The Grand Hotel is a railway-station hotel whose café and anonymous upstairs bedroom become the first meeting place of Hana Hanáková and Werner Stahl’s affair. Its transience offers concealment, but the hotel’s rooms also frame intimacy as an exchange: the relationship begins in a rented space, and Hana later describes it as part of how she gets by in wartime Město.

A Meeting Place Designed for Anonymity

Stahl chooses the café opposite the railway station. The location suits Hana because people come and go, no one remains a regular, and she is not known there. In the Winter Garden, among potted palms and rubber plants, a quartet plays Strauss and Lehár as couples shuffle around a cramped dance floor. The setting is at once cultivated and transient: music and conversation preserve an image of the city’s former cultural life, while Hana says that intellectual and artistic society is dying.

Their conversation makes the hotel more than a discreet rendezvous. Hana speaks of musicians and artists she has known, and of Paris and Vienna; then she asks about Stahl’s family. He tells her that Hedda was a violinist and that they used to play together. The café’s public setting accommodates this unexpected intimacy, allowing the two to disclose personal histories amid the movement and noise of strangers.

The Upstairs Room

A singer, described as a refugee from the Vienna cabarets, interrupts the conversation with a song. Stahl and Hana dance; he feels awkward, while her amusement at his physical response eases his thoughts of Hedda. Hana suggests that they go upstairs before the situation becomes embarrassing. The shift from the café to a bedroom is also a shift from public conversation to an encounter whose terms neither has fully stated.

The room costs eighty crowns, and its heavy velvet drapes, shabby furniture, weak table lamps, and ornate bed give it the worn, anonymous character of a place accustomed to assignations. Hana undresses and asks Stahl what he wants to do, with impatience in her tone. The encounter unsettles his sense of himself as a man guided by scientific truth: he finds himself in unfamiliar territory, drawn into an intimacy he has never shared with Hedda or anyone else. In the hotel’s enclosed room, desire and uncertainty occupy the same space.

Recollection and Material Exchange

In a later letter to Liesel, Hana explains that money is difficult and that she cannot give the details in writing. She describes a scientist who contributes to the funds and, in exchange, receives her care for his well-being. They meet once or twice a week at the Grand. The hotel thus recurs not simply as the origin of their affair but as the regular setting of an arrangement shaped by scarcity.

Hana’s recollection adds the detail of plums: Stahl has a boyish weakness for them, though they cost eighty crowns a kilo, and he eats them greedily. The price echoes the eighty-crown bedroom, bringing the hotel’s charged encounter into the same material economy as food. Hana recalls their laughter in the darkness alongside touch, taste, and scent, and admits to Liesel that she fears being judged a disgrace. She insists that people in Město survive by selling what they have, presenting the relationship as a means of getting by rather than a simple romantic attachment.

Absence and Return

The hotel also becomes a measure of Hana’s absence. After more than a week without seeing her, Stahl finds that she has not returned to the café, has not answered the telephone number she gave him, and has not appeared at the Grand when he goes there for a drink. When she finally appears unexpectedly out of a storm, their earlier meeting place can no longer contain the encounter: he brings her into the Biometric Centre, where he asks where she has been. The Grand’s function in their relationship is therefore defined by both recurrence and interruption—a discreet venue for their meetings, and a place whose familiar promise fails when Hana disappears.