Paris

Paris is both a real destination and a changing possibility in the lives connected to the Landauer family: a source of music and artistic gossip, an imagined refuge, a route of escape, and the setting of a brief romance whose meaning cannot be shared. Its recurring appearances bring intimacy and freedom into view, while war and conflicting memory expose how precarious those promises are.

Artistic and personal connections

Before a dinner at the Landauer home, Hana tells Viktor about meeting Vitulka Kaprálová at a café in Montparnasse on a recent visit to Paris. She has heard that Kaprálová is spending time with the composer Bohuslav Martinů and suspects they are lovers, though she admits she did not ask Kaprálová directly. The gossip leads Hana to ask whether Viktor has ever been unfaithful to Liesel. The question changes the tone of their conversation: the two had been waiting for Liesel and the other guests, chatting over drinks as evening fell, but Hana’s Paris anecdote opens a more intimate inquiry into marriage and desire.

Hana also brings records from Paris. One plays jazz, with a saxophone whose sound seems almost like another voice in the room, while she and Viktor stand by the windows looking over the garden. Later, after an uneasy exchange, she puts on another record, and a woman sings J’ai deux amours. The music accompanies a quieter conversation between Hana and Liesel about love, friendship, and their partners. Liesel begins to understand Hana’s love for her, and the word completeness comes to mind, carrying a shade of guilt. Paris reaches the house through objects and sound, but what it brings into the open is the feeling between the two women.

Escape and the city under threat

For Eva Mandl, Paris is the place she wants to reach after Hana helps her escape her husband. Hana describes arranging a taxi and a disguise, then taking Eva to the Nordbahnhof in a private train compartment. Eva had hoped to go to Paris; Hana instead puts her on a train to Prague, offering to accompany her but accepting Eva’s refusal. The proposed destination therefore remains just beyond the immediate escape. Hana’s account makes Paris a horizon of safety and reinvention, while the route actually taken is shaped by the practical decisions of the moment.

Hana later writes to Liesel about Vitulka Kaprálová’s fate. After marrying Jiří Mucha, Kaprálová falls ill while Paris is under threat from the approaching Germans. Her husband gets her out of the city, and they flee south toward Montpellier, but she dies in hospital two days after the fall of Paris. The cause is uncertain in Hana’s account. For Liesel, the news means that another part of the past has died: the young, like the old, are dying, while she sits in Switzerland, apparently safe but surrounded in her imagination by the wreckage of lives. The fate of a person first introduced through Parisian gossip turns the city from a scene of artistic possibility into a marker of war’s sudden reach.

The fall of Paris later seems small beside the German invasion of the Soviet Union, reported as an immense military advance. Even against that scale, the narrative returns to particular losses and separations: Kaprálová dead, Hana trapped in Město with Oskar, the Landauer house abandoned, and the family gathered in Switzerland. Paris is one element in a wider landscape of danger, but its fall makes the war’s abstract scale legible through the individual story of a young woman who escaped the city only to die soon afterward.

Zdenka and Tomáš in Paris

Years later, Paris becomes the setting for Zdenka’s first journey abroad. She is selected to attend an international conference on polio and its treatment. Tomáš has helped make her attendance possible but lets her retain her belief that the opportunity was a fortunate coincidence. For him, preserving that sense of contingency matters; for Zdenka, the trip opens an unfamiliar world beyond the limits of home.

The city appears bright and colourful beside the dull, monochrome impression of their home town and country. Zdenka is astonished by the hotel’s private bathrooms and complimentary soap and toothpaste. During the conference, she and Tomáš share a room and spend five days in an intimacy that resembles married life. Their stay gives Zdenka a concrete glimpse of a life in which they could remain together, and, after returning home, she says they could have stayed in Paris, found work as doctors and physiotherapists, and lived together freely. Tomáš answers by invoking her admiration for the Party; she clarifies that she is thinking about the two of them, not politics.

The difference between their hopes becomes a conflict about time and commitment. Zdenka imagines a future of motherhood, shared work, a home, and growing old together. Tomáš resists that future, privileging the present and treating their Paris days as already past. Their first argument grows from the question of what comes next. Zdenka proposes a break, and their closeness begins to loosen. Paris has made a shared future seem possible to her, but the visit cannot compel Tomáš to want one.

Memory, imagination, and what remains

After the trip, Paris becomes a disputed memory as well as a lost possibility. Tomáš and Zdenka recall different details: he remembers visiting the Panthéon, which she denies; she remembers a market on the Île de la Cité with tropical fish, caged birds, mice, and a rat, which he cannot recall. They laugh at the mismatch, but it fits Tomáš’s belief that memory and imagination are closely bound. He needs the image of the Panthéon, while Zdenka remembers the brightly coloured animals.

Their different recollections continue in Zdenka’s account of walking along the Champs-Élysées and turning into avenue Montaigne. Tomáš remembers the place through a lecture about Michel de Montaigne, scepticism, and the imagination; Zdenka remembers the image of her heroine Isadora Duncan on the façade of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Each carries away a version organized by personal attention. Paris therefore persists not as a single, stable account, but as separate memories that reveal what each person valued there.

When Zdenka later speaks with a representative from the Committee for Architectural Heritage, she calls her Paris trip a marvellous coincidence and recalls five wonderful days with her boyfriend. The representative recognizes that the experience did not last. Zdenka confirms that she and Tomáš, a doctor at her hospital, have drifted apart, and wonders whether their time together in Paris caused the separation. The visit remains precious, but its outcome is not reunion or escape: it becomes a memory whose promise and disappointment each character interprets differently. Across the novel’s changing periods, Paris holds together these contrasting meanings—cultural connection, threatened refuge, temporary freedom, and the fragile afterlife of shared experience.