Radek

Radek is a Czech violinist living in Winnipeg whose brief but significant relationship with Yolandi Von Riesen unfolds alongside her efforts to understand and protect her sister, Elfrieda Von Riesen. He offers Yolandi food, shelter, and sexual tenderness, but his most consequential contribution is also an act of listening: he has heard Elfrieda play, and describes a suffering that the music can carry even when the people in the room have no words for it.

Identity and Introduction

Radek is a European musician whom Yolandi meets while walking with her friend Julie on Julie’s mail-delivery route during a visit to Winnipeg. Julie has described him as handsome, lonely, and desperate; Yolandi admits that this was the reason she accompanied Julie. Radek has come to Winnipeg to write a libretto, joining a city that Yolandi depicts as a dark confluence of muddy waters and tragic stories. The city and its river landscape become part of the atmosphere of their conversations, though Radek himself is introduced through the more immediate combination of music, loneliness, and attraction.

He rents a small attic apartment on Academy Road. There, as Yolandi tells him about Elfrieda’s despair and numbness, she also wanders through thoughts about futility, rage, and oddly named lunar seas and Canadian waterways. Radek listens patiently, nods, pours wine, and makes food. Their conversation is not presented as a clean exchange of ideas: Yolandi wonders what he understands when he listens to her ramble in a language he does not really understand. That uncertainty makes his attention meaningful without turning it into a claim that he can solve or fully comprehend her distress.

Music and Elfrieda’s Suffering

Radek reveals that he has heard Elfrieda play in Prague. Yolandi is surprised that he has never mentioned it. He remembers an audience of hundreds who did not leave, yet experienced the performance as a private pain: something unknowable to the listeners, with secrets held by the music itself. Afterwards, people stood in the bar and drank without speaking. In his account, their silence is not indifference so much as complicity with an experience for which ordinary words are insufficient.

His response gives Yolandi an outside witness to what she has seen but cannot readily interpret. Radek does not claim to diagnose Elfrieda or explain her suffering away. Instead, he describes the limits of the audience’s understanding, while insisting that the music knows something the people present cannot say. He ranks Elfrieda with Ivo Pogorelich and Evgeny Kissin, and says that she understands the piano as the perfection of the human voice. His admiration is both artistic and personal: he calls her beautiful, and later goes to the psychiatric ward because he wants to tell her how much her piano has meant to him.

The contrast between music’s expressive power and speech’s inadequacy also shapes Radek’s exchanges with Yolandi. He can listen to her account of a sister determined to leave life, but listening does not give him control over that crisis. His testimony about the Prague performance offers recognition rather than a remedy. It enlarges Yolandi’s understanding of Elfrieda’s playing while preserving the privacy and unknowability at its center.

Intimacy with Yolandi

Radek’s relationship with Yolandi develops through conversation, hospitality, and physical care. He prepares pasta or rice, pours her wine, and kisses the back of her neck as he passes between the table and kitchen. Yolandi jokes about his pale skin and the wiry black hair covering his body; he jokes in broken English that he is not fully evolved. Their exchanges allow humor and exhaustion to occupy the same space as her fear for Elfrieda.

Yolandi tells him that she has been faithful to her husband and has raised children with him. Radek responds with a sweet smile, as though he likes that version of her, even while the two of them are now together. When exhaustion makes her put her head down at his table and fall asleep, he cleans up, carries her to bed, and removes her clothes carefully, setting aside her jeans so the lip balm in a pocket will not fall into the dust beneath the bed. He places her shirt over a lamp, making an aura in the room, and makes love to her gently. Yolandi associates his gentleness with the word her grandmother used for her grandfather as a husband; the comparison frames Radek not as a grand romantic solution but as a person whose care is legible in small, deliberate acts.

His musician’s body is present in those acts of intimacy too. Yolandi likes to feel the hard ridges and grooves on his fingertips, formed by pressing violin strings for five or six hours a day. He sometimes speaks a single Czech word softly when he comes, but the word remains untranslated. Radek also tells her that she once barked like a dog in her sleep. Yolandi only vaguely remembers the dream, in which what she felt and wanted to say emerged as an inarticulate bark. She connects that bodily, wordless expression to her gradual effort to understand Elfrieda’s silences; the connection belongs to Yolandi’s reflection, not to any claim that Radek can interpret either sister completely.

Departure and the Hospital Visit

When Yolandi leaves Winnipeg, she says goodbye to Elfrieda and promises to write her old-fashioned letters. She also stops at Radek’s to thank him for the food, shelter from the storm, sweetness, grace, and time. When he begins to say, “yeah but …,” Yolandi shrugs, smiles, and backs away, continuing her thanks rather than staying to resolve what he might have said. The hurried farewell leaves their relationship suspended in unfinished conversation.

Later, after an evening in which she remains no closer to deciding what to do about Elfrieda, Yolandi phones Radek and leaves an apologetic message. She says he may make her the villain in his opera, and tries unsuccessfully to remember a Czech word he sometimes uses. The apology does not explain or settle their separation; its hesitant ending, followed by her silence on the line before she hangs up, makes the message an attempt at repair without a confident expectation of response.

Radek reappears at the psychiatric ward, his violin strapped to his back like an oxygen tank. He has heard a rumor that Elfrieda is in the psychiatry department and that the situation is serious, involving suicide. Although visiting hours are over, he has come specifically to see her and tell her what her piano has meant to him. He introduces himself to Yolandi’s mother, who leaves the two of them by the elevators. The violin makes visible the purpose of his visit: he arrives not simply as Yolandi’s former lover but as a listener who wants the pianist herself to know that her music reached him.

Separation, Recognition, and Narrative Role

Yolandi briefly thinks Radek has come to find her, then recognizes that she may have forgotten he moved on. Radek counters that she was the one who moved on. Her question about whether he plans to serenade Elfrieda carries jealousy, which she recognizes even as she hopes her smile will soften the cattiness in it. The exchange keeps the relationship emotionally unresolved: neither person is reduced to a simple pursuer or rejecter, and their accounts of who left do not match.

As Yolandi walks away, she apologizes for everything she has said and for the situation as a whole. Radek tells her that her time will come, clarifying that he means her happiness. His reassurance does not promise reconciliation or change the circumstances surrounding Elfrieda’s hospitalization. Instead, it offers Yolandi a small expression of care at a moment when she is carrying fear for her sister and unease about her own choices.

Radek’s narrative importance lies in these crossings between private life and public witnessing. He is at once a lover who tends to Yolandi’s exhausted body, a musician who recognizes the force of Elfrieda’s performance, and a visitor who brings his violin to the ward when he cannot get access to her. The book does not make him an answer to the family’s grief. His patience and tenderness matter precisely because they do not abolish the silences, uncertainty, or distance that shape the sisters’ crisis.