Prater

Prater is where Viktor Landauer first meets Kata and where a later visit brings them back to the Ferris wheel that has come to signify their affair. Its public pleasures—the fairground, the wheel, the cafés—frame a private relationship, while the wheel’s return turns the park into a place where memory and consequence circle back.

The First Encounter

Viktor pauses in Prater when a woman asks him for a light. The surrounding fairground is full of children’s laughter and stallholders’ calls; ahead lies the station and his train home to Město. The woman holds an unlit cigarette and seems in a hurry. She is smaller than Liesel, with quick, intelligent features and unusually pale blue eyes that seem almost transparent.

As Viktor lights her cigarette, he notices her grey cloche hat, short dark hair, white blouse, narrow skirt, and amber brooch. He guesses that she is a Slav and reads her appearance as that of a modern woman, though he initially considers her prettiness precise rather than remarkable. When she asks whether she can do anything for him, he accepts the invitation rather than continuing to the station.

The Wheel and the Affair

Viktor proposes a ride on the wheel. His decision to linger is driven by curiosity, sexual attraction, and the sense of youth and innocence he sees in the stranger, as well as by the details of her expression and bearing. Kata is startled by his suggestion and resists the idea of going up, but the wheel becomes the setting for their first shared encounter.

On a later visit, Kata takes Viktor’s hand and pulls him, protesting, towards the queue, asking whether he remembers their first time. He does. The Riesenrad has become a talisman: whenever he sees its arc above the city’s houses, he thinks of her. The narrative explicitly links the recurring sight of the wheel to the wheel of fate, so the ride is more than a remembered amusement; it gives their repeated return to one another a visual form.

Public Play, Private Consequence

After the ride, Viktor and Kata walk through Prater and drink beer at a café. Earlier, Viktor has called Kata his sweetheart and said that he loves her in response to children who overhear him; they receive the word with delighted shock, while their mother tries to quiet them. Kata later returns to that declaration. Watching sparrows peck at the crumbs she has thrown, she asks Viktor about what he told the child. He dismisses it as a joke, but Kata calls the joke cruel and turns her gaze towards the slowly revolving wheel.

The exchange exposes the difference between public performance and private feeling. What sounds to the children like a simple declaration of love becomes, for Kata, a painful joke; the wheel turning in the evening air holds the scene’s unresolved tension. Prater thus gathers the affair’s beginning and its later recollection into the same landscape, where an apparent game acquires emotional weight.