by Ivan Klíma
Could we be surprised that where the basic law was dog eat dog some people, out of despair, hopelessness or poverty, decided to take that law at its word and behave like dogs? When the law of the jungle applied, it was hard to decide who was the culprit and who the victim. In such conditions, the most progressive forces in society indicted class justice as a whole and called for its total transformation. And in the awareness that that goal was unattainable for the time being, they demanded at least the abolition of the severest penalty! But what had their problems in common with ours?
He went on to add that the author, as he could see, was still a young comrade, and maybe for that reason had not yet properly learnt the distinction between true humanism, whose concern was the welfare of all conscientious working-people, and pseudo-humanism which made a great song and dance about a few dozen outcasts and murderers. He was sure the author meant no harm, although his article expressed nothing but confusion. He was only astonished that this had not occurred to the experienced comrades on the editorial board.
He gave us both a reproachful look and took off his glasses to clean them.
The editor at my side asked to speak. It had not been the intention of either the author or the editor, he said, to initiate a debate about a problem which was undoubtedly marginal and abstruse. All they had wanted was to recall it. Most probably they had underestimated the negative effect which the article might have on public opinion. None the less he took the liberty of pointing out that Comrade Marx himself had warned us not to overestimate people’s sense of justice, for people were also influenced by the survivals of dead and dying historical periods. Somewhere in the collected works – the editor couldn’t recall exactly which volume, but thought it was the fifth – Marx had specifically stated that the people’s views on justice lagged behind the evolution of economic and legal ideas, and in 1853, Marx himself had written an article about the death penalty, stressing that such punishment was unjustifiable in civilised society, and he, the editor, drew attention to the fact that Marx had used the word ‘civilised’, not ‘class’ society. That was precisely what had led the editors to accept the article currently under discussion. And he, while recognising that most of the criticisms voiced here were justified, continued to think that the article might still appear, if its author were to revise certain points in it; were he to stress, for instance, that the death penalty could not be abolished in our country for the time being, while stating, as we had been reminded here, that it was an exceptional punishment which would be totally done away with at some time in the future.
When I looked back at his speech afterwards, I realised that it was not merely opportunistic (as I thought at the time). He had been seeking a way of publishing most of what I had written, because he knew he would never manage to publish the lot.
But I, at that moment, was aware of only one thing: that I was being asked to sign an article conceding that the death penalty had to remain for the time being, instead of an article demanding the abolition of capital punishment – and I declared that that was something I had no intention of doing. And that could have been the end of it. They would have shelved the article. It would have become just one of many unpublished texts and I could have gone back, without any trouble, to my job at the institute.
Ever since, I have often wondered why I didn’t leave it at that statement. After all, I had taken part in enough meetings of the kind before. I was well aware of the style of thinking or non-thinking on display – it would disgust me, but I had always managed to control myself. That fact that I didn’t manage to that time was the fault of the man chairing the meeting: my onetime fellow-student – original occupation, prison guard. He had difficulty putting together an intelligible sentence. He was unable to distinguish Europe from Asia and the Middle Ages from our own century, but in spite of that, he had been permitted to study, and now – since being qualified – he had the power to decide what ideas were permitted and required in his field. And it applied not just to me but to the entire nation.
I did not stop at the point where I might have come out unscathed, but instead went on to declare that in a country where only a few years ago so many innocent people had been hanged, including some of the nation’s best men and women, we should abolish the death penalty forthwith. For a moment my statement left them thunderstruck and I quickly added that I could see no reason why there should not be the freedom to consider and write about any problem at all.
The grey-haired man stopped me short and asked me if I meant to say that there should be freedom for all views, including racism, fascism and nazism.
I said that I meant nothing of the sort, as he knew full well. I hoped that he had found no racist or fascist views in my article. He replied that it depended on how one looked at it. I asked him (my indignation was rapidly growing) what that was supposed to mean. He declared that in essence I was demanding that fascists and war criminals should go unpunished!
I started to shout at him not to twist my words!
One of the two younger men made a further attempt at compromise. He could tell from the way I was defending myself that I accepted that certain views could not be published. That meant that someone had to assess them first.
I shouted that I did not maintain anything of the sort.
What did I maintain then?
I maintained that censorship was only needed by governments which went in fear of truth and their own people. It was only needed by governments that had never been elected. And I added that wherever freedom of speech was suppressed, there was a risk that unqualified people would start to take the decisions and that power would fall into the hands of those of dubious character.
Now my ex-classmate joined in for the first time to ask me if I was trying to say that the Party, which in our country chose comrades for leading posts, gave priority to people with dubious characters.
I told him I had been talking in general terms, solely against the suppression of opinion and restrictions on freedom of speech.
So was I trying to say, Nimmrichter continued, that the Party did not have the right to suppress hostile opinions?
