THE town was well awake and about its early morning business before I reached the gray walls of the barracks. I passed courtyards where dogs were barking at the heels of children who were leaving for school, where women were hanging out wet sheets and underwear, where hawkers were knocking on doors and maids were scrubbing paving stones. The town smelled sweet with baking bread and pear trees in bloom. It was a world at peace with itself and I did not belong there.

I stopped at a shop for coffee and a bun. People at the tables were talking about themselves and laughing over small jokes they all understood. I felt in my pocket for the order which instructed me to report to the headquarters of the regiment to which I had first been attached in an army that was now out of existence. Strange how the old forms still remained after a revolution! Why should I have to report back here in Česká Budĕjovice? I didn’t mind; it was as good as any other place. But the order seemed to make no sense.

The barracks were just as ugly as ever, and just as capable of erasing one’s sense of individuality. Yet I felt at ease as soon as I had passed through the gates, for here I knew what was expected of me and there was no need for questioning thoughts. Major Čižek looked up as an orderly announced me. At first he looked surprised, and then he came around the desk and shook my hand warmly. “So that’s where you’ve been!” he said, making a motion toward my uniform. “You know you were reported dead?”

“No,” I said, remembering that Mother had not written to me for a year and a half. But I had written her after I reached Salonika. “I was taken prisoner in Macedonia.”

The major gave me a puzzled look. “Your battalion reported you missing, believed dead.”

I explained how our patrol had been cut off. The expression on my face must have said more than my words. The major looked at me sharply and then he smiled in the crooked way his men so much liked. He explained carefully about the situation then prevailing in the Czechoslovakian army: the men in all units were given the privilege of objecting to any officer who had, during the war, behaved in a manner they felt contrary to the new national spirit of the army. He went on to say that he wanted me to undertake to form a company of engineers. If I could do so, we would leave for the Hungarian border at once.

I tried to explain that I was at his service, but how could I agree to do as he asked unless I knew how the men would receive me? Instead of answering me directly the major said, “You were awarded a captaincy nearly a year ago by the Imperial Army. Your record as a soldier and an officer is known to us fully. But for the time being, you will retain your former rank. I’ll have the men fall in for inspection at once. We’ll see what you can do about getting a company together. There’s no time to lose.”

When we reached the courtyard the men were already waiting in line. They were still wearing the field-gray of the Imperial Army, but their old marks of rank had been removed and replaced by new Czechoslovakian insignia. I stood before them in the bright spring sunshine, and as I looked up and down the lines I recognized familiar faces I hadn’t seen since the Serbs led me away in Macedonia. They were all studying me carefully. What were they thinking? Were they remembering old orders for discipline that now seemed in retrospect to have been persecution? I was not afraid to face their various tempers, though it was conceivable old grudges were being nursed against me. Perhaps they expected me to make a flattering speech, to woo them. I looked up and down the line, letting my glance rest for a second on each face, as though I were the one who was passing judgment. My brain was as cold as ice. Then I said in a voice as crisp as I could make it, “Who will serve with me in a new company of engineers? We will leave for the Hungarian frontier in a few days.”

They shuffled their feet and looks passed up and down the lines between them. Three men stepped forward, but before their left heels had clicked against their right heels, the entire line broke formation and crowded around me. It was unsoldierly, but it was the way of the men in those days. They wanted to know how I was and where I had been and to tell me they were glad to have me back. I heard the words bratře poručíku on every side; calling me “brother lieutenant” was another sign of the new spirit within the ranks. My company was quickly formed.

After that I was given a forty-eight hour leave, and I left on the first train for Prague, still in the French uniform. All the way I slept and it was dark by the time the train pulled into the Franz Josef Station. I walked out through the crowds, feeling very strange, as though I were moving through a recurrent dream of childhood.

The first change I noticed was a large sign where the name of the station had been, indicating that it was now called the President Wilson Station. All over Europe that name was taking the place of one-time kings and elder statesmen. I went out to the street and saw that its name had been changed to Hooverová.

I stood there, puzzled and wondering. How many other things had been altered in Prague since the last time I had seen it? How many things more important to me than the names of streets? I decided to call someone on the telephone and ask about my mother. It would be easier to face news of her in front of a small black telephone box. But I couldn’t think of the name of a single neighbor I could call.

