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The story
Newly divorced, Eva moves into a peeling third-floor flat above a Žižkov courtyard and finds, behind a loosened skirting board, a shoebox of love letters from 1963 — beautiful, urgent, and never sent. As she traces the woman who wrote them and the man she was forced to give up, the building gives up its other secret: the carpenter restoring the staircase, who keeps finding reasons to climb to her door. Across sixty years and one set of windows, two women learn the same hard lesson about the cost of caution — and Eva must decide whether the past is a warning or a permission. A luminous, tender novel about second chances and the letters we never dare to send.
Two editions, free — read it in English (The Unsent Letters) or Czech (Neodeslané dopisy). Choose your language with the download buttons above, or read the whole book in your browser by downloading the EPUB.
Read the opening — Chapter One, free
The boxes arrived in two taxi runs and one borrowed Škoda. Eva had refused to hire a van. Hiring a van meant admitting she owned enough to need one, and she had spent eight months proving to herself that she did not.
By three the Škoda’s owner — her colleague Petra — had kissed her on both cheeks, pressed a bottle of Moravian wine into her hands (“for the first night, Eva, not the first hour, I’m watching you”), and driven off. The wine went on the kitchen windowsill. Eva stood in the middle of the main room and looked at the boxes ranged against the wall with the neat hostility of a small occupying force.
The flat was on the third floor of a building that had been elegant in 1908 and declined since the way certain people manage to — keeping, if not beauty, then a structural dignity. The ceilings were three and a half metres; the plaster mouldings had been painted over so often they’d gone soft at the edges. The floors were wide-planked, the varnish walked off them in the traffic paths, the bare wood pale as old linen. The windows, double-cased, gave onto the courtyard, and the courtyard, four storeys down, held a chestnut the colour of tarnished copper in the October light.
She went to the window the way a person presses a bruise: to learn its dimensions.
The tree was enormous. It had no business growing that large in a yard so small, and yet there it stood, crowding upward, its highest branches nearly level with her sill. At this hour of a Tuesday the light came flat and silver off the opposite gallery, finding the last leaves. Below, a watchmaker’s shop held one corner, its sign hand-lettered in a face she dated privately to around 1978. Across the way, fresh scaffolding shrouded what the landlord had called a hairdresser and was plainly becoming a wine bar — the sort with an unpronounceable name that would charge two hundred crowns for a glass of Welschriesling. Between them: bicycles chained to a downpipe, a recycling bin with its lid propped on a brick, and a cat she did not yet know.
She watched the cat cross the cobbles with enormous deliberate dignity. Then she turned back to the boxes.
She had her order. Linen first, because sleep mattered. Kitchen things next, because coffee in the morning mattered. Then the work materials — the linen thread, the loupe, the pH pens, the conservation tissue — because she was someone who worked, and it mattered to look like that person even in a flat furnished with one rented bed and one rented table. Books she left for last. Books could wait; they were patient.
Tomáš had said that of her once. You’re patient. He’d meant it kindly, and she’d taken it kindly, and only now, eight months on, was she starting to understand it had been a diagnosis.
The trouble was the draught.
It came off the long wall of the main room, from the skirting under the window, a cold thread of October she met each time she passed. She had already shifted a box twice rather than face it. On the third pass she laid her palms flat to the boards, feeling for the gap, and found that one length — forty centimetres, dark with old paint — wasn’t merely gapped but stood a few millimetres proud of the plaster, bowed outward the way wood goes when it has breathed damp a long time.
She went for her toolkit. What she found first was the wine.
The bottle was still on the sill. She looked at it. The light had dropped, gone amber, and for a moment the flat looked, if not warm, then possible.
The toolkit was in the second box she opened.
The chisel — she used it on stretcher bars, near enough — went behind the skirting easily. The wood gave with no drama at all. This was the undignified truth of old buildings: they didn’t resist intervention so much as crumble, or flex, or come away in your hands in a small cloud of plaster dust and a smell of something older underneath — lime, coal, the kept breath of a hundred years.
The shoebox sat in the cavity between the skirting and the outer wall as though it had been put there on purpose. Because it had.
Eva sat back on her heels.
A shoebox from — she tilted to read the faded print — Baťa, which put it at fifty years old, more. It was tied with what had once been twine and was now a perished, brittle thing that surrendered the moment she tried to ease it without truly easing it. Under the lid: a small resistance, then air. The smell that rose was not unpleasant. Old paper, old dust, and a faint sweetness, from the years when cheap soap still had that.
Letters. A bundle of them, a few loose sheets, and one envelope — the only envelope — creased and refolded, its flap tucked rather than sealed.
She didn’t open them at once. She was a conservator; she knew the discipline, which was to sit a moment and breathe and look at what she had without touching it, because the first thing you learn is that you can’t un-touch a thing — you can only be careful before, and diligent after.
The top sheet was fountain pen, a clean controlled cursive from the era when handwriting was still taught as a skill and quietly prized. She could read it from where she knelt without lifting it: J. — only that, the single initial in the upper right, standing in for a whole name.
She picked it up.
What she read, crouched on cold lino in a flat she had lived in for three hours, the October light failing and a strange cat moving across the cobbles below, was a letter that began in the middle of a thought:
—and I have been trying to find the correct word for the thing that happens between us when we are in the same room, which is precisely the thing I cannot put in a letter, and yet here I am putting it into a letter you will never read, which makes the whole problem rather elegant.
