Roman Prajzler

“Well, except the way it ended up was that it just wasn’t legally possible. Then one time Norek and I, that was when he turned eighty, we were in Moravia, and basically we got into a bit of a spat because of the cabin, that they weren’t able to get it back. So Norek got angry at us, and me and one other boy, we reckoned we’d go see Kobík and we’d just solve it somehow. Perhaps we could put some money together and buy it. So we set off to see Comrade Kobík, Mr RSNDr. [doctor of Socialist studies] Kobík. We rang at the door, and Mrs Kobíková opened it. We asked if we could speak with her husband, and she stared at us. That was an incredible situation because she said: ‘My husband had his ashes scattered today.’ Well, and we didn’t know about that of course, but it was such an embarrassing situation... If we had known it was his funeral that day, we wouldn’t have come. So we sorted it out somehow in the end, and we put the money together and bought the cabin sometime in 1995.”