Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

I wrote the article with enthusiasm, and I really do feel I managed to present the maximum evidence for the proposition that the death penalty was a relic of times when the main aim of capital punishment was to exact retribution, appease an outraged public, or protect innocent people from criminals. At that time, I wrote, people still lacked explanations for the origin of crime and knew nothing of social diseases, let alone mental disorders. But how could we justify such punishment in our own days?

I sent the article to a cultural weekly where it would attract a much wider readership than in a specialised journal.

In time I was invited to the editorial offices and the editor went through my text with me, deleting from it the passages that seemed to me the most significant or at least the most personal, and promised that he would include the article in a future issue. I could therefore look forward to finding it there, unless something predictable happened to stop it, of course.

Something predictable did happen — the censor vetoed it. I received a message from the editorial board asking whether I would like to attend the discussion at the relevant department of the Party’s Central Committee.

There were three of them waiting for us in a large office (there were just the two of us).

They all introduced themselves though I failed to catch their names, and we sat down at a table on which there lay several photostats of my article. Most of the text had been struck through with different coloured pencils by someone with a warped predilection for ornament, and in addition, large question and exclamation marks had been drawn in the margins.

A secretary brought us coffee and the three of them talked together in low voices, while my companion clipped the end of his cigar and I sat there totally unaware of what we were waiting for. And then a door at the back opened and in came a little fellow with a small head on top of broad shoulders. There was something familiar about his chubby features. He nodded to the editor and even smiled at me, saying in a high, almost womanlike voice that we were acquainted, weren’t we? I nodded, but I still couldn’t place him or put a name to him. I therefore asked him how he was. He replied that they had just given him this job. And how about me, had I got married? I told him I had and he grinned, displaying ugly yellow teeth, and commented that they had been great times all the same. Did I still remember Eva? — after all I had been sweet on her in those days. She had married and divorced and not long ago had married an Abyssinian or some other Arab and gone off to Turkey with him.

It was this display of geographical knowledge which at last enabled me to put a name to the face: Nimmrichter. And at once my mind went back to that garret in Košiře and that party of long ago with Nam the Korean, and the story of the priest and the underground cell, the priest he had called a ‘fat mouse’. And I was so overwhelmed with disgust that I turned away from him and sat down at the table without a word. My former classmate had no alternative but to open the meeting. For a while I tried to follow what he was saying, but then I realised it was the same old sentence all over again, the one he used to weave without end. Only the diction had changed: no doubt he had picked up the intonations he had heard at countless meetings. Thus those who pretended to be listening to him — everyone, in other words — were fooled into thinking that he was actually talking, speaking in sentences and moving from one idea to the next.

When he finished speaking, having opened our discussion in worthy fashion, he nodded to one of his men, who, rapidly and without interest (as if he had said the words so often that he didn’t notice them any more), declared that the question of the death penalty was a serious problem and our society regarded it as an exceptional and temporary measure. That was also how it was formulated in the legislation. No doubt the time would come when we would consider the abolition of all punishments, and hence the supreme penalty also, but for the time being such a consideration would be premature, and I was bound to realise that we had no institutions in which to place the most serious criminals and assure their resocialisation. What would be the point of bothering the public with a question that was insoluble at the present time?

Only later did I realise that this man, who for the rest of the discussion guarded a passive silence, had been trying to help me. He was trying to shift the whole argument to a level at which questions were admittedly separated into useful and non-productive, timely and non-timely, appropriate and inappropriate and so on, but at which no one would get worked up about my having expressed subversive ideas.

It was then the turn of his colleague. He declared that our legislation had become a matter for the working people. I would be surprised how often, in cases where professional judges hesitated about a verdict or even fell into error, ordinary people with their sense of justice had a proper perception of the seriousness of an offence. How many times, in cases in which we, lawyers, narrow-mindedly insisted on the letter of the law, the people were capable of being broad-minded, but how, on the other hand… I was amazed to find, even though he was talking directly to me, his words started to become incoherent.

Suddenly he paused, staring at me, and I realised that his last sentence had been a question.

Receiving no answer from me, he gave the reply himself, declaring triumphantly that a law like that would not be understood by people, let alone approved.

Then the last of them took the floor. He was an older fellow wearing shoemender’s spectacles. He reminded me of the father of my long-exiled schoolmate and I subconsciously expected him to say something wise.

He said he had read the article with interest, for the very reason that he himself had once occupied the condemned cell. He fell silent and lowered his head, so that his glasses slipped to the end of his nose and he gazed at me through the cut-off lenses with a look that seemed to me benevolently stern, and added that in those days they used to execute the best sons of the working class. Since then, everything had changed, which certainly none of us here doubted. These days, only criminal elements and real enemies of our system landed in court. It was true, he said for my benefit, that there had always been individuals among the workers who ended up taking the path of crime, but in those days conditions were such that many of them quite simply had no other choice. Class society was cruel and grounded on violence, selfishness and property, not like our new society which we had built on comradely relations and mutual help and trust.

Could we be surprised that where the basic law was dog eat dog some people, out of despair, hopelessness or poverty, decided to take that law at its word and behave like dogs? When the law of the jungle applied, it was hard to decide who was the culprit and who the victim. In such conditions, the most progressive forces in society indicted class justice as a whole and called for its total transformation. And in the awareness that that goal was unattainable for the time being, they demanded at least the abolition of the severest penalty! But what had their problems in common with ours?

He went on to add that the author, as he could see, was still a young comrade, and maybe for that reason had not yet properly learnt the distinction between true humanism, whose concern was the welfare of all conscientious working-people, and pseudo-humanism which made a great song and dance about a few dozen outcasts and murderers. He was sure the author meant no harm, although his article expressed nothing but confusion. He was only astonished that this had not occurred to the experienced comrades on the editorial board.