Vlastimil Marek

“To get across the bridges to the cemetery – for instance from Motol to Karlín – passing across Vltava river, was impossible. I always had to explain myself. When I wasn’t at work, I used to come to Wenceslas Square and admired the young guys who were driving around with a bloodstained flag. I loved the freedom embedded in all the flyers and jokes. All of Wenceslas Square and the streets nearby were full of slogans: ‘Lenin, wake up, Brezhnev got crazy.’ On Old Town Square, there was an inscription: ‘Fine Arts of the 1920’s USSR,’ and a tank was standing just under it. This was great material for the photographers and so I took pictures of everything I could. When I was arrested in 1968, they confiscated and destroyed all of the negatives.”

“I lived such an intense life in 1986 that I got arrested. It was the Kafkaesque punk and things like that. While in the prison cell, I was telling jokes to the other inmates, teaching the Gypsies to go to sleep early and dream. I explained them that they were free in their dreams, out of jail and so on. It took a long time to explain it them. There was also a surgeon and a civil engineer, they had messed something up, the doctor had been doing abortions and the engineer was in prison for some embezzlement... I practiced yoga there. When I began my exercise, the guard rushed in because they thought that I wanted to hurt myself or kill myself every time I crossed my legs to the lotus position. The gipsies were thus watching through the peephole so that I could exercise. And every morning the men were going to the toilet – it was a small room which could not be aired at all, and it was in summer, at the end of August, and the stench from each of them was thus horrible.. Only I didn’t stink. They were really surprised by that, especially the surgeon. I explained to him that it was because of the yoga exercises that I was doing and he asked me how it was related. ‘Well, the stool of a yoga practitioner is soft, solid, and it does not stink.’ He got mad at me: ‘I know every bone in the human body, so what are you trying to teach me?’ He kept fussing about it but one day – on Friday evening we always got so-called cold supper: it was a tin full of ground shin, it was disgusting, and it also contained lard and a lot of pepper to make it somehow palatable, and we were to eat it with plain bread and cold water. When the surgeon received this meal for the first time, he said: ‘I’m hungry, so I’ll somehow manage to eat this grub. But I got an idea. If you don’t shit your pants tomorrow after eating this, I will start practicing yoga.’ And he did.”

“For two years, I worked in a warehouse selling equipment for fine artists. Everyone used to come over, we played ping-pong etc. We would work for two days, listen to music for the next three days, discuss things, and I published my first magazines. We also began copying prints. It was in 1977, when the Charter began spreading. There were related materials which I hand copied in 1978, and already knew this was the beginning of the end. Things couldn’t go on. I found a job as a security in National Gallery. That was where I found my ideal. In the evening, I and two colleagues locked the door behind us. One of us would stay at the reception and us two young ones would go inspect the collections, lock everything, turn on the alarm. We then had the garages or changing rooms to use for reading, typewriting and doing anything we wanted. We were copying the samizdat, reports of the Committee for the Protection of the Unjustly Accused, and everything.”

“Once I bought a typewriter from an accounting department. Its platen was almost one metre long and I intended to use it to write experimental poetry in long lines. I even carved my own set of letters. It was awesome. But what happened then – I remember it precisely because that was the first time when my wife was really scared for me – we lived in Vinohrady and I worked in the printing works at nights. I always worked alternate nights there and then I spend the days on the Charles Bridge and the subsequent nights I stayed at home. I stole some lead letter types from the printing works in order to have my own set of letters and be able to typeset the whole book by myself. I wished to be independent. But the first Xerox machines appeared during that time as well. I haven’t even typeset the whole book, only about five pages, because the first Xerox machines then became available. I wanted to help the dissidents as well, to print documents for the Charter… But then the first copy centres sprung up, and it got much faster to do it that way. I thus quit doing that but then I had to get rid of the letter types: secretly, I was carrying them in heavy bags, because lead is really heavy –and walking through the Vinohrady neighbourhood and placing them into trash cans here and there. My wife was terribly afraid that I would get arrested.”

“For instance, we were standing in Italská street and couldn’t make it all the way to the Radio building. Cars and tanks were standing and so we shouted at them, showing them we were carrying a coffin but it didn’t work. Some Russian officer wearing a military beret was shouting at the soldiers. I could understand Russian and tried to explain to him, showing him the body. He got afraid – a soldier who probably never saw a dead body, began whistling, pulled out a flapper and let us go through. When we returned, he wasn’t there anymore. We were unable to get out of there with the dead body. I started shouting in Russian that they were morons. One of them lost his nerve and pulled the trigger of his assault rifle. At that very moment, we moved half a metre. I was half a metre from death because the burst went above the corpse and not through us.”