Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  ‘Well get in then, but quickly, we can’t wait.’

  ‘Mummy, have you got your licence?’

  ‘Daddy says you mustn’t drive without your licence. Don’t rev so much, you’ll wear out Uncle’s battery.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, it won’t start. What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Alena, I’m sorry!’

  ‘Mummy, when Uncle starts the car, he pushes in the choke.’

  ‘What choke, Martin?’

  ‘That switch.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Alena!’

  ‘Mummy, you can change to third now.’

  ‘Mummy, how far is it to the hospital?’

  ‘Firty minutes, stupid. It’s firty minutes to town. Daddy said.’

  ‘Mummy, what if Honza dies before then?’

  ‘Mummy, you can push the choke in now.’

  ‘Mummy, I don’t think Honza’s breathing any more. Did he make a suicide?’

  ‘What’s a suicide, Mummy?’

  ‘It’s when someone doesn’t want to live any more, isn’t it, Mummy?’

  ‘Why didn’t Honza want to live any more, Mummy?’

  ‘Because his leg hurt, stupid!’

  ‘Stop talking to Mummy. Can’t you see she’s driving? And she’s bothered. Aren’t you bothered, Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy, Honza touched me with his hand and it’s freezing.’

  ‘His hand must be freezing if he’s not breathing!’

  ‘But he touched me with it.’

  ‘He couldn’t have touched you if he’s not breathing!’

  ‘But he did.’

  ‘So what? So he touched you, but he’s still not breathing, though.’

  ‘You should have turned off by the shop to go to the hospital.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No, but there was a signpost.’

  ‘What signpost?’

  ‘One with a big blue H. Daddy said it means hospital.’

  ‘Mummy, Honza is terribly, you know, pale. I think he really will die! I’m frightened.’

  Inside the hospital grounds, she wasted five minutes trying to find the proper wing and another five looking for an orderly with a stretcher. Maybe it was less, but every minute she waited seemed endless to her. Then she was left standing alone on the black and white tiles of the corridor.

  She walked up and down. What if he died and it was all her fault? Please God, if you exist, don’t be so hard on me. Other women do it too. Without thinking twice, just for fun, or out of boredom.

  Ten minutes. Back and forth.

  They have lovers and talk about them as if they were talking about television. They love describing how they deceive each other. And nothing happens. You don’t punish them in any way, God. I did it for his sake. I wanted to help him. If he dies, what shall I do? What shall I tell his mother?

  She heard a door open on the corridor and then caught sight of a doctor. He was small, old and fat. ‘Was it you who came with that young fellow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘No, just a friend.’ And she felt the blood rush to her cheeks. He was beating about the bush, so it meant bad news. Prepare yourself for the worst, madam . . . ‘We’re here on holiday together.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ the doctor said. ‘He’ll soon be well, but the problem is he might try again. One can never be too careful in these cases. Have you any idea why he did it?’ And it seemed to her he shot her a meaningful glance.

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. Her cheeks blazed as if she had a fever. But he surely couldn’t suspect anything. It was merely his duty to ask. But that wasn’t even important. The main thing was that he’d recover. She felt a sudden sense of relief and tears came to her eyes. ‘I just happened to have the car, so I brought him.’ And she was amazed at the strangeness of her voice. She wasn’t: used to lying.

  ‘And the place you brought him from: does he have any relations there?’

  She shook her head. Then she said: ‘He only has a mother, and she is in Prague.’

  ‘OK, we’ll have to send word to her. It might be better if she came for him. Could you leave us her address?’

  ‘But I don’t know it. He . . . he’s sure to tell you later.’ Her throat was dry and burning. ‘And he really is out of danger, Doctor?’

  ‘You need have no further worries.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor!’

  ‘If you like, you can come for him yourself the day after tomorrow.’

  So he’d twigged at last. That is if he hadn’t known from the very first.

  Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

  1

  It must have been some time in the fourth year of grammar school that I decided it was high time I set down in writing my ideas about how the world should be run. The essay was entitled ‘The Ideal State’. When, some time ago, I opened the black exercise book with its copperplate title and the dedication, To My Friend Miroslav Vozek, I was amazed to find that most of the pages were missing. Had I torn them out myself? Why? When? Apart from the few remaining pages that deal with justice in the ideal state, I can no longer recall what my essay said. But I can still remember how zealously I filled the narrow lines of the school exercise book with borrowed wisdom that I believed to be my own, and the anticipation with which I presented it for comment to the friend whose name it bore.

  My friend’s likeness I still have, preserved on the class photograph they took of us in the fourth year (my parents had wisely resisted the advice of my first post-war teachers and entered me two classes lower than my brilliant report would have permitted); Mirek is standing alongside me in the back row, a tall boy with curly hair and a long face.

  His father owned a shoemaking workshop in Dlouhá Avenue; you had to go down steps to get to it and the windows hardly reached to street level, so that inside the lights were kept on the whole day. I used to visit their ground-floor flat just behind the shop. Mirek had a small bedroom, no more than a box-room in fact, with a window on to the airshaft. I can only remember two pictures from that room: the first president and a reproduction of a portrait of Kant, whose severe face I can still see, with its high forehead and a moustache too long in proportion to the small chin. And shelves full of books.

  My friend read untiringly: in Czech, French and German. His German was so good that it irritated me. What point was there in using the language of those who wished to annihilate us?

  The language was not at fault, he explained. Every language could be used to express good or evil, in the same way that a cup could contain good beverages or bad ones. Even so, most people, when they drank, paid more attention to the cup than what it contained.

  During our last summer holiday but one we went on a bicycle tour in the then backward regions north of Prešov (little did I suspect I’d return there one day against my will). Most nights we slept in haylofts or in wooden barns on bits of straw. We each took with us only the bare necessities that would fit in the packs fixed to our carriers. His bare necessities included several volumes of the Henriada series, the books stuffed in the side-pockets of his pack where matches, tinned rations and soap properly belonged. Each morning at daybreak when outside the bells were ringing their summons to morning mass, the dogs beginning to bark and the primitive pump starting to shriek, he would sit up in his sleeping bag, open the book he had left ready next to his head the previous night, take out his two-colour pencil and transport himself to distant worlds. Sometimes he would even read aloud to me as I lay there still half-dreaming:

  God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

  That sentence stuck in my mind at the time, along with another statement:

  Nietzsche, that candid and persuasive writer, overlooked the truth that in history only one code of decent and noble behaviour has ever applied, the code that was laid down by Homer, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, the medieval knights and their gentlemen successors . . .

>   He used to lend me books, and I would then hump them around with me everywhere like he did. And one scene springs to mind. We are lying on some lakeside or river bank somewhere reading Seneca or Rádl, surrounded by tantalising scantily clad female bodies. This was a better and more valuable activity, more spiritual than just lolling around and doing the same as everyone else. Besides, Buddha abandoned everything and everyone and went off into exile.

  I had no talent for philosophy, however. I had neither the ear nor the patience for it. I saw little sense in contemplating the meaning of concepts such as beauty, happiness, justice, well-being or even truth. Far more important, it seemed to me, was to reflect on how to make sure that people had access to beauty and an opportunity to hear, proclaim and discover the truth. Again and again I would steer the conversation around to consideration of the practical aspects. From the heights of Plato’s Republic I plummeted to the mundane world of newspaper editorials. He tried to win me over to the ideas of the Stoics. One’s first duty was to strive for wisdom and self-improvement. One must act in harmony with nature and not be deflected from the path of tranquillity by matters one cannot influence. When one has achieved all that, when one has attained the state of ‘apathy’, one loses all interest in power, politics and physical passions, and along with them, all worldly anxiety and fear of death.

  I did believe, however, that in most of our arguments I had truth on my side, because, after all, I had behind me an unrepeatable experience of life, one that he too acknowledged and respected. But how was I to convince him?

