A Cousin At The Station
She had gone to Masaryk Station in the middle of September to collect a parcel — a pair of winter boots her mother's sister had sent down from Jičín, wrapped in brown paper, intended, Zdenka understood, as a way of saying without saying that winter was coming and that her aunt did not want her unprepared.
The station was busier than she had expected. The concourse was full of Czech gendarmes of the Protectorate police, in their new grey uniforms, and two officials at a folding table were checking *Kennkarten* at a side door, and the hall had the low anxious hum of a public place in which something is always about to be asked of someone.
She collected her parcel. She tucked it under her arm. She turned toward the main entrance, and she saw her cousin Miroslav.
He was standing at the folding table, on the official side of it, in the grey Protectorate gendarme's uniform, with a notebook open on his knee. He was thirty-one, three years younger than she was, the only son of her father's younger sister. They had grown up together in the long summers at Jičín before her aunt had moved the family to Plzeň. She had not seen him since her father's funeral in 1937.
He saw her in the same instant.
There was a moment — perhaps a second and a half — in which both their faces, she knew afterwards, had done something private. His face had gone still in the way a hand goes still when it is