Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  When the phone rang, she was unable to tell where she was or how long she’d slept. Her heart was thumping, whether from being torn out of her sleep or from excitement she wasn’t sure. But it was only her mother.

  ‘Am I disturbing you, love?’

  ‘Hello, Mummy.’ She tried to make her voice sound normal. ‘How are the children?’

  ‘That’s why I’m calling. Daddy and I have to go into town.’

  She hadn’t the slightest idea what time it might be.

  ‘Is it all right if he brings them over?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is!’ (Knowing her mother they were already on their way out of the door. Her mother never asked first, she acted and took decisions and merely announced them to others in the form of questions.)

  ‘Marketa is such a sweet child,’ her mother said. ‘She picked you a thistle in the park. Is Adam back yet?’

  ‘No, I think he’s in court.’

  ‘Is he very busy?’

  ‘You know Adam. He’s always very busy.’

  ‘I don’t know. He ought to choose some other profession. With his gifts and education.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy!’

  ‘All he’s doing is making lots of enemies. One day, one of those . . .’

  ‘Mummy, you know it’s pointless.’

  ‘There are plenty of jobs where they can use people like him. In export for instance,’ her mother was unbudged. ‘And no one ever bothers them.’

  She had only just hung up when the phone rang again and all at once she knew it was him. There was a moment’s silence at the other end. ‘It’s me . . .’ She didn’t say anything. She had been looking forward to the call and was pleased he’d phoned, or rather, she wouldn’t have been pleased if he hadn’t phoned, but now – any moment the children would be here and she hadn’t even managed to wash or get something to eat.

  ‘It’s you,’ she replied at last. ‘Had a good sleep?’

  He treated it as a joke. ‘I couldn’t get to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking of you.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you.’

  ‘Alena,’ his voice dropped as if he was afraid someone would overhear him, ‘I have to see you!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Right now!’

  ‘I can’t. How could I get to you? What’s the time, anyway?’

  ‘Three,’ he said, ‘five to three.’

  ‘There you are. My children will be here in a moment. And tomorrow I’m going away.’

  ‘That’s precisely why I have to see you. Please, Alena, I beg you!’

  ‘Has something happened?’ The urgency in his voice frightened her.

  ‘Yes. I’m in love with you.’

  ‘Oh, Honza, my love. But I can’t now!’

  ‘Just for a moment.’

  ‘Where are you calling from?’

  ‘From your place.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ and in spite of herself she looked round the bedroom.

  ‘I’m here in the phone booth. On the corner of your street.’

  ‘You’re crazy!’

  The doorbell rang in the passage, followed by the sound of a key in the lock.

  ‘Wait,’ she told him. Quickly she slipped on her dressing-gown. ‘The children are here,’ she said, ‘with my father.’

  ‘But I have to see you!’

  The bedroom door opened with a crash. Marketa was holding in her hand a prickly thistle stalk.

  Behind her flaxen mop there appeared the darker, round head of her son. The head said: ‘Mummy, is it true that donkeys eat this?’

  For a moment she was covered in shame. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Go and take your shoes off. And don’t interrupt me. You can see I’m on the telephone.’

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ suggested the voice at the other end.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘we might be . . .’

  The door opened once more. She turned to see the ruddy face of her father. ‘You’re on the phone? Sorry!’ But he remained in the doorway.

  ‘OK then,’ she said quickly, ‘but I don’t know when!’

  ‘I’ll wait here until . . .’ the receiver yelled. She banged it down, in a sudden fit of panic that even that might not silence it. She was sure she’d gone red, but her father seemed not to have noticed, or pretended he hadn’t. He was a well-bred man.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Daddy. I could do with popping out to the supermarket for bread.’

  ‘I’ll run and get you some,’ her father offered.

  ‘No, thanks all the same. I’ll get it myself.’

  ‘But you’re not even dressed,’ her father said, not yielding his offer. ‘I’ll be back before you’re dressed.’

  She hurriedly combed her hair. She tugged so hard it brought tears to her eyes. ‘There’s no need to worry, Daddy. If you’re in a rush, don’t hang about, I’ll go later on.’

  Her father went out, leaving her with the children.

  ‘Mummy, have you packed yet?’

  ‘I’m going to take that crying doll.’

  ‘Will Auntie Sylva be there with Lucie?’

  Now he’d be walking up and down outside the phone booth. Scrawny and with a visionary’s gaze, waiting for her. She was touched that someone was still waiting for her and wasting time that way. Whenever she was late, Adam scolded her roundly.

  She heard a distant rumble outside. That was odd: a storm first thing in the morning! No, of course, it wasn’t morning any more; in a moment Adam would be back and might see him. ‘Would you mind,’ she asked the children, ‘if I popped out for some bread?’

  ‘Daddy brought a loaf this morning,’ her daughter told her.

  ‘Daddy will need that one here,’ she explained. ‘We’ll need some bread for the journey. You keep an eye on Martin while I’m away.’

