In 1964, Hynek Jánský was dismissed from his employment as investigator and his vague classification of commissioner-officer was abolished. It seemed there was no longer use for his science. There was even talk that he should be punished and given a taste of his own medicine. His superiors, however, succeeded in having him released rather than suspended. Had he been suspended, it might have affected his pension, and in general could have led to a whole range of inconveniences. Instead Dr. Jánský was released from his position and hired as assistant chief stock clerk in a small produce warehouse on the outskirts of Prague, where he was responsible for a staff of seven, a handful of forklifts, and maintaining the temperature of the frozen fruit and vegetables. All his years of expertise, his irreplaceable experience, lay fallow. His subordinates were negligent, and his only superior was a drunk who laced his morning tea with rum. But then came 1968, Russian tanks entered the country, and over the next few months Hynek received a series of visits at work, his old colleagues coming by to see how he was doing. He was ashamed he had nowhere to invite them except the neighborhood pub. They would sit and have coffee or goulash, and even though none of them ever came right out and said it, he knew his former bosses were checking up on him to see if he was still prepared. It went on like that for some time, until finally, around Christmas 1971, one day as usual he came to work and waiting outside the gate for him was a car with a driver, who handed him a sealed envelope. The moment he saw it, Hynek knew his days of hardship were over. It had been decided that every specialist was most useful doing the work he knew best. With shaking fingers Hynek tore open the envelope and pulled out a few sheets of paper. The most important one was his appointment as instructor at a newly founded academy. The driver, who had been watching him out of the corner of his eye, grinned. “An appointment, comrade? An appointment?”
“Yes,” Jánský replied. “But … how did you know?”
“You aren’t the first or the last … comrade,” the driver said, offering a warm smile. “So, where to? Where can I drop you off? Or,” he tipped his head toward the warehouse, “you want me to pop back inside for your things?”
“No, that’s all right,” Jánský said. “I can get them myself.”
“Just remember,” said the driver, still smiling, “always make sure to say good-bye to your coworkers. It might not be the last time you see them. You know the saying, comrade: Be nice to the people you meet on your way up, because you might meet them again on the way back down.”
And so Dr. Hynek Jánský became an instructor. Quickly and unexpectedly. His new workplace was on the opposite side of town from the warehouse of carrots, cucumbers, and other frozen vegetables. He had a vague feeling that the newly restored leaders were somehow ashamed of their new institution. In any case, however, it was a nice commute, especially in the spring. Every day he went to work, he walked from the tram stop past the low building of a nursery school, followed by a playground. After the playground he turned left and took a brisk nine-minute walk across a plot of land that had probably once been an orchard; now someone was trying against the odds to make a park out of it. At the intersection coming out of the park, Jánský headed left each day, and two and a half minutes later he stood before the expansive, welcoming building of the academy.
As an instructor, Dr. Jánský taught what was known as special techniques in nonpolice interrogation. His new institution in fact had nothing to do with the police. Odd as it seemed, no one asked who or what oversaw the academy, nor was anyone told. Jánský threw himself into his new work with gusto. His lectures analyzed the various types of pain, with every part of the human body described, depicted, and characterized in minute detail. He knew his way around nerve endings the way some travelers know their way around train stations, airports, and seaports. He knew every gateway, door, and pathway of pain, every pressure point, inside and out. His students, or, as the academy preferred to call them, trainees, were mostly men and hailed from vaguely named state institutions situated on the city’s outskirts, in villas with no address on the door, so as not to attract any unwanted attention from mailmen or overzealous gas and electric meter readers. Their employers, their institutions, and for that matter they themselves, more or less, didn’t exist. The fervor with which Dr. Jánský delivered his lectures at times overwhelmed even his rugged, experienced trainees, who wondered how one could bring oneself to butcher a human soul like that, never mind a body, imagining what it might be like to be on the other side, the wrong side, and fall into their instructor’s hands. This wasn’t just a few slaps or a punch, a fist and a few broken ribs, this was science. In all the years he worked at the academy, however, the one thing Jánský regretted was that, despite repeated urgings on his part, his findings, which his Russian colleagues developed and he expanded on with unusual diligence and skill, were never approved and published as a textbook or lecture notes. He didn’t succeed, despite pushing for it up until he left the position for a well-deserved retirement in 1980. Thus his knowledge and understanding could be passed along only orally, through his lectures behind carefully closed doors. Like any good teacher he did his best to make the subject matter appealing to his pupils. He wanted them to be able to grasp it for themselves and to develop the knowledge and skills he taught them. He wanted his pupils to surpass him. Every year he began his first lecture by saying, “There are as many ways for our body to cause us pain as there are for it to bring us happiness and pleasure. That is the basis of our science, which we must always take as our starting point. But remember, dear friends, there are at least three times as many ways for a person being questioned to tell us what he knows, or what we want to hear.” Here he stopped for a well-measured pause before adding: “Exercise One: Describe the ways in which your own body brings you pain and pleasure. We have twenty minutes remaining until the end of class. Please begin writing. I will collect and evaluate your work at the end of the hour.”
