Daňa Horáková

"Ludvík Vaculík wrote Český snář (Czech Book of Dreams), which was in fact his diary, in 1979, e.i. the year of our wedding. And because he was my best man, he naturally put it in his dream diary from that year. And in that chapter about the wedding he describes it all, he also describes my mother, how she impressed him, what a lady she was, and what a tough little denim girl I was compared to her, just not a feminine person at all. And in this chapter he also mentions, implies, or if I'm not mistaken, quotes Zdena, the woman, who conveys the opinion of the so-called 'whole of Prague' that I am a collaborator [of State Security], and he doesn't deny it. He simply did not say 'no, that's nonsense'. That's where the whole affair came from. Not to mention the fact that the ground for people believing it had already been laid before. State Security - I read this in my files - the so-called Major Říha proposed a plan to spread disinformation about me being a real cop. And it was so successful that many people believed it."

"I was simply at home, of course. It was already dark and someone rang the bell. I went to open the door, I had no idea who it was, and there was standing Vašek [Havel]. I didn't know he had been let out. He was just standing there and he was so thin and pale. I didn't understand it at all. Then he walked down the corridor to my room. It was clear that he had been released. He said something about, I don't remember exactly, that he had done something nasty, that he just had to confess and change it. And if I wouldn't call Rudolf Slánský [Jr.] So I called Ruda. Ruda came within half an hour, I never had to explain anything to Ruda. He answered the phone and immediately said 'OK, I'll come.' Ruda just was, it sounds nasty, but he was available whenever he needed to be, without asking why or how or what for. And then Ruda arrived. The two of them hugged each other, it was very cute, because Ruda, as he was taller, he was patting Vašek on the back like a bear. And Vašek simply explained what had happened [in prison, under pressure, he promised to withdraw from public political life] and that he had to write a retraction of that withdrawal. Well, then we started writing it. I was typing on the machine, the gentlemen were formulating. It was kind of surreal, like a movie scene, almost conspiratorial, but at the same time incredibly emotional. At one point, Vasek had to go to the bathroom in the shared corridor, and when he came back, his belt was unbuckled. He didn't buckle his belt. And it was only at this point that I realized he had been in prison. Until that moment, prison had been such an abstract thing, like a theatre play, it was just unreal. And it was only at that moment that I realized that he had been without a belt for four months, so he had forgotten to buckle it. And then we wrote up the retraction [of the withdrawal] and then I delivered it, the next day."

"When people say today that we published books, it's a completely misleading idea, because the publishing consisted of... I'll describe it chronologically. Let's say that Vašek [Havel] and I... Václav Havel's job was to search authors, to find authors, which I later did with him. When we agreed with an author to publish a book for him, say with [Jiří] Gruša, or with [Václav] Havel or [Karol] Sidon, you name it... I just got the manuscript and I handed it over to one of my copyists. I had this army of about five or six housewives who transcribed the books for me, on mechanical typewriters, into this small format. And depending on how skilled any one of them was, or how good her typewriter was, one original would turn into something between twelve and sixteen copies. Carbon paper, thin paper, carbon paper... And then they handed me the copied work. And I used to lay it out on the carpet in my room at home. The original, the second copy, the third copy... And there was a very important question of how to distribute it to make it fair. Because of course the first page was perfectly legible. I always kept that one for myself, I just decided it was mine, but I used to lend it all, it didn't stay with me. And then I just rotated them [the pages of copies]. Now imagine you have a book that's, I don't know, three hundred pages long. And then when it was put together, it made, let's say twelve copies, I took it to the City Library, which was around the corner. We had a binder there, a gentleman who secretly bound it in black cloth, and on the front were two gold letters EE, Edition Expedition. And then Vašek [Havel] got three or four copies, and I had subscribers for the rest, and they were allowed to buy it from me. But on the condition that they'd keep on reading it. That it would just be passed on. And the price, I calculated that from the expenses that I had. Because I had to buy the carbon paper. Not buy, but try to get them. Well, and the copyists. That's what it was calculated on. Just recently I asked a friend of mine, who has almost the whole Expedition, unlike me, what the books used to cost. He said between 200 and 500 crowns."

"What I called salons was actually no more or less than people meeting. It started the year I graduated, e.i. in 1971. And it dawned on me after I came back from America, from the experience that people had communicated a lot there [in the USA], that suddenly there were these white places in Prague where people didn't dare to talk at all. In pubs, for example, they just sort of talked aside. And I had this flat where I lived. There was one room, and it was a big room, 36 square meters. And so I decided that I was going to invite, regularly, people I trusted. And that we would get together, but not just for a pub chat, but that it would have a kind of program, that it would be almost a kind of seminar. And it started out that we would meet every Tuesday. The way it worked was that people would come in, ring the bell, and in the hallway that was shared in the shared flat they had to change their shoes, so there were always a lot of shoes, which annoyed the gentleman who lived there terribly. And then I served tea and biscuits, at first. And then somebody would give a lecture, and I would just invite whoever I knew: philosophers, singers, sportsmen, nuclear physicists, and each one of these invited people had a certain topic. They presented it in the form of a lecture, really, during which there was silence. And then I led the discussion."