Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

She stayed with us and her old parents (Grandad was already over eighty) alone in a country full of enemies, and in addition spurned, branded and condemned. Only the date of departure remained to be announced.

Then the moment arrived. It was just before mid-day and Mother was cooking potato dumplings, my favourite, for lunch. The doorbell rang; there stood a little fellow, a complete stranger. He made a deep bow, then spoke some quiet words I couldn’t hear and my mother rushed out on to the staircase. For the first time in my life I heard her scream. She screamed so loud that doors opened all over the house and neighbours came out to look. The housekeeper came to see us and someone telephoned Auntie Simona who lived nearby. They had generously given us two hours to pack. Even the little fellow helped bring things and toss them into the cases. Then they drove us to the fortress, where they assigned thirty people to live with us, allocating us twice two and a half square metres of blackened floor, just enough space for six of our mattresses, six mattresses for the three of us and three cases at our feet. That was our space. My mother was always a stickler for cleanliness. She was careful to get for us everything that medical science prescribed: vitamins and fresh air, a balanced diet, a proper night’s sleep in a well-aired room. Now there was nothing she could do for us but leave us some of her own portion of food and straighten our bedding when we kicked it off at night.

Within a week, my brother — scarcely three years old — came down with a fever. Someone offered my mother a tablet, but she was frightened to give him anything without a doctor’s prescription. So instead she sat by his mattress, and while he cried she tried to sing to him in the quietest of voices, almost a whisper. (Where had the days gone when she used to sing to me night after night in her soft, heart-warm, pain-free voice. Oh, my dear wee son, In the field so wide There stands a castle by the babbling river’s side!) She must have sung to him all night. So many nights without a glimmer of hope, nights like fringes on a cape tied with a cord at the neck; in the morning someone rushed in to tell them that a sick-bay had just been opened. So she wrapped my brother up in several blankets and carried him through the chilly corridors. In time I was to discover that the system of corridors was rational and simple in true Maria Teresa style, but on that occasion we rushed round and round in circles going up and down staircases coming out in places we’d never seen before or in places we’d come to more than once already. Then someone shouted at us to make ourselves scarce, that there were Germans on the way, but it was too late, they appeared out of nowhere: two men with black jackboots and skull badges on the front of their caps.

We went rigid, our backs pressed to the wall, and my mother clutched to herself the bundle of blankets encircling a crying mouth. I stood several paces in front of her, terrified that the disorderly cries would infuriate the two masters of our fate then approaching.

And that is the scene as I still recall it: the long corridor with its many unglazed arched windows and a row of dark-coloured doors, two policemen whose heavy footsteps were coming nearer and nearer; armed justice on the march, requiring the world to bare its head; and my mother motionless by the wall, with her pale, exhausted face, my mother clutching a bundle of blankets from which crying could be heard.

Meanwhile through the arches of the never glazed windows flakes of snow drifted out of a chill ash-grey sky and even started to settle on the floor of the corridor, making the black of the approaching jackboots even blacker and even more menacing, therefore.

2

The first time the barrack gates opened for us was in the middle of winter. Under the supervision of a local policeman with a rifle, two men in dark overcoats were carrying my brother out on a stretcher. Hanuš had fallen ill with scarlet fever; I had got over my own attack and now — wrapped up in a blue winter coat — cheerfully stamped along at the side of the stretcher. The free snow lay knee-high. Somewhere in the distance whole armies were being smothered in snow, but I didn’t see them, all I saw was the man in front carrying a dark lantern and the empty street before me. I recall it all like a Bruegel painting, although maybe slightly less apocalyptic. I can even hear the rustle of crows’ wings, the crunch of the crisp snow and my brother’s quiet moans. My brother was afraid they were taking him away from his mother. I leant towards him so that he knew I was there and had nothing to fear, and he slipped his hand out from under the blanket and gripped me fiercely. And I walked alongside the stretcher in the freshly fallen snow, with what seemed free space about me at last, and it was a blissful moment when I became aware of the change. It was as if liberty was already mine, as if I were not just moving between two prison buildings, as if I was unaware that in a few moments this outing would come to an end. What can it have all meant to my brother at the age of three? Once, many years later, I asked him if he sometimes recalled those days. ‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ he said, ‘it never struck me that I ought to try and remember too.’ And he made an effort to bring back something that happened there to at least one of his friends, but couldn’t remember anything except that on the front of the barracks just below our window there hung two plaster horses’ heads that frightened him. He was unable to remember, even though he has a better memory than I; that period had torn itself away from his memory like a top-heavy boulder and fallen into the depths. But I couldn’t forget. I was older, at the age which we all carry within us as the age of innocence and first perceptions. I carry my boulder around within me, but I have got so used to it that I stopped being aware of it long ago. I have become accustomed to not thinking about it. Even at the time I was becoming used to it: to not thinking about the long slips of paper with name, date and number, which signalled a step into the unknown; to not taking any notice of the weeping or terror of others, those who were selected; to not thinking about the emptying rooms, the people who had spoken to me not long before and would never say anything to me again; to not becoming attached to anyone or anything, when everyone and everything was destined for destruction; to not thinking about Osi who could walk on his hands or Ruda who almost knew off by heart Dr Holub’s Journey to Mashakulumbu and could talk about Dr Schweitzer’s hospital as if he’d visited it himself, or about timid, sickly Olga who apparently gave her first concert at the age of ten, so that I even stopped remembering Arie, though not so long before I had been incapable of conceiving of a day without him.

So I became practised at it and their shades ceased to affect me and I no longer encounter them even in dreams. When I walked round the museum at Auschwitz some years ago, past piles of battered suitcases marked with big enamel signs, I realised that I’d forgotten even my friends’ surnames.

Arie used to wear a little skull-cap: the yarmulke. He would never stay and play with us till evening but would always go off and pray the maariv. I found it odd or even a waste of time. I was sorry for him. And then the day came when I felt that I liked him, although I can’t remember the immediate reason why. I was unable to get to sleep that night. Up I got from my palliasse, got dressed and slipped out of the room without making the slightest sound. I ran along the long corridor. Arie’s father was chairman of the Council of Elders, so he lived with his family in an apartment. It was an incredible refuge with real beds, cupboards, a table and chairs, situated at the opposite side of the building. I had to pass many doors before eventually finding myself in front of the right one. Then I waited with thumping heart to find out if he too was awake and would come out so that we might meet.