Jiří Kostúr

“When I was already living in Prague, the state agent who had me in his territory requested me to give him my north Bohemian report; it states that me and my wife at the time had escaped prosecution because of bad cooperation between the regional State Security departments. The fact that I was an editor was written there because they knew it from the snitch. I used to lend him Vokno and so on, I didn’t tell him everything, of course, but we had it stored away in his cellar.”

“It was election time, I was still living in Lom, and back then I was, as they called it, earning something extra aside - secondary employment - in the forest. I was a boiler man, and I merely worked in the forest after hours, but sometimes also during work hours - everything was possible under Socialism. And I cut wood as an aside, timber yards and such. You do that using what they call a splitting maul - you cut it with a saw, use wedges, and so on... They did equip me with some handles, but they kept breaking, so I had one made in the Benar plant - that was a textile factory, it probably doesn’t exist any more, textile factories usually don’t exist any more... I guess I had a friend in one of the workshops, so he milled out a larger hole in my splitting maul - which is something between an axe and a hammer - and I bought a pick-axe handle into it to make it last. And when I got out of the bus with the maul, I was returning from Litvínov, I went down the street towards my home - it was on the other side of a railway viaduct, and on the closer side of the viaduct there was a so-called ‘agit room’, that was the election room during the polls. And these State Security agents who were interrogating me in Prague, they shouted: ‘We know that you wanted to smash up that election room with an axe!’ At first I stared at them completely dumbfounded, what were they talking about!? But then I remember that I had been there with my splitting maul, the handle is more than a metre long, and I had been using it as a walking stick; and then I saw all those blokes standing outside of the election room in suits and ties. I said to myself, look, the elections, and so I twiddled it like a walking stick, just for fun. I didn’t take part in the elections, of course, well, and there was one policeman there, who I knew, I greeted him, and later I read what a bastard he was, how he had informed on me, and it was he who told them about this - that I had gone by with a woodman’s axe, as he called it. Of course he didn’t say I wanted to stop the elections, but he did note that I was passing by just at the moment when the district party secretary arrived - he was called Puchmeltr, he lived in Lom. So the policeman just noted that there to make it worse for me. How could I know some secretary was arriving? But I just walked by normally. Well, and those State Security officers in Prague pulled this out at me when I started living there those six months. So that’s just one peculiarity from my State Security interrogations at Bartolomějská Street.”

“And this is from Nová Víska, from the kitchen. I’m reading the chronicle. That’s the chronicle from Nová Víska, but it didn’t survive. I hid it. As I write in that one short story In the House, they happened to make a raid. I was just skinning a rabbit, my hands were all bloody, and suddenly I see - cops, lots of cars, and they were leading the boys into yard, who they’d taken there on purpose - so I grabbed it straight away and hid it in the attic. But you’ll read all of that in the story. - This is also from the kitchen. This girl, you can read the story last, she’s called Silvestra, that is the person I had one experience with, which is what the story is about. She doesn’t like me much, because of that story, but I know that it’s a nice story even though... well, it’s from real life. - This is from the barn in Nová Víska, this is the actress Dana Němcová, this is her son Ondra Němec, here’s Loony, here’s his wife Juliana. That was during some performance, Plastic People [of the Universe] I guess, when they released her early when she was in prison for VONS (Výbor pro ochranu nespravedlivě stíhaných - Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted - transl.), they had her in custody, she ended up with a suspended sentence. Loony, as you can see, has short hair, he’s back from prison. I picked out the most important ones. - This is another picture from Nová Víska. The boy bet he would eat a whole jar of chilli peppers. This is him being fed, just out of interest. - This is a nice poster of John Mayall, this is Skalák, this is me, this is Tomcat-Havelka, who owned the firm Globus, a music publisher, this is Silvestra... - This is a detail of me trumpeting out some blues. - This is Skalák and Robin, just to show the mood, that we played there in the kitchen. This boy’s called London, he played with Sváťa Karásek until recently, before Sváťa had his stroke. - This is Sváťa himself in the kitchen, playing. - This is me and Porky, that was when we were being evicted, so there’s the cab-over there - you’ll read about that. And here someone took a picture of us loading things. And this is the cab-over that we filled with the things, and it’s like a new-year’s greeting card (a Czech tradition - transl.) from Nová Víska, to say we’re finishing. We were the last two to leave the house. In the meanwhile, because it wasn’t possible to take it all at once, there was a pile of other stuff there, so the firemen came, and the boys came, they helped load up so that we had it over and done with. - This is from the parish house in Rejšice, that’s me in the hat, that’s my dog, and Irish wolfhound, and that’s my friend, he was prison, I wasn’t. - This is Blažkov in South Bohemia, where I lived, a semi-secluded place, you can’t see the neighbouring houses. - And I added one photo here of me sitting on my first horse. And this big one is from Rejšice - when we had visitors, we would sit by the table under the lime tree. So those were some photos that have some value and that connect to what we’ll be talking about.”

