Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  Yes, I agreed, but strength did not mean cruelty. He replied that nothing we did could be cruel to them, we could only be cruel towards the people. It would be cruel if we let the people fall into their hands again.

  I spent the whole night before the trial debating with myself how to behave. The defendant had acted on the understanding he was in the right. After all, they were his things he was hiding and therefore in his own eyes he was the one protecting them from appropriation not the one who had appropriated them. But even if I took no account of his subjective conviction, what had been the objective effect of his action? What of value had been destroyed or misappropriated? How was I to bring in a verdict of guilty in all responsibility? The trouble was that I was not responsible solely to myself. The moment I joined the Party I had voluntarily accepted Party discipline. Now, those who represented the Party, for reasons that were not (and did not have to be) clear to me, were demanding the stiffest penalty. Was it for me to resist? Whom or what would I be helping if I were to do so? What was I able to influence, in fact? The defendant’s fate. Hardly. My fate? Undoubtedly. They would classify me as unreliable, as a friend of the other side. But I wasn’t, for heaven’s sake! I had never felt the least sympathy for shopkeepers or big farmers, nor for any of those we now classified as class enemies. All I wanted was to respect justice. But what was justice?

  I gradually stopped worrying my head about the circumstances of the case and the defendant’s guilt or otherwise. Instead I thought about myself and the consequences the case might have for me personally.

  I sentenced that man to three and a half years’ imprisonment, even though I knew full well that the sentence was unjust, and although I was fully aware that the majority of those who had worked themselves up to some post or other in The Hole and had some hand in the exercise of power accepted bribes and committed fraud, that at least half of all the illegally distilled liquor found its way into the cellars of those who ought to be setting an example, who represented the law or at least the authorities, and that where liquor was not enough, money changed hands. I convicted a victim. The only thing I can advance in my defence is that I lived in a vacuum and lacked courage.

  I had not been a faithful servant of justice. All I had managed to do was to assist the existing state of lawlessness, sometimes aggravating and sometimes attenuating its mistakes, while acquiring experience and trying to discover what the law was. But the more I learnt about the true state of affairs, the less acceptable I became for the existing regime.

  In the same way that people who start ruling stop being people and become masters, a servant of arbitrary power who starts to think stops being its auxiliary and starts to become its enemy.

  2

  Conditions that day were extremely harsh. Low, cold clouds were sweeping in from the Polonina Carpathians in the north and now and then they would shed large, sticky flakes of snow.

  We drove to a village right on the border to persuade the peasants not to withdraw from the recently created cooperatives. The vehicle – an old retired Praga lorry with a ripped awning – belonged to the town council. Eight or nine of us sat inside. Most of the people I knew at least by sight. Local council officials, men and women teachers, district administrators and even an army officer. I remained silent although the rest of them talked. I lacked the matter-of-factness and confidence of people convinced of the rightness of their actions. Admittedly I was convinced that what we were asking of people was sensible, necessary and in their own interest, but why should I be the one to explain it? I was born in the city; their language and their way of thinking were alien to me. Moreover I was reluctant to enter people’s homes uninvited, particularly at a moment of the day when people had the right to their privacy and relaxation. During visits I would let my partner do the talking (not only was he a local, he also knew the local language and usages) while I would just sit on a chair and embody the authority and dignity of penal power. Remember thai: the law supports those who obey and assails those who rebel.

  It was dark when we came to a halt on the muddy village square. Yellowish lights in two or three of the windows, a paraffin lamp swaying in the wind in front of the pub. I jumped down from the lorry and caught sight of several men in light-coloured trousers and dark hats going into the pub.

  I did not know the place, being there for the first time. All those villages seemed alike to me: wooden houses with moss-grown thatched roofs. I was the last one in line, behind a woman in a short quilted jacket, whom someone in the lorry had addressed as Magdalena. I couldn’t recall having seen her anywhere previously.

  Suddenly, behind us, the pub door opened and several men came out on to the village square, which was dimly lit by the swaying lamp. They shouted something, though I couldn’t understand a single word. Someone from our group said something angry in response, at which one of the men in front of the pub picked up a stone and threw it in our direction. The shouting immediately intensified: abuse and curses which I also did not understand, but their gestures left me in no doubt as to their meaning. The woman in the quilted jacket turned to me as if asking for help; I took her by the hand and led her back to the lorry.

  I don’t know where those people had managed to find them so quickly, but now they were armed with pitchforks and other implements, and one of them was clutching a long woodcutter’s axe. It was he who now barred our way, shouting something or other, and I told him to let us pass, that we would be leaving immediately. He went on shouting but I walked past him, together with the woman I was leading, and he let us go, perhaps because what I had said was foreign to his ears or because I had a woman with me, or because I spoke calmly and quietly. They let us pass and the rest of the party straggled along behind. After climbing on to the lorry I scanned the scene and that moment printed itself on my memory: unshaven faces, threatening fists, upraised pitchforks and sticks and a deafening roar of voices that seemed to me scarcely human.

