Tomáš

Tomáš is a paediatrician who tries to live outside time, treating the present as the only reality even as his work confronts him with disability and mortality and his intimate life with the consequences of divided fidelity. In the hospital physiotherapy gymnasium he calls the Glass Room, his attraction to Zdenka begins; his affair with Eve later exposes how difficult it is to make an absolute present of a life shaped by promises, memory, and what may happen next.

Identity and the Eternal Present

Tomáš works as a paediatrician at the children’s hospital near the Glass Room. The narration describes a hard core of his mind as philosophical rather than medical: he has decided that past and future are illusions and that only a continuous present exists. That belief is not merely an abstract position. He inhabits it by standing at the windows, smoking, and looking out over the city while Zdenka leads exercises behind him. For him, the view, the cigarette, and her reflection are the moment itself, not points on a timeline.

His chosen stillness sits uneasily beside his profession. The children in the gymnasium are recovering from polio, and their leg-lifting, bending, stretching, and turning are difficult, awkward exercises rather than a return to effortless childhood. The story describes their limbs as twigs and sticks and their faces as pale with illness. At the hospital, another patient, Alenka, lies in an iron lung; her future depends on machinery that will breathe for her, and the world reaches her inverted through a mirror. Tomáš recognizes the irony in her name: Alenka is Alice, destined to live through a looking glass. His theory of time may hold the present still, but the children’s bodies make vulnerability and an uncertain future impossible to ignore.

Meeting Zdenka in the Glass Room

Tomáš first meets Zdenka in the gymnasium two years before the scene at the windows. He has come to the physiotherapy department to follow one of his patients’ progress and finds her on duty as a new member of staff. She tells him this is her first job since abandoning her childhood ambition of becoming a ballet dancer. The movement from classical dance to recuperative physiotherapy seems to her a modest leap, as she jokes; she is now helping children to walk when she had wanted to fly.

Tomáš laughs at her joke and is drawn to the energy that seems to him so unlike his own exhaustion from work. Zdenka’s optimism and belief in the future oppose his despair and refusal of temporal thought. Their conversation begins with his patient, then moves to her ambitions and hopes and his lack of them. She comes from Hranice, a town in the north toward the Polish border, whose name means border. She proudly describes it as the continent’s watershed: streams on one side run toward the Baltic, those on the other toward the Danube and Black Sea. Tomáš associates her with water from that first meeting, thinking of her as his nymph. He invites her for a drink within minutes; within days they are seeing each other regularly, and within a week they are making love.

Ondine, Breath, and Mortality

The story connects Tomáš’s association of Zdenka with a water nymph to the curse of Ondine, a condition affecting one of his young patients. The child breathes normally while awake, able to move her ribs and diaphragm and ventilate her lungs, but stops breathing as soon as she falls asleep. She must sleep on a ventilator or die of asphyxiation. The condition is a mystery to the medical profession, and its name brings the medical case into contact with a legend about love, mortality, and breath.

In the tale, Ondine is an immortal water nymph who loves the mortal Palemon, although he is already promised to Berta. A nymph who bears a mortal’s child must surrender her immortality. Palemon reassures Ondine with a vow that his every waking breath will pledge his love and faithfulness. After their marriage and the birth of their child, Ondine becomes mortal, subject to age and decay. The legend gives Tomáš a language for the danger he imagines in intimacy: love and bodily dependence cannot be held apart from change and death.

Tomáš thinks of Zdenka as Ondine, but his use of the legend is not simply a romantic idealization. He wonders why he betrays her and reasons that risking the curse might inject meaning into his life. Breath attracts him as a subject because it is fundamental to life and also carries the sequence of birth, life, and death in the words inspiration, respiration, and expiration. Yet he also fears the curse in its relational form: if Zdenka discovers his unfaithfulness, he believes she would be destroyed. His simultaneous courting and fear of the danger reveal the contradiction at the centre of his conduct: he seeks intensity through risk while resisting the temporal consequences that risk creates.

Eve and the Divided Relationship

Eve, who uses the English form of her name rather than the Czech Eva or Iva, is a journalist on a local newspaper. Tomáš finds it easier to see her than Zdenka because Eve has her own apartment in the city centre. It consists of one room and one bed, a space suited to their encounters, which are quick and not particularly passionate. Eve tells him what she wants him to do; he experiences their sex in a detached way, almost as a medical procedure that relieves a kind of pain. Even there, he feels guilty about Zdenka.

The difference between the two relationships matters more to Tomáš than whether Eve objects to his having another lover. He understands that Zdenka would mind and does not dare ask her the question he asks Eve, because he believes he already knows the answer: Zdenka would be devastated. With Eve, he finds none of the jealousy and envy he expects in other relationships, and their mutual knowledge of one another’s other attachments makes him feel closer to her. That ease does not absolve him. It sharpens the distinction between Eve’s acceptance and the harm he thinks the truth would cause Zdenka.

The Glass Room and the Discovery of Betrayal

For Tomáš, the Glass Room is an ideal place to make love because it appears to have no points of reference, memories, or illusions. He looks across its bare space: chromium pillars, white walls, a cream floor, a curve of wooden panels enclosing the area used for individual treatment, and a patterned stone wall that stands out as the room’s one irregularity. He tries to define the room as a present without context. The scene exposes the limit of that effort: Zdenka begins to weep.

When Tomáš moves to comfort her, she pushes him away and contrasts his coldness here with the warmth and love she remembers from Paris. She says she wants the warm, loving version of him, then identifies what his theory of the moment cannot erase: another woman. Tomáš smiles and denies it, calling her suspicion absurd. The encounter turns the room’s supposed freedom from memory into an accusation. Zdenka remembers the difference between Paris and the Glass Room, reads his changed manner, and names the betrayal he is trying to keep unspoken.

In another exchange, the light from the windows leaves Tomáš little more than a silhouette to Zdenka, yet she can read his expression from the way he holds himself and the small movements of his head and hands. Asked whether there is reason for jealousy, he admits that he and another woman were once engaged. Zdenka finds the fact incredible in a man who refuses to plan for the future. Tomáš says that he broke off the engagement, though it was mutual in effect. The admission complicates his self-presentation as someone outside time: he has made a commitment oriented toward a shared future, and its broken history remains present between them.

Narrative Significance

Tomáš’s philosophical present is tested not by argument alone but by the specific lives and relationships around him. The children’s exercises unfold as difficult work toward movement; Alenka’s breathing depends on a machine; Zdenka remembers his warmth in Paris and recognizes his coldness at home. Against these temporal pressures, Tomáš’s wish to stay at the pinnacle of a single moment reads as both a genuine outlook and a means of evasion. The Glass Room makes that evasion visible: its transparent, nearly bare space cannot remove the past from Zdenka’s memory or prevent the future consequences of his actions.

The Ondine motif binds his professional world to his erotic imagination. A child’s life-threatening inability to breathe during sleep gives the legend a present medical urgency, while Tomáš turns breath into a metaphor for the whole course of life and for the fidelity he has broken. He pursues the peril of discovery while fearing its effect on Zdenka, and seeks release with Eve without escaping guilt. His significance lies in this unresolved conflict: a man who denies time is nevertheless governed by accumulated choices, remembered intimacy, and the possibility that the person he loves will learn the truth.