“When I read in my State Security file that the state agents from Prague and Mladá Boleslav suspected me of handing over some sacks in the forest, I kept thinking what they were on about. Dammit, if they wrote sacks, that’s something specific. And then I realised that I used to go to the forest to rake up leaves because I didn’t have any bedding for the sheep, and I didn’t feel like buying any from the co-op farmers. I had a twelve-oh-two at the time, I would bring the leaves home with me, and they made it up as if I was handing something over in sacks. My eyes goggled.”

“Then came the house inspection, which I was both a witness and protagonist of. By that time the boys wanted to move out: Skalák, Černegová, and someone else. State Security invited them and wanted to confiscate the cabin for what they called reasons of defence. The boys were to get replacement flats in Chomutov, but the invitation was just a pretence because at the same time State Security did a big raid - a house inspection. I myself was butchering a rabbit when they came. My hands were all bloody, but the first thing I did was to grab the chronicle, it was almost as big as the Devil’s Bible, and I ran upstairs to hide it under a pile of mattresses. As the only one there they took me away to Chomutov for questioning, while in the meantime they rummaged through the whole cabin.”

“The main aim of Vokno was, well, the aim of the first period of Vokno, which lasted the sixth issue... The sixth issue didn’t happen, because they made a huge raid and bagged a number of people, mainly František Stárek, then Loony, he pretty much copped it instead of me, because he didn’t have anything to do with that first period, he only had two articles printed there, and then two boys - Milan Frič and Martin, or Michal Hýbek - he was a cameraman for Czech Television after 1989. We wanted to map the artistic scene, and that was reflected by the cover. It was basically a symbol of a window, and each issue had a different focus - for instance, number two had painting, there was a photo of a painter’s easel. Then three was devoted to literature, so there was a heap of typing machines; four, I can’t remember exactly; five was, I think, modern art; and one was for music. We had just agreed with Fanda that we would map it out like that, because the “undies” (underground people or community - transl.) were mainly oriented towards music, but there were more areas, so it went beyond the underground. That’s why I copied out those verses and then recited them, Diviš for instance, and perhaps some others, to give those people a slightly wider perspective. That was the educational goal of the magazine, educational in inverted commas that is, not that we would be some kind of teachers, not at all, bust just that the magazine lived. We even wrote in the editorial to the second issue that we’d pour some other stuff into their dumb heads, if I can say it like that...”

“Petr Placák wrote Fízl (Cop), so I wrote Práskač (Snitch). I decided I wouldn’t approach it too seriously, because it’s clear actually. That’s why I chose the title (Dobrý práskač Švejk - The Good Snitch Švejk), I borrowed it from Jaroslav Hašek and replaced the soldier with a snitch, because there were so many snitches around me all that time, just as there were around the main figures of Charter 77, as is well known. The fact is that I chose a somewhat humorous take, well, more sarcastic than humorous, sardonic remarks, but not some kind of super-primitive anti-Communism. To some extent, I make fun of the State Security agents, because I said to myself that I won’t be all emotional after twenty years, and the title reflects that. It hasn’t been published, and the question is whether the prospective publisher mightn’t end up with a loss, because there mightn’t be all that much interest in it. If they wrote about it in the newspapers then it would [make money], but I didn’t do any advertising, any marketing, as they say today.”

