Brother Kodet would have been only too glad to stand in for him. If he had asked his friend Martin Hajek or his wife, one of them would have preached in his place. There is less than an hour until the plane lands, so he dashes off to the airport. He left it until last week, when his mother's condition suddenly took a turn for the worse, to call his sister in America. He put off breaking the bad news to her for too long and now he reproaches himself that Rut might not see her mother compos mentis.
Rut lives out in Oregon and they have seen each other just twice in the past twenty-five years.
Until recently, they were only able to write about the most banal things, so they preferred not to write at all. But for years Rut used to send him a thousand dollars every Christmas, which amounted to more than his entire annual salary. Last year she even invited him to Oregon. Rut was born two years before the beginning of the Second World War, while he arrived two years before its end. His sister could still remember air raids and their father's first arrest, whereas he is not sure he remembers his father's first release.