I replied that to start with, they were not the Party.
He insisted that I answer his question: Did the Party have such a right, or not?
At that moment, the image returned to me of a priest in an underground cell being marched around those four walls from morning to night and being forced to do press-ups and squats. I had foolishly let myself get carried away. I declared with sudden caution that a sensible party suppresses neither the views of its enemies nor of its own members.
He repeated his question once more: his untypically precise sentence. But I merely shrugged and sat down, suddenly incapable of pursuing that doomed argument or even taking in anything of what would happen next.
Nothing else did happen. Nimmrichter rose and wound up the proceedings by declaring – with amazing coherence – that in view of what I had just said, it was clear to him that someone else would have to settle the issue. The others rose also. Nobody said any more to me and we separated without any of the usual courtesies.
In the corridor, when we were at last alone, the editor leaned towards me and said quietly that I had certainly given them a good lashing, but I’d probably got myself into hot water in the process.
Chapter Nine
* * *
* * *
1
A LEXANDRA WAS SITTING next to him with a contented look on her face. As if everything was fine, whereas the fact was that he had not yet summoned up the courage to infringe the cosiness she offered. He had merely refused to go to her attic, preferring instead to embark on a trip that was inappropriately long for the short time available.
She drew a small flat bottle of vodka out of her handbag and opened it. ‘I got this sudden fancy for it. Fancy a swig too?’
‘I’m driving, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I’ll have just a wee drop then. You’re sure you don’t mind? Sometimes Ruml d
oesn’t approve. He thinks it’ll be the ruin of me.’
‘Maybe he’s right.’
‘No, he’s the ruin of me. If I didn’t get drunk now and then, I wouldn’t survive living with him.’
They caught up with a column of Russian military vehicles. It was moving up the next hill and the rear lights flashed red above the road’s dark, wet surface.
‘He wanted to run out on me when we hadn’t been together more than six months,’ she said. ‘He found this girl, her father was a general. Ruml thought it might be a way of getting himself a cushier number. In Sweden or even Honolulu.’
The vehicles in front of them were crawling along and the road was all bends, so it had been impossible to overtake more than one tardy field kitchen, while the time kept ticking by. ‘But he didn’t leave you in the end.’
‘But he wanted to. He would have kicked me out with the kid. He offered me fifteen thousand, saying it would be worth both our whiles, the bastard! I told him I’d kill him: if he so much as mentioned it again I’d poison him, even if I had to swing for it. But they wouldn’t top me, that much I did know about our fucking laws. I’d be only too happy to go to gaol, knowing that I had rid the world of a shithead like him.’
‘Would you really have poisoned him?’
‘I already had the poison at home.’
‘What kind?’
‘It makes no difference.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘What do you want to know for? Need to get rid of someone too?’ Then she said: ‘We always had it at home. It was Dad’s. He’d got hold of it before war broke out.’
He was questioning her about poison that didn’t interest him. All their lives people asked questions about things that didn’t interest them. The things that really worried them normally remained unsaid.
The previous night he had had a dream: he arrived at a dance where everyone else belonged together in some way: only he was alone. He realised he was well over forty and he still hadn’t found a wife and therefore had no children. He couldn’t dance either. The band played, unknown couples danced all around him and the realisation started to grow in him that all hope had gone for him. And in the dream he had such a depressing sense of futility that he burst into tears. When he woke up he felt momentary relief. He wasn’t alone. He had a wife, children and even a mistress. But who did he have really?
In reality he was alone. It was a mistake to draw comfort from the fact she was still sitting at his side at that moment: his beautiful, wanton, tipsy mistress.
He could, of course, act as if everything was all right. Accept a way of living in which nothing was said about real worries, in which people only talked about conventional things and did what suited them. It was possible to live a life which had no bearing on one but was merely convenient, and even pretend that it was the most suitable lifestyle, because it occasionally offered a chance of passion, whereby it had something in common with real life – though in real life, passion alternated with grief and anxiety.
He pulled up in front of the cottage, got out and unlocked the door. She entered nonchalantly, as if the house belonged to her. She tossed her handbag on to a chair and went to switch on the radiant heater in the bedroom.
And what if it hadn’t been her in that lighted room that night?
But did it really matter? He was so distracted he had almost forgotten that she was someone else’s wife, the wife of his friend, in fact. It was as if he was unaware that she was concealing him as much as he was her, and that their affair had been marked from the outset by deception and betrayal.
He had no right to make any demands on her at all, and there was nothing he could expect of her but to give him precedence over another for a few moments of unforeseeable duration, and to hope that they could fill those moments with an activity that seemed to him so ecstatically blissful that everything else palled into insignificance. Perhaps it wasn’t so little he could expect of her, but it was not exactly what he would like to settle for, what he might accept without a sense of hopeless downfall.
