THE TWENTY-SECOND
‘Just imagine, Madame Doctor, what happened, right outside our front door…’ Mrs Tomská calls to mind the squat little building in the village on the pilgrimage route in Silesia; she sees the church with its rounded tower, the little park, the fire hall, the inn and the beautiful buildings with their burgeoning gardens. It was this village that, some twenty-five years ago, Marie Sněhová left on the bus for her first job in the offices of the Klement Gottwald metalworks, armed with her knowledge of German, which everybody up there in Silesia knows from childhood, and French, which the good parish priest taught her in the free hours after all the Masses had been said. He taught her so well that she passed the state exams at the language school in Ostrava and could boldly fi
