Luděk Marks

"It was a Sunday and I walked out of the apartment on Slovak Street without knowing anything. I was staying with the Dus family, with Michal Dus, who unfortunately died last year. There were more of us chartists there, so the apartment was quite popular with them. Police knew that I was there, that I lived there. I decided to visit my daughter, who lived with her mom in Dejvice. So I came out of the house and immediately my investigators jumped out, one major Pešek, or captain Pešek, these guys had always several different pseudonyms. They chased me back, told me not to even try to escape from the house, to go home, that I wasn't going anywhere. So I tried the back entrance, but everything was locked. So I came back, there was a car under the windows, so of course, I called. The phone was wiretapped. I didn't care, I just said I couldn't come and no one was allowed out of the apartment. Not just me, but everybody else, Mr. and Mrs. Dus. Michal Dus' father, parish priest Jan Dus, was not lazy and sent his second son with an incredible supply of food and drink and of course, whoever came in to visit us was not allowed out. So slowly the acquaintances piled in and it turned into a huge party and celebration. We played the music full blast because we had nails pointed at the windows, at the panes of glass. There were eavesdroppers, judging by the vibrations. There were plenty of bugs in the apartment, but the fun didn't drag on any political topic. It was more like we were making fun of them. They didn't leave until 7:00 p.m. Nobody knew why, and it wasn't until the next day that I learned that Mitterrand had invited Havel to breakfast at the French embassy, so it was only because of it that the rest of us were isolated. I don't understand the connection at all. But it was on the same day."

"I had worked for many years to develop an appropriate psychiatric profile to match that of 'unfit to serve', but unfortunately, due to certain political pressures, it just wasn't a possibility, I was taken away despite the protest of my doctor and so on. They didn't care at all about my laboriously manufactured diagnoses over many years. They routinely wrote in Pilsen-Lyně, which was an airport. I don't know what they would do with an artist at an airport, so it was clear to me that since there were some three percent casualties at that time, there would be a plane wheel going off, and it would kill me. But I wouldn't be willing to go anywhere else either. I solved it quite radically. There was some congress of the Commies in the Palace of Culture and the Merkur advertising agency was in the Nusle Valley, so I got myself drunk and went to attend the congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, with the idea that I would read a report on freedom of spirit and individualism. I wasn't allowed in, of course, I didn't get into the hall, but I managed to go up to the second floor, and on top of that I was completely naked. For some reason, they didn't want to let me go to read my report. So I was dragged away by the police, I was in Bohnice Psychiatric Ward for some time. Given my permanent residence was still in Ústí, later they moved me to the hospital among the mad teachers, and it was somewhat more normal there. So I avoided the army, but there was a suspicion of a criminal offense of rioting and I saw a forensic psychiatrist who played a game with me for six hours - let's arrest Mr. Marks, let's not arrest Mr. Marks, let's arrest him, let's not arrest him. After about six hours, he came up with no arrest. Anyway, I was sentenced to psychiatric outpatient treatment, which meant that about once every two months I had to see my psychologist for a talk, for instance, what was new in samizdat. Later on, we published C. G. Jung, and Erich Fromm in Vokno. He was enormously interested in that, so it was a kind of collaboration, when I was unable to come, he wrote that I was there anyway, so it was a great collaboration with the psychologist."

"It's a disunited thing because there is no clear manifesto of the underground, no programmatic definition. There's the Third Musical Revival Report, and a lot of people confuse that with an underground manifesto. It mostly only covers a few parts of it, that is music and then only more widely, for example, lyricists, but Magor doesn't exactly define what is and what is not necessary, how to do what, what to see with what eyes. That's nonsense. So that in itself, that it's not really clearly defined what's underground and what's not, that's what makes up the spectrum of underground, that there's a different approach comparing authors. Every person, from the very educated people to the uneducated, the officially educated, the predominantly unofficially educated, or the discarded. That's also a question. She was an illegal Czech Studies major, which was invented for us by Jan Lopatka, so we also took literary history, theory, and linguistics. That was also a work worth a separate chapter. The second thing is the approach, it's more about the personal, the individual. It's actually an individual approach to that environment. Not being in. Not to be pulled into their scene, to be absolutely independent. There's a line somewhere, and I don't go over it. Not to participate in the official culture at all. That's a given. Just not to cooperate, to ignore."