The chestnut was throwing down its leaves again this morning. You can’t see it from your window — you are round the corner and two floors too high — so I will describe it for you: reckless. The tree is entirely reckless about its own dying. Each time the wind comes off the hill it lets go another armload onto the cobbles and does not appear to mind in the slightest. I have begun to envy the chestnut. Envy is the wrong word. I have begun to study it, the way one studies a discipline one means, eventually, to practise.
Your name I will not write, which you know, and which I have stopped resenting. Or am in the process of stopping. Let me say instead: J., who understands the load-bearing properties of things; J., who stood on the seventh stair and wrote something in a small green notebook; J., who told me once — only once, in passing, as though it were not the single important thing he had ever said — that a building does not want to fall, it is only prevented from standing.
I am trying, at present, to be a building.
I can’t tell you here what I mean by that, because here is also nowhere; these pages do not exist; you are not reading them. But if you were — if there were a version of this letter that could cross the courtyard and climb the stairs to wherever you are in the evenings, which there is not —
I would tell you that I think about the way you—
The page ended there.
Eva turned it over. Blank. She went through the rest quickly enough to confirm they were all letters — a dozen, perhaps fifteen sheets — all in the same hand, all addressed the same way, to J., the whole of his name as far as these pages allowed. No return address. No date on the first sheet; on the second, a month and a year struck at the top in a different hand, and she recognised, with a specialist’s small pleasure, the strike pattern of one particular typewriter. An annotation, then, added later — by whoever had found them. Or by the writer herself. 1963 sat right with the paper weight, the faded ink, the Baťa box, the cut of the cursive, the coal smell beneath it all.
Nineteen sixty-three.
She was still crouched. Her knees had stopped reporting in some time ago and were now simply legislating for her bones. She sat down, her back to the wall under the window, and held the fragment in both hands, her training keeping them level even though something in her chest had given up on being careful.
J., who stood on the seventh stair and wrote something in a small green notebook.
She turned it over in her mind. A staircase. An engineer, or an inspector — someone who noted the seventh stair. She was in the building where it had happened. Below her, somewhere in the dark vertical well she had climbed three times that afternoon with boxes, was the seventh stair.
She looked out. The chestnut was still there. The light was nearly gone.
The tree is entirely reckless about its own dying.
The writer had looked at this tree. Had sat, presumably, at this window — in this room, which had perhaps not always been a room you sat idle in — and watched it shed, and set that sentence down in a careful hand to a man called J., whose full name she’d decided she could not commit to paper. And then, because she had never sent any of them, she had sealed the whole problem into a Baťa box and pushed it in behind the skirting, beneath the only window from which you could see the chestnut at all.
Eva considered this the way you consider a door left slightly open.
Then she considered how the writer had known the letter would never be intercepted: because she had never sent it. She had sat here and written to a man whose name she would not write, and done it — presumably — for the reason people do anything unreasonable: because she needed to, because the alternative was worse, because saying a thing into silence is less unbearable than leaving it wholly unsaid.
Eva set the page on the lino beside the box. She pressed her palms flat to her thighs. She was aware that she was in a strange flat, on a floor that smelled of coal and old varnish, the last daylight going, Petra’s wine still corked on the sill — and that she had begun, without deciding to, to cry. Which she had not done in the three hundred-odd days since she’d signed the papers that made official what had been unofficial considerably longer.
She had not cried about any of it. Not the flat on Wenzlova they had divided without a fight, because they were both people who did not fight, which had been the whole trouble in one clause. Not the spare room that had stayed a topic carefully never raised, a grief they had both preferred to keep at the altitude of wistfulness. Not eight months of her own competence, of being perfectly all right, of being — Petra’s word, kindly meant — resilient.
She was crying now over a woman she did not know, whose name she had only as a single initial, M., glimpsed on the second sheet without meaning to keep it; who had loved a man called J. in 1963, and not sent him the letters, and walled them up under the window, and been dead, in all likelihood, for years.
It was, Eva thought, the most efficient grief she’d had in a while.
She washed her face at the kitchen tap — the bathroom ran hot but slow, and she hadn’t that kind of patience tonight — opened Petra’s wine, poured it into a mug because the glasses were in a box she hadn’t found, and stood at the dark window watching the lit panes on the opposite gallery.
The courtyard was empty but for the cat, arranged now on the lid of the recycling bin like a figure set on a plinth.
The seventh stair. A green notebook. The load-bearing properties of things. The wine was fine; she would tell Petra it was excellent.
She took up the first letter again and read it through twice more, slowly, with a conservator’s attention: checking the raking light for pencil beneath the ink, the fold lines for any text gone into the crease, and — she couldn’t help it — for the word that came after the way you—, which wasn’t there, was never going to be there, which was precisely the point.
She folded it along its own creases and laid it back on the others.
Out on the street beyond the courtyard a tram went by, and its bell carried in through the glass, two light notes, unhurried. The chestnut shifted in the dark, and one last leaf, late to it, let go.
Eva thought: I will find out who you are.
She didn’t say it aloud. She didn’t need to. The flat was quiet and the box was open and the letters were there, and she had already — she understood it only now, on the cold floor of a flat she had rented to hide in — stopped hiding.
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