  Magdalena remained at my side. Everyone chatted excitedly, only she remained silent. I sat with eyes closed leaning against the side of the lorry. I was overcome with tiredness and a sense of being a foreigner in that strange, far-flung, indecipherable world, and then I suddenly felt a kind of pressure on my shoulder and the touch of someone’s hair on my face. I opened my eyes but nothing could be seen in that darkness but the glow of several cigarettes.

  When we reached the square of our own town, someone suggested that we should immediately report to the police and someone else wanted us to go straight to the Party secretariat. In a quiet voice, Magdalena asked to be excused as she felt unwell. I offered to see her home.

  Sleet continued to fall and the clock in the tower struck the hour. It was only nine o’clock, though I had the feeling that most of the night had gone. She lived in a bed-sitter in one of three newly built blocks of flats.

  As I entered her sitting room I was taken aback. Part of the left-hand wall was taken up by bookshelves containing large, leather-bound old volumes. Two tall Chinese vases containing stems of reedmace stood either side of the bookshelves. The wall opposite was hung with a painting by some romantic master showing a girl on the shore of a storm-tossed sea, and an old map of Mexico with the rivers and deserts coloured by hand. I stepped over to the map and found the blue stream of the Rio Grande. I suddenly heard someone say something in a strange, croaking voice. I was startled, but it turned out to be only a parrot in a cage talking to me. I sat down in an armchair. The Persian carpet beneath my feet was thick and soft, and the light in the room was also soft and green-tinged. I had the impression it was shaking, so that tiny shadows like showering grain swirled round the walls. I heard the sound of water running into a bowl or a kettle and then the aroma of coffee reached my nostrils.

  She came into the room wearing a long red dress. Her hair, whose colour recalled the reedmace heads, was tied with a green ribbon. The parrot and I roused ourselves at the same moment and it screeched: ‘Go away, you loony! Good night!’ I went as far as the bathroom, whic
h smelt of soap and violets. In the mirror I saw a tired, unshaven face. It was a long time since I had last noticed myself as a person: the rather stocky figure, the left shoulder always slightly higher than the other, the short neck, the nose that looked as if it was broken at the root – a nose that lent me a resemblance to the caged parrot. All the time I was being told from the next room to get out, but I returned to my armchair and to Magdalena. I needed only to reach out in order to touch her. She stood up and covered the cage with a sheet of steel-blue velvet. The parrot’s name was Theo and the words were addressed to her, not to me. There was no one else for him to talk to, as there were just the two of them. She repeated those words several times with vehemence: Go away from here. Get away from this town, where she had been posted as I had. Get out of this country! And go where? A long way away. Somewhere so far away that she wouldn’t have to hear of this country again; so she could forget about it and everything connected with it. Why? Because living here was dreadful and depressing. How could one live in a constant state of torture? I had no idea of the hour, having lost all sense of time. I knew it was my duty to contradict her. It would also have been a good idea to say something about myself, but I was too overcome with desire to say anything. At last I made up my mind. I touched her hair with my fingertips and stroked her neck. And then she looked up and waited for me to kiss her.

  3

  I don’t know whether I loved her, but I desired her so much that in the middle of a hearing I would suddenly realise I wasn’t taking in a word of what was being said around me. I was missing making love to her, missing the touch of her slim body, the kisses from her large mouth, I was missing her voice, though probably only because it was so long since I had heard anyone speak to me tenderly.

  I don’t know whether she loved me, but I am sure she needed me. She was lonelier than I. Her mother had died during the war and her father (he had been a doctor in Brno and had I been from that city, I would certainly have known his name) had fled abroad nine years before. She could have left with him, of course; they had all left then, including her uncle. She had been twenty at the time and studying aesthetics and music and she could not see why she should have to abandon her studies. Apart from that, there was someone she had not wanted to leave behind.

  She had remained alone in a superbly furnished apartment with lots of valuable paintings, carpets and Chinese porcelain, as well as a piano and some old books. They had moved her out of the apartment, and I don’t know about the fellow she had stayed behind for. They must have split up, or maybe he fled too. In any event she never told me anything more about him.

  She was unable to make a career in her chosen field: how could she have, with a background like hers! They had posted her to the school here. She taught geography and history and ran the school choir, singing folk songs (some of which she had collected and arranged herself). She had a feel not only for music but also for literature and painting, having come from a home where art was part of life, not just a topic of conversation. With my obsession for politics and my readiness to talk about everything under the sun, whether I understood it properly or not, I must have seemed to her an uncultured ignoramus.

  Her world seemed to be governed by another law and another time. She tried, at least briefly, to draw me into it. She taught me to sit down and drink tea; to stay calm and say nothing. To listen to music without talking and without thinking about anything but the music. At such moments as those I used to feel we were close, that she was closer than anyone else to me, and that she felt the same; but I expect I was mistaken.

