A Visit From The Priest
He came on a Sunday evening in the middle of June, after vespers, and he climbed the four flights to her flat the way he climbed the steps of the pulpit: one at a time, with a pause on the half-landings, not out of frailty so much as out of a kind of liturgical attention to the act of climbing. She heard him on the stairs before he knocked. She had been expecting someone for several weeks without knowing who.
Her flat was two rooms on the top floor of a building on Anenská, with a window that looked across the roofs toward the river and, on clear mornings, the long pale back of Petřín hill. She had lived there since her father died. The previous tenant had been an elderly widow of her father's acquaintance who had left the furniture, a carved sideboard that was too large for the room, a wedding photograph of strangers that Zdenka had put in a drawer rather than throw away, and a canary whose death the following spring had been the only death in the flat in Zdenka's tenancy, until the war.
Father Vojtěch took off his hat at her door and bowed to her in the formal old way, as though he had not baptised her, as though they had not spoken three afternoons before at the landing.
"Zdeničko. May I sit."
She put the kettle on. She had a small ration of real tea hidden in a tin behind the flour, and she made it for him without asking, because he had never in forty years drunk the