  My ideal state was situated on an island that was so cold that people had to work very hard for their living. Work too was a path to virtue and thus also to bliss, as was rapidly understood by Aram, a journalist personally invited to the island by its president, Sylvio Ruskin.

  The two of them sat in the simply furnished presidential palace, which contained no more than a heavy wooden table and two wooden armchairs, elaborately carved though of quite simple design, made by one of the president’s ancestors in his spare time. He had been a philosopher-cum-woodcarver by profession.

  ‘I have been given to understand,’ the journalist Aram declared, ‘that your country has no criminals or even petty delinquents, so has no need of courts, prisons or even executioners. How did you achieve this?’

  An inspired smile played on the president’s face. ‘The basis of all crimes,’ he rejoined, ‘– so we believe, at least – is inequality, and material inequality above all. That then leads to poverty and despair, and they for their part arouse envy.’

  ‘And what about laziness?’ Aram enquired. ‘Is not mankind’s innate laziness perhaps the cause of many crimes?’

  ‘Laziness is not innate,’ the president smiled. ‘Idleness goes hand in hand with unearned wealth. You may take our republic as proof. We have eliminated material inequalities, and lo and behold, you will find here neither envious nor lazy folk, and no criminals.’

  ‘But the innate desire for evil?’ the journalist interjected once more. ‘Psychology teaches us that there will always be individuals who do evil solely from a pressing inner need.’

  ‘Psychology is wrong,’ the president retorted. ‘It ascribes to human nature what the citizen acquires through upbringing, bad example, poverty or ignorance.’

  The journalist reflected a moment, before continuing stubbornly with his objections: ‘What do you do when a man is overcome with jealousy that his neighbour is cleverer or possesses a more attractive wife than he does? What if he decides to obtain her for himself even at the cost of something as horrifying as murder?’

  ‘You are an incorrigible sceptic,’ the president admonished him. ‘However, it is clear that you have not yet understood the spirit of our state. Why should anyone be jealous of his neighbour, when each has the opportunity to excel in something, be it only diligence, truthfulness or physical prowess? And as for wives? Everyone chooses the wife of his taste, and tastes vary.’

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ the journalist exclaimed with incredulity, ‘that your people never commit misdemeanours, offences or any misdeeds at: all?’

  ‘Of course they do,’ the president admitted, ‘but we allow for such failings. Once a week – once a fortnight at harvest-time or during other peak work periods – the entire community meets together at district level, and at those assemblies each citizen carefully examines his actions and even his private thoughts, and of his own free will confesses anything questionable he discovers in them . . .’

  Mirek received my composition with interest. He always used to show greater interest in my doings than I in his; therein lay his superiority over me: that he perceived the need I had to be someone worthy of attention. When he had read my essay – I think it only took him a single evening – he told me I had written something very stimulating, albeit rather inductive. General rules were easy to formulate, and they tended to neglect the various contradictions, variables and possible objections that praxis necessarily concealed. He also criticised my excessive trust in reason, saying that I forgot that the human soul sometimes defied all rational explanations; reason was its creation, after all, so the soul was naturally higher and more complex than its product. It was all excusable, however, and I would probably become a politician rather than a philosopher.

  His commendation, which, had I been wiser, I would have taken as disparagement, filled me with a sense of elation that as always in my case took the form of talkativeness. We argued into the night about the future shape of the world and I preached about what we must do to achieve a perfect order of things, an order that would confer well-being and happiness on the whole of mankind.

  Mankind! Including the African pygmies and the nearly extinct Indians of the Cherokee tribe, and the homosexuals of Greenwich Village – mankind including half a billion Chinese, without me having yet set eyes on a single one of them in my life!

