The Soviet army liberates Město

The Soviet army liberates Město in a battle that Laník and his sister first experience as a cacophony from beneath the Landauer House, and then as the arrival of soldiers who take up quarters in its Glass Room. The scene moves from unseen violence to an unexpected encounter: hoofbeats, at first mistaken for something monstrous, herald a Soviet woman officer and her troops. Liberation is not presented as a distant change of power but as an immediate alteration of who occupies the house and what happens within it.

The battle heard from below

The battle’s end takes little more than a day. Gunfire comes from the south and west; smoke drifts across the skyline, shells pass overhead and explode in the northern suburbs, and low-flying aircraft with red stars on their wings briefly drown out the gunfire. In the lulls, traffic can be heard moving north along the road below the house. From the basement, the movement of armies remains audible but largely invisible: Laník stands on a chair to look through a window, sees smoke above the Špilas fortress, and cannot tell what is happening beyond it.

A nearby explosion shakes the house, and plaster falls from the basement ceiling. Laník leads his sister farther into the inner rooms by candlelight, away from the window and the failing power. The furniture glimpsed in the storeroom—a couple of chairs, a glass-fronted cupboard, a wardrobe—belongs to the domestic world now repurposed as a shelter. Above them, gunfire, explosions, and running feet make the house seem both refuge and exposed position. When footsteps and machine-gun fire sound directly overhead, Laník urges silence; his sister grips his hands and calls him by the childhood diminutive Joška. Their familiar family intimacy briefly anchors them in a place where they cannot know who is fighting above.

From imagined threat to unexpected arrival

The battle falls quiet enough for the siblings to wonder who remains overhead. Then iron-shod footsteps ring across the pavement. His sister whispers that it might be the Golem; Laník identifies the sound as a horse. The correction does not make the moment safe. In mechanized warfare, horses seem almost unreal, and their multiplied hoofbeats—there are several moving around the forecourt—are followed by someone hammering on the front door.

Laník arms himself with a bottle of clear liquid taken from a cardboard box and climbs the spiral stairs from the basement into the kitchens. The Glass Room has ceased to be a glass room in its former sense: tarpaulin, which he rigged, covers gaps, and low afternoon sunlight cuts through them. He crosses the living area and climbs to the entrance hall, where the battle has receded up the hill but the horses remain audible beyond the glass panels. Opening the door brings the threat into view. A Soviet woman officer stands outside, broad-featured and wearing a green forage cap with a red star; her broad shoulders carry rank boards, and medal ribbons mark her khaki blouse. She has a pistol aimed at Laník’s chest.

Laník tries to meet the armed stranger with words she might recognize, offering several terms for comrade before presenting the bottle as a gift to the victorious Red Army. Soldiers and horses fill the scene behind her: at least three horses are tethered to the railings, with hay on the pavement. The encounter’s improbable details—the bottle, the language guesses, the animals outside the modernist house—replace the battle’s distant, almost abstract sounds with immediate negotiations over danger and welcome.

Occupation of the house

A shared word for good breaks through the officers’ initial suspicion. The woman advances, embraces Laník, kisses him on both cheeks, and then kisses him on the mouth. The encounter is welcoming but not ceremonially distant; she smells of horses, sweat, and ordure, a bodily reminder of the long journey and the conditions of military life. Her affection makes contact possible before the two can fully understand one another.

The Soviet troops move into the house: a dozen young men and three women, described as battle-weary and battle-scarred. They bring their equipment into the Glass Room and mount a guard over the horses. Two machine guns, a mortar, three or four grenade launchers, and several rifles are stripped down and cleaned there; oil smears the linoleum. The room that had been part of the Landauer home becomes a military workspace. Laník’s sister has gathered enough courage to come upstairs and protests the soldiers’ use of the space, but they answer her protests with laughter.

The officer asks whether she is Laník’s wife. He corrects her: she is his sister. The distinction survives the language barrier, as the words for wife and sister are shared between their languages. When Laník points to the officer’s rank insignia, she identifies her rank as sergeant-major. She names stages of the route that brought her there—Rostov, Odessa, Jassy, Kishinev, Bucharest, Budapest, and Bratislava—then gestures onward. Her list gives geographic scale to the arrival: these soldiers have crossed thousands of miles to reach Město, the European city whose liberation is now taking place inside a family home.

Liberation as a change of presence

The arrival changes the house before the narrative turns it into an uncomplicated emblem of victory. The German forces are leaving, but Laník and his sister have experienced that departure as explosions, trembling walls, darkness, and uncertainty about the armed people overhead. Once the Soviet troops enter, the danger of not knowing who is outside gives way to the visible presence of soldiers, weapons, horses, and a commander who can offer signs of recognition across a language divide.

The scene’s contrasts keep that change concrete. Aircraft and gunfire belong to mechanized warfare; horses clop across the paving stones. A pistol points at Laník, then the officer embraces him. The Glass Room’s domestic floor acquires oil stains as weapons are cleaned upon it. Liberation ends one military presence in Město and establishes another within the Landauer House, where the siblings’ shelter becomes the soldiers’ quarters. The battle is thus both a historical turning point and an intimate reordering of space, registered through sound, touch, household objects, and the shifting occupants of the home.