Tomáš Tichák

"And there, actually, in that interrogation, for four and a half hours, they read to me what they had recorded, and they wanted me to explain to them every line of what I meant. So there was like a line, that was the Maugli play. "There's only been monkeys here for at least 1,000 years." What did you mean? ' I said, 'Well, what I meant was, it's a comedy, isn't it, it was the jungle town,' so I said that. 'Okay, let's move on.' And then they said, 'You know what gave us the biggest chill?' Because he's this Mowgli genius and he ends up getting all these awards and he gets an honorary doctorate from some university in Islamabad or something. And that's what gave them the biggest chill. I really didn't know why. He said it was a clear allusion to the fact that he got an honorary doctorate from Reza Pahlavi from Husak. Well, and then they found out because they got hold of the script of the play King Kong, which was an apartment show that we did three times in Olomouc and once in Prague, and it was actually all about King Kong. In the end, it turned out that it was actually set in the belly of the King Kong that swallowed us, and they found out that that was the worst part. As they said to me afterwards in the interrogation, they had it worked out by university-educated experts. They found that it challenged the ties with the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact - King Kong is the Soviet Union, yeah, and the contract to buy, sell King Kong is the Helsinki Accords. That's all the university experts sort of found there. And they told me that they were giving me a choice: either that I confess to it, and that as a young person, I had the right to bump my nose, as they said, or that I had finished my degree."

"We received all the Charter documents and reproduced them, transcribed them. I used to read it in class, completely in secret, to my classmates. And we had a lot of fun, even the other ones, like the feuilletons and stuff like that. Of course, to those who I could see were interested. But we certainly normally talked about it during break. I remember one time I had a folder full of samizdat under my desk and we were having a civics class and the teacher came up to me like this and said, 'What's that under your desk?' and then fortunately he changed his mind."