Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘The father needn’t even come in person,’ he said, ‘if that’s what’s worrying you. It’s enough if he lends you his identity card.’

She went on shaking her head. She was unable to utter a single word. What if he refused her?

‘It’ll cost a lot more to have it done privately. A lot more.’

‘I know. I’m allowing for that.’

‘It seems a shame to throw away three thousand crowns when you could see the board.’

‘I thought you might be able to, Doctor. If the need arose. I don’t know anyone else and I can’t go before the board.’

He stood up. He reached into a little white cupboard and took out a small polythene bag with a syringe and an ampoule. Even as the injection went into her buttock she knew it was pointless: she was pregnant, it had already taken root in her and was clinging to her: a new life.

‘How much do I owe you, Doctor?’ he asked.

‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in a fortnight’s time.’

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

Once, when I was just starting to go to school, my mother sat me on her lap and wanted to know what I thought about the idea of our leaving the house where we lived and going to live a long way away. How far away? Over the sea; but it was such a little sea that they only called it a channel. (And as the word in Czech is the same as for a drain, for years afterwards I imagined us having to jump over a narrow gully covered with lots of iron grilles.) Mother also showed me a picture of brick houses and strange, half-raised bridges over a river. A job was already waiting for Father in the city of Liverpool and in the front hall an enormous sea-chest with shiny locks stood yawning open (it still stands covered with an old tablecloth in a corner of the flat in the Old Town Square). I couldn’t grasp why we would have to move. Father therefore tried to explain to me that our country was going to be invaded by an enemy who could come and kill us. And wouldn’t he get us in that country over the drain? No, that country was on an island and no enemy had ever conquered it.

But Mother and Father both hesitated about leaving. They both had their parents here and Mother was too attached to her native city; so in the end we didn’t leave.

That country over the channel was subsequently linked in my mind with talk of a happy end to the war and the return of the good times. I would hear people talking about what ‘London’ had reported, as everyone waited day in day out, month in month out, for the invasion.

Years later, when I had to suggest a country where I might like to go for further study, I wrote: Britain. They never sent me anywhere, of course; I was merely allowed to repeat my suggestion the following year.

When my third year at the institute came, they informed me that I could go to Britain for four weeks. It seemed incredible that they really meant I would be allowed to get on a train and cross the frontier unhindered, for the first time in my life (I was thirty-three by then). I would be taking a ship to sail across that channel before stepping out at last on the shore where I had been supposed to land a quarter of a century earlier.

Several days before my departure I received a telephone call: I didn’t catch the name, but there was something familiar about the measured manner of the other’s voice. He said he had caught sight of me from the tram as I was walking along Národní Avenue, and it occurred to him we might meet for a chat. I struggled fruitlessly to remember to which of my acquaintances the voice belonged. I therefore told him I was just leaving on a foreign trip and suggested we meet on my return. To my surprise, he told me he knew about my trip and would like to see me before I left. He wouldn’t keep me long; he knew what such journeys were like. At last I realised who I was talking to. It was Plach.

He was sitting behind a battered café table and his face lit up as he caught sight of me. I scarcely recognised him. His pugilist’s face had filled out and his distinct features had become flabby. His hair had turned grey and he had become an off-the-peg dandy; my former fellow-student even smelt like a suburban barber’s shop. He told me he read my articles. They were interesting even if I did go a bit far sometimes. He asked after my family, actually referring to my mother’s condition and my father’s imprisonment of long ago. He was glad it hadn’t been anything serious. He also had news of our other fellow-students. Eva was working in a house of culture in some distant part of Moravia. She had married and was now divorced. Nimmrichter had been working as a lawyer for an export company but had just been promoted to a higher post. But about himself he said nothing, and when I asked him, he ignored my question, which aroused my suspicion. Then he said he had heard about my planned journey.

Who had told him?

He’d forgotten. Someone just happened to mention I would be travelling. He had a favour to ask of me. He needed to get a letter delivered and would rather not send it by post. He would give me the address. It was in London, not far from the place I would be staying. I was staying at Patrick McKellar’s, wasn’t I?

My amazement that he knew where I’d be living pleased him. But he proffered no explanation, and only said that I would most likely receive an immediate reply, which I would bring straight back to him. I had nothing to fear; there would be nothing dangerous in the letters, nobody would make any sense of them apart from the people they were intended for.

So why didn’t he send them by post?

He would sooner send them this way; but there was nothing to fear. Nobody suspected people like me; at most they’d ask about alcohol or drugs. Letters didn’t interest them; it was a free country, after all. He made an attempt at laughter and I was clearly intended to join him. He added that it might be arranged for me to travel more often if I was interested.

I tried to persuade him of my unsuitability for such errands.

He told me to give it careful consideration and gave me his telephone number so that I could call him. Finally, he told me not to mention our conversation to anyone. He knew I would understand. He smiled again, we paid the bill and left the café. I shook his hand and as he moved away from me, I started to boil with indignation.

I was annoyed with myself for not having said no straight away and for actually shaking his hand and treating him as a friend. I decided that I would call him first thing the next morning and tell him that I wanted nothing to do with him and I would sooner not go anywhere.

I realised with regret that I would have to forgo my trip. Admittedly I didn’t know what position my former classmate held, but I expected that his influence was great enough to prevent my journey.

But I didn’t call him, either the next day or any of the subsequent days — and he didn’t call either.

I waited for them to inform me that my journey had been cancelled (what reason would they give?).

Even when the train was already entering the border station at Cheb and the frontier guards were nearing my compartment, accompanied by two dogs straining impatiently at their leads, I was still almost certain that they were heading for me, that they had been detailed to drag me out of the carriage and send me home.

They came aboard. A uniformed guard at each door: no one to enter, no one to leave. A soldier in green overalls shone a torch under the seats arid other soldiers shone their lamps under the wheels of the carriage. I handed over my passport. Although I had thought about nothing else but this moment throughout the entire journey so far, I had not yet rehearsed the words I would say in protest against their harassment. They then handed back my passport and even thanked me; moments later they left the carriage. The train slowly moved off and still I couldn’t believe they had let me through. I gazed at the dead, ochre landscape which was bereft of all life apart from a few semi-derelict buildings, until at last I saw it, for the first time in my life: the barbed wire! The barbed wire of my camp, stretching on high posts endlessly in both directions, and below it the machine-gun towers. The train again braked, hooted and came to a halt. I went rigid: they had me after all; the order to stop me had just been delayed for a few moments, or possibly they were only playing with me. And I waited paralysed like a cornered mouse, like a condemned man on the steps to the scaffold, like a patient on the operating table.