World War I

World War I enters the novel through a contrast between historical hindsight and remembered physical trauma. In Aomamé’s reflections on 1926, the war marks the end of an older European order and precedes catastrophes that people at the time could not foresee. In the Dowager’s childhood recollection of Paris, its aftermath is not an abstract historical transition but a city filled with wounded soldiers, mourning, and coffins.

Historical hindsight

Listening to Janáček’s Sinfonietta in a taxi caught in traffic, Aomamé imagines the year 1926, when the piece was composed. Its principal theme had first been intended for a fanfare at a sporting event. Her historical reverie places it in a newly independent Czechoslovakia, freed after World War I from long Habsburg rule. People drank Pilsner beer in cafés, made efficient and finely crafted machine guns, and enjoyed a brief interval of peace in Central Europe.

That calm acquires its meaning from what followed. Franz Kafka had died two years earlier, still little known; Hitler would soon destroy the small country. Aomamé’s reflection emphasizes the gap between historical knowledge and lived time: no one then knew what was coming. The war thus appears as a break in the European order, but not as a moment whose later consequences were already visible to those living through it.

Paris remembered by a child

The Dowager recalls that, when she was ten, her diplomat father took her to Paris, where they lived for about a year in an old apartment near the Luxembourg Garden. World War I was nearing its end, and the stations were crowded with wounded soldiers. Some looked scarcely older than children, while others were elderly.

The city’s beauty survives in her account, but her memory of that year is dominated by bloodied impressions. Men returned from the trench front missing arms, legs, or eyes and wandered the streets like abandoned specters. She remembers the whiteness of their bandages and the black mourning crepe women wore on their arms. Horse-drawn vehicles carried heaps of new coffins to the cemeteries; people turned away and fell silent as they passed.

Memory, touch, and historical time

The recollection unfolds between the Dowager and a girl at the table. After hearing the story, the girl pauses, then places her hand over the Dowager’s. The older woman squeezes it. The gesture links the child who once encountered the coffins in Paris with the girl listening now, without collapsing their different experiences into one.

The Dowager remembers her own parents holding her hand with the same force and reassuring her that she was safe. Their words could not make the wounded men or the coffins disappear; the memory that remains is of a child’s exposure to consequences too large for reassurance to resolve. Set beside Aomamé’s reflection on what people in 1926 could not know, this recollection gives historical time two scales: the later understanding of events and the intimate images—bandages, mourning crepe, silent streets—through which catastrophe persists in personal memory.