When I came back to Prague after my father had been arrested, the apartment itself was still there, but the life around it had changed. The family businesses and the car were gone. My mother sold what could still be sold. My uncle Antonín Valach liquidated his art gallery and gave my mother the money to help her get through that period.

My mother’s dressmaking moved into the apartment. The sewing machine was in the dining room and the dining table was used for cutting cloth. There was a three-way mirror in the living room for fittings. The two sofas were the beds for Jana and me. Before my father’s arrest my mother’s salon had been a real business with employees. Now she was working out of our home, making one-of-a-kind dresses for women who had been her customers before.

Everyone in the apartment house seemed to know that my father was in prison. Nobody talked to me about it, and among the children it did not seem to create any social difference. We were simply the children who lived in the same building and played together.

The Catholic elementary school on náměstí Míru was closed. Jana was going to the public school on our street, about half a block from our apartment, and in September 1949 I started there in first grade.

What I remember being taught there was that capitalism was evil, and that a revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat were necessary before we could have socialism and eventually communism, which was presented to us as the ideal system. The enemies were the bureaucrats of the former ruling parties, the former capitalists, and the owners of large farms, the kulaks.

We were taught about the heroes of the Soviet Union. The ones I still remember are Pavlik Morozov, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and Alexei Maresyev. As I remember it, the war heroes we were given all came from the Eastern Front, where the Soviet Union was fighting Germany, and not from the Western Front.

Jana and I asked our mother about the things we were being taught. She told us what she thought, and she told us that we could never repeat any of it at school or talk about it with our friends.

We were taught that religion was the opiate of the masses. The explanation was that religion kept poor working people from complaining and kept them working for the rich capitalists. We were taught Darwin and evolution, against the Catholic beliefs I had grown up with.

Zdeněk was a good friend of mine, although he was not one of the children from our apartment house. He was an atheist. At one point the children were more or less divided between the Catholics and the ones who accepted Darwin and evolution. Walking home from school his side called us Jesuses and we called them apes. Then we forgot about it and went back to being friends and playing.

Eva’s mother later divorced and married Ing. Jan Čemus. He became important to me in a different way. He had books, and he taught me chess. I already knew how to play with my father, but my father could never bring himself to let me win. Playing with Čemus was more enjoyable, and he developed my interest in the game.

I read anything adventurous I could get. Karl May and Old Shatterhand were favorites, and so were The Three Musketeers and western stories. Some books circulated unofficially from person to person.

There was also a low attic space above the corridor. We reached it with a ladder through a little door above the bathroom door. Zdeněk and I treated it almost like a tree house. There were piles of old Rodokapsy up there, cheap adventure and western booklets, and to us they were treasure.

The attic was connected with the Bureš part of the house. What struck me only much later was that the secret-police searches of our apartment never found that space. As an adult I realized that, theoretically, my father could have hidden almost anything there, even guns. I have no reason to think he actually did. It was simply one of those things that became obvious to me decades later.

We had to join the Pioneers, the Communist organization for young children. We wore a red bandana and a white shirt. Only much later did I understand that in some ways it was similar to organizations like the Scouts or Sokol. My memory of it is not all bad. Along with everything else they taught us some things worth knowing, like helping people who needed it, and helping older people carry something or get across the street.

Somehow old Mrs. Bureš was able to keep the apartment house and its grounds private. Only the children who lived in the house could play in the backyard, and the friends we picked ourselves. I remember one person whose job was keeping up the building and another one who took care of the grounds full time.

Only recently I learned that Mrs. Bureš’s husband, or maybe her grandfather, had been a well-known builder in Prague, and I had the impression that somehow people had covered for her so that she could keep the property. That is only my impression and I do not know how it actually worked.

The regular group of us was Eva, Standa, Kája and Kája’s sister, whose name I no longer remember. We played together all the time.

The backyard was huge. There was one large shed for tools and gardening equipment, and another large shed that I remember as looking something like a beehive. After several years that second shed became the working shop of our neighbor Mr. Doležal, who was an upholsterer.

There was a large waterfall that ran down into a small pond. At the top of the waterfall there was a large altánek, a glass sitting house or tea house, and from up there you had a wonderful view over part of Prague. It stood above the railway tunnel where the trains came out on their way from the main railway station.

There was a large greenhouse where vegetables and other plants were started from seedlings.

And there were three small forest-like areas where, as a child, you could actually get lost.

That was where we played cowboys and Indians, and hide-and-seek. In the winter we made a sledding run that I remember as almost a kilometer long.

When I came back to Prague for the first time in 1991 I went to look at it. The grounds were not what I remembered from when I was a child. Only one of the structures was still standing, and I do not remember which one it was. There were two lions made of stone or cement, broken into pieces on the ground.

Whatever was going on around us, in that backyard we could forget about it and just be children.