Vlastimil Marek

“When I became a member of parliament for the Civic forum in Prague 2 after the Velvet Revolution, I experienced something which has forever cured me from my naïve belief that something would change. I was still working as a night guard, so all the butchers and people like that who needed an approval to open up a shop were coming to see me. There were many funny stories, but this one tops it all: During the first free election I refused to serve in any positions. Later on, each member of parliament had two or three areas of responsibility, and there was no way to avoid it anymore. They kept urging me: ‘Mr. Marek, you need to be in charge of something.’ At that time, Hotels & Restaurants in Prague 2 district had a provision in their articles that their managing board had to include one MP from that election district. I asked them: ‘Are you sure that I will not have to attend any meetings?’ ‘No, certainly not.’ And so I signed the agreement. Three days later I received a phone call: ‘Is that Mr. Marek?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you are the member of parliament, right?’ ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘And you were recently appointed to the managing board, right?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Mr. Marek, could you help us, please? We’ve got a problem. You don’t have to go anywhere, you don’t need to do anything, but what happened is that one of our colleagues had just dropped out, he planned to go with his wife for a three-month trip around the world – Near East, India, China, Japan, and so on.’ I was shocked. I ended the phone call immediately as I realised that the only person whom I have ever told about my unrealisable lifelong dream was an STB officer during one of my interrogations in the Ruzyně prison. I was telling him this just to while away the time. During those three days, Hotels & Restaurants of Prague 2 - actually members of the Secret Police, obviously – managed to find out based on my interrogations that I was incorruptible and naive, but that I had a dream. And if I had accepted their request for help, they would have gotten me at that very moment. That’s the way they work and hold power over all the others, and thus it seems that we the good people have no chance to stand against the bad people. We cannot even imagine what kind of things they can scheme and what kind of conspiracy they can prepare in order to get hold of a person and make them do what they want.”

“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.”