I met Jana Kolembářová while I was still at AŽD. Pepa had arranged a small party with two girls. Jana was supposed to be part of that evening, but instead of becoming interested in Pepa, she became interested in me.

That was the beginning of our relationship.

My father was still in prison during the early part of it. At home my mother was under enormous strain, and my relationship with Jana eventually became another source of conflict between us.

One night I came home from a date with Jana after midnight. My mother objected strongly. I was old enough by then that I was not willing to have her determine when I could come home, and the argument ended with me moving out.

I do not remember enough now to reconstruct every detail of what happened with the keys, and I do not want to invent it. What I do remember is my mother coming to me afterward and begging me to return home. She told me that if my father found out I had left while he was in prison, it would kill him.

We reached some kind of agreement about the limits of what she could demand of me, and I came home.

Jana and I stayed together when I entered the army.

The relationship became serious enough that at one point I went AWOL because of her. Later, while I was still serving, Jana became pregnant.

She did not have the baby.

For twenty-seven years I believed I knew what had happened behind my back. I believed that my mother Marie and my sister Jana had intervened on behalf of my father and persuaded Jana Kolembářová to have an abortion. That was the explanation I carried with me. The relationship did not survive. Jana and I broke up before I finished my army service.

There is one small trace of this already in another story. In 1964, when Kudibal and Věra unexpectedly came to see me in Tábor, I assumed at first that they had come because of my girlfriend’s pregnancy.

Then twenty-seven years passed.

In 1991 I was back in Prague with Kotva. I decided to see whether I could find Jana.

I went to the house in Hanspaulka where she had lived and rang the bell at her old apartment. There was a different surname on it by then, and I had no idea who would answer.

A woman came to the door. It turned out that she was the daughter of Jana’s sister. She now lived there with her own family. Jana’s mother and sister were no longer there.

I explained who I was.

She telephoned Jana.

Then she handed me the telephone.

After twenty-seven years, suddenly I was talking to Jana Kolembářová again.

And almost immediately she told me something I had never known.

She said that she had just read a letter my father had written to her all those years before, asking her not to have our baby.

That stunned me.

Until that moment I had believed that my mother and sister had acted for him. Now Jana was telling me that there had been a letter from my father himself.

I have never seen that letter. I do not know whether it still exists. I also do not actually know how it reached Jana. I have assumed that my sister may have delivered it, but that is an inference. I also cannot now say with certainty what part, if any, my mother played. The one thing I know directly is what Jana told me on the telephone in 1991: she said there was a letter from my father asking her not to have the baby.

Jana gave me her telephone number.

A few days later I called her again from Kotva’s apartment, and we began filling in some of the twenty-seven missing years.

She told me that she had married a man in Switzerland. She had not liked living there. She felt that her husband had treated her almost as a trophy wife, and eventually they divorced.

She returned to Prague and later married a doctor. They had a son who was about two years old when we spoke. As I understood it, he was her first child.

We talked about meeting.

For a little while it seemed that we actually would.

But after roughly two telephone calls, Jana changed her mind and cancelled.

In our last conversation she asked how I was doing. I said something about having gone through some hard times.

She did not have much sympathy for that.

She told me that she had stayed in Communist Czechoslovakia while I had lived in America, and that I had no idea what it meant to have a hard time.

That was the last time I spoke with her.

I had written her married name and telephone number in the small notebook I always carried in the breast pocket of my leather jacket.

Later during that Prague trip I went to an expensive restaurant in Dejvice with my cousin Dominika. It was the kind of place where you left your coat with an attendant and the entrance was controlled.

When dinner was over, my leather jacket was gone.

A woman’s fur coat had disappeared too.

I was told afterward who had apparently come into the restaurant and taken them, but I had not seen it happen myself.

My little notebook was in the jacket.

So Jana’s married name and telephone number disappeared with it.

As the years passed I forgot the name and the number.

Much later I asked Honza, Dominika’s son, if he could investigate the old Hanspaulka building and see whether anyone there still knew where Jana or her family had gone. He told me that nobody there knew them anymore. I was never completely certain how thoroughly he had been able to investigate it.

I never found Jana again.

What stayed with me was not only that I had found her once and lost her again.

For twenty-seven years I had believed one version of what happened when she became pregnant. Then, standing in a hallway in Hanspaulka in 1991, a woman I had never met handed me a telephone.

Within minutes, something I had believed since I was twenty-one years old changed.

My father had been dead for twenty-six years by then.

I could no longer ask him whether he had written the letter, what exactly he had said, or why.

And I never saw the letter myself.

All I have is what Jana told me that day.