10:00 Czech lesson. 11:00-12:00 discussed rerecording etc with Milena. Lunch at home after shopping. Ezra saying how high an opinion of me Barbora has. She’s taking the idea of being my mother with great seriousness. Didn’t do any writing. Except in this diary. Read Virginia Woolf. The start of World War II.
Notes:
Phone-boxes. Czech phone boxes are made out of what looks like balsa wood and unlaminated glass. They are very fragile. The actual phones are also easily vandalized. I have come across at least one that had had the money box taken out. This meant one could retrieve one’s one crown piece after making the call. Our local phone boxes are covered in homemade OF posters, Volte 7.
Lift. It has taken me this long to note simply that the lift in our building doesn’t stop on the 9th floor going up, the floor on which we live. This means that you can either stop it by opening the doors or pressing the stop button or you can go up to the 10th floor and then it will stop at the 9th floor going down. The lift has wallpaper, very domestic wallpaper on the inside and a mirror on the wall to the left. It seems to go fast some days and slow some days.
TV. Actuality spends most of its time following Havel around. The other day he went to a Škoda factory, a carpet factory, a farm, across a desolate landscape and looked thoroughly bored with the whole thing. The one piece of information from a terrible article on Havel in The European, which is an awful paper, which connected is this:
“You see,” he said, “I don’t even have time to buy my own cigarettes anymore. When other people buy them for me they never manage to buy the brand I like.”
Metro. The Metro-station at Můstek is always full of newspaper sellers. The odd are selling books of photos of Jan Pavel II and Saint Havel II together. Also women selling white feathers or snowdrops. Respekt. Svobodné Slovo1. Rock & Pop. The OF paper.
English newspapers: Available – The Financial Times, The Guardian International, The European.
Important books: Charta 77; Petr Pithart – Osmašedesáty (a history of 1968); Jiri Vančura – Nadeje a zklamání (Pražske Jaro 1968); Josef Heyduk – fragmenty2; Planéta Exilu; Ivan Klíma – Má Veselá Jitra3; Jarovlav Hutka Požar v Bazaru4; [Ivan] Klíma – Láska & Smetí5; Václav Havel Dálkovy Vyslech6.
Formerly the main daily newspaper of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party. The title translates as Free Speech.
A short story collection by a translator from French.
My Merry Mornings: Stories from Prague, 1985, Readers International
Untranslated, but the title means Fire in the Bazaar. Hutka is still active as a folk musician in the Czech Republic.
Love & Garbage, published in 1989, after being banned, the Czech edition sold 100,000 copies.
Title means Remote Interrogation, but translated as Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala, Vintage, 1991.