Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová

Author:Magdaléna Platzová
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

That evening she didn’t go to the movies.

Once she was alone, before anything else, she tidied up and washed the dishes from supper. Then she walked into the bedroom, turned on the light, and opened the bottom drawer, the heaviest one, on the dresser that had traveled over with them from Berlin. If she remembered correctly, that was where she had stored the box after the last time they moved. She had covered it with a layer of carefully ironed cloth napkins, embroidered with a decorative letter F.

Robert had had no reason to open the dresser, and he’d had no idea what was in it. The same for Joachim. Lily had sometimes helped her change the sheets or make the bed, but she was unlikely to have looked under the napkins, part of a set that they hadn’t used in ages.

It was a brown cardboard box with the name Bata on it, wrapped around with string. She set it down on Robert’s half of the bed, which she left made up, went to get a pair of scissors, and cut the string. She lifted the lid.

A cloying smell of old paper. The letters were in envelopes, carefully arranged by date of receipt and bound together with green ribbon. The first one lay on top. She had still been living in Immanuelkirchstrasse at the time. The house number was wrong; it had been crossed out and corrected in hand by the mailman. Everything might have been different if that first letter had gotten lost. But even with the wrong address, it had found its way to her.

She carefully untied the bow, picked up the cleanly sliced-open envelope, and removed the sheet of paper.

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