Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  Now the mere absence of the usual obstacles relaxed me.

  I assumed that my wife felt very much as I did. After all it had been her wish to know other countries and cultures. But her longing to visit distant lands was only an expression of her need to escape her humdrum life – and that need remained.

  One evening I returned from the university. She was sitting in an armchair looking out of the window.

  What was she looking at? Nothing. Had there been any post from home? No, there hadn’t. The children? They were asleep. Was she sad? No reply.

  The doorbell rang in the apartment below us, where several girl students lived. I could hear the sound of a noisy welcome and then a door banged. Immediately afterwards a record-player started to bellow. I tried to ignore it and actually managed to, only being disturbed by the repeated ringing of the doorbell downstairs. Then I became aware of the strange silence that reigned in our own apartment. Alena was still sitting looking out of the darkened window.

  What could she see there, what was she looking at all the time outside that window?

  Where was she supposed to look? At me all the time, perhaps?

  In our apartment, silence; beneath us, the sound of drums.

  Could I hear the music at all? She wouldn’t be surprised if I was unaware of it. And she had always wanted a husband who could hear music. How could I go on sitting and reading with music like that in my ears? And she added, without any sort of logic, that eighteen guests had already arrived, all young people, and they were most likely dancing while we just sat at home, and if we did go anywhere it was just to sit down again and yak.

  What did she suggest then?

  She would like to go somewhere where something was happening, where people moved around, made love, laughed, danced.

  So I rang the doorbell downstairs and asked if we might come to the party.

  We entered a packed room that resembled the one we lived in; even the furniture was the same. The walls, however, were covered in posters and photographs and the floor was strewn everywhere with cans of beer and bottles of cheap Californian wine. The far end of the room was almost lost in smoke.

  Some of the guests (most of whom were lying down or sitting on the carpet) told us their Christian names, and two girls made room for us under one of the loudspeakers. Someone handed me a can of beer and asked us what country we had come from. Before I had a chance to reply, he stood up and moved off somewhere else. Then a circulating cigarette reached me. I made the point that I didn’t smoke, but my attitude to smoking was of no interest to anyone, so I passed the cigarette on to my wife. She, to my astonishment, inhaled the smoke before passing the cigarette on. I asked her what sort of cigarette it was and she told me she would find out. She stood up and then I lost sight of her in one of the groups.

  Very soon my eyes started to smart from the smoke and I found it hard to breathe, besides which the music deafened me. My age and my mood set me apart from the rest. A girl with long blonde hair (her face immediately merged with the faces of the rest) sat down next to me and asked me if I loved her. She said she loved me, that she loved everyone, particularly the poor little hungry Pakistanis, as well as all animals including polecats, frogs and spiders, she loved everything that lived and moved, and she raised a finger in front of her eyes and said she loved her finger too, because it was alive and moved. Then she went stiff, propped up against the wall, her finger held up in front of her; she had turned into a statue made of warm matter, still breathing.

  I closed my eyes slightly and it seemed to focus my perception, as if I were looking from a dark auditorium at a stage and saw actors who had experienced none of the things I had, who had never stood at the gates of death, or even had any inkling of the misery elsewhere in the world: neither the misery of hunger nor the misery of the hypocrisy that buys one’s existence. They had known nothing of that, which is why they could lie here dead drunk, elated and inert: animals born in freedom; what had they done with it – what would people do with freedom?

  I got up and went off in search of my wife. She was chatting avidly with some young men. She tried to introduce them to me. I noticed that her eyes too seemed to have acquired a glazed look, that they had been transformed into mirrors and the pupils had expanded and become static. She leaned towards me and asked in a whisper whether I had noticed that they were going off behind that curtain to make love. She would also like to make love. I suggested that we could go home in that case, and she, with a frankness that took me aback, told me that she fancied making love with one of those lads, not with me. But she instantly seemed to take fright and snuggled up to me, telling me she could see a great blue prairie, that was either a field of flax or heather, and we would go to that prairie, and she said that now she was happy among those people, who were innocent, self-sacrificing and unspoilt and thought about nothing but love.

  3

  One of my new colleagues had a pastor friend in far-off Texas, in a town not far from the world-famous Carlsbad caves. The town itself was of little interest as such, but from there it was scarcely a half day’s drive south to one of the most remarkable national parks. The pastor friend would welcome us as his own.

  So during the Christmas holidays – oh, my childhood friends, my murdered childhood friends, I remember how we would walk through the corridors of the barracks and tell each other the stories we had read in books about the Comanches, Apaches and Navahos galloping on their horses, and through them all flowed the Rio Grande; they were unreal names for us and we pinned our thoughts on them because they came from a world where life was different, where one could race through unbounded spaces, and if you were attacked you still had your Winchester rifle to fire at your attackers, and evil and violence were still avenged – I set off on a trip with my family. We drove for two whole days. The only other time we had been so far south was when we visited Menachem in his desert kibbutz; but here an icy wind blew from the mountains and snow lay on the roofs of the Indian puebla. The next morning – we suppressed our urge to drive on straight away – we huddled amidst a group of spectators watching the Indian celebrations in honour of the buffalo. This was where my childhood heroes lived. They took off their ready-made clothes and bared their bodies, now pampered by civilisation, to the cold air. Some of them donned ancient dilapidated, moth-eaten buffaloes’ heads. They walked and danced in time to the drums, their teeth chattering; one of the children was sobbing and one of the youths fainted. I was overcome with a sense of disappointment, or rather sorrow over a world that tried to recall itself in vain, and I willingly acceded to my wife’s request for us to visit instead the world of the future: some nearby communes.

