. Although the divorce had been Paul's idea, although it had been his wish to change his life, it was ultimately my life that, again, had been turned upside down, inside out.

* * *

An autumn sunday, noon. Gently, the sunlight filtered through the old elm. The leaves had not yet begun to turn. Behind the large white house, the apple tree sheltered promises of glowing red. They were having lunch in their kitchen: sardines on toast, with mayonnaise and lemon juice, and white wine left over from last night. How pleasant this is, Helene thought, this silence filled with sunlight, now that the girls have their own lives. There were so many years of Sunday-morning rush and chaos. This is iridescent, calm. The new school year is beginning. I will forget the bad summer. There have been bad moments before, many times, and I have been able to forget them. I will go on and be happy. I have many reasons to be.

Earlier that morning she had watched Paul shaving, and they had considered whether they could afford a trip at Christmas. "We could send the girls skiing," she had said, looking at him in the bathroom mirror, "and go to the theater every night." Paul was very handsome, even when his cheeks were white with lather he was very handsome, almost unchanged after thirty years, except for a few wrinkles around his eyes, with a flamboyant shock of dark hair. She still liked to watch him shave. She gently felt for the small bald spot on the back of his head, a leftover from his fall down the stairs a month ago. It was almost overgrown now.

Later, they were having lunch. A lawn mower next door suddenly began to rattle into the silence. "These Americans," she said and laughed. "They certainly don't observe Sunday, do they? Such an infernal racket at lunchtime!" She got up to close the kitchen door, sat down again and picked up a piece of toast.

Paul looked at her quickly between a bite of sardine salad and a sip of white wine. "We ought to be talking about existential things," he said.

Helene looked up, surprised. "Why?" she said, chewing. "Can't you get away at Christmas?"

"I intend to change my life," he said.

She looked at him. She had a piece of toast in her mouth, forgot to swallow. The kitchen clock above their heads made a deep humming sound. She swallowed. "What — how do you mean?" she said and shook her head.

"I'm not going to wait," he said, "until they carry me out of here feet first, one fine day."

She looked at him. She wanted to say something, but her voice did not seem to want to come out. "What are you going to do?" she finally whispered.

He took a sip of wine. Carefully he set down the glass. "Maybe we will have to consider divorce," he said.

The clock hummed. Their neighbor walked past the kitchen door with his lawn mower. For a minute the noise permeated everything.

"I see," she said. "I see. Divorce. Just like that." Suddenly, unexpectedly, she felt her cheeks turning red, felt her temples turning red, and her ears, and then the red creeping under the roots of her hair. Shame welled up, her heart was beating hard now, harder than the lawn mower next door, terrible shame at not having suggested it herself, years ago. Shame, terrible shame at being had. "All right," she said. "All right. Why not? If that's how you feel, why go on living here?"

She got up, replaced the chair carefully without hurting the basset hound lying under it, and walked over to the window. She registered that it was not Jack who was mowing the lawn but Mike, his son. He had tied a blue bandanna around his forehead to keep his long hair out of his face, and he waved to her. She raised her hand.

Paul, behind her, said, suddenly uncertain, "Maybe we should talk some more?"

She quickly turned away from the window. Her anger was now everywhere, hammering in her head, in her shaking fingertips, in her shaking knees. Anger, sown over many years and never harvested, anger at cringing for so long under his temper tantrums, now bursting forth with a force that she could not halt, that she herself could barely comprehend. She walked over to the table, collected the plates and the silverware, resting her fingers on them. She began rinsing the plates. "What is there to talk about?" she said over the warm faucet. "You seem to have made up your mind already. What am I supposed to say now?"

She had stacked the plates and the silverware, and wiped the kitchen counter. He hesitated in the middle of the kitchen. He said, "You could move to Europe."

She halted, the dishrag in her hand. She shook her head. "To Europe? What would I move to Europe for? We have two American children, don't we?"

He shrugged and left the kitchen. He went up the stairs; the couch in his study creaked. He had lain down for his nap, as he always did on Sunday afternoon.

The lawn mower rattled past the kitchen door once more. Then it moved away, was turned off. In the sudden reverberating quiet, sunlight shimmered on the elm leaves.

* * *

Bernard, then, is the top layer, the benevolent daily presence. We met because he was curious and persistent, traits that are not, I am told, typical for someone with his handicap. He had read (oh yes, he reads, with the help of ungainly machinery, which sits on top of his desk, enlarging and projecting words onto a screen), he had read a review of my book, and had ordered the book from his bookstore. And then he wrote (oh yes, he writes, with the help of the same beautiful invention), then he wrote me a fan letter. At that time I was getting a lot of fan letters.

