by Ivan Klíma
The next day, I had to go to school, even though there were scarcely three weeks of the school year left. I was fourteen, so they sent me into the fourth year. I have no detailed memory of that class. I am unable to recall a single teacher or single fellow-pupil, I remember only the feeling I had: awe combined with disappointment and uncertainty. I could understand nothing of what was going on around me. For the first time in my life I entered a gymnasium, and while everyone else was swarming all over the place, exercising on the parallel bars or doing arm swings on the horizontal bar, I stood to one side, aware that I would never manage any of it. The teachers used to bring the strangest objects into chemistry and physics lessons and speak in a language full of symbols whose meaning was a mystery to me. I was not even capable of concentrating on those things I might conceivably have understood, such as history and geography lessons.
Two or three attempts were made to get me to answer questions on the previous lesson. Even though they asked me the simplest and friendliest of questions I maintained a terrified silence. Everything set me apart from the rest, even my appearance. I could not relate to them in any way. I was waiting for them to make the overtures (after all, I was superior, having undergone exemplary suffering of the kind then held in high esteem). But they had no reason to. They had no use for me.
I was waiting for Arie. Whenever I found myself alone at home I would take out his photo and the picture he had given me and sit looking at those two relics, the only mementoes of his existence. Once I took the cloth off the kitchen table, set up some goal-posts, took out some buttons and played a game of button-football. In it I played for myself and my pal – playing fairly for him, since I beat myself in his name. But there was no point in it, so I put the buttons away and went out to wander around the streets instead.
That first month, Father had given me a hundred crowns to spend. I bought my first illustrated magazine ever. It smelt fresh from the press. I sat down on a bench behind the Rudolfinum and read some concentration camp story. Then I continued on my way. I took a tram as far as Košírěv and was amazed to discover that the woods began so soon. A bilingual street sign lay in a narrow ditch, but apart from that, nothing recalled the war. After so many years, I had trees above my head once more. I lay beneath one of them and listened to the sounds of the forest. I no longer remember what I thought about, but it must have been one of the most telling experiences of my childhood as it turns up again and again in my dreams: I get on a tram that takes me through an unbelievable cluster of houses and eventually arrives at the edge of a wood. I get off and find myself in a silent landscape. I walk along a soft footpath, alongside which runs a narrow ditch often full of junk, and start to climb upwards. The trees about me begin to change; I walk through a birch grove and between dreamy pines like fluffed-up parasols, and mountain spruce at whose dark feet the strawberry-red caps of toadstools peer out of the moss, until at last I emerge into a realm of total calm, and in my dream I can hear the musical sound of wind blowing and I am happy.
Strangely enough I did not fail school that time, but came through with flying colours. I didn’t pay any attention to the school report; I couldn’t have cared less about it. I had yet to adopt either the mores or the competitiveness of civilisation. Only years afterwards, when I turned up that already yellowing document among my papers, did I realise that it was a testimonial not to myself and what I knew, but to the era when it was issued and most of all to the people who issued it.
The war was finished – and so was the regime of occupation. Its most hated representatives had either fled or wound up in prison while their victims had been proclaimed martyrs. But all that concerned just a tiny section of the population: most of the people had not died, fled or gone to gaol, but merely gone on with their lives. Overnight, they had entered a world which commended actions that yesterday’s laws had identified as crimes, a world whose laws declared yesterday’s crimes to be acts of heroism. They naturally regarded this change as a victory for historical truth and agreed that guilt must be assessed, wrongs put right and society purged.
But what was to be identified as guilt and what condoned, seeing that they had all lived under the former regime, however hated and imposed it was? Seeing that the existence and actions of the regime had also depended on their own existence and behaviour. Who was to be the defendant, who the witness and who the judge? At the trials that were to take place, would not those who confronted each other in the courtroom be equally guilty and equally innocent? The very will to cleanse oneself of evil and to atone for guilt conceals within it the risk of new crimes and new wrongs.
As they looked back, it is certain that many felt pangs of conscience. They would happily have done something to atone for the past, not just for everybody’s sake, but for their own. And some of them had had the good fortune to be sent this emaciated wretch who had come back from somewhere or other. His state of neglect was so great that at the age of fourteen he had no idea what the square on the hypotenuse equalled or when Charles the Fourth died. But was it his fault? Did he not merit magnanimous indulgence?
It is unlikely that my teachers had conspired among themselves; they had taken their decision independently and sent me off on my life’s journey with – in place of the learning I had missed – a little bit of their own guilt in the shape of a faked school report. Perhaps they believed it was some atonement at least for their silence over the previous five years, those five years when they had had to teach lies if they wanted to teach at all, and that through this action they might redress the injury I had undoubtedly suffered. In fact it merely fostered in me the mistaken notion that I enjoyed some kind of special privilege, love and consideration, and served to alienate me even more from my peers, who sensed that their efforts had been cheapened by that single bogus report. My teachers failed to realise that nothing in life can be redressed. Our former actions remain as irrevocable as bygone days. At best we can try to forget what happened. On condition that we find sufficient human forbearance within ourselves and a trace of the nobility of spirit which we sense to be a divine attribute.
