SPRING was fitful about making its debut in New York that year. Cold winds blew down the Hudson and across Central Park and through city canyons, churning up dust and papers and the smell of the subways that came through gratings on sidewalks. Some days the wind would haul to the east and then the rain would come down, not in sudden storms, but as though it meant to go on forever. The frantic screech of doormen’s whistles tore through the monotonous beat of water on windowpanes and umbrellas and bus tops. But one day in April the sun shone clean through washed air and after that the face of the city smiled. Bulbs burst into bloom in beds around the Plaza, men swept old leaves out of the fountain, roller skates ground on pavements, and there were chalk marks of hopscotch games in the middle of side streets. In place of the rink at Rockefeller Center there were colored umbrellas, and more doors of more old houses on streets that ended in the East River were painted vermilion or emerald or wedgwood blue.

These were the days when I walked from one end of Manhattan to the other. Sometimes the walks were aimless, sometimes I set myself a specified area to dissect. One day Milada and I found our way to the Bowery and on to Hester Street and Mott and Mulberry and Park Row. We had been reading more American books and we wanted to see for ourselves. Usually I walked alone. Had I been able to find an equivalent of our European coffeehouses I should probably have sat in one day after day, reading papers and watching other men go about their business. But their counterpart in America is the corner drugstore, those centers of Yankee culture in which advertisers must surely all be born. And drugstores I hated. I could never decide whether they were at the root of American culture or whether they were an outgrowth of it.

The kind of shock we had experienced leaves its mark for more than a day. Because at first I had thought only in terms of the tragedy of my country, the reaction was doubly severe when I began to realize that ten years of the hardest work I ever expected to do had been smashed to bits and swept away. Not a single splinter was left. In such a situation, one can either find enough belief and strength to start again, or one cannot. As I walked the streets of New York that spring I decided that I had the strength, but no belief. There was no sense in building up my small world again if not only I, but millions of human beings could be ruined by a few signatures on a piece of paper. To me, the agreement of Munich was not an isolated act but a symbol of the steady process of betrayal of everything that a sane man could believe. Yet the rest of the world seemed to mind very little what had happened at Munich. In such a world, what could I trust?

As children, most of us have been taught to look upon the ant as an example of persistence and diligence. We know that whenever an anthill is destroyed the ants will set about instantly to carry their eggs to safety and then they will rebuild their hill exactly as it was before the accident. Once upon a time I had believed in the validity of such instinctive work, but now I revolted against the ant principle. I knew that the fiends who had destroyed all honest work in my country would kick over more anthills until nothing but complete destruction lay about them in every direction.

And yet a man cannot go on living if he believes in nothing. My problem was to find a substitute for the old principles I had once considered infallible. I felt that I must talk to others who were able to realize what we were going through, whose experiences were similar to our own. There were a growing number of refugees in New York. I knew only a few of them by name, but I determined to hunt them out and talk to as many as I could. New York is essentially a city of villages, each one self-contained and self-satisfied, so it was not difficult to find these new guests of America. I went from one to another, asking questions and listening to answers. What were we going to do now? My questions played back and forth over the theme in an attempt to get at the root of our common problems, but the answers were all the same.

I discovered that there are two kinds of refugees in New York. One kind is wealthy, even by American standards, and the other kind is not. In Central Europe, in the days before 1939, there were strict laws in every country which aimed at preventing the flow of money beyond national borders. To find rich refugees in New York could mean only that they were people who had found ways of circumventing the laws of their own land. It must also mean that they were men who had felt a long time ago that Europe was unsafe. So in those days when I had been completely absorbed in my work, happy in a conviction that my country would always be my country, these people had been suspicious. While I was building up they had already begun to tear down.

And now they talked of nothing but their plans for making more money in America. Because they seemed to take it for granted that I was still the man of position they had known in Prague, they tried to interest me in their grandiose schemes. They were all attempting to sneak into an enterprise that someone else had made a good thing, determined to put their money to work while they continued undisturbed in their social life on Park Avenue. Even the sighs they gave for their lost countries and for the people who were dying on the other side contained too many references to beautiful homes, wonderful furniture, carpets and paintings and cars.

A second group of refugees shared the same ideas but had insufficient means to enable them to talk of huge enterprises. These were the ones who nearly always spoke of opening a restaurant. If their ideas were more circumspect, they settled for a pastry shop. Because of their sentimental attachment for the smell and taste of familiar cooking which they missed in America, and also because they were naturally drawn toward some kind of work which they thought would bring them easy money without demanding too much hard work, day and night they discussed the possibilities of selling food. But it nearly always developed that they knew nothing whatever about baking or cooking good food. Their minds were not filled with visions of themselves standing over a hot stove, but sitting behind a cash register listening to it ring as it took in the dollars.

A third group of refugees were those who came out of Europe with nothing but the clothes on their backs, most of them unable to buy as much as a cup of coffee when they landed in New York. They were the ones with ample ant intelligence, plus admirable energy and will, to enable them to find a new place for themselves where they could dig their own little trenches out toward the sun. Their spirits were high because for most of them this was the first setback of their lives. They congregated far from Park Avenue, on the upper West Side, and they could be seen at any hour of the day walking up and down Riverside Drive, talking together and making their plans.

I respected these latter people and in part I understood how they felt, but I could no more fit in with their plans than I could with those of the wealthy refugees. I could admire them and at the same time be sorry for them, but I was in no mood to join them. They were happy enough to be ants in the new world, but I refused to become an ant again because I had already gone through too much ant work. What was happening in Europe appeared to me to be part of an epoch which would last too long for any of us to reach the sun beyond it.

