Professor Vladimír Just

I also remembered a classmate of mine who ran away about a year or two later. After working at the Theatre on the Balustrade for a while as artistic director. There was one director after another running away at that Balustrade in the seventies. That this classmate of mine has a fairly successful career as a minister no longer makes art. That he works somewhere in that ministry, and he even works in the complaints department. So I knocked on the door, said hello, and we reminisced about all sorts of things. And he said, 'Well, I'll do it for you. I'm going to get that drawer out.' And now he filled me in: legitimate complaints, partially legitimate complaints, and illegitimate complaints. 'Pray you're in the third one.' Well, I wasn't there. So he went to look at the legitimate ones, and I wasn't there either. 'Well, I guess you're the partially legitimate culprit. And I'm going to try to make and justify...' Because we were friends, Vondrášek was his name. 'Well, I'll try to justify why I think it's more in the first sort, but it's going to take some time. It won't be in a month, but in maybe a quarter of a year, half a year, I'll give you the happy news that you've definitely been reassigned with your brother to that box of unjustified complaints.' Only we didn't care that much because we stopped playing, we weren't allowed to play.

But that last one ended in a huge crash for me. I'll be ashamed of it till the day I die because a friend of mine who's already had a blue and is a doctor today said, 'Look, I'll give you these vials, there's protein in there. A little bit of that protein, if you just put a little bit in that shampoo, a little bit, you can't overdo it, the pee in the protein, that's it, they can't send you. You don't have to finesse anything. Sometimes something hurts somewhere, yeah.' So I went through that once. I had it hidden away to keep it inconspicuous, even in that hospital where they were examining my bladder, my kidneys, and why I still had that protein in my urine. So I kept it inconspicuously in a box of, I think it was Winstons, some American cigars, not Marlboros. That's how I kept the jars in there for when I was in hospital for a fortnight, to keep me clear. If I got picked at night, they'd test my urine to see if it was different than in daytime. So I kept it on my bedside table. And an old friend of mine, who was already a medic, still a student, but he was already serving there at na Františku, came in and said, 'I could do with a cigarette, I've only got two left. I said, 'Well, of course, why not.' Pause. And he came back the next day and said, 'I'm out of them, man. Don't you have any cigarettes?' I said, 'I'm quite a non-smoker.' I was going to demonstrate that I didn't have any, and suddenly, there were these Marlboros. And I quickly closed the door because I didn't know him well enough to confess right there on the scene, 'I've been avoiding the military service all this time.'

"The main limitation is not that the tanks came and people were fired from work and so on. Rather, the main limitation was in the internal self-censorship that one wrote something and already knew it stood no chance, if I did not want to be a dissident, that is, to be completely out of the field and write samizdat and meet friends of this kind, so live in a kind of catacombs, so to say, more or less. Just as I want to write the truth in some way, if it was at all possible within the limits, so you have begun to adapt internally. But that internal self-censorship was worse under normalization. You know, in the 1950s, as during the Nazi occupation, it was clear there. There was an office that banned you, did not accept it; they just cancelled it, ended it so. Even during the First Republic, white censored newspapers were published, so the regime admitted - yes, censorship existed here."

"Then I saw him live again in the Rubín theater, where my brother and I played again, because I only knew him from the media and from foreign stations, as they were slandered in Red Law and the like. And suddenly I saw him sitting there at the bar, so I approached him. He was rather happy because people usually avoided him. He came there and it got empty around him like that, because to be photographed, they were sitting there with Havel talking. Since he was my old idol and he recognized it from my rare notes, we could remember Semafor (translator´s note: famous theatre) and all that. So I talked to him for about an hour. Then, after November 1989, I found out that the bartender - his name was Pepa Koška - the bartender who always warned us there, like, 'Guys, be careful,' that he was also an agent."

"He issued an order that from a certain place above - that is, I do not know, from some head of the office to all the deputies, and the father was very high, because he had the capacity to do so - he must enter social democracy compulsorily. So my father in January 1948... he felt, my mother told me when he died, he had a big worry that he was a non-partial all his life and all of a sudden, and all of a sudden he had to join the socially-democratic party. All right, so he went in there so he could do his job. And as soon as he got there, there was a coup and they were obligated to be sent to the communists. And he didn't want that anymore, so he didn't pay the contributions, which he refused. No-one asked him, he suddenly got an ID and from being a Social Democrat, he suddenly became a communist, because they had made a so-called merger, they had just been swallowed up by a stronger party. And my father absolutely refused. Well, he didn't tell us then, but I learned that from our staff when I was a proper adult and my father was dead. "Mr. Just, you falsified all the questionnaires, you wrote everywhere your father was a non-partial person!"