"I met him, of course, in Nerudova Street at Bondy's when he came there. Franta Stárek had one week off and each other week he was a boiler operator at the Church of St. Thomas in Malá Strana. So when he was in Prague, he took all the things he needed and took them to Bondy and consulted with him in Nerudova Street. We met there several times and that's how we gradually came to cooperate. Initially, thanks to Bondy, who also had an overview of what I was doing. At that time I had been working at the Museum of Czech Literature since 1986, so I had pretty solid access to literary and historical sources. I was mainly working on the Fin de siècle period, and I did a kind of portrait of Arthur Breisky and that whole generation of modern revue, which had some of these forgotten authors. So, Bondy and Stárek came up with the idea that it wouldn't be a bad idea to expand the literary section of the magazine Vokno to include a literary-historical section. So we gradually published portraits of various people there, even, for example, it wasn't only my work, of course, Tomáš Mazal collaborated with us, who published in Vokno his beautiful study of Paul Leppin from the circle of German writers, from Prague, Meyrink, Hadwiger. So that's how he got to work for Vokno. I wasn't working far from him, so instead of lunch I ran down Nerudova Street to St. Thomas, František and I arranged what would be needed, terms, contents, etc., and I went up again, bought something to eat on the way, and ate at work. Sometimes it happened that I ran like a dove into the arms of the State Security, because the door to the boiler room, you couldn't see in, there was no window, it was a massive iron one. When I opened it, I couldn't get lost anymore. They were inside. 'And who's coming next?' And they were just picking up František, so they took us both away. It happened several times, unfortunately."

"On 21 January, which was a Saturday, the week was to culminate in a demonstration for Jan Palach by marching to Všetaty. Of course, it was clear that both the Prague train station and the train station in Všetaty would be completely cordoned off, and that no one would be allowed in or out. Nevertheless, many people tried to get there. They were, of course, detained or immediately sent away. My then-girlfriend Petra Hejdánková and I decided to do things differently and we left the outskirts of Prague by bus to Mělník. So not from Florence, that would be the same as from Masaryk Station by train. We got on at the edge of Prague, went to Mělník, and from there, it was eleven kilometres. It wasn't cold, it was January, but it was quite sunny, so we walked to Všetaty. We were already arriving there, it was getting dark soon. It might have been before five o'clock. After four o'clock. We got to the railway crossing in Všetaty, and we could see from a distance that there was a police patrol at the main railway crossing and that there were civilians and uniformed people and the PS VB, the village clowns. One of those people ran after us, picked us up, and punched me in the stomach, a warning punch. He called the uniformed ones and they dragged us to their station, there they surrounded us, started shouting at us, and so on. They put Petra aside and started searching her purse for candles. They took me under the armpits and dragged me towards the village to the police station. They started shouting at Petra so I looked back to see whether she was all right. It was a provocation. They immediately started, 'He's twitching, he's twitching!' The non-uniformed, plain-clothes cop told them to pin me down and he restricted my hands behind my back with handcuffs and punched me in the face so hard that I lost consciousness for a second. I was woken up by the blows of the baton. I was dragged away, while Petra was taken somewhere in the woods like all other girls. They dropped them off and left them there. They left me in the police station, facing the wall, legs spread. There were about ten other people there. They started walking around me and yelling something to the effect that I had attacked a policeman. I could see what was going on. They had the classic system of beating someone up and accusing them of violence because they knew that I didn't have witnesses but they did. That they'd all testify that I tried to assault them. It helped me a lot that the PS VB geezers didn't have their story straight. One of them said that I had swung at Lieutenant Zahorejka with my right hand, the other one said that I had swung with my left hand, and the third one admitted that my hands were actually in handcuffs, so it was clear that my lawyer, whom I got from the Charter Fund money and who was not afraid to defend me in this case, so to speak, political case, Dr. Pavlok was his name, then he had a simple case. He said that they were contradicting each other, and that wasn't the only issue, there was more of that kind of nonsense. My case was given to a prosecutor Zikmund, because the prosecutor's office for Mělník region, the district prosecutor's office, was in Mladá Boleslav. So I was transferred to Mlada Boleslav. So this Zikmund, this prosecutor, accused me of assaulting a public official."

"I was in the caravan that day and I was told not to wait for the next shift, that I would lock the caravan, because the drilling was over, and I think Michal Macenauer was supposed to come there and that he would not arrive until the morning. So I was there until five or six, I packed up my belongings in Hřensko and took a bus to Děčín so I could continue by express train to Prague. There was a demonstration in Děčín, and I missed the express train. The next train didn't leave until after 7 o'clock. I found out what the demonstration was about. It was some kind of silent ecological demonstration by students. Then I arrived in Prague around nine o'clock, sometime after nine o'clock. I walked through the city centre with a rucksack, and there were little crowds running around like after a dispersed demonstration. It looked like that every time a demonstration ended. A few cops here, another few there, some groups around, a mess. So I didn't pay attention. I went to a friend's place for the night. In the morning I went down to see Martin Machovec in Břevnov, on the way I went down to Loretán Square, where Ivan Wernisch was the night watchman, and he told me what actually happened. So I didn't dawdle, I didn't even unpack my rucksack and I went to see Petruska Šustrová in Bechyně. She had a little house in Bechyně, her mother bought it for her so that she would have a place to raise her children. She went there on weekends and we often met there too, Olga Havlová, the Stankovičs, Bělíková, Jarda Koukal, just the whole Chartist gang. There we listened and found out exactly what had happened to Martin Šmíd and so on. That was all we could do."