I lit a cigarette and stood there trying to brace myself against the next thing I must do. People began to look at me and some spoke as they passed. Others patted my shoulder and two girls waved from a passing car. At first I thought someone behind me was attracting this attention, and then I realized it was the blue uniform they were saluting. I merely happened to be inside it.

As I began to walk toward Václavské náměstí I saw another new street sign that read Maréchal Foch. I went on and on, letting the lights and the faces of people on the street and the familiar sounds of my own language drift through my senses unchecked. Gradually they had their comforting effect.

I stopped again when I found myself at the corner of Příkopy, which we had known as the Graben. The name of the old Kaiser Kaffee was changed, too, but people were going in through its doors, laughing just as they had done years before when a shy boy had waited night after night on this same corner for a girl. Because I was afraid to go to Smichov I followed a couple inside. It was the first time I had ever been through the doors. Instinctively I kept waiting for someone to turn me out of the place, but I was welcomed by the maître and shown to a good location at the bar. My wishes were waited upon breathlessly, and the service offered with my drink was disconcerting. I remembered how the sword-clanking officers of the Imperial Army had been welcome in any restaurant and café in the old days. Now my uniform was creating prestige for them here in the same way. Suddenly it seemed very funny.

I drank slowly and looked about. It was a smaller room than I had imagined it would be. A girl in evening dress sat between two men farther down the bar, but she was the only one in the room who might possibly work in the place. I ordered another drink and when I started to pay, the barman motioned my money away as though he were embarrassed by my offer. He asked me how it was where I had been, but the question indicated no real desire for information. I asked him if there was a girl working in the café by the name of Julča. When I tried to describe her he scratched the back of his head and decided there was not. “I’ve only been here three months,” he said. “Wait. I’ll ask.”

His face was pulled down to an assumed solemnity when he came back. “Sure,” he said. “She used to work here. Right along. But she must have got tired of it. She jumped in the river one night. About a year ago. That’s what they say. Friend of yours?”

I thanked him and left. I hadn’t really expected to find Julča. I didn’t expect to find any part of the old world as I had left it. It was the fact that even a few things could have remained unchanged that I found more disturbing than anything else. How could any aspect of life not show some difference after these last four years?

I jumped on the first streetcar that came along on its way to Smichov without giving myself more time to consider my hesitancy in making this last lap of the long journey home. I slumped into an empty seat and stared out the window, trying to focus my thoughts beyond the lump in my throat. The car moved along the quai, following the bend in the river. It was too dark to see the water except where it reflected lights now and then. The car made another slight bend and my eyes drifted over the face of the Hradčany across the river. Here was another change, more profound than any of the others. The lights in the castle were on. It was the first time in my life I had seen them like this. No windows had ever been lighted up there before the war. Now there were lines of them, giving the dark mass of the old castle a faint contour against the night sky.

There stood the Hradčany, just as it had for centuries, the stronghold around which Prague had grown. Beautiful and massive, it sent its thrusting towers into the sky to mark a meeting place of generations, a contrast between the old world and the new. On the crest of the hill were palaces, monasteries, churches, convents, and now offices of the new republic. That must be the meaning of the lights in the castle. Once upon a time its old yellow walls had been the home of the kings of Bohemia. Now Thomas Masaryk lived and worked there. What difference did it make if three hundred years had been lost between the last king and the first president? History would call it nothing.

Time expanded in my mind, on and on, until it burst like an overinflated balloon. What difference did anything make, now or forever, if I couldn’t find Mother waiting for me? The wheels of the streetcar kept repeating “alive or dead, alive or dead.” A tugboat on the river hooted its warning to another barge, and the sound brought a wave of nostalgia for the days of my childhood on the Vltava. Alive or dead, alive or dead . . .

It was nearly midnight when I got off at the corner by the building where we had lived. Here everything was the same so far as I could see. Just as I reached the outer door of the building I remembered that I had no key and the concierge always locked up after ten o’clock. I stood there in the dark, trying to think what to do, while a housemaid moved in the shadows, wrapped in the arms of a boy in overalls. As men always do in moments of indecision, I took out a cigarette and lit it, and in the flare of the match I saw beside the door a small sign Mother had kept there for years, advertising her designs. Surrounding her name were tiny samples of her needlework, fine and delicate and colorful. I looked at the sign a long time.