She looked around. ‘Everything is the way it was last time. Haven’t you been here since?’
‘The idea hasn’t really appealed.’
‘You could have come on your own.’
‘What would I do here on my own?’
‘I didn’t mean all alone,’ she said with impatience. ‘I meant with some girl.’
‘If you were me would you come here with someone else?’
‘I don’t know what I’d do if I were you. Maybe I’d be with someone else if I had such a rotten mistress who’d sooner take her kids to the cinema than stay with me.’
‘Thank you for being frank.’
‘I don’t like being alone,’ she explained. ‘You left me in the lurch that evening and you will again.’ She pulled the bedding out of the chest and started to make the bed.
‘That’s not true,’ he objected.
‘You’re like the rest of them. You think I’m daft? Everyone promises me the earth, everyone makes out he loves me eternally and then, when the chips are down, he goes and does a bunk. I’m pissed off with it. I’m pissed off with sitting and weeping on my own.’ She sat down on the chest. ‘It’s cold here, so I’ve made the bed. I might as well get straight in. Would you bring me the bottle from my handbag?’
When he returned, she was standing undressing right next to the red-hot element. He noticed she had bruises on her arms and back.
‘What are you staring at? Oh, yes. We had another fight. You said you don’t beat your wife. So what’s your way of abusing her?’ She scratched her calf with her bare foot while letting down her hair. ‘No, I don’t want you to invent something. I couldn’t give a damn. I couldn’t care less about your wife.’
What did she care about? She made love to him because it happened to suit her, and he had happened to cross her path. She talked to him about love, wandering monks, the light in people, her dreadful husband and her childhood and he set great store by it. But all it needed was for him to say one evening that he didn’t have the time and she made love to someone else who happened to suit her. That was what she was good at: making love and talking; she had given everything a try and discovered what lovers liked and what aroused them. And it seemed to him that she had the ability to behave more freely than him, and that there was a chance that with her he might opt out of the staleness of his own life in favour of some nobler and more fulfilling destiny.
Maybe she did behave more freely than he did – or she was less restrained, at least; but nobility was unlikely to be what she was seeking, and it wasn’t what he was seeking with her. And freedom without nobility of spirit did not uplift one.
But what right had he to judge her? Why was he trying to convince himself that he deserved or that he would be capable of caring for a nobler or freer creature?
‘Turn the light off first,’ she crouched under the covers, ‘and get a move on. What’s keeping you?’
So he joined her in bed.
‘Do you still love me at all, anyway?’ She encircled his mouth with hers and pressed up against him and he pressed up against her. But that wasn’t his purpose for being here. Why was he here, in fact? He had ccme to tell her . . . what exactly? I love you, I still love you, my false love, it’s stronger than my plans, stronger than my moderation, stay with me, stay with me for these few moments at least.
‘Darling,’ she opened her eyes as he got up, ‘you’re getting dressed? Are we going somewhere?’
‘I have to go for the water.’
He took a bucket from the kitchen and went outside. The air was pure and the moon shone from between the clouds. He could see several lights in the depths below him and on the hillside opposite the woods were darkening and becoming lost in the distance.
Why on earth am I here?
He could set off through those woods which went on and on, maybe right to the coast, a pack on his back, in the pack two blankets, bread, sausage, ersatz coffee. And he c
ould even take his own potatoes and wouldn’t have to beg any from a farmer. And instead of a slide-rule – what would he take in place of a slide-rule? He couldn’t think of anything as indispensable. He had nothing of the kind; that was his disadvantage. But on the other hand, he could walk alone, escaping his guards and his fellow-prisoners; he could sit, lie, change direction when he felt like it; he could go forward, retrace his steps, light a fire, drink from springs, stay among the rocks; he would not have to leave his chosen place, or wait, or answer, or beg, or promise, or have mercy, or do harm, or listen to lies, or think up excuses, but could rid himself of fears, put up his tent and walk right to the coast. So many possibilities and he was stuck here.
He was here to make love. To lie at one side of the woman he desired, while on the other side lay her husband and someone else, a whole host lit up by the reflections of the setting sun. He was here so that in the meantime his wife could wander about at night with a mendicant student who carried gas bombs in his pocket and flung them under the beds of rabbis and false judges. Children stood waving on the porch, then the bomb exploded and struck the wrong ones as usual, the splinter struck from behind, not killing but burrowing into the flesh, so the child’s hand no longer waved but hung limply. That was a free life without nobility of spirit, one possible life option.
The bucket was full. He cupped his hands and scooped up some water to clear the lump in his throat. But it didn’t help; it was something else choking him, not something he could wash down.
‘Did you have to go far for the water, darling?’ she asked on his return.
‘No, the well is just behind the cottage.’
‘You were away a long time. Did you want to run away from me?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Are you tired of me already? I expect my conversation isn’t clever enough for you.’