  And we did indeed come across a group of huts made out of mud, motor-car chassis and newly felled trees. In the single living room, which was acrid with smoke from burning wood, tobacco and marijuana, several young people sat around and half-naked babies romped about on the mud floor. My wife attempted to take one of them in her arms, but the brat burst into tears and bit her in the hand.

  In the communal dining-room, a bespectacled and bearded prophet put aside a book wrapped in newspaper and permitted us to ask him questions. My wife therefore did so and heard everything that she already knew from articles and pamphlets, namely, that the most important thing in this fetish-ridden civilisation, where man and his labour-power had become a commodity, was to seek the love and fellowship of others. In a world of motors, deodorants, flush toilets, artificial insemination and tinned dog-food, in a world where a quarter of humanity went hungry and millions of people were dying of hunger, the only way we could preserve our sanity was by returning to nature, starting to drink spring water and fertilising the soil with what had been used to fertilise it over the centuries; by rejecting all the achievements of civilisation.

  And what about when the children fell ill? Alena wanted to know. Didn’t they even take them to a doctor? Nature knew best, as it always had. My wife was captivated and had tears in her eyes, whereas I distractedly
opened the book with the newspaper cover and discovered that it was Marx’s Das Kapital.

  The next day we finally reached our destination. I left the family, tired from the long journey, at the presbytery, and set off further south on Route 385, which ran through wilderness. All around me stood the grey-brown wrecks of mountains, yellowing prairie grass stuck up through the rocks, as well as low clumps of cactuses. The road was bordered by a monotonous barbed-wire fence; no buildings anywhere, only the occasional hand-written signpost indicating not towns but individual ranches.

  I drove as far as the tourist centre beneath the majestically towering peak of the Casa Grande. I hired myself a small cabin, took a shower and drank a glass of milk. After lunch I drove to the banks of the Rio Grande. It was an ordinary river, fairly narrow, in fact, in whose bed a turbid stream flowed lazily along. I crossed it on a punt (no one asked me for my passport) to Mexico. I spent about an hour wandering around the dusty streets of the border village. The huts here were low and squalid. A bunch of half-naked children shouted something at me, but I didn’t understand them. Most likely they were begging for money. It was so pitiful and unromantic and so unlike my childhood notions that I returned disappointed.

  The next day, I set off for the mountains with a few sandwiches and an orange in my pocket.