2
Father was never over-attentive towards me. On the odd occasion, he would give into my wheedling and play a game of chess or draughts with me, or help me with my maths homework. What is the sine of sixty degrees? Fear grips me as I struggle in vain to remember. I remain silent. Father is patient. Not to worry, I can work it out, after all. On his instruction I draw an equilateral triangle. What am I supposed to do now? I have no idea. Why did I draw the triangle? he asks. In order to work out the sine of sixty degrees, I mutter, because if I said I didn’t know for a second time, Father’s wrath would most likely blow me off the face of the earth. Of course it was to calculate the sine of sixty degrees, but that wasn’t the question. Why an equilateral triangle? I look at the drawing in front of me. Most likely because all the sides are the same length, but I realise I mustn’t say so. I say nothing. What do I require? How will I work out the sine of sixty degrees – what does sine mean? I mutter the definition. Right-oh, then, so what do I need? A right angle, of course! Yes, that’s obvious, a right angle. So what do I do now? I’ve no idea, but I say I’ll bisect one of the sides. Excellent. And what’s that called? A perpendicular, of course. I drop a perpendicular. Quite right. What is the cosine of sixty degrees? Father watches me expectantly. From his expression I surmise that every numskull, every country bumpkin, every retard knows the value of cos 60°. All I have to do is look. Father is raising his voice and getting red in the face. I must surely see it, let me not dare to say I don’t know; I’m only pretending not to see the relationship. My mother rushes in and begs my father not to shout at me, can’t he see it’s only terrifying me. But how is my father to keep his temper when this nincompoop fails to see he must divide a half by one. He most likely doesn’t know what that makes. A half divided by one is a half. Well, at least that, then. So what is the cosine of sixty degrees? I surmise it must be a half. But how is that something so meani
ngless, so imaginary, so inconceivable as the cosine of an angle of sixty degrees can be at the same time so tidy and balanced as to be expressible by the two words ‘a half’?
But very soon after, when the war had been over for almost a year, I got measles and was confined to bed for a long time in a high fever. When at last I was able to get up, Father himself suggested (what had he got out of my childhood, in fact? We had passed each other by, been torn apart at the very moment when we could have become attached to each other, and deprived of so much time that we never managed to make up, never managed to become close) that we go and play football in the yard together. Metal washing-line posts formed the goals. It was the first time since my early childhood that my father had gone out to play ball with me. We kicked the ball from one goal to the other and I played with all my might to show my father that by now I was a worthy opponent. Then suddenly, in the middle of the match, just as Father was getting ready to shoot, my forehead went cold and I started to lose control of my arms and legs. I could see the ball flying past me into the goal, hear my father shouting ‘Goal!’ I grasped the red-painted metal post and tried to reach the ball that lay only a few paces away from me.
The doctor was small and ruddy-cheeked with gold-framed spectacles. He spent a long time listening to my heart and his repeated request for me to hold my breath aroused my anxiety.
When he finally let me go I went and sat in the waiting room. It was still a private practice, which meant that even the waiting room had a particular character of its own, and I sat there in the company of several dozen ticking clocks of different shapes and sizes while Mother and Father remained in the consulting room. When they finally emerged, my mother’s eyes were red from weeping.
Back home they put me to bed, explaining that I had developed a slight heart condition and the only remedy was bed rest. I might have to be patient for a few weeks or even months and stay in bed without moving too much. (Oddly enough, while I recall it I relive the feeling of regret that when my father wanted to give me a treat the match should have come to such an inglorious conclusion. And I can see the ball flying past my suddenly enfeebled hands, and hear my father’s voice gleefully – no doubt to show how seriously he took the game – shouting ‘goal!’, and I wish a miracle might happen to let us finish that interrupted match.)
The period that followed remains virtually amorphous in my memory although it had an undoubted impact on my life. Initially I lay in my corner of the kitchen. Later, my father was appointed director of a nationalised factory in Brno and his room was empty on weekdays, so I was moved in there. The windows in the room looked out directly on to the square and I was therefore able to hear the sound of strangers’ footsteps on the paving stones, the singing of drunks at night and cooing of the pigeons that roosted in the ruins of the Town Hall. From time to time, something less familiar would happen: a band would play or there would be uniformed parades: Sokol members, scouts and legionaries; I would observe them and envy them their mobility.
I had had no time to form new friendships and my old friends were dead. I remained immobilised in the room’s narrow confines, surrounded all the time by the same old shapes and voices. At least I could listen to the radio, which – maybe there was something fateful in that for me, those repeated encounters with criminal justice – relayed hour upon hour of live broadcasts from the Nuremberg trials, and commentaries on that symbolic act of reckoning with the deeds of the war.
