Město is bombed

In November, an unannounced bombing devastates Město and nearly destroys Landauer House. The bomb that falls into the garden spares Laník and his sister in the basement, but blasts apart the Glass Room’s plate-glass walls and transforms the house from a place of light into a tarpaulin-shrouded refuge. The episode makes survival hinge on a fraction of chance: the city is struck without warning, and the house escapes destruction by a difference in trajectory too small to see.

The city before the attack

Snow lies in the corners of the streets, while a heavy fog blurs buildings and alleys. The obscurity makes pedestrians seem like ghosts, vehicles like monsters, and buildings like castle keeps; it also muffles sound, restricts movement, and carries the cold into homes with meagre fires and spare rations. The description turns the city’s existing hardship into an atmosphere of near-invisibility, as if Město has already been withdrawn from the ordinary world.

An air-raid siren sounds early in the morning. People feel their way through the fog to shelters and basements, wait through prayers and curses, and emerge when the all-clear announces another false alarm. The routine resumes: queues for food, labour in factories. Město appears starved and anaemic, a place accustomed to enduring alarms and scarcity. That familiarity makes the actual bombing more violent: the warning people have learned to distrust gives no notice when the bombs finally come.

The bombing and its near miss

The bombs descend through the fog without warning, engine noise, or an alarm. At the first detonation, people suspect a gas explosion, perhaps sabotage; the continued blasts make clear that the destruction is spreading across the city. Roads are torn up, paving stones hurled aside, and churches, houses, shops, and part of the railway station reduced to rubble. Shrapnel rattles over the tarmac, while smoke and dust thicken the fog into a deeper obscurity. The attack is rendered not as a visible contest between armies but as force arriving from an unseen source and breaking apart the familiar city.

At Landauer House, Laník and his sister are deep in the basement when a bomb falls toward them. She recites the litany of the saints and the rosary, trying to secure some advantage for survival; he yells at her to stop. Neither hears the bomb itself: it falls faster than its sound. They hear and feel the explosion, which seems to enter their bones as the building shakes to its roots. Plaster and cement crack, and the plate-glass windows—the walls of frozen liquid through which Rainer von Abt designed the Glass Room—flex and burst.

When the debris settles, the siblings release the instinctive embrace in which they have clung to one another. Laník mutters that the bomb came close; his ears hum, and his sister weeps. He tells her she ought to be glad they are alive. When he cautiously looks out from the basement, the survival they have just experienced becomes a matter of geometry: a fractionally different parabola could have sent the bomb through the terrace and the Glass Room, then down through the ferroconcrete into the basement. Five hundred pounds of high explosive might have destroyed the entire construction and killed them both. Instead, the bomb falls into the garden’s wet earth, leaving a muddy crater where the silver birch had stood.

Damage to Landauer House

The blast leaves the house standing, but not intact. Later that day, Laník climbs to the terrace and peers inside. Scimitars of glass are scattered over the floor, the linoleum is torn in places, and dirt peppers the wooden-and-plaster partition he had put up to conceal the onyx wall. In the following days he covers the broken windows with canvas tarpaulins. The intervention is practical, but it changes the room’s character: the Glass Room is no longer a place filled with light, and instead lies in the gloom of dusk. When sunlight does enter, it cuts through gaps in the coverings like blades of glass.

The damaged house thus registers both what the bombing destroys and what chance leaves standing. Its transparent walls, the defining feature of the Glass Room, have become shattered panes and makeshift coverings. The building survives, but its openness is replaced by shadow and concealment. Laník’s earlier effort to hide the onyx wall from those who might take it is now part of a larger landscape of damage and improvised protection.

Uncertainty and the meaning of survival

In the pub, people say the Americans carried out the attack, describing it as the capitalist war machine’s random destruction of Město’s working people. The account does not confirm that explanation. The bombers’ identity remains uncertain, and the city’s residents are left with the fact of the explosions rather than an assured account of their origin. Laník’s conclusion is similarly stark: the bombs are random. Their apparent arbitrariness does not make the destruction less consequential; it makes the difference between death and survival impossible to explain as merit or intention.

The siblings’ survival gives the episode a sharp reversal: a building that might have collapsed around them is still standing, but its defining room has been broken open to the weather. Their relief is inseparable from the image of the crater and the absent silver birch, while their different reactions—her prayer and tears, his anger and insistence on gratitude—show how the same near miss is experienced in incompatible ways. The bombing’s decisive consequence is therefore not only physical damage to Město and Landauer House. It also exposes how fragile the house’s carefully made order is when confronted by violence that gives no warning and chooses its victims by chance.