Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  ‘Give it here!’ he said, taking the red school bag from her hands. ‘You’ve not been home yet?’

  ‘But I wouldn’t have had time!’

  ‘Had your lunch?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘There were so many children in the dining room. I was afraid I’d be late.’

  They crossed the street. She stopped in front of the window of a gift shop.

  ‘Have you already decided what you want to buy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And have you got your money?’

  ‘I’ll have a look.’ She took her bag from him and rummaged in it for a moment. Then she pulled out her pencil case. The pencils inside were all sharpened in exemplary fashion. From a side pocket she withdrew a folded fifty-crown note. ‘Do you think this will be enough?’

  ‘Bound to be. Grandma doesn’t expect you to give her anything expensive.’

  She stood looking in the shop window obviously captivated by the painted jugs, costume dolls, Good Soldier Švejks and ashtrays of fool’s gold.

  He had not spoken to Alexandra today yet. He had been stuck in a meeting from first thing till mid-morning. Then he had tried to call her, letting the number ring a long time but unable to overcome the instrument’s callous unconcern. Most likely she was still waiting for him to call her. If he didn’t get through to her, who would she go to lunch with, who would she make a date with for the evening?

  He scolded himself for failing either to trust her more, or to pull himself together before he ended up fettering himself, which would be the path to destruction.

  He guided his daughter into the cosmetics shop next door. They had a gift package of three over-priced soaps in a gold-coloured box on a bed of pink velvet. The box took her fancy. She also chose a skin cream for thirty crowns. ‘But it’s going to come to over fifty crowns altogether,’ he warned her.

  She unearthed several coins from the pocket of her anorak. ‘Will this be enough?’

  He counted all the coins. ‘Yes, but you won’t have a single crown left.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  He found it touching that she was willing to spend all her savings on a present for his mother.

  They left the shop. Then he took her to a milk bar and ordered her a milk shake and two open sandwiches. He took a milk dessert for himself. He watched her as she drank, her little nose submerged in the glass. He felt tenderly towards her but was unsure how to express it. ‘Do you want my whipped cream?’

  She scooped it up. ‘Don’t you eat it?’

  ‘No, I’ve never eaten whipped cream.’

  ‘Didn’t Grandma get cross with you?’

  ‘She didn’t know. It was during the war. Even the milk was rationed. Whipped cream was something we didn’t even dream of.’

  ‘Not even before the war?’

  ‘I can’t remember any further back.’

  ‘Grandma said you could buy everything before the war. Before the war, how old were you?’

  ‘The same age as Martin now.’

  ‘Do you think Martin won’t remember anything either when he grows up?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say. Have you got the presents?’

  ‘Wait a mo, I’ll have a look!’ She bent down to her bag. He looked at her blonde head and narrow shoulders. He ought to be her protector. His own childhood had not been especially happy but at least he had had someone he could trust and run to for protection. Who was she going to trust, when one day she discovered that her nearest and dearest had let her down and some Alice or other declared officially that the home she was used to was no longer her home. What was she going to do, how was she going to behave? Was she ever going to have the courage to become attached to anyone again?

  He was overcome with regret at what had happened, which had been partly his fault. But in this life what could one retract or put right? To regret one’s own actions made sense if one was determined not to commit them ever again. Otherwise one’s regret was simply agonising, or more likely, consoling self-deception.

  ‘Look, Daddy,’ she said, just after they left the milk bar, ‘they’re showing Dumbo here. We could go and see it today, it’s Friday.’

  He hesitated. What had his daughter been doing these past weeks? What had made her happy, what had made made her sad? He did not think he had noticed. ‘All right. Buy some tickets for five thirty.’ He gave her twenty crowns.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll make it? I know you’ve got lots of work.’

  ‘I’ll be there on time, don’t worry.’

  ‘We’ll wait for you outside the cinema.’

  ‘There’s no need to worry!’ he said, stroking her hair. He hurried away from her to go and call his mistress at last.

  She answered before he’d even finished dialling.

  ‘What’s up? Why didn’t you call?’

  ‘I did call you.’

  ‘You called me?’

  ‘It was engaged.’

  ‘You can’t have strained yourself. I’ve not budged from this chair since this morning. I’m colouring a stork.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘You’re joking! There are five of us stuck here. One of them is daubing a little boy stork, one a mummy stork, one the background, one the little girl stork. I’m the daddy. Can’t you show up this afternoon, at least?’

  ‘I’ve got tickets for the cinema at five thirty.’

  ‘For both of us?’

  ‘Manda wants to go to Dumbo.’

  ‘I can’t stand cartoons. You’d have to be perverted to go and enjoy the fact that some poor girls wasted two years of their lives colouring in fucking baby elephants. I thought we might go somewhere together this evening.’

  ‘But I promised the child . . .’

  ‘Couldn’t your wife take her?’

  ‘Of course she could. It’s just that I’ve got the feeling . . .’

  ‘You’ve got the feeling you ought to stand me up?’

  ‘We could see each other after the film.’

  ‘What makes you think I’ll have the time then? Do you think I’m always available when the notion takes you?’

  ‘What about tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ve got other plans tomorrow. With other people.’

  ‘Well it can’t be helped. I hope you have a good time.’

  ‘As good a time as I’d have with you, that’s for certain.’

  He hung up. He opened his desk drawer and then quickly closed it again. Sometimes he had the feeling that everything being played out around him, everything he participated in with such seriousness was no more than a farce, an absurd play that all the players were in by mistake. They smiled and bared their teeth (both apparently an expression of the same instinct) as directed by an author and a producer they had never met, and they had no idea how or by what route they might leave the stage with honour. Now, for a very short while he had had the impression of leaving the stage behind, of living, really living, but more than likely he had just ended up in another, less well-known, but equally absurd play, and yet again he was required to act as directed by someone else. Would he prove capable of resisting and leaving this one, or could he at least transform it into reality?

  But what was the point of resisting at this moment, of fostering false hopes in the child, of sitting oblivious next to her in the cinema? The worst thing would be to start play-acting on the children’s and his own behalf.

  A whole age ago, he had caught the fancy of a sad-eyed clown who could already see his own end and had selected him from a whole crowd of children, as if he had guessed that this was the one who would be able to transmit his message to others. But what precisely was the message he had entrusted him with? He had told him that it made no sense to play-act with the aim of deceiving oneself and others. That one should live in harmony with oneself and the world.

  What was he to do? How was he to find harmony when he was incapable of knowing himself, had never learnt to heed his inner voice and it was so long since he had seen his ow
n light, ever since he lost it in the way sleepers lose for ever the light of the star that they observed with such amazement in the night sky before they fell asleep?

  The clown hadn’t told him, and now no one ever would.

  The telephone rang. He quickly lifted the receiver but it was only his father wanting to meet him somewhere other than at home. He arranged it for the following afternoon when his father had assured him it was nothing of immediate urgency. He was rather pleased to have something to do now it seemed as if he would have time on his hands.

  2

  His father was supposed to meet him right alongside the place where the gigantic monument once stood. As usual, Adam arrived several minutes early, but his father was already sitting on a bench – with his back to the river, understandably, so as not to be distracted by the view of the city – writing something in his notebook – figures, no doubt. He had tossed his shabby coat over the back of the bench.

  Adam sat down next to him. ‘Something happened, Dad?’

  ‘Your mum doesn’t know I’m seeing you,’ his father began conspiratorially.

  ‘Is something wrong with her?’

  ‘What would be wrong with her? I told her I was going to the library. But Hanuš rang yesterday. Did you hear about it?’

  ‘How could I have?’

  ‘He hasn’t called you?’

  ‘Not for a bit.’

  ‘Do you know he wants to come back next month? Adam, he must be off his head!’ Father spat in disgust on the filthy verge.

  ‘That surprises me.’

  ‘Your mum’s pleased, naturally. She takes it as a matter of course. Adam, I really hope you haven’t been advising him to do anything of the sort.’

  ‘No, I haven’t given him any advice at all.’

  ‘For goodness sake, try and explain to me what he thinks he’ll find here? They’ll kick him out of that institute of his the moment he steps through the door. He’ll end up stoking a boiler somewhere or shovelling coal, like those pals of yours.’

  ‘My pals don’t shovel coal.’

  ‘But there are others who do. And even if they don’t kick him out, what could he possibly hope to achieve here? Do you really think it’s possible to do any decent academic work in this bloody place? They’ll set some numskull over him and he won’t let him do a bloody thing. Or maybe you think I’m wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know what the situation is like for mathematicians.’

  ‘The same as for everyone else. What can you achieve if they don’t give you access to information, if you’re not trusted and there’s no investment? Who appreciates conscientious work here? Have you already forgotten the reward I got?’

  ‘You did get that prize, Dad.’

  ‘What I got was two years and one month. And when they first took me in to see my charge officer, do you know what he told me?’

  ‘You told me, Dad.’

  ‘He said: “You won’t be beaten, don’t worry.” And I said to him: “Of course I won’t, after all I’m in a socialist . . .”’

  ‘Yes, you’ve told me before, Dad!’

  ‘He said to me: “You’d be surprised. You should have been here a few weeks ago.” Now tell me, what sort of idea is it, him coming home?’

  ‘I expect he’s got his reasons.’

  ‘What reasons, what sensible reasons could he possibly have? You don’t think it’s that woman, do you? We don’t know her, but she’s bound to be crazy – mad for home, like all women. Your mum’s the same: she’d sooner die than live abroad. But everything’s finished here now, can’t you see?’

  ‘In what sense, Dad?’

  ‘Science and technology are finished. And especially anything creative. They destroy anyone who might be capable of achieving anything. Because the place is run by numskulls and lazy slobs. And when everything’s on the rocks because of them, you know what they’ll do? The same as they did then. You know how long they held me in solitary?’

  ‘Yes, but things were different in those days.’

  ‘So you think things were different in those days. You tell me, then, if anything happened to the ones who sent me to prison that time, me and all the other innocent people. They’re still sitting where they were all those years ago. Like that Presiding Judge of yours.’

  ‘But Hanuš knows all this. It was you who told him, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘So tell me what’s got into him, then.’

  ‘Maybe he wants to come home because this is where he was born. He knows the streets here. There are forests for him here. And he understands everything that people say to him. And we’re here too.’

  ‘What sort of nonsense is that? Are you telling me there are no streets over there and he can’t understand what people say?’

  ‘Why are you shouting at me, Dad? I didn’t put him up to it.’

  ‘People aren’t the same as birds or animals, for heaven’s sake. They’re not forced to go back to the place they were hatched, regardless of the fact they’ll be shot at.’

  ‘You might be wrong there, Dad.’

  ‘I might be wrong?’

  ‘Forgive me, but you were wrong when we came back here after the war.’

  ‘What I did wrong then was to put my trust in an untested project. But there’s one truth that has been tried and tested over millennia: everything that people have has to to be worked for. And now tell me this: who in this country still does an honest day’s work? Who is still allowed to do an honest day’s work here?’

  ‘You’re right in all you say, Dad, but maybe he sees things differently.’

  ‘In what way could he see it differently?’

  ‘You look at everything with a mathematical eye, but you can’t calculate everything in life.’

  ‘Oh, can’t you? More’s the pity. Most people don’t calculate at all. He doesn’t need a slide-rule to work out that there he has the freedom to read what he likes and go where he wants, while here he’ll be lucky if they don’t send him to shovel coal. And what if they send him to prison . . . Who’ll stand up for him? Who stood up for me then?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘I don’t know how you meant it.’

  ‘For instance, I mean that people go on believing in God even though it has been proved to them – calculated – that everything began twenty thousand million years ago with a big bang, that the universe is expanding, and that human beings evolved from less developed creatures.’

  ‘What are you dragging God into it for?’

  ‘I was just trying to show that people are capable of believing and acting in ways that seem to defy reason.’

  ‘Adam, are you serious? You can’t really approve of Hanuš returning because of something so fanciful . . . so unreal, can you?’

  ‘It’s his decision.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you if you’d call him or write him a letter, but I can see that he wouldn’t get any sensible advice from you anyway.’

  ‘I can write to him if you like – but I expect you’d put it much better.’

  ‘God! You’ve come a long way, Adam!’

  ‘We both have, Dad! Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t be pleased to see Hanuš? To be able to see him whenever you like?’

  His father reached for his coat. ‘My being pleased or not isn’t the point!’

  What was the point then? He walked back to the Old Town Square with his father.

  ‘Don’t tell Mum about our chat.’

  ‘Don’t worry. And write to him!’

  ‘Write to him! If I write what I think in a letter, it’ll never reach him!’

  Dusk was already falling. The floodlights illuminating the Town Hall and the astronomical clock suddenly came on. How long ago was it that he and Hanuš had walked here together? He couldn’t even remember.

  Adam, is that you? Thank God.

  What’s wrong with your voice? What’s happened? Where are you calling from?

  From a phone box. I got into a bit of a scrap, Adam. The
y almost – I got thumped, and I could do with a change of trousers. They’re in the wardrobe in the passage. Just make sure Mum doesn’t see you. I’ll be all right in a second.

  As he led him into an entranceway they left a trail of blood behind them on the paving stones.

  They were still the same paving stones, but the rain had washed the blood away long ago, or passers-by had carried it off on the soles of their shoes.

  He could have walked through to Příkopy and taken a tram home, but instead he set off through the lanes he had walked along every day for so many years: either alone or with friends of long ago. Here was the Bethlehem Chapel. He could go and have a look inside. The one and only code of decent and noble behaviour: the one laid down by Homer, Socrates . . . He couldn’t remember whether Hus had been included in the list. He certainly belonged there. Secretly I had wanted to belong in that company, which is not closed to anyone, surely. But what have I to show?

  A group of foreigners was coming out of the chapel – the doors closed behind them and locked. He wouldn’t be taking a look round today.

  He was aware nevertheless of a sense of relief at moving among places that linked him to the past, that were capable of speaking to him and thereby lessening somehow the burden which the present heaped upon him.

  Is it really possible that this feeling is completely unknown to Father? Have streets only ever been connecting lines for him between a starting point and a destination?

  For the first time in his life he had dared to tell him he might be wrong. It wasn’t that he had previously lacked the courage – he hadn’t been sure. He had been far too inclined to accept his father’s standpoint which made such a categorical distinction between the useful and the useless, between the beneficial and the futile, between the sensible and the senseless. It was odd that he had had to wait till he was in his forties to have the courage to leave his father’s world. Perhaps Hanuš felt something similar and wanted to return for that reason. To see his father and also to spite him.