Hana Hanáková's pregnancy

Hana Hanáková’s pregnancy is a decisive change in her circumstances: it makes a private relationship consequential for a child’s future and forces her to state plainly what she wants. She tells Werner that the child is his, confirms that a test has returned a positive result, and asks to keep the baby. Later, her letter to Liesi brings the news into a different relationship, where it echoes the earlier intimacy surrounding Liesi’s pregnancy and the birth of Ottilie.

The News and Its Confirmation

Hana announces her pregnancy to Werner after he has urged her to leave at once. She does not go immediately; instead, she says there is something else he needs to know, connecting the disclosure to the question of his miscegenation. She then tells him she is pregnant. The sequence makes the announcement more than an isolated medical fact: it arrives amid a conversation about the consequences of their relationship and the risks attached to it.

Hana confirms that she has had a test and received the result the previous day. She identifies it as the rabbit test and repeats that it is positive. When she tells Werner that the child is his, she removes any uncertainty about why she has come to tell him. The pregnancy is presented as a fact she has checked and a responsibility she places before him, not as a possibility or rumor.

The Choice to Keep the Baby

Hana’s position is unequivocal: she wants to keep the baby. She sits without moving as she says so, and later repeats the request while looking back into the car. Her stillness and repetition give the decision a restrained force; the scene centers on what she asks for rather than on any elaboration of the circumstances of conception.

The narration marks how sharply her situation has changed in Werner’s eyes. He remembers the woman who first picked him up in a café as someone who knew things he had barely imagined; now he sees her as fragile and asking him for money. This contrast records a change in their practical relationship as well as in her appearance to him: Hana has moved from the position of the knowledgeable guide to one in which she needs material support. She explains the stakes in her own terms, saying the baby is the only future she has. The pregnancy therefore gives her choice an existential weight without resolving what that future will contain.

The Letter to Liesi

Hana’s news reaches Liesi through a letter that she reads repeatedly. The text records her reading it for the fourth or fifth time, perhaps the sixth or seventh, without keeping count. The repeated reading conveys the difficulty of taking in what Hana has written and links the new disclosure to Liesi’s own remembered experience of pregnancy.

The letter explains that Hana had believed she could not have children because a doctor had told her she was barren. She now knows that belief was wrong. Yet the discovery is not presented as uncomplicated relief: Hana tells Liesi that she wants the baby, and the possibility of motherhood is accompanied by the burden of deciding what to do. She addresses Liesi as someone close enough to receive that admission, making the letter both a disclosure of fact and a request to be understood.

Earlier Intimacy and Changed Circumstances

Liesi’s response is shaped by memories of her own pregnancy and Hana’s attentiveness during it. As she rereads the letter, she recalls Hana’s closeness, the wonder they shared, and the moment when they used a pendulum to divine the sex of Ottilie, correctly. She remembers Hana kneeling with her hands on Liesi’s pregnant belly and reacting with amazement. These details establish that the pregnancy news returns Liesi to a period when the two women shared an intimate, hopeful attention to an anticipated child.

The final turn from those memories to Hana’s present situation is stark. What had once been a shared experience of wonder now arrives as a letter about Hana’s own pregnancy and her uncertain prospects. The parallel does not make their circumstances identical: Liesi remembers her pregnancy from the position of a mother, while Hana is still asking to keep the baby and imagining it as her only future. The contrast gives the pregnancy its significance across the narrative: it joins their lives through remembered care while revealing how differently the possibility of motherhood can be lived.