  ‘I’m going with you,’ the little boy said.

  ‘Stay here,’ she told him. ‘Take a look out of the window. It’s going to rain.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, Mummy. You always used to tell us that rain doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she admitted in desperation, ‘but when you’re shopping it does, because the food can get wet.’

  ‘Then why are you going shopping, then?’ Martin started to snivel. ‘I don’t want to stay here with her. She bosses me about.’

  So they all went out together. She could hardly insist that they obey her, seeing that her motives were so obviously base. She saw his tall figure from afar. He was standing still, leaning on the lamp-post and looking in the direction from which he clearly expected her to appear. Her lover.

  In the supermarket she bought one superfluous loaf and some rice. Probably she ought to be buying something for the journey, but she was in no state to think what they might really need; Adam usually took care of the shopping. As she was leaving the shop, he was still standing there. My little lad, she addressed him silently, and felt so tenderly towards him that she had to make every effort not to desert the children and run over.

  Before we taste the waters of Lethe

  1

  It was my first encounter with punitive justice, or rather with an all-powerful police. They accommodated us in a rambling barracks. During that winter of 1941–42, we were sleeping thirty-two to a room, lying on mattresses on a filthy floor tramped over by soldiers’ boots for the past century and a half. From the window could be seen a number of ordinary two-storeyed houses. Indeed there was altogether little of interest in that town, except perhaps for the bastions of the fortress, and the cemetery with the graves of Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Cabrisovič and Trifko Grabež, whose action allegedly sparked off a world war virtually forgotten now. In the distance, beyond all the houses, the battlements and the cemetery, there were hills. A steep grey-green hillside whose features remained etched in my memory for ever.

  The features of the people, however, have been lost to me. What would have remained unchanged of those features anyway after three decades, had they lived on? But none of t
hem did, as far as I know, apart from me, Adam Kindl, No. . . . – but I don’t even want to recall the number – and my mother and my brother Hanuš. I can’t even muster the names of most of the people; in our room there lived three Stein families, but that name conjures up no faces, it is only a sound: one of the sounds of those days, like the snatch of a silly rhyme that I learned on the scarlet-fever ward:

  Aaa, aaa, aaa,

  Doktor Schlanger ist schon da.

  It all seems equally real and equally unreal, only a gathering of bloodless shades, without feeling. Sometimes it strikes me that they have had nothing to do with my fate, and then I find it incredible they were once part of my life.

  I can’t even remember the name of that woman, not even her face, just the fact that she made a little table out of suitcases, and covered it with a tablecloth. On the tablecloth there stood a vase, and in the vase artificial flowers – marguerites I think they were. That woman – only women and children lived in the room – was kind to me like all the others, and because our mattresses were only separated by a narrow aisle and we lay feet inwards, whenever I went to bed I could see her, her lips, whose shape I no longer recall, of course, as they tried to form themselves into a reassuring smile.

  Once I woke up in the middle of the night. I slept fitfully in those strange surroundings full of noises, loud sighs, snores and sobs, and I heard a moaning that filled me with anguish. I sat up. On the bedside table made of suitcases there shone a lighted candle and that woman was sitting with a cushion folded between her back and the wall, her grey hair falling about her livid, sweat-beaded brow. I gazed at her, unable to move or say anything, and as I watched her wiping the sweat from her forehead, writhing and giving out inarticulate moans, my terror grew.

  Worst of all, no one else woke up; I alone shared the woman’s wakefulness. I knew I ought to get up and ask her what she needed, or wake someone else, seeing that she hadn’t done so herself. Instead I pulled my blanket over my head and blocked up my ears. I had no inkling yet that there are sounds that cannot be escaped so easily. Curled up beneath the blanket with my eyelids squeezed shut, I heard and saw her more clearly than in reality. When I woke the next morning, she was already lying motionless, her face covered with the sheet, and on the sheet the bunch of artificial marguerites. Women were walking by with cups in their hands and my brother was building something out of the few bricks he’d brought with him, someone was yelling that coal was to be handed out, and on the table made of suitcases the precious candle was still burning. Then two men appeared with the first stretcher I’d seen in my life. They loaded the dead woman and shortly afterwards I saw them passing through the barracks gate and disappearing along a snow-covered street.

  That evening, I escaped into the courtyard. It was the only place from where I could see the sky. A cold and almost imperceptible light filled the darkened yard with terrifying shadows. Until that moment – it was only a few months after my tenth birthday – I had only played. Even my stay here had only been a game. I had played at queuing for food with a dinner bowl; I had played at transports; I’d even tried to play at being afraid – though my fear of those men in uniform was genuine. But how could I suspect the depth of the chasm into which we had been thrust? Now I realised that a single, irrevocable moment could interrupt the game. Now I too was being loaded on the stretcher, my head carefully put straight and the sheet being pulled over again and again. Just cover the lad’s eyes, he can’t see any more anyway. Anguish quietly crept out of the nocturnal shadows. I yearned to escape from the barracks, not just from here: to escape from a world in which everything ended so hopelessly. Lord God come! Jesus Christ appear to me! Give me a sign that You know about me, that You hear, that You are still the Redeemer, tirelessly redeeming still. I looked up at the sky. The stars could be seen more clearly here than in the town where I was born, they seemed to me to fill the sky far more. Amidst all those stars, each of which was supposed to be bigger than the Earth and was ablaze with enormous flames, God was swimming like an enormous invisible fish. He didn’t hear anything – He couldn’t through all the roar of flying stars. It seemed to me that I could hear the distant crackling sound of that mass flight of stars.

