The Czech Exile

My dearest Hana,

I do not know if this letter will ever reach you. I have been writing to you for six years — letters I cannot send, addressed to an apartment that may no longer exist, to a woman who may no longer remember my face. And yet I write. I write because the moment I stop writing is the moment I stop believing that I will see you again. And if I stop believing that, then what is left?

We are at Dunkirk now. The Germans are surrounded inside the port, and we are dug into the sand dunes, watching, waiting, fighting the small ugly fights that grind men down. The ruins of the city stretch before us like a graveyard of stone. Every shattered window is the window of our flat on Vinohrady. Every broken street is the street where we walked, that cobbled lane behind the church where you stopped to look at the flowers in the window and I kissed you for the first time. I walk through the ruins of France and I see Prague. I cannot help it. The architecture is different, the language is different, the wine is different — but the shape of loss is the same.

I am forgetting the sound of your voice. This terrifies me more than any battle. I can see your face — I have your photograph, creased and faded, and I trace your features with my finger every night — but the sound of you saying my name has begun to blur in my memory. I remember that you pronounced it with a soft J, because that is how we say it in Czech, and that your voice went up at the end, as if you were always asking a question. But the actual sound — the timbre, the warmth, the way your laugh turned into a giggle when you were truly happy — it is slipping away from me. I am losing you syllable by syllable, and I cannot stop it.

Do you remember the chestnut trees in front of the National Museum? We would sit on the steps in the evenings and watch the lamps come on across Wenceslas Square. You would lean your head on my shoulder and tell me about your day, and I would pretend to listen, but really I was just feeling the weight of your head against my collarbone, feeling the simple miracle of being alive at the same moment as you. I would give anything — anything — to feel that weight again. Just once. Just for a moment.

What is Prague like now? I try to imagine it. I have heard fragments — the assassination of Heydrich, the reprisals, Lidice, the hunger. But I do not know if you are safe. I do not know if you are alive. I do not know if you have found someone else, someone who could hold you when you were cold, someone who could be there when the bombs fell. I pray that you have. I pray that you are not alone. And yet, in the small hours of the night, when the wind is cold off the Channel and the men are sleeping, I pray that you have waited for me. I am not proud of these prayers. They are selfish. But they are true.

If I die here, I die with my eyes turned east. Toward home. Toward you. I die with the taste of Prague still on my tongue — the beer, the dumplings, the sweet liqueur your mother made at Christmas. I die knowing that somewhere in the world, there is a woman named Hana Nováková, and she was my wife, and I loved her across rivers and mountains and years.

Tell Czechoslovakia that her sons remember her. Tell the streets of Prague that Jan Novák walked them, loved them, fought for them from a foreign land. Tell my mother that I died thinking of her kitchen. And tell Hana that her husband loved her — that he loved her from the moment she looked up at him on that cobbled street behind the church, that he loved her through the invasion and the occupation and the exile, that he loves her still, wherever he is, wherever she is, whatever has become of them both.

I am putting down my pen now. The dawn is coming. The bombardment will begin again soon. But for this moment, the world is quiet, and I am with you.

With all my love, across all the distance in the world, Jan

P.S. — If you ever see Prague again, stand on the steps of the National Museum for me. Look at the chestnut trees. Remember me there.