The housemaid disentangled herself from the boy’s arms, and as she put a key to the door I held it open for her with my hand. She looked at my uniform and let me in without a word, falling back to say a further good night to her boy. A man lurched in behind me, carrying beer from the saloon next door, and disappeared in the dark. When I looked up at the window where the curtains had been blowing out the night Grandfather died I almost expected to see them blowing out still, but the window was dark and closed.

The years fell away from me as my feet moved over the cobblestones of the courtyard in the dark. They knew without help from my brain just where to go, where to avoid the water that always stood in certain small puddles after it dripped from the eaves, how to avoid familiar obstacles on the uneven floor of this inner yard. I let them carry me upstairs to our door, and then I waited again for some minutes before I knocked.

There was no sound. After awhile I knocked again and a dog began to bark downstairs. Then I heard a slow shuffling that grew more distinct as someone behind the door approached it. Not Mother, but someone very old and cautious. The bar was carefully pulled back on the inside lock and the door was opened carefully, slowly. An old, worried face under white hair blinked in the light from the stair well. She made no sound as she looked at me. The door opened wider and she stood aside to let me in.

All the time I was crying with my head on her knees I could feel her gentle hands stroking my head, following the hairline to my collar, moving softly across my temples. Sweetly, slowly they stroked me, as they had done when I was a child, and after awhile I was able to stop crying and be still. Her hands hadn’t changed. They had the same rough tips caused by the needles, and they still told me more about her love than anything else I knew. A kind of hard core went out of me with the crying.

Neither of us made any attempt to sleep that night. There was too much to say. Some of it came out in words, and much of it grew in the silences. There were so many things I found I had no need to tell Mother. If she couldn’t understand with her mind, she accepted with her heart.

When the windows began to pale with the morning, we finally tried to sleep. Toward noon I woke up to see her sitting on a chair at the foot of my bed. How long she had been watching me I don’t know. She brought breakfast to me in bed, and then we began to talk of events in an outer periphery beyond ourselves.

For a long time she had not written to me because she had been told by a sergeant in my old company, who stopped to see her when he was on leave in September, 1917, that I was dead. It was a trick often played by soldiers at this time. They used it to get money from the families of their comrades. This sergeant doubtless believed he had seen me dying on the field, but he also believed that Mother would pay him for delivering the last reminiscences of a companion of her son. Mother surprised him by refusing to cry in his presence. She merely thanked him for his courtesy in coming to see her and sent him away with a blessing, completely unaware of his intentions.

Outwardly she accepted the story of my death by not writing to me from then on. No word came from me to refute the sergeant. But she never for a moment believed me to be dead. She knew she would have felt different, somehow, if it had been so. And she was equally sure that some sort of communication could be maintained between us, without a written word. When I finally managed to get a letter through to her from Salonika, she was not surprised. But it happened to arrive when Grandmother was dying, and by the time the funeral was over the letter was nowhere to be found. She might have written to headquarters in the hope of reaching me eventually, but she had lost the feeling of any need to write to me by that time. She was convinced I would be conscious of her love just the same.

I watched her as she talked and tried to remember her as she had been when I went away. Her values, her spirit and her gentle character were still there in her face for anyone with a heart to see, but her physical responses now were all tired and old. She had been pitifully hungry throughout the war; nearly everyone in Prague had been close to starvation except for the very rich and the usual war profiteers. She had been cold because they never had any heat in the apartment, and night after night through the winters she had pulled herself out of bed at two in the morning in order to get milk for Grandmother. Long lines formed outside the dairies every night. At dawn the milk was given out as long as it lasted, and those at the end of lines got none. Mother’s clients had stopped buying handwork; the allowance from my pay had been her only income for more than two years and then it, too, had stopped. Uncle had sent her nothing at all. Now the clients were slowly coming back again.

It felt strange to be alone with Mother. All my life our one or two rooms had seemed unbearably crowded because there were always too many people living in too small a space. Now our home appeared large and luxurious in comparison with the way I remembered it, and also in comparison with army tents and mud-holes in the ground. I missed Grandmother only as I would miss a headache when it stopped. I missed Grandfather in the true sense of wishing I could talk with him again, but the world had moved too fast for him at the end of his life. He would never have understood how different this war had been from the fight on the barricades in 1848, and not understanding, he would have considered me weak to have been so deeply affected by it.

Yet beyond the absence of my grandparents there was something else different about these rooms, something gone that had always oppressed me. I wanted to know what it was in order to enjoy the change even more. After awhile I knew what I missed, while Mother was telling me about Leo.