My book, my English translation of my book that had been published ten years before in German, the story of the destruction of my family, had hit American bookstores at the right time. The labor of translating, which had been an act of pure self-preservation after the divorce, since it had kept me from gritting my teeth in helpless rage and from tearing my hair in deep sorrow, turned out to have been beneficial in every way. Suddenly I was, in a modest way and for an instant, a minor celebrity. There were reviews, full-page ads, columns in Newsweek, a discussion on public television, and phone interviews with Herbert Mitgang and George Will. There were many fan letters, and I dutifully answered each one of them: "Thank you for your kind words about my novel. It is for readers like you," etc.

But Bernard did not intend to let me stop there. He wrote back. And he wrote again. I was at first intrigued by this persistent blind man who wrote funny long letters, signing them, "Me and Dog." Then I turned peevish. I was, after all, still a celebrity and did not have time to answer letters, which kept arriving every week. But Bernard was not one to give up. "That's quite all right with me," he wrote. "I can write enough for the three of us." Which he did. Although his persistence annoyed me, his letters kept me laughing. Then he began sending flowers, whole basketfuls of them. Never before had I received so many flowers. I had to relent, thank him. Soon he announced that he had booked a flight to Cambridge, because he was determined to meet me. Could I be at the airport, since his dog didn't know his way around Massachusetts?

I was, at that point, impressed by his spirit. I bought a new dress and went to the airport. What I saw there, stepping from the flimsy commuter plane, was a tall man with beautiful hands and a face not unlike that of Leslie Howard. Love at first sight, at fifty-three? Yes, love and sympathy and affection at first sight.

* * *

The girl she once was, a lifetime ago, in Prague: pale and thin, her hair tied into a small knot at the nape, her long arms in a pale blue sweater of recycled wool. The New Look had prescribed the length of her skirt, thirty centimeters from the floor, no more and no less, and the last remaining linen sheet from her mother's once immense trousseau had been utilized. The heavy linen, dyed navy, could almost pass for lightweight English tweed. Two camel's-hair blankets, dyed navy, had been fashioned into a coat. Navy, she remembered, had been the color for young girls from a good family, before the war. The family was no more, she knew, but this way she could pretend. The family had been lost in many transports, had been gassed, had died of broken hearts, of crushed hopes, had been detained, were dead of exhaustion. Only the girl she once was had been left. She was alone.

She lived by herself in a small apartment in an apartment house at the edge of the city: a hallway, a bath, a living room and a tiny kitchen; they called it a studio. After the end of the war, when it finally became clear to her that nobody would come back, that her whole family was dead, the girl had exchanged the large apartment of her parents for the studio on the fourth floor. The young couple who had owned the studio had been very eager to get the large apartment. They were expecting a baby. So they had simply moved without the Housing Ministry's permission: they did not want to apply for months and tie themselves up in all the red tape, only to be told at the end that they could not move to begin with. The young couple had bribed the superintendent, and they exchanged apartments, hoping that the other tenants would keep quiet about it. They did.

The girl had filled the studio with all the furniture she had been attached to: the couch, covered in brown velour, the two armchairs with a lamp table, the bench to hold her gramophone and her collection of Mozart records, the armoire, the small table. She was proud of her invention, a long board on top of the radiator, where she arranged books and flowerpots and Gerd's photograph in a wooden heart frame. Nobody would have guessed that the long board was not really a shelf, that it was part of her parents' double bed.

The girl had not kept the Oriental rugs; they seemed too middleclass, too much a symbol of what had been destroyed. She had taken only a beige-and-brown wool rug with her to the fourth floor. The superintendent put the Orientals in the storage room. From time to time he would stop Helene in the front lobby to report that he was putting mothballs on the rugs, she would be grateful to him one day. She always thanked him dutifully. She had been brought up to be very polite, and she had learned that agreeing to things as they came to her would protect her from more sorrow.

The studio was very comfortable with the large window, which she did not have to cover, since there were no more blackouts. She had put a ruffle of flowered fabric, made from her mother's old robe, on top of the window. There were only meadows underneath, and then far away the houses on the hills of the Weinberg section. Paul, later, would call the view at night the "Manhattan skyline."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Journey from Prague Street by Hana Demetz. Copyright © 1990 Hana Demetz. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraphs,
Begin Reading,
About the Author,
Copyright,