Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘I don’t know how you meant it.’

‘For instance, I mean that people go on believing in God even though it has been proved to them — calculated — that everything began twenty thousand million years ago with a big bang, that the universe is expanding, and that human beings evolved from less developed creatures.’

‘What are you dragging God into it for?’

‘I was just trying to show that people are capable of believing and acting in ways that seem to defy reason.’

‘Adam, are you serious? You can’t really approve of Hanuš returning because of something so fanciful… so unreal, can you?’

‘It’s his decision.’

‘I wanted to ask you if you’d call him or write him a letter, but I can see that he wouldn’t get any sensible advice from you anyway.’

‘I can write to him if you like — but I expect you’d put it much better.’

‘God! You’ve come a long way, Adam!’

‘We both have, Dad! Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t be pleased to see Hanuš? To be able to see him whenever you like?’

His father reached for his coat. ‘My being pleased or not isn’t the point!’

What was the point then? He walked back to the Old Town Square with his father.

‘Don’t tell Mum about our chat.’

‘Don’t worry. And write to him!’

‘Write to him! If I write what I think in a letter, it’ll never reach him!’

Dusk was already falling. The floodlights illuminating the Town Hall and the astronomical clock suddenly came on. How long ago was it that he and Hanuš had walked here together? He couldn’t even remember.

Adam, is that you? Thank God.

What’s wrong with your voice? What’s happened? Where are you calling from?

From a phone box. I got into a bit of a scrap, Adam. They almost — I got thumped, and I could do with a change of trousers. They’re in the wardrobe in the passage. Just make sure Mum doesn’t see you. I’ll be all right in a second.

As he led him into an entranceway they left a trail of blood behind them on the paving stones.

They were still the same paving stones, but the rain had washed the blood away long ago, or passers-by had carried it off on the soles of their shoes.

He could have walked through to Příkopy and taken a tram home, but instead he set off through the lanes he had walked along every day for so many years: either alone or with friends of long ago. Here was the Bethlehem Chapel. He could go and have a look inside. The one and only code of decent and noble behaviour: the one laid down by Homer, Socrates… He couldn’t remember whether Hus had been included in the list. He certainly belonged there. Secretly I had wanted to belong in that company, which is not closed to anyone, surely. But what have I to show?

A group of foreigners was coming out of the chapel — the doors closed behind them and locked. He wouldn’t be taking a look round today.

He was aware nevertheless of a sense of relief at moving among places that linked him to the past, that were capable of speaking to him and thereby lessening somehow the burden which the present heaped upon him.

Is it really possible that this feeling is completely unknown to Father? Have streets only ever been connecting lines for him between a starting point and a destination?

For the first time in his life he had dared to tell him he might be wrong. It wasn’t that he had previously lacked the courage — he hadn’t been sure. He had been far too inclined to accept his father’s standpoint which made such a categorical distinction between the useful and the useless, between the beneficial and the futile, between the sensible and the senseless. It was odd that he had had to wait till he was in his forties to have the courage to leave his father’s world. Perhaps Hanuš felt something similar and wanted to return for that reason. To see his father and also to spite him.

Hanuš had grown up before him. Or at any rate he had not shared the childish willingness of immature students and political preachers to turn the world upside down, to improve it and make it conform as rapidly as possible to their own vision of perfection. Hanuš certainly hadn’t believed he was destined for something like that, let alone felt a vocation to judge others. He had chosen the most abstract occupation possible — one that nowhere obliged him to interfere in other people’s lives and impose his own attitudes. And if anyone started to force their ideas down his throat he would start to lash out.

The world we inhabit is becoming less and less adult. Most people have so little work to do, know so little of suffering and are answerable for so little, that they cannot recognise the essential moment when they move from an area in which they are led, into one in which they have to move according to their own free will, one in which they are required to take charge and protect, instead of demanding care and protection.

Criminals too are mostly immature even when they pretend to be acting entirely according to their own wills. Just as children regard themselves as the centre of the world, criminals accuse others of failing to provide what they long for.

The ones they accuse are terrified of them. They detest criminals, while at the same time having an interest in them which sometimes verges on fascination, and are susceptible to being moved by their life stories.

For his part, when he was required to judge real criminals, their life stories did not move him at all. People who wanted to judge the crimes of others had to avoid being moved by the cruel or tragic circumstances that led up to those crimes. They had to accept that tragic circumstances form part of most people’s lives, and only certain individuals succumb to them. That was the essence of their fateful choice, their transgression or their inability to cope with circumstances. And someone who was unable to resist the temptation to take another’s life disbarred himself from human society. That applied as much to those who committed crime as to those who fought it. During his life he had come across more murders committed by those claiming to fight crime than homicide committed by non-uniformed and unorganised criminals.

He was already hungry, but he enjoyed wandering the gloomy lanes. His head was clear and for the first time in a long time he felt a lightness of spirit that uplifted him. All his anxieties, worries and longing were gone from him — for that short while at any rate. He passed the courthouse where he worked. It was only a short step from here to that house, that cosy haven where he had spent so much time in recent days. An uneasy thought crossed his mind. He dispelled it immediately, but continued in the direction he was now used to taking.

He had concluded that the death penalty was unacceptable more in order to save himself from temptation and the innocent from arbitrary decisions than out of any compassion for criminals and the cruel circumstances of their unsuccessful lives. As for protecting the innocent, he shouldn’t fool himself. It was a well-known fact that the moment tyranny overruled the law, innocent people started to die at the executioner’s hands, even if, only the previous day, judges had weighed up a thousand times the circumstances of a proven murderer’s action. Tyranny was not balked by any tradition. Tyranny had no scruples; that was what made it tyranny. On the contrary, the moment it started to limit itself it ceased to be tyranny. The moment a hangman became a mere gaoler, an acceptable state of affairs was on its way back.

This was his first murder trial. There was something so reminiscent of his own life about the manner of the crime and the nature of its victims that he was pleased he did not have to work up sympathy to counterbalance his own bias. If this particular case was also to be his last one — and sadly, it seemed increasingly likely — then paradoxically it would consummate his childhood experience: his experience of mass gassings. Perhaps it would be such a total consummation that his experience would leave him, in the same way it had left his brother’s memory, and he would be able to heave a sigh of relief.