Dvoracek's wife, Marketa, doubts the "so-called evidence" against Kundera. She told France 24 satellite TV channel, "I don't know how reliable it is. I saw the document from the police. It remains to be proven [whether it is] real, but for Mike [the name Dvoracek goes by now] and for me it makes no difference...It really doesn't [make] any difference whether the denouncer was a very famous person or someone not at all known."

Without Kundera's testimony, the only unobstructed patch in this muddled mosaic is a 58-year-old police document, which the Prague Institute has authenticated. Its resident historian, Ruldolf Vedova, told Jerome Dupuis of L'Express: "We had the document analysed by the Czech Secret Forces archives. The paper, the names listed, the identity and the signature of the officer were all examined - and the document was found to be authentic." Yet one day after Hradilek's article was published, another Czech historian, Zdenek Pesat, came forward with a complicating admission. In the spring of 1950, Pesat had been a third-year student at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University as well as a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party faculty committee. He is now bed-ridden and on oxygen, saying his poor health makes it impossible to give further interviews or address the matter any more elaborately then he does here. He wrote: "Dlask contacted me and told me that his girlfriend [and future wife] Iva met a former friend whom she knew had fled to the West and that he probably illegally returned. Dlask told me that he reported it to the police. He had the feeling that he also must inform about it to his mother organisation. And because we both were studying aesthetics and because he knew me best of all KSC faculty committee members, he told it to me. I supposed that Dlask wanted to protect his girlfriend from punishment that could follow if her contact with an emigrant or even an agent-provocateur from the secret police became known. I did not react in any way to his communication and I did not talk about it to anyone. I have not met Dlask since our student days and I have put it out of my head."

If Dlask's jealousy was the overriding emotion, then this story would appear the more plausible. But why does Dlask's name appear nowhere in the local police files? Did he use Kundera's identity to avoid his own paper trail? If so, how could that be done in an age where personal documents had to be proffered at every turn? It's possible, as Anja Seeliger, co-founder of the German internet magazine Perlentaucher, points out, that Dlask might have gone to the secret police independently of Kundera's going to the local police - which is not so far-fetched when one considers that a five-year prison sentence attached to anyone found guilty of failing to report suspicious behaviour in those days.