Still one more group of refugees were those who had been sent for by members of their families who had already become established in the United States, perhaps for several generations. As soon as these refugees arrived they were absorbed into American life. No one thought of them as refugees for long.

If there was no place for us in any of these groups, then where did we fit? I didn’t know. I stopped seeing the refugees, though some of them we counted as friends, and began to walk alone again. For awhile I haunted the movie theaters. Day after day I went to them, as though to a drug. For an hour or so they allowed me to escape from myself, but when I came out into the daylight the hangover was bad. I stood for many hours in front of the show windows on Fifth Avenue that were filled with beautiful glass, until I was afraid of being observed and asked to move on. So I walked up and down Fifth Avenue and looked at women who were exotic and tantalizing and sometimes really lovely. Invariably I ended at the spot I liked best in the city, where I could let my head go back and my gaze flow upward until I found the topmost ledge of the R.C.A. Building. With its great upsweep, soaring straight above everything roundabout, it tempted me like a devil, beckoning me to try once more to climb high with it, over Fifth Avenue, over New York, over this whole new world.

Again and again I went back to it, but every time I turned away. I no longer believed America’s slogans. Today a newsboy, tomorrow a president. Get a job washing dishes at Schrafft’s and hope to become a manager overnight. They were not applicable to me. I was forty-two years old, not a boy. But I had nothing better to substitute. Somewhere I must find a new set of beliefs, to show me a new way of life.

It was toward the end of April that I retreated into Central Park. I walked over every inch of its winding paths. I tried the benches one by one. I watched other lonely men find solace in feeding fat pigeons, but I was never able to follow their example nor to spend any time looking at animals behind bars in the zoo. When the fruit trees blossomed and the turf grew heavy I spent hours lying on the grass, and there finally some new ideas began to swim into my mind.

Why did I like more than anything else to lie on the ground, I who had always lived in a city and had within me the traditional respect of a European for the lawns of his country? It was a new conception of freedom, this first opportunity I had ever known of letting my body find contact with grass and earth, even if this turf was mixed with cigarette stubs and chewing-gum wrappers. It comforted me as nothing else had done in the city, in spite of the fact that all about me were the façades of buildings like staring faces, some beautiful, most of them ugly. Every morning now I left Milada to find her own solace in work with her hands: mending, cooking, sewing, cleaning. I envied her, but I couldn’t share her work. It was her chosen way of keeping her mind from worries, and there was only a limited amount of it to be done. So I went to the park. And day by day I began to piece together a new philosophy.

It was like a mosaic. Whenever I found one colored tile of an idea I had to look for a counter color, and that made me see still more pieces. Thoughts followed thoughts, and the ones that matched each other I held onto, until I could find still more that would fit the pattern. What had seemed ugly one day became less ugly another day when my mind hunted for reasons and found them. Condemnation became tempered by wiser judgment. Sometimes I struck what seemed to be a dead end in my mental wanderings, and I had to go back and start over again. But day by day I felt that I was advancing, gradually finding my way to conclusions, noticing a true pattern emerge as the pieces were put together.

Each night when I got home I recapitulated my thoughts for Milada, asking her if I was right or wrong. And I found that she was reaching her own conclusions, just as I was. She not only agreed with me, she pushed me forward a little, urging me to go on to find more pieces, encouraging me not to stop until I brought dreams into the focus of reality.

Slowly I found my way out of business-bred reasoning into extreme sentimentality. And then back from sentiment to logic. One warm day when the trees made heavy shadows against the sun my mind kept repeating “grass and earth . . . grass and earth . . . relaxation and meditation.” What did it mean? On this hard and dirty ground I had found the first chance in my life to think my own thoughts through. I could never have done it in a club chair, nor even in a coffeehouse. I said to myself, if we could get out of New York, back somewhere into this huge country, away from all these people, all this crazy ant activity which was only trying to seduce me into a repetition of the same foolish behavior that would lead nowhere . . . if this park had served for so many weeks as my only refuge among seven million people, what would a truly quiet, green place do for us? Running water that would fall over clean stones, wildflowers blowing in the wind, silence and seclusion away from all human foolishness?

“Where is my home? Where is my home?” The words of our anthem had a sharp new meaning for me. “Brooks are running through the meadows . . . orchards dressed in spring’s array . . .”

I got to my feet. I had found an answer. Out of the tragedy of catastrophic failure, of broken castles in the air, out of a completely meaningless future had emerged a promise of happiness. Now I could do what once as a boy I had longed to do; I could be a farmer or a planter in a country across the sea. Nobody could stop me now . . . no uncle, no board of directors, no customers, no employees, no fights for higher income and titles. No longer would I have to bow before Indian princes, remember protocol and diplomacy. If America was the country of unlimited opportunities, I could interpret the words quite differently from the way the people who lived in the buildings that looked down on me were probably thinking of them. I wanted no opportunity to become a slave to money. If America was the country of unlimited opportunity, it would let me do what I liked.

I could hardly wait to get home to talk to Milada. When I burst into our two rooms and managed to tell her what I had discovered in the park, she said, “Of course, dear. It’s the only solution for us. In the deepest unhappiness there is always some happiness to be squeezed out. Let’s take the few dollars we have and buy a small secondhand car. Let’s get rid of everything we’ve brought except what we can pack and take with us, and drive out of New York toward the rest of America. No program, no plan, no timetable, no frontiers, no passport regulations, no customs houses, no prejudices of language. We can stop wherever we like, and then one day out there in the country we can find a place to stay and decide what to do next.”

It is a miracle that Milada has never been an ambitious woman. Otherwise we might have landed on Park Avenue after all.