Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  When they erected the building they took it as one article of faith that architecture should be modern and airy, and as another that the legal system should be founded on principles of justice, freedom, equality before the law, and harmony. Everything had changed since those days – only the building remained. And in order to conceal its true aim they had hung up in the entrance hall a red banner with a slogan extolling socialist law as ‘an auxiliary in the construction of the socialist homeland’.

  I vividly recall the sense of apprehension that gripped me as I first entered the faculty’s spacious entrance hall.

  I stood there surrounded on all sides by groups of unknown people. I caught snatches of conversations and unintelligible sentences. What discouraged me most of all was that they at least knew something of what I was totally ignorant of: the subject of my new area of study. Once again I was about to find myself in my old situation: the only non-initiate amongst the initiated, though now bereft of a martyr’s halo, with no hope of sympathy or indulgence.

  My sense of unsuitability for my chosen area of study was so powerful that it continued to give me nightmares years later. Again and again I would find myself before a panel of gowned examiners, incapable of answering the most basic questions: ‘What is the object of law? What is natural law? What is material law?’ I had no idea. But gentlemen, I would say, seeing an escape route though also aware of the ineptitude of what I was saying in the light of what I had just proved – I’ve already graduated, you don’t have too examine me any more. And then the examiners would burst into surly laughter; on one occasion, I recall, they pulled out musical instruments from under their long gowns: trumpets, flutes and trombones, and in order to seal my ignominy, they played a fanfare. That dream continued to hound me even when I had come to realise that my ignorance of the basics of law was the best grounding I could have had for my course; after all, some of my teachers knew no more than I did, and if they did, they made an effort to forget it, in order to make space in their minds for the new, revolutionary constructions.

  My new colleagues differed from my previous colleagues and comrades both in appearance and in spirit. Their clothes seemed to me unusually elegant and in most cases their minds were more on football, the pub and the girls’ halls of residence, than on the questions which I regarded as important and worthy of interest. I felt isolated among them by virtue of my views and my past. People who have suffered rejection tend to return to that experience over and over, whatever reasons they find to do so.

  There were also practical reasons for my solitude in those days: I just didn’t have the time to make friends; I had to earn my keep. About six months after my father’s arrest, my mother called my brother and myself in and asked us through tears what our plans were. She said that she would be taking a job, of course, though she knew it would be the death of her, because she could scarcely drag herself up to the first floor. She would go out to work none the less; she could hardly go on living off Uncle Gustav who was himself an invalid and anyway, she wanted us both to be able to finish our studies. Hanuš, who was just fourteen, declared without a second’s thought that there was no need for him to study. He suggested that he should go off and live in some apprentice hostel, thereby not costing us a penny. On the contrary, he would earn some money during his very first year, particularly if he went to train as a miner. I don’t know whether he meant that suggestion seriously but he only managed to provoke a still more explosive fit of weeping in my mother. It was then that I declared with a sense of importance that I would take over the running of the household. I decided that I would eat in the student canteen twice a day and that my brother would have school lunches. I promised that I would bring bread from the canteen and sometimes maybe soup. I said we would both apply for student grants and would both take weekend jobs, as well as finding holiday employment, naturally. Maybe in addition I would manage to find some odd jobs during my afternoons. I then totted up our expected income and expenditure and was surprised to discover it balanced on paper. The purpose of those calculations was above all to appease my mother. I didn’t believe for one moment that I would receive a grant, let alone my brother, just because our father was in prison. But I was wrong. They awarded us grants and moreover a social worker called who helped Mother apply for a special allowance for my brother, since he had not yet reached school-leaving age. And every single evening just after seven I would dash to the student canteen with an old oilcloth satchel. By then the cooks all knew me and knew the poor old battered mess tin, still black from the times Father had boiled soup and tea in it over a fire during his previous imprisonment, when he was being marched through Germany. The cooks treated me generously. Usually I would come away not only with bread and soup but also buttered potatoes or dumplings with gravy poured over them.

  Before the canteen closed for the weekend, the cooks would give away any left-over buns or fruit bread. I would stand a little way off with my eyes glued to the low hatch for fear of arriving too late and missing the precious booty. I don’t know whether I was aware at the time how the pattern of my life was repeating itself: that docile queuing at a kitchen hatch, waiting like a dog for scraps. But my subconscious apparently registered it. It registered not just the congruence of the situations but also the difference between them, the marked change for the better – as far as the leftovers were concerned. It explains why my situation did not depress me but, quite the opposite, filled me with a sense of satisfaction at my expertise in coping with life’s adversities.

  2

  In point of fact my expertise was all self-deception. I hadn’t the faintest idea how money could be made in the society in which I lived. I still had too much faith in all those public statements: not the ones about justice alone, but the others too, about the generous rewards for honest toil.

