Miloš Houdek

“The 80s were coming to a close and I would go to Kojice to an evening with David Vávra and his Theatre Sklep, and I noticed, it was in the spring of 1988, that communist officials who were present were just shaking their heads, wondering what David Vávra and Theatre Sklep were doing. How free they were while having fun, in a way no one had ever did there before! In Praha, after all... The cultural and artistic movement had been getting stronger in Praha, and thanks to the Theatre Sklep for example, it gave the impression of something absolutely fresh and free. I recalled the end of the 60s, when I had been living in Praha, and I thought that they were able to create an atmosphere similar to the end of the 60s. That the society had been moving in a certain direction and that I had to pay more attention to what was happening in the society, to perceive it in a more precise way, as David Vávra and his group got away with something that would had been utterly impossible in the 70s.”

“On August 21st, I borrowed a bike from my older brother, a Favorite bike, my older brother´s pride. I rode it to work and I got hungry. So I went to Černý Kůň (The Black Horse), a pub on the main road between Praha, Kutná Hora and Čáslav. Whole convoys of various military vehicles were passing by. And people in the pub were quite nervous about what happened and what would happen next. With my mind racing, I left the bike outside and I forgot to put a lock on it, as I was telling myself that I would eat a soup in a hurry and then I would rode it back to my brother. So I ate the soup and paid in a hurry, then I went outside and found that the bike was gone. Some moron just stole the bike, in such a difficult situation.”

“The order had been issued that the garrison library has to be modernised, and all the books which no one would borrow for more than five years, I guess, could be discarded, written off, taped up and replaced by two thousand crowns worth of contemporary literature, both Czech and foreign. So I was exhilarated as I was writing off the works of Stalin and registering the works of Hrabal, as I had been writing off book by Lenin, the works, which hadn´t been borrowed by anyone for more than five years, as I was ordered to do so! So I would write off Lenin and replace it by American folk poetry, that had been published back then, by African-American poetry, by Czech authors – Škvorecký, Hrabal, Páral, all that had been published back then. And in 1965, I would add: Jack Kerouac – October in the Railroad Earth, Robinson Jeffers; in brief – all of the sudden, there was modern, contemporary foreign literature in library in Kladno, where I was living, where I was doing my military service.”

“When there was a financial reform, my mother forgot some money in a book, a few notes of the first currency from times right after the war, with Masaryk and Štefáník on them, and she would send me to Česká spořitelna (Czech Savings Bank) by the hotel Savoy in Kolín, near the bridge, now it´s the Masaryk bridge, where I was supposed to exchange it for new banknotes. And as I went out, I met an old lady, well at least I thought she was old back then, she might have been forty years old, the age is relative, and she had a bag full of money and she went to exchange it. She had this leather satchel full of notes, maybe she kept it hidden somewhere, and she went to the savings bank to have it exchanged, and later, I found out that she was a fortune-teller, well-known not only in Kolín but far and wide, and the interesting fact I could add is that even Milan Kundera, the famous Czech writer living in Paris, visited her once.”