“And this friend of mine, he left for England, he didn't do his military service, he didn't have to, and he sent me this postcard from London while I was in the army. That was a bad thing, you know, that you would get this postcard from abroad where capitalists were in power. It wasn't delivered, of course, but there were those two men in plain clothes, from the counterintelligence, and they took me to some room for an interrogation. And they started to ask me: 'Do you know people abroad?' - 'No, I don't.' - 'Are you in touch with people abroad?' - 'No, not at all.' - 'Have you been exchanging letters with anyone abroad?' - 'No.' - 'And how would you explain this?!' And he would show me that postcard, slamming it against the table. 'And how would you explain this?', he yelled. So I looked at the postcard for the first time in my life, there were those British guards with their enormous hats, and there was my address and he wrote: 'Hello, Zdenda, many greetings from London,' and underneath that, there was: 'PS: I had almost been appointed the King of England, as far as golf was concerned.' As we used to play golf together, we were quite fond of it. And they insisted that this was some kind of a code. 'What does it mean, this code of yours?' - 'I don't know.' To make it short: I spent the whole day with them, as they came to pick me up before I could have breakfast, and they held me until the very evening. And they were interrogating me all the time. And there was this well known pattern, as there were two of them, and this one would come into the box, he would be the good cop, and he said: 'Don't be stupid, don't spoil your career in the military, just tell us what does it mean, and you can go, you are free to compete in that thing of yours.' And maybe I would even tell them, being just nineteen years old, and I was just scared, but I couldn't tell them anything as there was no code. Then came the second man, he would yell, he would be banging on the table, and he would threaten me with Sabinov, this well-known prison in Eastern Slovakia, and he felt free to decide how many years I would spend in prison, and as they got nothing out of me – not that I was brave, there was nothing I could tell them – so in the evening they would take me elsewhere, the case was closed, and on the next day, they would just throw me out. And they would call me, stating that I had to present myself in Cheb at a given time.”
