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SEVEN of us lived in one room and a tiny kitchen. There were only three of us who ate and slept there, but the other four were never absent, for they were the paintings and photographs which hung on the walls. In one way or another they dominated my whole life.

Besides Mother and me, there was my grandmother. She was a presence and an impediment in our daily affairs, but she had no more effect upon the life of our imagination than if she had been an irritating and penetrating noise over which we had no control. And yet if it had not been for Grandmother, my mother and I might never have grown so close, so hidden away together from what she was.

Perhaps it would be best to tell about her right away. I remember her as a small woman, thin and bony, and I knew always that she didn’t like me. She was seventy-two when I was born. Once upon a time she had been the spoiled daughter of a wealthy bourgeois family of Prague. She had fallen in love with an attractive young man who was her opposite in every imaginable way. He was a worker, possessed of enormous vitality and a courageous belief in himself. She thought when she married him that she could force him to give up his weaving for a relatively good position behind a desk. But she was disappointed.

Why Grandfather married my grandmother no one could ever guess, but his stubborn and independent mind probably never accepted for a moment her petty suggestions when he was courting her. He was even then master of Perutz’ whole workshop, the greatest textile manufacturer in Prague. He loved to work, but he refused to be bossed. In fact, from the time he fought on the street barricades of Prague in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 until the day he died, he maintained his independence intact. And always his fame as a weaver increased.

It was when my mother and her younger brother were children that my grandfather suddenly left his job with Perutz, either because he had been given orders which he couldn’t obey without compromising his integrity, or because he could stand no more of my grandmother. He went to a textile firm in Alsace-Lorraine and stayed there some years, but always he sent his earnings home. When he could stand the separation from his children no longer he returned to Prague. The day he came home he found my mother, a young girl of fourteen, keeping the house for her brother of ten because her mother had gone away.

Grandfather had no words of recrimination for Grandmother when she returned some days later, and he never asked her where she had been. But from that day on he never spoke a word to her again.

The details of my grandmother’s personal affairs in those years I do not know and I never asked for enlightenment. It was enough to see the selfish, vain woman who lived with us spend her days caring only for her own amusement and personal comfort. But I do know that she did everything in her power to wreck my mother’s life, though she would doubtless have considered herself motivated by mother love. No one, she was determined, should marry her daughter unless he was wealthy, and wealthy young men were not easy for my mother to meet. Whenever a presentable but impecunious youth came to call, Grandmother arranged to have a short talk with him alone. After that, he never came again, and my mother was led to believe he had lost interest, like all the others.

She was such an attractive young woman, my mother. I still have pictures which show her sweet face framed in soft curls. She looked like her father and she carried all his strength of character, but it was years before she understood how to use that strength to her own advantage. By the time she was thirty-two she had resigned herself to the life of a spinster. Her brother had gone away to earn his way in the world and her father had moved into the country where he could work independently of the big textile firms. Her mother needed a servant, and that, it seemed, was where her duty lay.

She had one girlhood friend whom she sometimes visited with her mother’s permission. When she met a stranger one afternoon at the home of this friend she made no mention of the fact, because he had expressed no wish to call upon her and obviously cared nothing for the good graces of her family. Within three weeks they were married.

He was handsome, polished in his manners, and surrounded with the atmosphere of adventure. He was a well-known figure in the casinos of Baden-Baden and Carlsbad, renowned for the flourishing risks he would take and the ease with which he was always able to recoup his losses. From his appearance and his way of living at the time Mother met him, he impressed everyone as a wealthy man, but he alone knew that his days of great risks were over.

There is no wonder that Mother fell in love with him so easily. On his part, he probably meant her no ill, seeing in her a fortunate harbor. Perhaps he thought her financial background was better than it proved to be, but he was also genuinely in love. So they were married, without Grandmother’s permission.

They rented a small apartment in a pleasant section of Prague called Vinohrady, which in translation means “the hill where grapes are grown,” and furnished it to their own nineteenth century tastes. And they were happy, as only two people can be when they believe their last hope for happiness has already gone.

One afternoon about a year after they were married he went out as usual, and Mother never saw him again. He was found dead on the street from a heart attack and they carried him straight to the morgue. It took Grandmother no time at all to close her own home and move in with Mother. In slightly less than two months I was born.