  I was at the age when one is too bound up in one’s own feelings to be able to notice the feelings of those who seem more powerful and hence exist in order to afford one protection. It was only years later that it struck me how dreadful it must have been for my mother. She was so delicate that even before the war she scarcely coped with living. Now she was assailed by calamities and tribulations – each more terrible than the next.

  She had been one of a large family. I remember how many there were of them in Grandad and Grandma’s flat on Anenské Square: Mother, Auntie Anita and Uncles Ivan and Jakub, and the youngest of all – the pale, and to my eyes, very beautiful Auntie Marta. They had all grown up together in that flat, which had just one room and a kitchen, so I couldn’t fathom how they all squeezed in, let alone the lodgers my mother told me used to live in the kitchen. My mother was the second youngest.

  I think she loved her brothers best of all. They were both absorbed in politics and had become professional revolutionaries (something which at that time might have been rash, and certainly was not as profitable as it is nowadays). And she adored her diminutive father who, while he never rose higher than the rank of a municipal official, was a self-taught intellectual, had mastered several languages and studied the still rather unfamiliar works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Bebel. He was well versed in both mythology and history (our continent’s, at least: he would tell me stories of Odysseus, Cromwell, the incorruptible Robespierre, and of Napoleon, the genius who had buried the revolution); and he had visited – mostly on foot – a large part of the empire of his birth, even meeting, in the course of his travels, the Emperor himself, whom as a socialist and republican he could not of course admire, and whose right to govern he denied; yet he regarded him as such an important personage that fifty years later he could describe exactly what the Emperor was wearing at that moment. Grandad also played the fiddle and could blow the bugle, and if I implored him he would take it out of the cupboard, insert the mouthpiece and blow a tattoo or play the Radetzky March.

  On the first night of one of the many occupations of our country, when Hitler’s army was nearing Prague, Auntie Marta gassed herself. I still don’t know if it was the only reason or just the last straw on top of some personal misfortune, but before we even held the funeral, both uncles turned up in our apartment, not to join in the mourning, but to seek refuge for the one night. They were wanted by the police. I remember them talking for a long time, and clearly hearing through the wall my mother’s sobs. She begged them to give it up and not abandon her. And I heard the calm, deep voices of my uncles (they addressed her as Mousie) trying to console her. I fell asleep. Next morning the uncles had gone from the flat and I never set eyes on them again.

  A few months after Auntie Marta’s funeral, Auntie Anita disappeared. Mother knew only that she wanted to flee to the Soviet Union with her fiancé Karel, but she did not learn whether they actually succeeded or not.

  Then both uncles were arrested. The court, which only ever delivered one verdict and hence lost all right to be called a court, pronounced the inevitable sentence and shortly afterwards they were executed. That was probably one of the reasons why my mother fell ill. She lay for several days in high fever. She was only slightly recovered when they summoned my father to the transport. I remember her packing Father’s things into two big suitcases they had bought at the beginning of the war. Linen and high boots which I’d never seen him wear, several boxes of grape sugar, medicine against typhus and lots of socks. (Who would he have to wash them for him, and would they ever meet again, in fact?)

  She stayed with us and her old parents (Grandad was already over eighty) alone in a country full of enemies, and in addition spurned, branded and condemned. Only the date of departure remained to be announced.

  The
n the moment arrived. It was just before mid-day and Mother was cooking potato dumplings, my favourite, for lunch. The doorbell rang; there stood a little fellow, a complete stranger. He made a deep bow, then spoke some quiet words I couldn’t hear and my mother rushed out on to the staircase. For the first time in my life I heard her scream. She screamed so loud that doors opened all over the house and neighbours came out to look. The housekeeper came to see us and someone telephoned Auntie Simona who lived nearby. They had generously given us two hours to pack. Even the little fellow helped bring things and toss them into the cases. Then they drove us to the fortress, where they assigned thirty people to live with us, allocating us twice two and a half square metres of blackened floor, just enough space for six of our mattresses, six mattresses for the three of us and three cases at our feet. That was our space. My mother was always a stickler for cleanliness. She was careful to get for us everything that medical science prescribed: vitamins and fresh air, a balanced diet, a proper night’s sleep in a well-aired room. Now there was nothing she could do for us but leave us some of her own portion of food and straighten our bedding when we kicked it off at night.