  And so, impelled by undying hope like two prospectors with gold-fever, my brother and I took one job after another. I remember loading beet one Sunday in autumn on a distant state farm. We each of us earned ten crowns for the whole day’s work, but as a bonus, we were allowed to go to a nearby orchard and pick as many plums as we could carry. That was our most successful venture. On another occasion, we helped with the threshing at some other farm. The corn was stacked in a rick that was beginning to rot and we had to fork it off laboriously. I was stationed by the thresher until I got an attack of hay fever and others had to take my place while I sat gasping at the foot of the corn rick, in despair at the earnings I was losing.

  We would set off for distant destinations on our bikes, or our earnings would not have even covered our transport costs. It meant we saw quite a bit of the country and what stuck in my memory at the time were deserted villages, unreaped fields and overgrown meadows; the dismal sight of abandoned dung-covered farmyards full of wrecked vehicles and rusting farm machinery; houses with dilapidated roofs, the glass gone in the windows, and half-naked gypsy children racing around in the mud. Most of all, I remember the mud, seemingly infinite quantities of it, that we would have to wade through on our trips out and back.

  I can also recall bonfires at the edge of the forest or on damp verges, and our warming ourselves at them in company with homeless strangers, roasting potatoes or toasting bread. They used to offer us home-made spirits to drink and the gypsies would sing songs whose words we couldn’t understand.

  Then my brother came with the news that there was big money to be made in the Brdy Forest where they were felling trees infested with bark beetle. I rode off to the place on a Thursday evening. I was allocated sleeping accommodation in a semi-derelict wooden hut without any sanitation. I recall waking up in the middle of the night and trying to cover a broken window with a blanket so as to stop the rain falling on my bed. I then worked with a couple of elderly gypsy women and some Slovak re-emigrants from Romania stripping the bark from the tree-trunks. Where the trees had been recently felled the work was easy and the bark would roll off in long (and sweetly scented) strips, but on others it would cling as if nail
ed on, and my hands would bleed from the clumsy, blunt scraper. The gypsy women would shout things at me that might have been friendly or even teasing: from time to time they would come to fetch stripped bark for burning and as they bent over they would expose their dark, distended breasts to me.

  On Saturday afternoon, my brother arrived. They gave the two of us an enormous saw and an axe, and a frowning forester – who, I discovered years later, was a distant relation of my future wife’s – showed us how to fell a tree and where to cut the trunk so that it fell in the desired direction. So we worked there until nightfall and onwards again from first light the following day. We felled, trimmed and stripped five trees, if my memory serves me right. We worked non-stop with two short meal breaks. They brought us the meals out to the forest and I can’t remember any more what it was like, but when the frowning forester came to work out how much work we’d done he announced to us that we hadn’t even earned enough to cover the cost of the meals and we each owed him two crowns. My brother started yelling, waving his arms and abusing him, but the forester just rolled up his tape-measure impassively; shouting and even threats were things he was used to. Then my brother suddenly started to sob. He sat down on the stump that we had only just created – my brother was still frail and skinny in spite of the double portions of dumplings with tomato sauce I had been bringing him from the canteen – his head in his hands and his slender, almost girlish, shoulders shaking with sobs. And when he finally stood up and we were about to abandon this ungrateful battlefield in contempt, the forester came over to us – after all, he was a relation of my so far unencountered wife – and we each had a ten-crown note stuffed into our pocket.

  3

  After the holidays our material situation improved somewhat. They did not allow my brother to study, but he managed to get on a training course as a radio mechanic, and being dextrous, was able to make some extra money from the start by repairing people’s radio-sets.

  I was offered a job as an academic assistant in the faculty library. It was a good library with many thousands of books, although only a few dozen titles were in regular circulation. I received a salary of two hundred crowns a month and my duties were very light – merely to enter the new titles in the catalogue each week and spend half a day, twice a week, looking for requested books and putting returned books back on the shelves. That left me quite a lot of time to myself and I would spend it wandering among the shelves taking out dusty volumes at random, opening them and leafing through them. Sometimes, when one would catch my imagination, I would take it back to my desk and start reading it.

  In this way I read all sorts of books, most of whose titles and authors have long since gone from my mind, but they included a well-worn copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan published during the last war, Weyr’s Theory of Law, Kallab’s Introduction to the Study of Juristic Methods, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which someone had apparently classified as a legal work); however, those were books that no one ever requested. Who could possibly have had any need for reflections on pure law or the supreme legal norm? Who would have had the time to devote themselves to those superb, but abstract achievements of the human intellect when knowledge of a very different kind was now required?

  That year, we had to submit our subsidiary theses. The topic I had chosen had rather a long-winded title: Czech Justice in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century as the Legal Expression of the Ideology of Feudal Absolutism. I had not particularly wanted to tackle a historical topic, but had been absent when the topics were given out, so was left with no more interesting choice.