In 1917 my cousin had been called into service by the Imperial Army, for he was still an Austrian subject. He was put into the Medical Corps as a private, and they sent him to train in Prague at the Hradčany Barracks. He came to see Mother out of politeness and then he came again. She had been anxious at first to give him something to eat that he would like, something he wouldn’t find poor in comparison with his own home and the rich food his mother served. All she could make were some cookies without flour, sugar or butter, and some coffee, but he seemed to enjoy them. One day she discovered that Leo was always hungry because the army was short of rations and he had no money to buy food in restaurants.

Mother always knew how to feed hungry hearts, even if she had too little food to satisfy empty stomachs. Leo needed her affection even more than he needed food, but she gave him both. She said he was a tall, well-mannered boy, shy and no longer a show-off. She called him an aesthetic type, with marks of deep unhappiness in his eyes.

Uncle, of course, had been furious when Leo was made a private in the Austrian army; he thought he should have been granted a commission as a medical officer at once. Uncle’s way of easing his injured pride was to give him no pocket money.

Leo became tremendously fond of Mother. She let that part of her story go without saying. One day he put his head on the table and started to cry as though he were a small boy. With his voice muffled by his hands he tried to tell her how much he wished he could have been me because then he could have lived with her always. He hated his own mother and father, and he was convinced they hated him, too.

There were many aspects of human nature which Mother was incapable of understanding because she could never believe any human being was all bad. She felt that Leo misjudged his father, and she felt it her mission to obliterate that misunderstanding. So she wrote to my uncle and asked him to come to Prague because Leo needed him badly. Uncle refused.

In a short time Leo had a nervous breakdown. That was what Mother called it. She learned then that sometime before, Leo had fallen in love with a sculptor in Berlin who had taught him to use morphine. He was discharged from the army because he had begun to use it again, and that brought Uncle to Prague fast enough. They met in Mother’s presence and it must have been a first-class row which even she was unable to prevent.

As they were leaving, after Uncle had informed Mother he would put Leo in a sanatorium in Germany, his eyes fell on the portraits of Grandmother’s mother and brother. He came back into the room and looked at them a long time. He talked about his relationship to them and what fine figures they were. He said how proud it would make him to have such portraits on his own walls in Berlin, to show his friends what his family background had been. There was just the right place for them in his library, where they would show up to far better advantage than they did here.

Mother could never have resisted such broad hints, even had she wanted to. She insisted that Uncle take the portraits. Their grim prudery was of no use to her, but she was careful not to say so, and Leo was pressed into service to help carry them away.

In all my life I have never met another man who remained so true to his own mean character as my uncle. It may be that he showed a somewhat better side of his nature to others, but I never saw it. He had a genius for bringing out the worst of everyone with whom he associated. How the same two individuals could have produced both him and my mother was always beyond my comprehension. And yet, because of the circumstances of their early life, as well as the opposite quality of her own nature, Mother never condemned him nor let me speak ill of him in her presence. As a result, I suspect he has had a far greater indirect influence on my subconscious mind than I guess.

I asked Mother how Leo was getting along. She hesitated for more than a moment, and then she gave me the end of the story, her hand patting mine while she talked, as though to counteract the effect of her words. Leo had been released from the sanatorium with a record of complete recovery, but instead of going home, he disappeared. Weeks later he was found in a cheap waterfront hotel in Hamburg, the kind of hotel with beds to rent by the hour. He had finally taken enough morphine to end his life.

I was sorry for Mother because she was still so unhappy about it, but Leo’s death made small difference to me. So many better men had died in my presence in the past four years. It was the lack of meaning in his life, not his death in itself, that spelled tragedy. I looked up at the large rectangles still showing on the wall where the two portraits had always hung. Then I knew what it was that had made the house seem so much happier. As long as I could remember those two grim relations had been used to reprove me whenever Grandmother felt in the mood for reprimand. Those two brown faces had frowned on everything I had thought or said. It was fine to have them gone forever.

There had been seven of us in two rooms that rainy night in 1915 when I went away to war: Grandfather’s body, Grandmother, the portraits, the photograph of Uncle, Mother and me. Now there were three. Grandfather was with us still in a small frame on the dresser. We had achieved the ultimate in luxury. Mother and I were alone together in our own home. I went off to war again at the end of two days, but this time I had no wish to go. Even before I left I began to look forward to the day of my final return.