Every high school held a formal ball in the winter of the last year, and mine was no different. Ours was at the Municipal House, near the Powder Tower. There were three ballrooms — two of them had proper big-band orchestras, and a smaller room had a student orchestra playing Dixieland-style jazz. Students from other schools came too; we sold tickets to friends of ours who went to other schools around Prague.

Everyone was required to bring an adult chaperone. My mother was there. My sister Jana came with Zdeněk. My father did not come.

You were expected to dress properly. I wore a tuxedo — a “smoking,” we called it — that had belonged to my cousin Tona. My friend Vašek’s father was a tailor, and my mother paid him to alter it so it would fit me. I had shiny formal shoes to go with it.

My mother was a wonderful dancer. She could dance almost anything, but the čardáš especially. She also knew the Charleston, and she had taught it to Jana and me some time before, though not specifically to get us ready for the ball.

I did not have a date. I danced with different girls.

The Charleston turned out to be the part of the evening everybody remembered. I danced it in a group, not alone and not with any one girl in particular. The ushers thought the Charleston was too wild, too Western, especially so close to the room where the jazz orchestra was playing, and they kept trying to break us up and move us along. We would go out one door and come back in through another. Eventually they gave up trying.

The following summer, not long before the Maturita, our year had a formal dinner at Nebozízek, the restaurant partway up Petřín. It was a very nice dinner. This was not just my own class — all four parallel classes, A through D, were there together. I was in A. Eva Muzikova, who was in C, was there too.

There were no parents this time, but some of the teachers came — I think it was mostly just the homeroom teacher from each class, though I could not swear to that. I drank šroubovák.

After dinner broke up, everybody scattered into smaller groups. I do not know where Eva went, or most of the others. My own group included Bohouš and Vašek for certain, along with a few other boys and some girls whose names I no longer have. We worked our way through Malá Strana from one place to the next — I could not tell you all of them anymore. The fanciest one was U Mecenáše.

We ended up at Kampa. By then we were drunk and just wandering. I do not really know why we ended up there specifically — I suppose the rowboats must have looked like a good place to sit down, but that is only a guess I make now, not something I actually remember thinking at the time. There were about three big rowboats tied up along the bank. We sat around on them, talked, and waited for the sun to come up.

After sunrise I walked home. It was the first time in my life I had come home in the morning after being out all night. My father was there, and he did not say a word about it. I do not remember whether my mother was even awake, or whether she said anything.

Then came the Maturita. Everybody was anxious about it — I was too, though it was not any one subject in particular that worried me. I studied alone at home rather than in a group. It took a lot of preparation; those examinations were not easy.

My four subjects were mathematics, physics, Czech, and Russian. The whole process took several days. First came the written examinations — you had to actually produce the answers yourself, nothing multiple-choice about it. Then came the oral part, one student at a time, in front of the whole class. We all sat at our desks and watched while each person in turn was called up front to be examined. There were extra people in the room too — teachers and outside observers, some of them connected with the local government — sitting at the front and along the side. They watched, but they did not ask me anything themselves. It was the regular examining teacher who gave the assignment and asked the questions.

I do not remember any particular question I was asked in any of the four subjects. I did very well in math and physics. I got a D in Czech, which was still passing. And I got a C in Russian, which surprised me, though maybe it should not have — I was never any good at languages, and it was not a matter of one bad day.

Afterward, my Russian teacher spoke with my mother about it. She told her that she had watched me answer the math and physics questions, and seeing how well I could do there next to how I did in Russian made her feel she had failed as my teacher. Because of that, she said, she had not given me the grade in Russian that she otherwise would have.

There was no ceremony, no list posted anywhere, nothing announced publicly. I found out privately that I had passed. It was only many years later that I learned quite a few students in our year had actually failed. At the time nobody made those names public, so most of us never knew who they were.

Around that same time my father was sick and in bed. We had one of our long, exhausting talks while he was lying there — the kind we always had. I do not remember what it was actually about; today I would guess it was probably the usual things between us — school, what I was going to do next, politics, religion — but that is just my guess now, not something I can actually recall. What I do know is that he was glad I had passed.

My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Uhlířová, gave me my maturitní diploma with my mother there. She told the two of us, right then, that I would not be able to go to university, because of my father’s political background. But she had also prepared a written recommendation for me. It said that I was highly talented in mathematics, and that after I proved my relationship to the working class, she recommended that I be allowed to attend university.

That was how it stood. I had finished the Maturita, and I had a teacher’s word in writing that I was good at mathematics. And university was still closed to me until I could prove something about myself that had nothing to do with any exam.