  I remember waking one night to discover she was not lying at my side. I waited for a long time and when she failed to return, went to look for her. She was sitting half-dressed in the kitchen. I asked her why she was not sleeping. She told me to be quiet and leave her alone. When I insisted that she come back to bed, she told me she didn’t want to sleep any more. She didn’t want to live any more, she couldn’t go on living like this. What did she mean, she couldn’t go on living? Not like this and in this place. Because it was not human to live a lie, to live surrounded by lies, to live in a country enclosed with barbed wire which was impervious even to ideas. Everything was empty and mindless, and I was mindless too, I was the embodiment of emptiness. She hated me, she said through tears. Why? Because of what I had done with her, what I was doing to people, to the whole of this country. And what was I doing? I was pushing it deeper and deeper into the void, casting it into darkness. I and the rest of my ilk; we were just like insects, like locusts, like flies. We had flooded the land with our paltriness; we were a swamp into which one could only go on sinking deeper and deeper.

  I was cut to the quick. I got up, got dressed and made to leave. But she held on to me in the doorway. She hugged me and begged me not to leave her there all alone; I wasn’t like all the rest; I at least listened to what she told me, even if I didn’t understand her.

  Then we made love. With passion and with hate. We made love out of loneliness and despair, out of pain and aspirations which eluded each other.

  So what did she want? I asked her. What did she want to do?

  To leave, of course. To cross the sea. To go anywhere where one could still live without lies and dissimulation. And would she take me with her? She might; maybe I would change there. But she knew I wouldn’t leave. She may have been right and I wouldn’t have left: after all I had my parents and brother here; and besides, I had never dreamt of going off to live under a foreign system. Of course I hadn’t! This was my system. The most I had dreamed of was changing it a little bit, improving it: that much she knew about me already. But how would I change it? Remake it in what image? I had no real image inside me anyway.

  4

  In the middle of a not particularly important trial a man entered the courtroom – he was a fairly portly fellow in his thirties, wearing a white shirt and checked trousers, from which it was immediately obvious to me he was no local.

  He made a rather stiff bow and sat down on the last of our three benches. He wore old-fashioned spectacles with slender frames that reminded me of the pince-nez my grandfather used to wear.

  His presence perturbed me. It is true that our trials were public, but I was able to tell in advance the likely or possible visitors. This man was not one among them.

  Had I done something wrong, perhaps? Had my sentencing been a bit too lenient of late? Or had someone denounced me for leading a dissolute life?

  I became nervous and stopped acting naturally. In fact I started to shout and act in a severe and peremptory manner, while at the same time stumbling over my words and losing my concentration, so that it was almost impossible for me to dictate properly for the record.

  He was waiting for me at the end of the trial. He said his name was Matěj Kožnar and he worked as an editor for Prague Radio. He had come to our district to do some research for a programme. He had heard about me and he was sure I would be able to tell him something interesting about local life. Would I be prepared to spare him a little time?

  I felt relieved, and even pleased that someone should be interested in my experiences and opinions.

  I took him on a walk through the town. The day was hot and everything seemed bleached under the mountain-blue skies. I gave him a guided tour of the building site where the new hospital was under construction. The new hospital was supposed to have been opened the previous year, but they had been unable to complete it because again and again most of the building materials would disappear. I could even show him cottages which everyone knew had been built from stolen materials.

  He quoted a Russian proverb to me: In olden days they fed a single sow, the trough has got a lot more crowded now. Then he asked whether everyone really did know that the cottages we were looking at had been built out of stolen material, and I confirmed that was the case. He asked whether theft which was public knowledge could still be regarded as theft. I replied that theft was a term we used to describe the fact of something having been stolen and
not the concealment of that fact. He said he hadn’t expressed himself properly. What he wanted to know was whether a theft which was common knowledge and went unpunished did not begin to lose the character of an illegal action. For some time already, he had been observing an interesting transformation. Things which in the past had been punished as dishonourable and unlawful were now condoned or at least tolerated, while on the other hand, things which had once been considered honourable and lawful were now being punished. In his view this was deliberate policy – we were all supposed to be obedient subjects of the state, we were supposed to live in the awareness that we owed our every breath and our very existence on this earth to the benevolence of the state. And how better could the state demonstrate its benevolence than by pardoning us our crimes? And what more effective way was there of rendering us dependent on the state than allowing us to walk freely only thanks to its indulgence? That was why the state tempted us to break the law and actually goaded us to.

  Magdalena invited us to dinner.

  The parrot was so put out by the stranger’s presence that it withdrew to a corner of its cage and remained obdurately silent, while we drank wine and talked late into the night. Matěj was a native of Moravia like Magdalena, having been born in a village to the north of Jihlava. All his forebears on his father’s side had been Protestants and stonemasons for as long as anyone remembered. One of them, following the Emperor Joseph’s decree of religious tolerance, decided that he would endow his newly created congregation with a dignified church, one that would equal the other churches in the area. The congregation had raised some funds and Matěj’s great-grandfather set to work. He himself drew up the plans, dug the foundations and started the building, working from dawn till dusk. And in the space of three years, he had completed a church with a mighty vaulted ceiling and a tower with a belfry.