Gradually the Czech girl came to understand the city’s silent language, in which Severin was more fluent than she. She understood that, amid the city’s darkened walls, its towers and palaces, its strange decay, a suppressed unreality had become great within him, and that he always walked the streets with the feeling that today he would meet his destiny.

When spring and summer came, she stood with him by the ponds of the Baumgarten and fed the swans. She rode the ferry with him to Troja. They walked through the gates of the walled embankments and fortifications toward Pankraz, and sat together at the stone tables of a tavern in a garden where one-eyed Žižka had rested during the Bohemian wars. Not far off, the prison rose like a small city in the field, and the inmates worked on the lawn with spades. Beyond the one-story houses the street led into a nearby village and into the woods. The melody of the barrel organs blended with the sound from the poplars and the telegraph lines. Day-trippers came and the cabs threw up clouds of dust as they approached. Sometimes she and Severin also stopped at the street-tavern The Green Foxes. Years before, when Severin was still a child, they had had excellent beer and good food; many Germans used to come to the cabman’s bar. Now there was dancing here every Sunday and red and white flags fluttered over the door. A few steps further on there was the noise from a merry-go-round. Sometimes Zdenka and Severin sat on one of the golden swings and went for a ride. A man with high boots beat the drum and the children cheered. The band played the barcarole from The Tales of Hoffmann.

They were delightful hours for Zdenka. She hardly noticed when Severin became surly and reticent, and comforted herself with the next smile he gave her. But when autumn arrived and he became increasingly distant, she was more frightened than ever before. Sometimes she did not see him for days at a time. Silent, with sorrowful steps, she went home and sat in her little room. It was lively on the large square beneath her window, except for a few bellboys who were loitering on the corners. Zdenka waited until it had become completely dark. It was late in the evening when she lit her lamp.

With senseless and incomprehensible cruelty Severin had told her about Susanna. With cold eyes he searched her features for the tiny flame of jealousy while, in exhaustive detail, he described his adventure. It disappointed him that her love remained so resolute and unshaken and that no reproach stirred her lips. He thought of the girl in the theatre who had Zdenka’s mannerisms, and of the play in which she had appeared. How she had stood on the stage, thin and fragile, shaken by destiny! But none of this happened now. There was only a pain that flew over Zdenka’s face like a passing shadow, and he was not even sure he really saw it.

On Sundays they met less and less often. When they did, they usually went walking through the city’s parks, where the cold autumn flowers were already burning. The iron chairs in the municipal park stood in the damp sand, unused, and the kiosks that sold soda water were empty. Now and then they rode the funicular up the Hasenburg.