Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

He had paper and coloured pencils and would draw people and things there, even though it was strictly forbidden. He gave me a couple of sheets and lent me pencils, and we would sit together on a wide parapet and draw the yard: the food queue and dozens of figures. He could capture the rampart walls in perspective, the play of light and shade, and could even draw a cart and horses, while my lines would go all over the place instead of forming the appropriate shapes. He made me a present of one of his pictures, and I still have it, a drawing of an old woman, surely dead by now. She is seated on a folding stool, wooden clogs on her feet, spectacles on her nose, a yellow star on her breast, an outsized yellow star, and a blue vein on her forehead; and above her the grey barrack wall, leaning slightly as if it was about to collapse; it is broken in only one place by a curving window and in the middle of it, on a white window ledge, sits a crow. Whenever I look at the picture, it conjures up that strange, almost unbelievable world, and I realise with shock that I once lived in it. I know I ought to pass the picture on to the museum, in fact they once wrote to me and asked me whether I had some relic of those years, but I said no. It is the only souvenir I have of him, most likely the only one that anyone has.

There were days when we felt happy. We would play pig-in-the-middle on a small flat area between the barracks and the wooden building where the women peeled mica, and when it rained we held button-football tournaments or sat in a corner of a barracks corridor, telling each other the plots of stories we had read back in the days when we still had access to books. I’ve already forgotten the names of the novels that the others recounted (I myself told the stories of the Pickwick Club — having brought a copy of the Pickwick Papers with me from home — and the adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I loved) but I could be amazingly fascinated even by fragments of other stories and characters: Tecumseh (which meant Wild Cat Leaping on its Prey, if my memory serves me right) who strives in vain to save his Indian land, and Leather Stocking who tracks through the wilds to save his daughter abducted by the Indians, and Quonab who prays to the Great Spirit

Father, we are walking in darkness

Father, we understand nothing

As we traverse the darkness we bow our heads

and the high-minded William Penn, who declared that liberty without obedience was confusion, obedience without liberty was slavery, and Edison who said that his ancestors were fighters while he was just an old engineer engaged in the work of peace. And I can still remember the names of dozens of Indian tribes (in the distorted form I heard them from the lips of my friends) and the names of towns and rivers such as Santa Fe, Little Bighorn, Oswego and Detroit and Luenge. And now in turn the names of the lakes, countries and mountains of those distant continents conjure up a picture of that gloomy corridor: raindrops falling on wet parapets; and oddly enough I feel nostalgic, and I can’t tell whether it’s a nostalgia for my childhood years or for the never-never land of free proud noble men and endless space that seemed so unreal and incredible in the closed and impenetrable hollow of the barracks corridor.

Arie never told stories like that, he only read historical novels, besides the Torah and the Talmud.

I knew nothing of Jewish theology or traditions, and for years I didn’t even know the word Jew. I couldn’t understand its fateful connection with my own life, and I hadn’t the slightest notion of Jewish culture, language and literature, let alone the calendar, feast days and ceremonies.

What’s the Talmud? Arie told me that it was the teaching and wisdom of the old rabbis.

I wanted him to relate me something from that book, and he really did tell me several stories and I recall how in one of them evil spirits appear. I asked him, almost in amazement, whether he believed in evil spirits and he replied that in the days when those books were written, learned and devout men undoubtedly saw evil spirits. And where are they then? What has become of those evil spirits nowadays? They’ve gone into people, of course. He even smiled at my question. That answer stayed in my memory, although I can’t tell whether it was his own, or whether he was merely repeating someone else’s answer to his own question.

Why mustn’t people work on a Saturday?

The Sabbath day is the day of peace. At one time man lived in the Garden of Eden at peace with Him who created everything, blessed be His name, and with all creation. Man did not kill. He used the fruits without toiling in the sweat of his face. He warmed himself without fire and reaped without sowing. It is a great joy that at least one day in the week we can recall the time of peace and bliss .

None of it made any sense to me. After all, they were all just fables; man had risen from the ape and never lived in Paradise. Was it possible that someone could believe such stories?

I also vaguely remember how he would tell me with enthusiasm about the old law (he himself wanted to study law when the war was over and we went home again), about the Sanhedrin which judged more justly than courts today, and which could sentence to death in four different ways and for many different crimes, although it preferred not to use the death penalty at all. But I can no longer separate in my memory what I heard from him and what I read later and merely connected with him as being something he might have told me.

The stories and events have gone from my memory, but what stuck in it for ever was the nobility of his appearance. I greatly wished to resemble him. Even years later I strove to imitate his gestures and manner of speech. Little did I know that nobility is the most inimitable of qualities. It must be innate and it can develop only in those souls capable of perceiving in the world the presence of God, under whatever name, and acting in harmony with it of their own accord, not because they are commanded to.

My brother Hanuš was always falling ill. He was small, thin and pale — from time to time I would be troubled in the evenings by the nagging thought that he might not last out the night and he would be no more. At the end of autumn he fell seriously ill. The doctor who did casualty duty said he suspected pneumonia and advised my mother to leave my brother in sick-bay. But my mother decided she’d wait a day more, and put Hanuš to bed in our inhospitable room. She sat up with him that night but in the morning she had to go to work and I stayed alone with my brother. I knew that I was not to leave him even for a moment, and at mid-day was to change his compress, warm him some coffee on the stove and give it him to drink.

My brother lay completely still on the mattress, covered up to the chin with a soiled sheet, his eyes closed, his cheeks unusually flushed and his breathing raucous.

I sat down on the edge of the mattress; he opened his eyes slightly and moved his lips. It was not to ask for drink or food, but for me to tell him stories. Not very long before I had been at the age of listening to stories myself and I knew many, I had even read an account of the siege of Troy, with brave Achilles and Hector. So I talked to my little brother as requested. I told stories to myself and to him, both to lull him to sleep and to ease my own anxiety. I was afraid. I was afraid something terrible would happen, that Hanuš would start to call out in his fever, that he’d begin to cry or squirm, that he’d stop breathing, that an SS man would appear out of nowhere and tell us to get up. But my brother would be unable to get up and we would be punished on the spot and sent to Poland with the next transport. But my brother wouldn’t survive that journey and would die in the freezing draughts of that cold wagon.