Today, as I was walking through Andel, two police officers were coming the other way. When they saw me, they both started grinning. They were not speaking to each other, just looking at me and then each other, and grinning sadistically. One of them I can’t remember seeing before, but the other is very familiar. He is the one on the right in the photograph below that I took several months ago.
I don’t know what they were grinning at. Perhaps at the thought that they and their colleagues in over a dozen different countries have been sadistically gaslighting a paranoid schizophrenic for over 15 years? Perhaps they were grinning at the realization that after those 15 years, not a single policeman or woman in Europe has lost their job as a result of this, let alone suffered any legal punishment?*
Or perhaps they were grinning at the particular thought that in the 15 years of this, I have not been able to get the slightest help – either legal help, or psychiatric counseling—because nobody would believe me, and likely nobody ever will believe me?
Or perhaps this police officer is an erudite and cultured reader of literature? Perhaps that very morning he had been reading ‘The Trial’, written by Prague’s most famous ever son – Franz Kafka? Perhaps he was thinking to himself that he and his colleagues have been responsible for an individual’s hellish nightmare that even Kafka could not have dreamed up. For in that great author’s work, the main character is summoned by the State to be put on trial, the reason for which he is unaware, and whose date, location, and form appear equally nebulous and forever out of reach. But at least he knows he is on trial, and faces punishment. A hundred years after Kafka wrote The Trial, there is a resident of Prague who is not only ignorant as to why he is being pursued by the State, but has been deliberately gaslighted for fifteen years into doubting whether any of it is real, and that he is being pursued by the State at all, rather than simply suffering from a mental illness. Perhaps the police officer was grinning and getting hard at this realization? Perhaps he was now eager to get back to the station, and beat one off while thinking about it?
Perhaps it was none of these things. Perhaps he was grinning because (unbeknown to me) somebody wearing a clown costume was walking behind me? And perhaps because I looked a little agitated and frightened at these two officers apparently grinning sadistically at me, he will now get back to his colleagues and his boss, and they will decide together to point me out to a few hundred more security guards and shop staff in fifteen different countries, with instructions to mock me for ‘not liking to be looked at’, in order to punish me for being ‘paranoid’?
*Psychological torture in the Czech Republic carries a 12 year prison sentence. In the UK and many other countries, it is treated as seriously as murder and carries an automatic life-sentence for a serving member of the police, no matter in which country they committed the offence, or what nationality they are.