Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘The two are incompatible: power and a sense of disgrace. You spoke about it yourself.’

‘I know. But one likes to delude oneself that it won’t turn out like that in reality. I don’t know what we could do to help him. Get up a petition? We’d get some signatures, but only from people who are in the same boat as Matěj, and no one would give a damn. Adam, there’s not much left we can do. It’s more up to people like yourself.’

‘They’re not going to give me the job if they charge him.’

‘I don’t mean that. But you could have a word with the high-ups; they’ll listen if it comes from you.’

‘They’ve never been known to listen.’ He felt increasingly uneasy. People were starting to count on him again, to assign him a role. He didn’t mind them bringing him cases to hide, but he didn’t want people telling him how to behave, what action he should take, how and where to box clever and when to go in for cloak and dagger.

‘But you know from your own experience,’ Petr said, ‘they’re only prepared to talk to people whom they regard at least slightly as one of theirs.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘No offence intended, Adam. They’re the only kind who’ll be able to bring about a change for the better again one day.’

It was a marvellous idea, but he’d neglected to ask whether Adam still had any urge to change the world. He liked his friends but at the same time he wished at long last to belong to no one but himself and decide accordingly.

It was past midnight when Petr left. He went with him right down to the street door and then returned to the flat with the abandoned suitcase. Petr was wrong: there was no one who would still rate him as being ‘slightly one of theirs’, someone who might therefore stand a chance of being heard. One would have to make a much greater effort. It was a bit much to expect him to start going in for horse-trading when all he had to offer was his conscience and his honour.

If he made no effort, his career in court would come to a speedy conclusion and they would replace him, naturally, with someone who was prepared to make the effort. But what concern was it of his? ‘Why should he pretend to feel greater responsibility for the post he occupied than for himself? Alternatively: how could one be answerable for one’s post when one wasn’t answerable for oneself?

He could scarcely lift the suitcase. It weighed almost fifty kilos. He laid it on the settee and hesitated a moment before opening it. On top lay some books: Trotsky, Djilas, Orwell. A thick binder of Reportér magazine from the sixties and alongside it a box of letters without a lid. He could see that the topmost one was written in Matěj’s hand. Some of it was underlined and he couldn’t help noticing the words: ‘What does it matter, how many masters there are? There is only one slavery. Whoever refuses it is free, though the lords be legion.’ It was a quotation from old Seneca. Where had that old philosopher hidden his books and manuscripts? He hadn’t got away with it anyway and they’d forced him to commit suicide in the end, like Socrates. But apparently he’d died as he had taught: a free man.

How was he going to die? Maybe it would also be up to himself.

4

On Mondays, he usually had his office to himself. It suited him. There were only ten days left before the Kozlík trial and he wanted to be left in peace to weigh up the whole case.

If the truth were told, he would like to have had some conclusive proof that the man he was to try for murder had really committed it. Such proof was hard to come by, however. Usually nobody actually sees a murderer commit the deed, and one only had circumstantial evidence or expert testimony to go on.

He had received enough circumstantial evidence. However, Kozlík had provided not a single fact in support of his revised statement.

I started to get one of my headaches and went to my bedroom and sat there for a long time in the dark. On account of I was thirsty I went to the kitchen for the purpose of having a drink. Mrs Obensdorfovd was already back in her bedroom on the other side of the kitchen where she always left the door ajar for fear of someone stealing something from the kitchen. But I could hear she was asleep. That is when the idea came to my head that if I turned on the gas and went away people would think she had done it herself because it wouldn’t have been the first time and at her age she didn’t always know what she was doing…

Why did he confess anyway?

Normally it was difficult to force people with his sort of life experience and thickheadedness to make any sort of statement, let alone make a false confession and sign it.

From what he knew of Kozlík, he would have expected him to deny it even if they beat him up. They could not have extracted a confession out of him even with lengthy pressure. He had been scarcely two days on remand and there he was making a full confession. What had induced him to do it? Mental derangement? What could have deranged him to that extent? Maybe only the fact that when he had got over the fit of rage which powered his action, he suddenly realised what he had done. Or had something happened to him that night? Something he had not mentioned in his statement?

It would be as well to make the effort to consider the second statement, briefly at least, as if it were truthful. Kozlík came home from work during the afternoon. He knocked down the shelf and was told off by his landlady, from whom he subsequently took the savings book. He had been too agitated to notice whether there was anyone else in the flat. Shortly afterwards he had left to go and meet his fiancée, taking the savings book with him.

Shortly after, Mrs Obensdorfová junior arrived with her daughter. She didn’t notice the shelf had been knocked down in the front hall and her mother-in-law didn’t mention it to her either. It was conceivable; she had obviously been in a hurry and they had certainly exchanged only a few words.

Kozlík went to see an Italian comedy and then walked his fiancée home. About that time, someone had turned on the gas in the flat. Because Kozlík was still with Libuše Körnerová — though not even she had confirmed that, of course, and now she would be unlikely to confirm or deny it — it would have to have been someone as yet untraced and unsuspected. That person was then seen by the neighbour through her spy-hole. Either she had really seen the person and took it to be Kozlík, which one might concede, since she had assumed in advance it was him, or the person did not exist at all and she had concocted the story for some unknown reason. In that case it would have had to be Kozlík’s landlady herself who turned on the gas. But all the experts’ reports and other testimonies did not tally with such a hypothesis.

Whoever it was who had turned on the gas, Kozlík could have had no idea what had happened in the flat. Why had he not returned home, then? Libuše Körnerová had stated that she was in a hurry. Not even he maintained he had spent the night with his fiancée. The cinema performance ended around ten, so Kozlík must have been back at the tram stop by eleven o’clock at the latest. If he had wanted to return home he had had the chance to do so. Clearly he had not intended to go home. It was also possible that his landlady had thrown him out for breaking the shelf. But if she had thrown him out, she wouldn’t have given him her savings book.

He could have stolen the savings book, of course, then left the flat and spent the night at the home of someone he did not wish to name.

But it was unlikely that he would have missed the chance to prove his presence at someone else’s that night. After all, Protectorate laws no longer applied. It would not endanger the person who had sheltered him, so long as he or she knew nothing about his criminal action. Particularly if he had not committed any crime, or at most was in possession of a stolen savings book with a paltry amount in it.