  We also decided to go together to a lecture in the main auditorium of the Faculty of Philosophy; the moment a little bald man in glasses came in and started to explain something at the blackboard, I became so agitated that I was unable to take in a word he said. My friend, on the other hand, listened intently and even took notes; when we emerged on the square an hour later and I asked him if he had been satisfied, he replied that he would never again set foot in that undertaker’s parlour. He had realised that philosophy in that building was now dead – all that was left was politics. I protested that philosophy only starts to make sense when it enters the service of progressive politics, and he retorted with uncustomary forthrightness that that was nonsense, that it was an insidious lie on the part of those who feared the intrepid spirit. We quarrelled on that occasion.

  In the holiday before our final school year, we made a trip to the Bohemian Forest. In those days the region was depopulated and almost deserted. On the last afternoon of our trip, we climbed a hill from where we could see a pond in the plain below us. Several dozen buildings were grouped around it, and a short way away on a small knoll there stood a baroque church-tower. It was late on a cloudy day, but precisely at that moment the sun came out and the whole area beneath us was suffused with a ruddy glow. The sight of that glowing water and those illuminated roofs in the open landscape, above which the bluish nocturnal mist was just beginning to form, aroused expectations of comfort in us. Then we entered the village. The windows above the muddy road had all been smashed and the houses gave off a musty smell. We went round the whole village from house to house, past broken-down fences, gardens rank with weeds, the village shop which still retained its German signs, and then up to the church. It was locked. Through a hole in the wall, we entered the graveyard which abutted the church. Some of the gravestones lay overturned, others were hidden in an undergrowth of nettles and briar. Stained glass from the church windows crunched beneath our feet. We climbed up a beam to a window and looked in. The nave was bare, although there were pale patches on the walls where pictures had once hung. In the place where the altar stood formerly, the
re were the remains of a fire. Among the scorched remnants of wood we made out what was left of an arm pointing at us with charred fingers.

  When that night we lay down to sleep in an abandoned woodcutters’ hut, my friend told me that we had entered an era of barbarism and soon we would witness the new Vandals strutting about the burnt-out Forum and dancing their war dances in the ruins of the temple.

  I felt duty-bound to contradict him, to excuse somehow the havoc we had seen. The real barbarians, I told him, were those who had started the war. Now, on the contrary, we were at the start of a new era, an era of freer people. It no longer mattered who started it, he replied. What mattered now was who had assumed their mantle. He had no way of judging whether the new era would bring greater freedom, but one thing he could see: that it lacked nobility of spirit. And what was the use of freedom without nobility of spirit?

  Next morning we went our separate ways, but not before agreeing that he would call in on me on the day before term started.

  He didn’t call in, nor did he turn up at school. After a while I heard a rumour that he had managed to make his way to Germany and escape by the Berlin U-bahn.

  I liked him. He was the first friend I’d had since the war, and for a long time, the only one. I regarded his flight as a betrayal of me as well. Why hadn’t he hinted to me what he had in mind, at least?

  I still have a book of his, the last one he lent me. I could have returned it, of course, but I was shy of entering his parents’ flat, and besides, I was sure they wouldn’t miss it. Not long ago I opened it, probably for the first time since then. It was a paper-back edition of Plato. I found inside it a narrow slip of paper, and written on it in my friend’s legible handwriting, with its large, upright letters, ‘What is required for human welfare and happiness? According to Socrates it is intellectual activity, good memory, straight thinking and truthful judgement.’

  2

  When we were in the fifth year, I suggested we organise a mock election. (It was the most democratic election I have ever known, even if there was no privacy screen and the ballot slips were only pages torn out of a school exercise book.) Naturally, I was counting on a clear victory for the party which my father belonged to, and of which my martyred uncles had once been members. It was, after all, the only one to defend the interests of all decent people. To my consternation it only received three votes in our class. One was mine, another undoubtedly came from Josef Švehla who had been kept down from the previous year (due to political persecution, he stressed) and was the only communist in the class; he was such an unapproachable individual that even I didn’t like him, though I felt obliged to sympathise with him. I never managed to establish who had cast the third vote.