I do not remember my father coming home.

The earliest thing I remember about him being back is him being sick in bed. The bedroom itself was nothing exciting, just a king-size bed, a dresser and some chair, and a door out to a large balcony above the garage and the shop below. When I talked with him I usually stood beside the bed, and sometimes I sat by it.

He had a police-type whistle. He used it only when he was too sick to get out of the bed and needed something, since my mother would be in the kitchen or somewhere else in the apartment and would not hear him otherwise. I remember it as loud. When he was sick enough to stay in bed, what I remember is the coughing and the trouble breathing. I remember that he had a half-collapsed lung. I think the lung was from before prison and that it may have gone back to the war or to some illness from before there was penicillin, but I do not know that and I have never established it.

I would come in and tell him what they were teaching us at school, and he would explain to me what he thought was wrong with it, on religion, on politics, on whatever it was. I did not accept what he said just because he was my father. I questioned it, and the discussions could get loud. My mother did not like them because she thought that we were fighting. My father enjoyed them. He was extremely intelligent, and after about an hour of that kind of discussion I could be mentally exhausted.

He also told me that none of it could be repeated outside our apartment, and that I could not use any of it in an argument with a teacher. I understood the danger, and I got very good at keeping what was said at home and what I said outside completely separate.

I do not remember the particular arguments any more.

We listened to the radio together sometimes. We played chess and checkers, and I was playing chess with my father. He always beat me, and I never got better than he was.

I gave him some books to read. He liked Karl May and that kind of adventure story where there was a good hero. I may have talked with him about the books, but I do not remember doing it.

He was strict about school. A B was acceptable, a C was not. A C mainly got me a long lecture and grounding, which meant that I could not go out with my friends, and there was nothing more to it than that. The lectures were very painful, not because of any physical punishment, since there was none, but because of how long they went on and how heavy the discussion got. I do not remember whether I normally argued back during them. When the grades were bad he told me that I would be remembered as a small son of a great father.

We did argue in general. When I tried to argue in a situation where he expected me to obey, or where he considered the matter serious, he could get extremely angry, and that was when he told me that I would cause his death. It was the same father who had told me when I was five that he was not my friend, he was my father.

He often told me that he had gotten all As the whole way through law school, and that he had a photographic memory and could recite the material by the page. What he was telling me was larger than the grades. He said that under the old order he might have been able to leave me enough money that it would not have mattered so much how I did in school, but that after the Communists took over I was going to have to make my own way.

I did not resent the pressure at the time, although it could leave me feeling inadequate. He wanted me to go to university, but he never told me what I should become.

I do not remember him ever telling me directly that he was proud of me. I believe he meant well, even when it did not feel that way.

After prison he was assigned work at Elektročas as a machinist’s helper, for very low pay. His health gradually improved, although he was in the hospital off and on. He never told me that he resented the job. To me he seemed to accept what he had to do.

Several years later the president of the company, who knew what my father’s background was and who needed the planned quota to be shown as met, moved him to work with the financial and statistical books, as a “statistician.” My father explained to me how the quota system worked. His financial knowledge let him set goals that could actually be achieved and keep the books in a way that kept the company out of legal trouble for not meeting its quotas, since presidents of other companies had gotten into legal trouble over quota performance.

My mother’s dressmaking went on the whole time at the same intensity, and while my father’s pay was that low it was an important part of what the household ran on. He never discussed the exact financial situation with me. It was simply clear to me that there was no excess money for toys and for just fun.

My mother was not very affectionate, the way I remember her. She was nice most of the time and once in a while she snapped.

The laundry room downstairs was shared and had to be booked in advance. There were machines, a spinner and a hand tub, and the water was heated by coal. After all of that, the wet laundry still had to be carried up to the attic.

Once a year the parquet floors were done, every inch of them scrubbed and dried and waxed. One time my mother lost control over what a poor job I had done, and she chased me and hit me. That was not how she normally behaved.

When I was small I noticed that Eva and Standa had more than we did. Standa had a toy racing car whose front wheels could actually be steered, and I wanted one desperately and gave my mother a hard time about it. I only understood later what the money situation actually was.

My mother could make women’s clothing for Jana, but she could not make the trousers and the jackets and the shoes that I needed. So Jana could go to the Sunday dances, and there were times when I could not, because a boy needed good trousers, a jacket and shoes. I was embarrassed about it.

At Christmas there were relatively few presents, and we understood that the money was tight.

One of the things my father brought home from the machine shop was a tabletop hockey game. I remember it as almost the size of our dining table, with wooden sides and goals, two large discs and a small puck, and you flicked the puck and the discs with your fingers or with the solid back edge of a hair comb.

Elektročas held a family evening on St. Nicholas Day. St. Nicholas was one of the religious traditions that was not officially sanctioned and that people kept anyway, so the evening was propaganda speeches first, and then they handed out an assortment of chocolate figurines to hang on the Christmas tree.

My mother cooked. Two live carp were kept in the bathtub, and Jana and I played with them, and then my mother killed them and prepared them where we could not see it.

The tree went up on Christmas Eve, with real candles and sparklers on it. First there was singing, then dinner, and then the presents. I believed that Ježíšek brought the tree and the presents until I was about seven or eight, and after that I helped decorate it.

My father had come from an upper-class world from before the Communists, and he looked at the new society as something upside down. He reacted to villagers being bussed to the National Theatre without formal dress, to blue-collar workers heading companies, and to lawyers and doctors and former high officials driving trams and buses. He did not confront strangers about any of it. It came out inside the family.

He objected to Jana going to the Sunday dances, on the older standards about families and boys and propriety and what people would say, and my mother usually smoothed it over. He controlled where I went, who I went with, and when I came back. But he never judged my friends by what class they came from.

Old Mrs. Bureš had rented our first-floor apartment to my father, and that first-floor apartment was the better one in the house. A few years after my father came back from his first imprisonment, her son, Mr. Bureš, wanted to move back to Prague with his wife and their three daughters, one of whom was my age, and he wanted the first-floor apartment for his family. There was an elderly woman living in the ground-floor apartment, the přízemí, who had originally been the Bureš family’s služka, their housekeeper. Mr. Bureš had that ground-floor apartment renovated for us. The elderly woman moved upstairs to live with the Bureš family, and we moved into the renovated apartment downstairs. I do not remember the year. To us it was a downgrade, and there was less space in it, and it had nothing to do with my father’s health.

I still have his whistle.