The Ferrywoman of Prague

About this Story

Prague, 1941. Zdenka Kocourková is thirty-four years old and runs a small passenger ferry across the Vltava, a licence she inherited from her father along with the boat, the oarlocks, and the habit of reading the river by its smell. The Protectorate is a year old. The Germans have left the ferries alone because they consider them beneath notice, and it is for this reason that her parish priest, in a conversation that was not quite a question, begins to send her passengers who carry nothing but their hands in their pockets. This is the quiet story of her first year inside the resistance she did not volunteer for: the faces she learns not to name, the fear that becomes a kind of weather, a cousin in the wrong uniform, a body taken from the water at an hour when no one should be on it, and at last a winter crossing she will remember for the rest of her life. A patient, exact novel about the small moral arithmetic of occupation.

Chapters

1. 1 The Vltava In March
2. 2 A Passenger With No Ticket
3. 3 The Papers Inside The Cap
4. 4 The Night Crossing
5. 5 A Visit From The Priest
6. 6 What The Ferry Company Knew
7. 7 An Unfamiliar Uniform
8. 8 The Second Passenger
9. 9 A Cousin At The Station
10. 10 A River At The Wrong Hour
11. 11 The Crossing That Mattered

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