  I walked alone. The stony trail rose steeply up the mountainside and as I got higher more and more mountain ranges emerged in front of me. The ones towards the south were entirely bare, just stones, waterless valleys, grey-blue rocks riven with gullies, a non-terrestrial landscape, even more desolate than the one I had seen in the Holy Land. I only stopped when I was just below the peak, and I sat down on a warm stone to gaze at the motionless matter which nothing enlivened. It struck me that the time of a stone must be different from the time of people, animals or plants, and it seemed to me that I was being penetrated by that different time. The present and the past, both distant and recent, all merged, and suddenly I was dismayed, terrified and moved by words and events that had long since lost all meaning, and from the depths of my memory there emerged already forgotten figures, forgotten faces, and I could see Arie (was it really him?); his face was almost inhumanly pale, but the eyes that looked at me, his blue eyes, were full of life. I could say to him: Here I am! and for a moment I stiffened, expecting him to reply and say: Of course – we’re both together! And I was panic-stricken by the thought: what if not only he, but I also am long dead? What if neither of us returned from there, and this is actually my Valley of Death? And I remembered my mother; I saw her as a young woman, still in the days when she would sit at my bedside as I fell asleep: what had she wanted, what had she yearned for in those years? Sometimes she would talk to me about men who had once courted her, but I had received those revelations as I did all the other stories, like fairy tales or something I was read from a book. Her destiny did not affect me. And now I was racked with regret that our worlds had remained so remote from each other, that I knew nothing about my mother, and even if I wanted to ask her now, I could not. How remote I was from everyone. And what had my father actually felt when they arrested him? When he realised that his arrest was not an exception but a manifestation of the new order of things and relations, and that he had been wrong in all he had believed up till then? Had he not, even for one moment, longed to die? Had he ever contemplated death at all? What did love mean to him? Had he had any other women apart from my mother? I don’t know; he never spoke about anything of the kind; I knew only a tiny portion of his world: his enthusiasm for machines and politics. And what did I know about my wife? About my brother? About Magdalena? So she stood there motionless at the bus stop in her dark headscarf, while I left her further and further behind. And I hadn’t taken her with me on this journey though she had longed for it. Why hadn’t I? But it is you I am thinking of, my darling; you were actually my first wife. I am lying on ground which is stony and warm; it’s the day before Christmas; you and your parrot Theo are most likely snowbound, but I, if I look southwards, can see petrified waves and a great big bird of prey soaring above the mountain ridge. Do you recall all those times we would watch a buzzard circling above the valley below us? You yearned to escape. I have so many important things to tell you, all assuming that anything to do with me could still interest you, or if anyone could be interested in what happened yesterday, seeing that we two don’t have a past; and I, in particular, have no past because I learnt to forget it, it was too nasty; but when and where was the past ever good? Here they used to sacrifice youths to the gods, laying them on the altar and cutting their hearts out of their live bodies with stone knives; but that’s not the main thing; I have to tell you the most important thing, what I regard as the purpose of life – at that moment I went numb with horror that I was unable to define it. I didn’t know, I didn’t know the meaning, and that was why I had remained silent all those years. But no, I’m sorry. All I have to do is concentrate a bit more. I always knew it, after all. In fact, at an age when most people had their minds on other things entirely, I was sure I knew what I wanted. Yes, now I recall. When I was lying on that wooden bunk in a town which an empress had built for quite different purposes, I imagined to myself that I was a president or a general with the power of bringing people their freedom. I did not know yet what rights went to make up freedom, but I had come to know what lack of freedom was, I had an inkling what was felt by the youth who was laid upon the altar stone to have his heart cut out and his blood drunk, and, in the name of a god, at that moment impassive and hostile, to lose for ever his one and only – unrepeatable and unrenewable – life. I had an intimation what lack of freedom was: that it was a sacrificial altar on which we lay bound hand and foot and watched with alarm the movements of the sacrificing priest. I wanted to abolish that state of apprehension with a single magnificent decree, to end that state of the world in which victims were dragged to various altars. I know you’ll not be able to believe me, my far-off first wife. For you I was a judge and therefore a sacrificing priest with a knife in my hand; I was like the eagle circling on high not because it is free but because it is following its prey. But that was not me. I had simply made a bad choice. One has to fall in line and submit to another’s will, and if you have chosen badly, it often takes all your energy in order to try to eliminate the consequences. And did I choose at all? Rather I let myself be fitted in to life, by circumstances or fate, or whatever. That is where I went wrong; can you still hear me? I have to explain it to you. I was unable to take decisions; but it wasn’t simply weak-mindedness – I increasingly realised that every decision in this life is wrong from some point of view: fateful and wrong; I always used to spend so long weighing it up that in the end someone took the decision for me. That’s why I’m here now and you are snowbound so very far away. I couldn’t make up my mind to ask you to marry me, I couldn’t make up my mind to say: Let’s leave! But do you really think we would have been happier? After all there is nowhere to go to and no one to go with; we’re all alone; I’m alone and you would have remained alone on the edge of the desert and the bare rocks of the Sierra del Carmen.

  In the grey overcast sky, the sun slowly sank towards the sharp mountain peaks. If I stayed here, a bear might come in the night, pumas might rush up to me, snakes might hem me in, or some demon with a woman’s face might arrive from the sky and press its lips to mine. But most likely nothing would happen, I would just spend a lonely night. Once upon a time, sages would spend many days and nights alone. If I had forty days and nights ahead of me on this rocky cliff, I might just manage to come up with one single answer, but tomorrow I have to be back with my family and in a few days I have to dash back up north and visit dozens of people and write hundreds of letters and talk about everything, in other words, nothing, then board a plane and return to my homeland, relate my experiences, rush from place to place: that was the sign I was born under, that was the sign we were born under; will I ever really manage to call a halt?

  4

  Even tho
ugh excited letters were arriving from the homeland calling us back (what we had longed for all those years was at last coming about, Matěj wrote to me, and everyone is needed here, whereas there you’re of no use to anyone) and we wanted to return as soon as possible, we did not manage to get away before the middle of summer. One more farewell to the world of highways (anyway, all the newspapers were writing about my homeland, firing my impatience), a few nights of neon lights, nights in motels on the edge of small towns I would not see again, buying as many postcards as I could, a last crossing into Kentucky (I would never make Wisconsin now), gifts for my niece Lucie, some fashionable sunglasses for my wife, books for Matěj and Oldřich, woollen stockings for my mother and a shawl for my mother-in-law, a few records, at least, for my brother, and there, behind the glass doors of the airport, stood my parents: my mother in a hat that was fashionable twenty years before; they were waving, and behind them, next to my brother, I could make out the figure of Matěj. The customs officers seemed to me unusually friendly and unofficious. In a fit of impatience I asked Matěj to invite all the friends to come over that very evening.

  The flat was strewn with suitcases and heaps of brochures, maps, postcards and posters, as well as bottles of Kentucky bourbon, foam-rubber figures and magazines which would have seemed to me such a rarity only a year before; I was scarcely able to find enough chairs for everyone.