“It ended like this: there was a big round-up, not country-wide, they didn’t do Slovakia, they did North Bohemia, Central Bohemia, Prague, and, of course, West Bohemia etc. They wanted to destroy [underground culture]. For instance, they raided my home three times. But I had learnt already, so I didn’t keep anything at home. I always had it hidden, so that I didn’t lose my personal things. I guess I should that I thought I had everything worked out, and then we had our archive stashed with a State Security agent. So Franta Stárek was arrested, Martin Jirous-Loony, and these two boys, and it wasn’t until much later that I found out that Šimako - the husband of Silvestra from Osvračín, but they released him, he was in custody for a while, but he wasn’t convicted. Unfortunately, that meant the end of the first period of Vokno.”

“I lived my life. I didn’t feel limited in some way. Because since my childhood, since Slovakia, I had been directed mainly towards nature. I rode on horses at mountain cabins in Krkonoše, I worked in the forest, I wrote a collection of poems about life in a seclusion in Krušné Mountains, that was published in the early Seventies, it was approved by the ‘national artist’ Florian. Of course I was on edge with the system, but it didn’t limit me as such, and I wasn’t directly involved per se. There wasn’t much opportunity really...”

“And suddenly the State Security agents, the surveillance - that is, Department Four of State Security - were horrified to discover I had been away the whole afternoon! That it was actually me in that helmet! They didn’t want to get into trouble, so they edited it; the recording itself contains a funny sight - some person arrives and I open the door to him in a red T-shirt, and yet I was the one who arrived and I opened the door to myself. But then the Most [surveillance] team worked it out, and they began to check the license plate on my motorbike, they wrote to the traffic authority because of my Prague license plate - my registered place of abode was in Prague. It’s an odd thing, but Most District left me alone. They wanted to unmask us, mainly to catch us when making the magazine, and it was a stroke of luck that they did the surveillance a day before, because Porky and his wife left to Teplice that day. In fact, their documentation claims they had been trailing a young long-haired couple, but the times don’t fit, they just squeezed it in somehow to cover their cock-up - that they had let me escape...”

“We visited Lenin’s Museum. I don’t know why. Those were rooms draped in red, of course I can’t remember what exhibits they had there. We were three or maybe even four boys, fourth fifth class, not less and not more either, I think. We felt the need, and right there in that Lenin’s Hall, we went and did a shit, if I can say it like that... We knew we could be in terrible trouble for it, even though we didn’t actually worry ourselves too much, but it was that kind of revolt against the adult world, well, against the part we didn’t like... That’s how I explain it, anyway. It was roguishness, obviously, but in such a place! First off, they kept jabbering on about Lenin in school, so we desecrated the biggest thinking head like that... But to give it some political meaning, certainly not. I think that is something of my nature... I was naughty at school. In fact, so much so that the school wanted my mum to send me for diagnostics to some institute in Prague, where the psychiatrist was Professor Mysliveček. I don’t exactly remember how it turned out, but basically I was there for about a week. And when mum came to pick me up, she obviously wanted to know if I was bonkers or not. And that Professor Mysliveček told her: ‘Well, you know, your son is normal, he is a bit...’ What are those children called nowadays? Hyperactive. And that he would maybe recommend that the teachers that sent me there from the school should come for some diagnostics. In short, I was always on the side of those - I don’t want to use Havel’s term “helpless” - but those, who don’t let themselves be messed around with. Basically, I fight for things I think are good, and if I made various slip-ups now and then... what can I do about it now, when I’m seventy-two years old?”

“I’m one of the few people - perhaps there are more of us, but I don’t know of any other - who didn’t complain about being a boilerman. I discovered that it was an excellent job - free time, you can read there, the boilers run on their own when you fill them. It’s dirty work, manual work, but I never avoided that, I always earned a living with my hands. But mainly the free time! And especially in Axa - in the summer we worked the whole week and then took turns. We didn’t heat at night during the summer, it was just the water, so it could be managed, and then I had a month free, so I could tend to my own things at the parish house - the hay... There was a half-hectare meadow behind the church, but that wasn’t enough, because I had twenty sheep, so I even had to mow the ditches, no one does that nowadays. But in the winter we couldn’t do it in whole weeks like that, we did two days and then a week off because there were three big boilers there, you had to stoke that properly, but then they lasted eight hours. But you had to keep them running overnight, although I think the boilers were turned down, understandably. So I worked a week in the summer and then I had a month off. And people couldn’t believe their eyes, nor could State Security, but they left me alone at the time.”