Jaroslav Novák

“‘Stínadla is Revolting,’ that was actually the second part, a sequel to ‘The Mystery of the Mechanical Puzzle.’ Well, I was totally captivated by that… I fell in love with Jan Tleskač, who was a locksmith apprentice of Emil Mažňák. Jan Tleskač was an orphan and he had the puzzle, the ‘Hedgehog in the Cage.’ Well, and since Jan Tleskač was an apprentice and so was I, he felt somehow close to me, and I thus did two things: firstly, I began writing a journal just as he did… I did not have any model how to write a journal, I only knew that I needed to wrote a date. The second thing was that I began to make my own hedgehog in the cage.”

“He applied for the Expo 67 in Montreal at that time. I was telling him: ‘Bro, don’t be crazy, don’t you even think of staying there!’ – ‘No, no way!’ – ‘Really, I mean it, brother...’ He says: ‘No, no kidding…’ Obviously, he did remain there. With a twenty-kilogram suitcase and ten dollars which he had illegally bought from somebody here, he went for the Expo 67. In the first letter that we received from him he wrote: ‘My dear mom and dad.’ What he wrote sounded very reasonable, he must have had it already prepared and thought out… ‘I am not staying here in exile out of my own will... and he stated the reason for that, he mentioned his employer. He wrote names of three people who had wronged him: ‘I filed a criminal complaint against them, together with a request that they write such personal assessment on me which would correspond to reality. Objective and just, not a dishonest one, so that I would be able to live as a human and not as a fourth-class citizen.’”