Eve

Eve, a journalist on a local newspaper, is one of Tomáš’s lovers and the person whose concealed intimacy with him turns a private betrayal into visible proof. She treats her own relationships with an unsentimental candour, but the photograph that records her hand entwined with Tomáš’s makes her part in Zdenka’s hurt impossible to dismiss as an abstraction.

Identity and Introduction

Eve uses the English form of her name, rather than the Czech Eva or Iva. The narrative introduces her through Tomáš’s affair with her: she has an apartment in the city centre, a single room with one bed, making their meetings easier to arrange than his meetings with Zdenka. Their lovemaking is quick and, as described from Tomáš’s perspective, comparatively detached. Eve tells him what she wants him to do; he experiences the encounter as something like a medical process, a release of physical pain rather than an occasion of particular passion. Even in this arrangement, he feels guilty about Zdenka, whom he calls his Ondine.

The contrast between Eve’s practical apartment and Tomáš’s inward preoccupation establishes the affair’s uneven emotional register. The room enables secrecy and convenience, but it does not insulate Tomáš from his attachment to Zdenka. Eve is not presented as unaware that he has another life: when he finally tells her there is another woman, she says she had assumed as much.

Her Own Relationship with the Editor

After asking Eve whether she would mind if he had another lover, Tomáš learns that she, too, has another partner: her newspaper editor, whom she nicknames Oddball. She sees him once or twice a month. She describes his marriage as finished, finds him appealing, and says he is considerate and unlikely to cause trouble. Her explanation also makes plain the material advantage of the relationship: he gives her assignments that interest her and arranges the best hotels when she travels for work.

Eve’s candour unsettles Tomáš less than the circumstances might suggest. He has met the editor, regards him as middle-aged and unprepossessing, and is surprised to hear of the affair. Yet Tomáš has accompanied Eve on some of her work trips and recognizes that he has, in effect, participated in the secrecy surrounding it. That recognition amuses him and prompts his confession that there is another woman. Eve’s matter-of-fact response establishes a relationship in which both partners know that intimacy is not exclusive, although their frankness does not erase the consequences for the people kept outside that knowledge.

Assignment at the Hospital

Eve’s work brings her directly into Zdenka’s professional world. One evening she tells Tomáš she has a story to do in his part of town. He assumes she means Židenice, where his parents’ house is, but Eve corrects him: the story concerns the hospital, specifically its physiotherapy department. She deliberately emphasizes the department, aware that it is where Tomáš’s other lover works, and wonders whether she will meet his dancer.

The assignment brings together roles that had previously been kept apart. Eve is simultaneously the journalist arriving to report on the facility and Tomáš’s lover, visiting a place connected to Zdenka. At the appointment, she arrives with a photographer, shakes hands with Hana and Zdenka, and warmly insists that they call her Eve. Zdenka explains that the paediatric department has overall control of the facility and that physiotherapy is only an offshoot. The encounter places Eve within the department’s institutional circumstances, not merely within Tomáš’s private story.

The Photograph and Zdenka’s Discovery

The later group photograph in the Glass Room preserves the meeting among Hana, Zdenka, Tomáš, Eve, and the district chairman. Its evidence is easy to miss at first: Eve holds a notebook against her chest, while Tomáš has one hand on a chromium-clad pillar. Their other hands are hidden from the people on the far side of the narrow pillar, but not from the camera. Tomáš is holding Eve’s right hand, their fingers intertwined.

The gesture is not a fleeting or accidental touch. Its concealment and intimacy make it legible as practiced knowledge between the two of them. For Zdenka, seeing that contact transforms suspicion into proof. The camera’s record is neither memory nor imagination; it is an observation that appears fixed and unambiguous, confirming Tomáš’s betrayal. The photograph therefore does more than document a gathering: it exposes, within a public image, the private relationship that its participants had hidden from Zdenka.

Hana tells Zdenka that she had not known how to tell her and did not want to hurt her, but also did not want Tomáš to continue deceiving her. Zdenka accepts comfort briefly, then goes to wash and change. Looking in the mirror, she no longer sees herself as the sophisticated adult who has travelled to Paris and attended an international medical conference; she sees a bruised, pale, washed-out young girl and asks what Hana will think of her. Eve does not appear in that exchange, but the discovery she has helped make visible precipitates this collapse from adult composure into exposed hurt. Her narrative significance rests in that sharp reversal: the apparently detached affair, concealed behind the ease of a city-centre room and a hidden hand, becomes an image Zdenka cannot explain away.