(2)
In spring of 1968, a journalist came to visit engineer Josef Černý. He was the third one that year. A young man with about twenty-five years of life behind him. Eager as a puppy, he got straight to the point. But Josef had no interest in talking to anyone, and was disturbed that the journalist showed no interest in classical music, despite Josef’s repeated attempts to change the subject. The young man wasn’t interested in music, nor did he make any attempt to pretend to be, which in Josef’s opinion would have been the polite thing to do, and besides, he got Josef’s address from an organization Josef had never heard of. The young man also refused both coffee and tea. How can you have a proper conversation with a stranger without any coffee or tea? Josef asked himself. All the journalist wanted to hear about was Jánský, and he didn’t seem to understand why Josef didn’t want to talk about him. He just kept going on about justice and the rectification of old wrongs. What could a young man like him know about justice, Josef thought, absentmindedly shuffling the papers on his desk. Suddenly he surprised himself: “Are you in love?” he asked the young pup. The journalist nodded and blushed. His blushing led Josef to decide not to throw him out as he had the ones before him. None of them had been interested in classical music either, on top of which they had confused statics with statistics. Reasons enough, in Josef’s view, not to trust someone or waste time on them. Seeing the journalist’s red face, however, prompted him to change his mind and supply some cautious answers to his puppy dog — like questions. And so as Josef began to speak, the young man squinted his eyes and scrawled away in a notepad propped on his thigh. When Josef was done, the young man asked for a glass of water, drank it down in one long gulp, thanked him, and left. That was the last Josef ever heard of him. A few weeks later, Antonín stopped by with a newspaper article featuring several names, including Josef’s. Some of what he’d told the journalist was in there. After dinner Josef brewed himself his usual evening weak cup of coffee and sat down to read the article. Among other things it said a commission had been formed to investigate the case, that it was about time, etc. Every single sentence contained the words justice, punishment, or vindication. At the end of the article was the address of an organization for victims to contact so that every case could be properly investigated. Josef was taken aback. He had never thought of himself as a victim. Not him. The idea of being a victim didn’t fit with him or his profession. He had always viewed himself as having had an accident, an unpleasant political accident with lasting consequences, but the thought that he might be a victim had never crossed his mind. He sat down at his desk and opened the drawer with his round slide rule. It was his pride and joy, and he’d always found its special shape to be calming somehow. He redid the calculations that had come out fine the day before, but even after recalculating he still didn’t feel like a victim. Yes, that commission must be up to something. The question was whether the lines of force of their intentions intersected at any point with the vector of his political accident. Even traffic accidents with lasting consequences had a logic of their own, he thought, but he still didn’t feel like a victim, which actually made him feel bad. He decided to wait for his wife, who was out at the cottage, and when she got back he gave her the article and asked her what she thought. But Květa refused to comment. It was obvious to look at her that anything having to do with Josef’s imprisonment made her extremely uncomfortable. So Josef deposited the article in his desk drawer, and there it stayed.