When his stepfather first heard Mikuláš’s version of the dialogue between the milkmaid and the lathe operator, he was really worried about what was coming out of the long alcove. The second time he heard it – they were at the edge of the alcove and he was watching Mikuláš – still he was not able to make out from the crude babble more than a word here and there. But the third time – now he was standing within touching distance of Mikuláš’s little bed – it at last struck him that it was always the same, like some toy machine or the metallophone in a pocket watch which played the same tune over and over again. So the fourth time it started up (now he was holding little Mikuláš in his arms) he was able to give it his full attention. And the fifth time Mikuláš played his stepfather the dialogue of the milkmaid and the lathe operator, the latter was in a position to make out the most important bits.

He put Mikuláš back to bed – having first remembered to wipe his nose for him – then left the alcove, crossed himself, and slowly stepped over to the large commode. Here he knelt and with care pulled out the bottom drawer; under several layers of bed linen he did indeed find the German-army pistol and a pouch of ammunition. And the sheet right at the bottom of the pile, which had come into contact with the gun, he straight away removed. Now, of course, the problem arose of what to do with it; this was not made any easier by his knowledge of who was in the house. But in the end he found such a clever solution that the next day not even three secret police from the flying squad had any chance of finding it.

And now that they had failed to find it, he saw the need to re-evaluate his original intention. This never happened, either. It is a known fact that Jaroslav Foglar was to have gone to trial in a big case involving certain scout leaders. When the men came to place him under arrest, they did not find him at home – the day before he had broken his leg at some sports event at the youth centre where he was an instructor, and he had ended up in hospital. The men never came back; there was something in them which was all savage impatience and inflexibility. When their first plan failed to come off, they were thrown into confusion, and thus they abandoned it and pitched themselves at another. So that broken leg might just have saved Foglar his life.

The watchmaker Kryštof Mazel, too, had escaped their made-up eye; after which he was ‘merely’ moved out of his confiscated villa into a run-down tenement on Lidice Street.

When my father emigrated in 1951 my mother realized that we would be raided and made the subject of a thorough police search. In her desperation she raced about the flat, trying to get rid of everything that could possibly be a cause of our undoing. (The devil only knows which of the things we had at home could represent any kind of threat to us!) Of course, we could not avoid being searched; they dragged Mother in for questioning and a secret policeman joined us kids in the flat, playing the good cop in an attempt to draw out of us whatever he could.

When Father emigrated, he left Mother with three small children. (The youngest forced himself on the world a month after Father’s emigration; at eleven, I was the eldest.) But the battle to make a living was not the worst thing for Mother – her fear was worse still. What the secret police were good at was waking in their victims a sense of deep-seated guilt, thus imputing to them the role of wrongdoer so that they demanded for themselves the heaviest punishments, or even fed themselves from the barrel of a sub-machine gun (like that soldier at the Josefov barracks). The main purpose of their interrogations was to break the identity, to rob the subject of his soul. But it was not an option for Mother to go up to the attic and there hang herself on the washing line: she had three children, and it was about them that her fears were the greatest. Then out of this fear and this superimposed sense of guilt she had some kind of breakdown; she had to spend a while in the lunatic asylum before she could come home and re-assume her burden.

But to ward off the danger by faking a loyalty to those who threatened us – this was something she could not do. She had never been any good at play-acting. She was incapable of putting on a mask and assuming a role, as all those around us were doing. Her course was a different one; stage by stage (thanks to the tremendous strain imposed by her fears and anxieties) this course transformed her identity. All that remained of the original, was the strict code given by the Christianity in which she had been brought up. At the same time she began to identify with the source of her fears, until at last she had exchanged one identity for another. The Christian faith had been supplanted by the faith of her enemies. At its very core this was a religious conversion. But for all I could see it failed totally in its purpose: her fear and sense of guilt became still more intense. For the rest of her life she was in constant fear. At its end she had to undergo a very hard return journey. But what can we know of this journey?

Relatives of ours (today all dead) – of a family which before the Communist takeover had been both prosperous and well respected, and was, so to speak, an embellishment of the town’s spiritual glory – had no intention of changing their identity after the takeover. Still, they were quick to acquire an ability always to play their assigned role. The art of the actor, an art they assumed to safeguard their true identity (as I say, we will act out whatever they want of us – so why not play those idiots we hold in deep contempt, why not them?) – this art gnawed away at their identity. Who is he, indeed, who possesses the ability to act out whatever he chooses, whenever he chooses? He who spends the greatest part of his life play-acting? They donned masks which later they would have been unable to remove without taking off the whole face.

In the Fifties, to resist the Communist regime meant a spell in a prison or labour camp, even the loss of one’s life. In the Seventies and Eighties, resistance meant expulsion to society’s fringes, sometimes a spell in prison. This begs the question of how legitimate, how justifiable it was to make a play at loyalty or to exchange one’s identity, when one bears in mind the prevailing conditions. But how do we explain that this, let us say, justified approach always gnawed away at the very soul? How do we explain that the subjects were no longer able to be themselves, that the spiritual values of their stock were lost to them, that for ever more they were forced to play-act their own selves? Should we take this to mean that the only right way led to the place of execution or the prison or the labour camp, or that we should have allowed our unique, unrepeatable, our only lives to be kicked to the fringes of society, where they would remain for ever?

When Mikuláš Mazel was about five, his stepfather gave him a wristwatch known as a Hamilton. It was a cheap watch but it was solid enough. It was American. It was made by the Hamilton Watch Company – still the best-performing American watchmaker today – and it came to this country in 1945 with the American Army and the gun. When he wore it as a little boy, Mikuláš experienced the pride of a watchmaker’s son – in those days watches were scarce. (In Nové Město nad Metují the development of the Prima was making plodding progress.) But there was something of the obduracy of the watchmaker’s pastor in the way he continued to wear it (even though Kryštof Mazel many times offered him something newer and better, including a Rolex for his twentieth birthday); Mikuláš clung to his American soldier’s watch in its brass and nickel-plated shell.

And in the end it proved itself a thing of wonder. Several times since the time when Mikuláš was five Kryštof Mazel had opened it up and taken a look inside, changing a part now and then although there was no real need to do so. Indeed, nothing showed any sign of wear (not the spring barrel, nor the drive mechanism, crown wheel, or oscillator); the watch continued to be as dependable as a Japanese timetable or the rounds of Mr Knotek the chimneysweep. It was as if the god Chronos had showered on this cheap, pastor’s watch his especial favour.

But then, without warning, it stopped. And we will deal with this straight away. After all, we cannot leave Mikuláš to come to terms with it all alone, to find his own explanations for it.

Translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland