Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  But Mother and Father both hesitated about leaving. They both had their parents here and Mother was too attached to her native city; so in the end we didn’t leave.

  That country over the channel was subsequently linked in my mind with talk of a happy end to the war and the return of the good times. I would hear people talking about what ‘London’ had reported, as everyone waited day in day out, month in month out, for the invasion.

  Years later, when I had to suggest a country where I might like to go for further study, I wrote: Britain. They never sent me anywhere, of course; I was merely allowed to repeat my suggestion the following year.

  When my third year at the institute came, they informed me that I could go to Britain for four weeks. It seemed incredible that they really meant I would be allowed to get on a train and cross the frontier unhindered, for the first time in my life (I was thirty-three by then). I would be taking a ship to sail across that channel before stepping out at last on the shore where I had been supposed to land a quarter of a century earlier.

  Several days before my departure I received a telephone call: I didn’t catch the name, but there was something familiar about the measured manner of the other’s voice. He said he had caught sight of me from the tram as I was walking along Národní Avenue, and it occurred to him we might meet for a chat. I struggled fruitlessly to remember to which of my acquaintances the voice belonged. I therefore told him I was just leaving on a foreign trip and suggested we meet on my return. To my surprise, he told me he knew about my trip and would like to see me before I left. He wouldn’t keep me long; he knew what such journeys were like. At last I realised who I was talking to. It was Plach.

  He was sitting behind a battered café table and his face lit up as he caught sight of me. I scarcely recognised him. His pugilist’s face had filled out and his distinct features had become flabby. His hair had turned grey and he had become an off-the-peg dandy; my former fellow-student even smelt like a suburban barber’s shop. He told me he read my articles. They were interesting even if I did go a bit far sometimes. He asked after my family, actually referring to my mother’s condition and my father’s imprisonment of long ago. He was glad it hadn’t been anything serious. He also had news of our other fellow-students. Eva was working in a house of culture in some distant part of Moravia. She had married and was now divorced. Nimmrichter had been working as a lawyer for an export company but had just been promoted to a higher post. But about himself he said nothing, and when I asked him, he ignored my question, which aroused my suspicion. Then he said he had heard about my planned journey.

  Who had told him?

  He’d forgotten. Someone just happened to mention I would be travelling. He had a favour to ask of me. He needed to get a letter delivered and would rather not send it by post. He would give me the address. It was in London, not far from the place I would be staying. I was staying at Patrick McKellar’s, wasn’t I?

  My amazement that he knew where I’d be living pleased him. But he proffered no explanation, and only said that I would most likely receive an immediate reply, which I would bring straight back to him. I had nothing to fear; there would be nothing dangerous in the letters, nobody would make any sense of them apart from the people they were intended for.

  So why didn’t he send them by post?

  He would sooner send them this way; but there was nothing to fear. Nobody suspected people like me; at most they’d ask about alcohol or drugs. Letters didn’t interest them; it was a free country, after all. He made an attempt at laughter and I was clearly intended to join him. He added that it might be arranged for me to travel more often if I was interested.

  I tried to persuade him of my unsuitability for such errands.

  He told me to give it careful consideration and gave me his telephone number so that I could call him. Finally, he told me not to mention our conversation to anyone. He knew I would understand. He smiled again, we paid the bill and left the café. I shook his hand and as he moved away from me, I started to boil with indignation.

  I was annoyed with myself for not having said no straight away and for actually shaking his hand and treating him as a friend. I decided that I would call him first thing the next morning and tell him that I wanted nothing to do with him and I would sooner not go anywhere.

  I realised with regret that I would have to forgo my trip. Admittedly I didn’t know what position my former classmate held, but I expected that his influence was great enough to prevent my journey.

  But I didn’t call him, either the next day or any of the subsequent days – and he didn’t call either.

  I waited for them to inform me that my journey had been cancelled (what reason would they give?).

  Even when the train was already entering the border station at Cheb and the frontier guards were nearing my compartment, accompanied by two dogs straining impatiently at their leads, I was still almost certain that they were heading for me, that they had been detailed to drag me out of the carriage and send me home.

  They came aboard. A uniformed guard at each door: no one to enter, no one to leave. A soldier in green overalls shone a torch under the seats arid other soldiers shone their lamps under the wheels of the carriage. I handed over my passport. Although I had thought about nothing else but this moment throughout the entire journey so far, I had not yet rehearsed the words I would say in protest against their harassment. They then handed back my passport and even thanked me; moments later they left the carriage. The train slowly moved off and still I couldn’t believe they had let me through. I gazed at the dead, ochre landscape which was bereft of all life apart from a few semi-derelict buildings, until at last I saw it, for the first time in my life: the barbed wire! The barbed wire of my camp, stretching on high posts endlessly in both directions, and below it the machine-gun towers. The train again braked, hooted and came to a halt. I went rigid: they had me after all; the order to stop me had just been delayed for a few moments, or possibly they were only playing with me. And I waited paralysed like a cornered mouse, like a condemned man on the steps to the scaffold, like a patient on the operating table.

  When the train got under way again and finally crossed that imaginary – but oh so graphically demarcated – line, and with a hoot that sounded triumphant and joyful to my ears, stormed into the clean and colourful-looking station on the other side of the border, it brought back to me the very feeling I had known twenty years earlier. I was free! I leaned out of the window. A young fellow in a white overall was selling Coca-Cola, bananas, oranges and chocolate, there was a banging of carriage doors and from below the window came the sound of German: the language which, twenty years before, had been associated with the unfreedom whose grip I had escaped; the paradoxical transformation gave me an uneasy feeling.

  2

  My host lived in a residential area not far from Finchley Road tube station. I was given a room with walls covered in sabres, épées and etchings, and a comfortable soft bed, and the view was a skyline of London roofs. On the bookshelf, my host had prepared a selection of books for me, which I would have read had my restlessness not urged me to make more effective use of my time. So I hurried around the galleries and museums, attended one of the Quarter Sessions where some far senior colleagues of mine were trying a case of street assault, squeezed among the tourists at Speakers’ Corner and watched the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace. I took a trip to Eton to see an old English school and I even managed to get into the gallery of the House of Lords and listen to learned oratory on issues whose meaning eluded me.

  In all these things, which remarkably, surprisingly and for no apparent reason, had survived for centuries, I found something admirable, something of grandeur even. At the same time, I realised just how wretched were the conditions from which I had come. I came to realise the pitiful nature of a world in which people were forever exchanging one set of rulers for another, and with them their beliefs and their history, one in which past events were forever being amended and
embellished, thus depriving people of the chance to develop a sense of humility or pride; a world which, for centuries, those who wished to preserve their beliefs had fled, leaving behind those who found it easy to conform; a world where laws often ceased to apply even before they could be used, where the achievements of past generations were usually reviled and praise was reserved solely for current events; a world where fresh beginnings were made time and again in the name of something better and lasting, while in fact nothing had lasted longer than a single part of a single generation’s lifetime; a world where everything that was pure, dignified, noble or exalted aroused suspicion. How could one live in such a world? To what could one appeal, to what values, to what language, to what law, to what judge? And all I had done so far had been to contribute to that unhappy state. Without having learnt anything of the world I was born into, without understanding how it was administered and run, I had striven to change it.

  One evening, my host invited over some of his friends who wanted to meet me and learn something about my country.

  Of the many guests, two fascinated me in particular. One was a journalist who kept steering the conversation back to the show trials and always had a handy quotation from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Mao, not to mention other prophets of revolution that I’d never heard of. The other was a hermit-like bachelor of law from Massachusetts named Allan Nagel. Allan was very interested in my wartime experiences, the concentration camps and my views on capital punishment.

  I recall that the conversation initially turned on the recently concluded trial of a worker alleged to have murdered a woman, who had been found guilty by the jury although there had been no direct proof. At this point the others started a lengthy debate about the jury system. I was almost entirely unfamiliar with the matters under discussion. My concerns were of a different order, or even from another time. I started to feel embarrassed at my own ignorance. I went over to the window to escape their attention. A bowl of pistachio nuts stood on the window sill (it was the first time I’d ever tasted them), while outside cars passed by in a long confused line, and above them the lights of the neon advertisements constantly changed colour.

  If juries were unjust, I heard the American say, that was just one more reason why their decisions should not justify the carrying out of the supreme penalty.

  The journalist (the next day he brought me several copies of the journal he edited but I did not have time to read them and I was scared to take them back home as the very headlines were rather too forthright in their advocacy of world revolution and their condemnation of imperialism of all kinds) declared that so-called judicial verdicts had already taken the lives of countless of his comrades and he would therefore have every reason to favour abolition of the death penalty. However, in his view the controversy should not be side-tracked into the question of punishment. Instead we should be considering whether the unreliability or even mercenary character of the judiciary was not a reflection of the social system as a whole. And society’s imperfections could not be eliminated through moderation, only through revolutionary change. But could we deny the revolution the right to terror? Its enemies would stifle it before it had a chance to start putting things right.

  At last the conversation had touched on an issue more familiar to me. When it came to the basis of revolutionary justice I knew a thing or two. Amazingly enough, though, I didn’t start to argue with the journalist (I think I was rather deterred by his demagogic eloquence, for which I was no match in a foreign language) and I asked the American if, in his view, the death penalty should not even apply to child killers, mass murderers or war criminals.

  Why should anyone suffer punishment by death? he asked. After all, by executing the murderer we did not bring the victim back to life. And I was certainly aware that even the cruellest punishments did not deter future criminals. If that held true for common criminals, it was even more true for those we termed war criminals. After all, they committed their crimes in the name of a regime in whose victory they believed. That regime offered them not only impunity but also honour for their actions, which was dignified as service to the homeland or the ideal.

  He had clearly given careful thought to the question and probably read rather more of the literature on it than I had. I, on the other hand, had seen old women and old men in threadbare coats, people with one foot in the grave, who had been dragged from remote villages and transported for days on end in trucks intended for potatoes or even cattle; they were being carried off to their deaths.

  When, somewhere in the civilised world, a perverted murderer killed a child, it aroused widespread outrage and indignation – the crime was talked about for weeks on end. But what about when a murderer took hold of the entire machinery of a modern state, including the army and the police, and then used it to start such a campaign of killing that the number of victims surpassed the worst we were still able to imagine? Surely in such a case the crimes exceeded not only our powers of imagination, but also all usual considerations – all customary thinking about crime and punishment.

  The American listened to me attentively. Then he said that he could understand my personal concern and my indignation, but that he unfortunately took a different view. Either we perceived all human actions in terms of circumstances and mutual relations and came to the conclusion that every human life was inviolable and every infringement of its inviolability a crime, or we would remain stuck in the vicious circle of murders and their retribution.

  I said that I too understood his way of thinking (though I didn’t), but that I thought he would nevertheless speak differently if he had been through what I had.

  In reply, he said that it was something he didn’t like talking about, but seeing that I’d mentioned it, he too had come from Europe. Both his parents and his younger sister had stayed in Vienna during the war, he alone having been sent to Sweden, and managed to survive. His next of kin had all perished in the way I had indicated earlier, though where and when he had been unable to discover, in spite of his efforts.

  His words mortified me and I stuttered some kind of apology. The others steered the conversation elsewhere and I did not say another word the whole evening.

  That night, when everyone had gone home and I was alone in my small bedroom, I realised that I had disgraced myself not just by having tried to manipulate my listeners’ feelings but also because of the attitude I had espoused.

  3

  The next morning I set off to spend a few days in Scotland. My host furnished me with a whole list of addresses but I had decided to spend at least a day on my own. In Inverness, after booking into my lodgings, I boarded a pleasure boat at the quay with the prospect of a four-hour cruise on the trail of the famous monster.

  It was a clear, fresh day in late summer. About two dozen passengers were crowded on the deck. I went and sat in a brightly coloured deckchair in the bows. A sailor rang a brass bell in the stern and we were under way.

  The loch resembled an enormous river. The sheer, unwooded mountainside gave the impression of rising to heights one would normally think of as cloud level.

  Then a girl came and sat in the deckchair next to mine. I was expecting her to be joined by someone else, but no one came. She wore a nautical T-shirt and sat with her hands in her lap, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Maybe the sunglasses or the colour of her hair reminded me of my wife.

  I thought she was asleep and observed her almost blatantly. She initiated the conversation by asking if I had any matches (I never carried any), and then we chatted, or rather she talked while I lay looking at the banks and awaiting the appearance of new landscapes and new formations of hills and rocks from around each bend in the loch.

  She was American and had come here to visit relatives. She had done a lot of travelling, having spent several years in the Middle East and India with her father. She had lived in Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan and regaled me with all sorts of bizarre adventures, tales and sketches from her time in those countries, which all sounded so ex
otic to me.

  I don’t know what made her so communicative. Maybe it was the peace and calm of the cruise or the effect of the landscape which was so different from the ones in the countries of her adventures. Or maybe she was as lonely as I was. In the end I started to lose the thread of her narration, my mind turning increasingly to the thought that the journey would end in a few hours and we would both disembark. It would be up to me to invite her: to dinner, a glass of wine or beer, a walk, anywhere – and I was already touching those arms, leading her up to my little room in the boarding house, where we were already writhing in one another’s arms.

  When the boat reached the point at which it turned round and started on the return trip, my companion fell silent for a moment. Maybe she now expected me to entertain her for a change. But I didn’t know any exotic stories. What could I tell her about? About a man who thought he was going to bring people salvation and then discovered he had been mistaken? About the revolutionary who discovered the self-deception of revolution? About the lawyer who came to the conclusion that justice didn’t exist? About the son who wanted to imitate his father but discovered he lacked his father’s strength?