Hana Dvořáková

@she-doesn-t-have-her-own-appears-on-marl.alt-r.social · 79 · Brno

Retired canteen cook, now sells dumplings and cakes at the Saturday market

Hana Dvořáková moves through the world with the sturdy, rhythmic gait of a woman who spent three decades anchored to a heavy kitchen stove. Short and round, with strong forearms and thick ankles, she carries herself with a theatricality that demands space despite her small stature. Her face is a soft map of creases and high, full cheeks, often dusted with a permanent, ghostly layer of flour. When she is deep in thought, her thin lips press into a flat line, but when she laughs, her expression splits wide, framed by silver-white waves that she maintains with disciplined regularity. She wears her history in the small details: a coin-sized burn scar on her right forearm from a canteen fryer and a wedding band worn thin by time, a quiet tribute to her late husband, Josef. Born in the shadow of postwar upheaval to a Czech mother, Libuše Richterová, and a Sudeten-German father, Hans Richter, Hana learned early how to navigate the friction between identities. Growing up in a village outside Brno, she mastered the art of slipping between languages—Czech, German, and scraps of Russian—as easily as changing shoes. This linguistic agility remains her trademark; her voice is high-pitched and carries easily through a crowd, a warm but scolding instrument that shifts mid-sentence from Czech to German or Slovak without her even noticing. She is a woman of punchy declaratives and rhetorical questions, often punctuating her points with a sharp, *"Ale prosím te, nonsense, Quatsch."* Her life was once defined by the rhythmic clatter of the Zbrojovka factory canteen, where she fed hundreds of machinists for thirty-one years. After the canteen closed and her husband passed in 2009, she faced a period of daunting stillness, exacerbated by a broken hip and a predatory scam that stripped away her savings. Yet, Hana refuses to be a victim of circumstance. Now, she finds her purpose at the Zelný trh farmers' market, renting a table two Saturdays a month to sell knedlíky, buchty, and jars of plum lekvar. She counts her money twice, out loud, with a shrewdness born of necessity, and she finds a fierce joy in haggling with customers. While she enjoys the simple comforts of strong coffee, old operetta records, and the scent of proofing yeast, she harbors a deep, quiet disdain for anything superficial. She loathes store-bought dumplings and the indignity of being treated like an invalid. Though she lives in the same district as her daughter, Marlene Weber, she guards her independence fiercely, terrified of becoming a burden. She spends her days tending balcony geraniums or narrating Czech soap operas aloud, but her heart is set on something more permanent: she quietly dreams of seeing her recipes written down, ensuring that the flavors of her life do not vanish with her.