Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City Read Free Page B

a meagre pension which the State repeatedly threatened to stop if he were to insist on maintaining links with degenerate and anti-revolutionary factions. He knew Vaclav Havel, of course, still in prison at the time, and often met his friends from the old days, before 1976 before, indeed, 1968 - in cafes and pubs, where their conversations were monitored by police informers. He was frequently summoned for interrogation at police headquarters, even still, although the authorities must have known that he was politically powerless. He explained to us, in tones of weary amusement flecked with bitterness, how the procedure worked. There would be a phone call early in the morning, often before dawn, when he was still in bed, and a friendly voice would ask if he would care to come to such-and-such a building, always a different one, and have a chat. Just a chat, the voice would say, nothing serious, nothing for him to worry about, he could take his time, there was no hurry, a car would be outside, waiting for him, when he was ready. He would get up straight away and pack a small bag - pyjamas, a clean shirt, change of underwear, socks, shaving things, the all-important toothbrush - while his wife made coffee and heated rolls. This was their unvarying ritual. It was strange, he said, but they spoke little on these occasions, and only of practical things, despite the fact that they both knew they might never see each other again. There were friends and acquaintances who had been summoned like this, 'for a chat', and who had not come back. Arrived at the specified anonymous building in one of the city's more unbeautiful quarters, the Professor told us, he would be placed in a small, windowless room, bare save for a steel table and straight chair, and instructed to fill out a sheaf of official forms, listing the minutiae of his life and the lives of his parents, wife, children, while unseen eyes, as he well knew, watched him through the two-way mirror set before him in the wall. Then the interrogator would stroll in, relaxed, smiling, and infinitely menacing.
    These periods of detention, the Professor mildly observed, could be over in half an hour, or might go on for three days and nights, or even longer, with half a dozen interrogators working in shifts. He had never yet suffered physical violence. Like secret police forces everywhere, the Statnior StB, had a very great deal of information - when the files were opened after the Velvet Revolution, the names were discovered of tens of thousands of informers on the StB payroll - but found the greatest difficulty in piecing it all together. Frequently, the Professor said, the line of questioning would meander so far from anything or anyone that he might be able to tell them about, even if he were willing to, that he would have no alternative but to fall silent. The interrogators were always nameless. Many years later, another Czech friend, Zdenek,a writer and translator, and a leading Charter 77 activist, told me how one day after the fall of the communist regime he was walking in the city centre and spotted on the other side of the street one of his interrogators from the bad old days, and how, before he knew what he was doing, he found himself shouting across the traffic furiously at the fellow, 'What is your name? What is your name?' as if it were the one most important thing in the world, the one thing that he must know above all. And what did the former interrogator do? I asked, expecting to hear that he had pulled up his coat collar and slunk away in shame. 'Oh,'said with a shrug, 'he smiled, and waved, and called out, Hello there! How are you? and went on his way.'
    By now we were in Zlata Ulicka - the famousGolden Lane - hard by the walls of the fortress of Hradcany. I do not know how we got there. Indeed, much as I try I cannot remember what means of transport we used in any of our time during that first visit. We must have travelled by bus, or tram, or even, despite J.'s