Eva Grafová

"One fine day they moved some people we didn´t know at all into our flat. Some man by the name of Rybáček appeared with his wife who was Bulgarian and didn´t speak Czech, and they started to live in our flat. It was shared between two families because they said it was too big for one family. The wife had TB. Luckily, I didn’t catch it from her, but I did catch the antibodies, and since then I have never in my life been vaccinated against TB, as I developed immunity. Anyway, to live in a shared flat with strangers, especially Communists, when you think about it a bit, it will dawn on you that this is no existence, it´s not for living. My mother totally collapsed because of that because, to top it all off, she had come back from England, and I suppose this was because of my father. All her family stayed in England, both her sisters and her parents. Naturally she was even more unhappy because of that. My father was a born optimist, and I think he managed to endure all this a bit better, but she was in a terrible mental state. This, in fact, destroyed the rest of her life, and she was not even 40 at the time, I think. Then, and I don’t remember this as I was too small, my father did something. He installed a cardboard partition, making it possible to divide the flat. There was a corridor to walk in and out. They created two flats with a common toilet and the main entrance door. But owing to this partition, we lost the bathroom, and I lived without it for 29 years. We took a bath in a tin bathtub using water from the kitchen tap, and had to use a jug to empty the tub. Every week. It was not possible to take a bath more often, the process was too complicated, so once a week it was. The kitchen was ours. The second family had the bathroom and their flat could be exchanged, so during the years we lived there the neighbours kept changing. About 4 or 5 different families lived there, but we had no opportunity to exchange. Without the bathroom there was no chance. There was space to build a bathroom (there was a nice storage place), but my father had no money to do so. There was no water system, and they would have had to cut into the wall to install one. Father had no money because finally he ended up as a tinsmith earning some 600 or 700 Kč a month. He commuted to Dolní or Horní Počernice to work as a tinsmith, leaving at 5 in the morning by train from Těšnov."

"Of course, ever since she came back, my mother had wanted to see her own mother, who was getting older and older, in London. Every year she asked for permission to go and visit her mother, alone, without her family in Prague, of course. They refused. Every year. My father kept writing letters of appeal to the Office of the President, to Tonda Zápotonda and other officials every year. I might still have those letters around somewhere. I was silly, egotistical and not understanding, but this I understood: that always at a particular time of the year my mother locked herself in a room and cried for 14 days. For 18 years, they kept refusing her permission to see her mother, and always for the same reason: it was not in the interest of the Czechoslovak Republic, Socialist or something like that, and they always added that the permission was granted only to the next of kin. I think this was too much even for the Communists. Who is closer than a mother and her child? I don´t get it. Somebody should explain this to me. In the end, she was allowed to travel in 1963. She went there and returned completely devastated, because her mother no longer recognized her. She had Alzheimer’s disease, and maybe she had recognized her somehow, but the visit turned out other than my mother had hoped for. She came back feeling totally depressed. Then, my grandmother died in 1965."