  Happily the theses were not expected to contribute anything of academic value nor demonstrate intellectual effort. The author was merely supposed to show that he knew the main authorities and could evaluate them correctly in the light of the new legal teaching. I was determined to toss off my thesis as fast as possible. I read a couple of studies on the restored territorial administrations and the importance of the court of appeal. And then, in the course of my library duties, I happened to come across some recently reprinted entries from the ‘black books’ in which the statements of tortured prisoners were recorded – the collection had actually been compiled by a philologist not a jurist – and started reading it. The book was quite different from any of those I had studied so far for my topic: these were not the words of lawyers, of those who defended or made the laws, but instead the words of those who broke them. By and large, the voice of the accused sounds more human than the voice of the lawgiver, as the first of them is defending his life while the other is defending an abstract justice. Now I was reading the words of actual murderers, or of desperate wretches who had done nothing but steal the honey from a hive or poach the fish out of a pond; seduced servant-girls and milkmaids who had given birth in secret, and who, in order to escape disgrace or threatened by their lovers, had killed their new-born babies; spellbound women who cut off the genitals or fingers of hanged men, cut fringes off altar cloths, pulled nails out of gallows, picked herbs at full moon, made magic ointments and brewed potions to arouse love or charm away a pregnancy; and for it they were hanged or beheaded; women were buried alive and pierced with stakes, usually in the presence of spectators who were more interested in the bloody spectacle than in justice.

  As I read, I gradually realised that these were not the delusions of a demented brain but a record of things that had actually happened. A man hung from a ladder with his limbs dislocated while a torturer stood searing his sides, and he had said words which I was now reading centuries later.

  So far I had only learned things; I had mugged up on the history of legal ideologies and the ideas of Plato’s Republic just like those of the school of natural law, or the four features of dialectics, or Vyshinsky’s theory of analogy – without relating any of it to myself or my life.

  I had studied away unquestioningly, without it ever occurring that it might have anything to do with me. Now I was appalled. What paths had justice taken to get to where it was? What were the laws governing our coexistence? Why did we condemn one form of cruelty and condone another? Why did we extol one form of obscurantism and make another a capital offence?

  I pictured that enormous band of bailiffs, scriveners, judges, assessors, executioners, executioners’ henchmen, catchpolls, soldiers, gendarmes, confessors, informers, troopers, policemen, prosecutors and judges all united in the effort to protect humanity from malefactors, or at least from those they designated as malefactors. They had spilled so much blood that no one will ever measure it, but none, apart from rare exceptions, were ever called to account, because unlike the rest they had been able to cloak their craving for violence in the right kind of authority. And for the first time I realised that I too would be one of that band some day, although so far I had not had the faintest inkling of its actual nature.

  I started to hunt out more books related to my topic. Records of cases long closed: absurd indictments by the Holy Inquisition; crimes all the more cruelly punished for being so shamelessly trumped up. I read on out of a self-tormenting need to confirm my original impression, that beneath the veil of time-honoured justice, the mask of redemptive faith and the smile of holy compassion, was hidden the face of the selfsame beast as ever; it had simply been cunning enough to conceal its whims and combine them into a code which it contrived to foist upon humanity. Again and again, it demanded its ration of blood; tearing and ripping flesh with tongs, burning flanks, disembowelling, cutting off breasts, breaking limbs and crushing joints, piercing through tongues, gouging out eyes, burning alive, an eye for an eye, an eye for nothing, purely on a whim, out of injured vanity, out of spite. It murdered as retribution and as warning; it murdered for fear’s sake and for enjoyment’s sake. It murdered for theft of crockery, for infidelity, for banditry; for superstition and because it too was superstitious, for calumny and because it too believed calumnies, for belief and for unbelief; it murdered the sick and the healthy, the sick in mind and the greate
st minds of the day. Always with the same conviction and utter faith in the rightness of its actions, until one day it came up with the gas chambers, into which it planned to thrust everyone without distinction: a whole nation and whole nations. What would it think of next so it could eat its fill, so it could do away for good with the entire human race, and with itself?

  Happily my thesis had a deadline. I had to finish my reading and start to put it down on paper. But now I could not face copying out abstractions just to prove I could work with source material. It seemed to me I had to solve the contradiction between people’s yearning for justice and the institutions that pretended to be satisfying that aspiration.

  But I was unable to pursue my quest with sufficient integrity and impartiality. After all, it was my job to write about the cruelty committed by class justice in the service of power and obscurantist ideology, superstition and unreason. I sought out and ardently extolled the first manifestations of advancing, triumphant reason. I had become an enthusiastic advocate for the Enlightenment. The things it had achieved! It had put an end to religious intolerance, abolished the Inquisition, imposed a ban on witch hunts and torture – and even abolished the death penalty in many countries. Throughout history, the class struggle had assumed the character of a battle between reason and unreason. Bit by bit, reason was displacing unreason – which always promoted belief and blind obedience, and disparaged thoughtfulness, the spirit of conciliation and the opinions of others.

  There had been periods, it was true, when reason was suppressed and triumphant fanaticism had destroyed books and ideas, along with those capable of thought or merely eager to think for themselves. Unreason, I wrote, had always unleashed passions and violence and sown fear: such fear that the voice of reason was silenced; both those who doubted and those who knew stayed silent and served unreason, before themselves turning into pitiless murderers in the end.