Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

We put up in an old farm that had once belonged to the local count, situated not far from the river. The farm, which was in fact more of a manor house, had been transformed into a school, and the principal gave us permission to sleep in a room belonging to ornithologists from the Academy of Sciences. It contained five beds, a refrigerator and a sideboard with stuffed bustards, teals and wild geese. We would make love there every morning while the children, separated from us only by a thin partition and a door whose hasp could have been opened from the other side by a single push, practised pioneer songs. Three days later, we set off again through that semi-steppe, hiking upstream along the river bank, observing flocks of ducks and storks who were just gathering ready to migrate.

We ate fragrant white bread with pork fat and onions and she would tell me about her mother, her brother or her friends, sometimes stopping to ask if she was boring me. Certainly not, I would reply, I wanted to hear as much as possible about her. I knew that my reply would please her and anyway I was glad she was chatty, as I was afraid of the silence that could settle between the two of us, realising that my world and my interests were so alien to her. Then somewhere by the side of a dike we took off our rucksacks and I laid out a blanket in the shade of a hazel bush whose branches sighed in the wind. She knelt on the ground and gathered brown hazel-nuts among the fallen leaves. I coaxed her to come and lie down by me and we cuddled there. But not here, for heaven’s sake — what if someone came?

In Snina we spent the night in a tiny room containing six wooden bunks. The bed linen could not have been changed more than once a week and the walls were covered in dirty rhymes. Drunkards urinated right under the window, gypsies played and sang outside under the vast night sky while we lay and talked about how we would organise our life, how many children we would have (it had never occurred to me that I might need to have children) and when the night was so far gone that even the drunkards were too tired and the gypsies had wandered off to their miserable hovels on the edge of town, we snuggled up together and she asked me to say something nice to her. I tried to find words that would sound tender enough, all the while longing for her body. Which was so close, so near to me that it seemed absurd to waste time talking.

5

Two years later, we managed to obtain a flat with the help of Oldřich whose contacts inevitably included a housing cooperative chairman.

Subconsciously, I expected our new home to resemble in some way the home I had been accustomed to. My mother had always gone to the verge of extremes in her care of me and was always there ready to listen to me and share the events of my life and my attitudes to the world. My wife cared as little about what I ate as what I thought. She seemed to me like a child: still totally absorbed in herself, her own world and her own needs. She was incapable of concerning herself with anyone else’s world and needs.

At first I put it down to reluctance and tried being obstreperous. I deliberately kept myself to myself and refrained from talking to her about things I considered important or interesting. But then I realised that she didn’t notice my taciturnity in the same way that she didn’t notice when I wiped off the layer of dust that had settled on the furniture. All she required was for me to be there, to be near her and ever ready to listen to her.

It is also possible that I failed to find a way through to her; that the things I talked about seemed too remote to her. What she wanted from me was tenderness; what I offered was news of the world. But I was unaware of the disparity, being too taken up with outside events. I needed to be involved in them, to think about how to reform society, to reflect on new laws. I spent more and more time with friends who felt the same need. We had all spent a large part of our lives in intellectual deprivation, during a period when tyranny and violence reigned; now, it seemed, we were going to have the chance to remedy matters at least in part.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were fascinated by reason, having been brought up to regard the Church as the supreme authority. Revolutionaries, brought up in an irredeemably class-divided society, were fired with a vision of egalitarianism. We, in similar fashion, were attracted by a vision of freedom, or freedom of thought, at least.

We used to go on arguing late into the night. I longed to be allowed to speak, to share my conclusions with the others. I can’t tell whether that need was innate in me. When confronted by idiotic rulers and stupid laws, almost everyone feels enlightened and discovers within himself the capacity for useful counsel. Maybe if I had lived under a different regime or in another country I would have channelled my disquiet in simpler and more sensible directions. Perhaps I would have calculated motor winding like my father, or become a wandering monk or rabbi, or have presided in a dignified way in a law court, wearing a wig and judging in accordance with my conscience, aware that each of my judgements was also helping to construct the complex edifice of the Law.

I started to write articles, at least. Most of them had only a tenuous connection with my speciality — I wrote about Montesquieu in order to quote his views on the independence of the judiciary, I wrote about juvenile vandals in order to demonstrate the link between their cynicism and the cynicism of society as a whole — I certainly said nothing that was not common knowledge to anyone concerned with those matters: in the murky depths from which I was only gradually emerging there was little scope for real wisdom to develop.

I was so preoccupied with my activity that when my wife announced she was expecting a baby, I felt apprehension rather than joy or gratitude.

I scarcely recall the period of her pregnancy. She would complain about being tired all the time and negotiated shorter working hours at the library. She also wanted me to go with her to choose clothes for the yet-unborn baby. Minute smocks and bootees would arouse in her an enthusiasm that I found irritating as it made no sense to me and struck me as artificial. And at night she would put my hand on her swelling belly for me to feel how our child already lived. She must have longed for me to feel the same way that she did about it, for me to look forward to it like she did, but it was beyond me.

She felt the first contractions in the small hours of the first day of February. I telephoned my father and he came for us in the same old car.

It was still wintry and there had been a fresh fall of snow during the night so the car proceeded very slowly through the deserted streets. We finally got out in front of a dismal barrack-like building of unrendered brick and slowly trudged through the snow. I supported her with one hand while carrying a bag with her things and clothes for the baby in the other. Several early rooks were hopping about in front of the closed gates. Then the gates slowly opened as they had done on that far-off night; only the armed guard was missing, and there was I following the stretcher. At that moment I realised I had to leave her there, alone in her pain. I hugged her and told her I would be with her in spirit, and she told me not to worry about anything.

Someone took the bag from me, and her as well. She turned once more and waved, and it struck me that that moment would most probably bind me to her ever after.

1

MANDA WANTED HIM to help her choose a present for her grandmother’s birthday. They arranged to meet at lunch-time under the St Wenceslas statue. She couldn’t miss the statue. Otherwise she would be bound to fret about not getting off the tram at the right stop. She had inherited his tendency to worry.