The Protectorate government was also brought to trial. I already knew all the actors by the sound of their voices: the presiding judge, the defence counsel, the prosecutors and the defendants. Oddly enough, the defendants tended to arouse sympathy in me rather than anger. I hadn’t the slightest appreciation, of course, of the tricky doublesided situation that national leaders found themselves in whose country had been betrayed; whose country had betrayed itself and its liberty; and who therefore had had no alternative but to seek some acceptable degree of ignominy. I felt sympathy towards them as people or just as living creatures who had been shackled, stuck behind bars, deprived of their freedom, and were now cornered by the entire machinery of collective hatred. At the same time, the very ceremony of it all fascinated me. Early on the morrow I would eagerly await the newspaper so that I could feast once more on the dead phrases of the previous day’s proceedings. I would search for pictures from the courtroom. Likenesses of the defendants and the judges. And now that the live voices of the defendants were no longer in my ears my sympathy would wane and I would come to share the leader writers’ anger with the traitors who had sold out the nation and people, and hence myself as well.
In those days I still believed in it: justice. I still believed in a world whose inhabitants could be sorted out into guilty and innocent, defendants and judges. A fairy-tale world aspiring to the truth.
3
During that period, almost all the visitors to the flat were brought in to see me. Often they were people I had never seen before; some of them even spoke Polish or German and were only calling in on their way through Prague. They would sit drinking tea (there was never even the tiniest bottle of alcohol in our home) and talking a great deal about the future of the world, as well as reminiscing about comrades whom I had never known either. I have already forgotten the stories they told, but I remember that some of them would appear quite amusing until all of a sudden there would be mention of the death of arrested comrades or terrifying details of how they were tortured. At such moments, my mother would ask them to stop talking about it or at least get off politics for a while, because the lad merely swallowed everything they said and besides, there were other things to talk about apart from war, death and politics. But they would put her right, declaring that politics was the key to everything: happiness, justice and life in general. Their explanation of the world increasingly took root in my mind and my conviction grew that it was the communist movement which embodied courage, conviviality, wisdom, humanity and all the other virtues of whose real nature someone of fifteen has no idea, which is why they have such power of attraction.
The most frequent visitors were my Uncles Gustav and Karel. Both had spent the war abroad. The first as a private soldier on the western fronts and the second in Moscow, where, in company with Mother’s sister Anita, he performed some mysterious and, as I understood it, very important mission.
I could recognise Uncle Gustav from a distance because his stick would bang loudly on the wooden stairs. He would come and sit by me, resting the leg they had crippled in one of the last battles of the war on another chair, and hanging the stick up on the chair-back, before asking me how I was. Better, I would reply, and at that moment I really did feel better for Uncle Gustav brought life with him. He was one of those people who know something about everything and have an opinion on every possible topic. (Only much later did I realise that his self-confidence stemmed not from his personality and experience alone, but also from his political outlook, which incited him to express views on matters he knew nothing about.) He liked describing his escape to Palestine – the passage in a fishing boat so loaded down with people no space was left for food or drink: how, dying of thirst, they disembarked in the shallows a mile off the coast and waded in through the cold sea water. And then how a British patrol boat had appeared and started firing on them. Uncle had no love of the British, even though he had fought in their army. Not only had they greeted his arrival in freedom with gunfire, they had subsequently arrested him, convicted him of being a communist spy and sentenced him to death. (I now suspect that the story about the military tribunal convicting him of an assassination attempt, when after refusing the defence counsel offered he made a fiery speech, asserting that he was to be sacrificed in order to shroud a shameful colonial plot, and declaring that as a communist he would never stoop to personal terror, was largely my uncle’s invention. Maybe it was intended to lend greater weight to his narrative and furnish me with an object lesson in the partiality of bourgeois justice.) In the end, according to my
uncle, he was saved by the war, having found his way to England and then to Africa, where he fought at Tobruk. He told of a desert shimmering in the heat, with lions running around and bourgeois officers doing everything they could to humiliate the private soldiers and himself, Uncle Gustav, who purely because of his convictions had never risen above the rank of sergeant. Often he could do nothing but gnash his teeth at the sight of such stupidity and the occasional deliberate reluctance to win the war and destroy the enemy. Admittedly the international bourgeoisie wanted to get rid of Hitler, he explained, but above all they wanted their real class enemy, the first state of workers and peasants, to bleed to death.
On other occasions, my uncle would tell me stories about the days when he and my father were children in a little town on the Elbe (Father never found the time to tell me anything about himself). Though cruelly class-divided, the town he told me about was a peaceful place which had just welcomed its first motor-car and received its first chance visit from a travelling cinematograph, where fairs were enlivened by dancing bears, clowns with trained monkeys and fortune tellers with parrots; and he related how he and Father had helped to catch a mad bull that had escaped from beneath the knife of Butcher Balun whose shop stood right next door to the Kindls’ cottage. When their father fell in the middle of the war they were poverty-stricken and used to help Mr Balun in his shop. The butcher would exploit them as much as possible and was indifferent to the fact they were war orphans. And Uncle Gustav would deliver a speech attacking butchers, bakers, wholesalers and entrepreneurs who only ever lived in order to squeeze money out of the people; he appealed to me never to become a slave to money or property, but instead to serve the great idea of socialism.
