Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

The vehicles in front of them were crawling along and the road was all bends, so it had been impossible to overtake more than one tardy field kitchen, while the time kept ticking by. ‘But he didn’t leave you in the end.’

‘But he wanted to. He would have kicked me out with the kid. He offered me fifteen thousand, saying it would be worth both our whiles, the bastard! I told him I’d kill him: if he so much as mentioned it again I’d poison him, even if I had to swing for it. But they wouldn’t top me, that much I did know about our fucking laws. I’d be only too happy to go to gaol, knowing that I had rid the world of a shithead like him.’

‘Would you really have poisoned him?’

‘I already had the poison at home.’

‘What kind?’

‘It makes no difference.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘What do you want to know for? Need to get rid of someone too?’ Then she said: ‘We always had it at home. It was Dad’s. He’d got hold of it before war broke out.’

He was questioning her about poison that didn’t interest him. All their lives people asked questions about things that didn’t interest them. The things that really worried them normally remained unsaid.

The previous night he had had a dream: he arrived at a dance where everyone else belonged together in some way: only he was alone. He realised he was well over forty and he still hadn’t found a wife and therefore had no children. He couldn’t dance either. The band played, unknown couples danced all around him and the realisation started to grow in him that all hope had gone for him. And in the dream he had such a depressing sense of futility that he burst into tears. When he woke up he felt momentary relief. He wasn’t alone. He had a wife, children and even a mistress. But who did he have really?

In reality he was alone. It was a mistake to draw comfort from the fact she was still sitting at his side at that moment: his beautiful, wanton, tipsy mistress.

He could, of course, act as if everything was all right. Accept a way of living in which nothing was said about real worries, in which people only talked about conventional things and did what suited them. It was possible to live a life which had no bearing on one but was merely convenient, and even pretend that it was the most suitable lifestyle, because it occasionally offered a chance of passion, whereby it had something in common with real life — though in real life, passion alternated with grief and anxiety.

He pulled up in front of the cottage, got out and unlocked the door. She entered nonchalantly, as if the house belonged to her. She tossed her handbag on to a chair and went to switch on the radiant heater in the bedroom.

And what if it hadn’t been her in that lighted room that night?

But did it really matter? He was so distracted he had almost forgotten that she was someone else’s wife, the wife of his friend, in fact. It was as if he was unaware that she was concealing him as much as he was her, and that their affair had been marked from the outset by deception and betrayal.

He had no right to make any demands on her at all, and there was nothing he could expect of her but to give him precedence over another for a few moments of unforeseeable duration, and to hope that they could fill those moments with an activity that seemed to him so ecstatically blissful that everything else palled into insignificance. Perhaps it wasn’t so little he could expect of her, but it was not exactly what he would like to settle for, what he might accept without a sense of hopeless downfall.

She looked around. ‘Everything is the way it was last time. Haven’t you been here since?’

‘The idea hasn’t really appealed.’

‘You could have come on your own.’

‘What would I do here on my own?’

‘I didn’t mean all alone,’ she said with impatience. ‘I meant with some girl.’

‘If you were me would you come here with someone else?’

‘I don’t know what I’d do if I were you. Maybe I’d be with someone else if I had such a rotten mistress who’d sooner take her kids to the cinema than stay with me.’

‘Thank you for being frank.’

‘I don’t like being alone,’ she explained. ‘You left me in the lurch that evening and you will again.’ She pulled the bedding out of the chest and started to make the bed.

‘That’s not true,’ he objected.

‘You’re like the rest of them. You think I’m daft? Everyone promises me the earth, everyone makes out he loves me eternally and then, when the chips are down, he goes and does a bunk. I’m pissed off with it. I’m pissed off with sitting and weeping on my own.’ She sat down on the chest. ‘It’s cold here, so I’ve made the bed. I might as well get straight in. Would you bring me the bottle from my handbag?’

When he returned, she was standing undressing right next to the red-hot element. He noticed she had bruises on her arms and back.

‘What are you staring at? Oh, yes. We had another fight. You said you don’t beat your wife. So what’s your way of abusing her?’ She scratched her calf with her bare foot while letting down her hair. ‘No, I don’t want you to invent something. I couldn’t give a damn. I couldn’t care less about your wife.’

What did she care about? She made love to him because it happened to suit her, and he had happened to cross her path. She talked to him about love, wandering monks, the light in people, her dreadful husband and her childhood and he set great store by it. But all it needed was for him to say one evening that he didn’t have the time and she made love to someone else who happened to suit her. That was what she was good at: making love and talking; she had given everything a try and discovered what lovers liked and what aroused them. And it seemed to him that she had the ability to behave more freely than him, and that there was a chance that with her he might opt out of the staleness of his own life in favour of some nobler and more fulfilling destiny.

Maybe she did behave more freely than he did — or she was less restrained, at least; but nobility was unlikely to be what she was seeking, and it wasn’t what he was seeking with her. And freedom without nobility of spirit did not uplift one.

But what right had he to judge her? Why was he trying to convince himself that he deserved or that he would be capable of caring for a nobler or freer creature?

‘Turn the light off first,’ she crouched under the covers, ‘and get a move on. What’s keeping you?’

So he joined her in bed.

‘Do you still love me at all, anyway?’ She encircled his mouth with hers and pressed up against him and he pressed up against her. But that wasn’t his purpose for being here. Why was he here, in fact? He had ccme to tell her… what exactly? I love you, I still love you, my false love, it’s stronger than my plans, stronger than my moderation, stay with me, stay with me for these few moments at least.

‘Darling,’ she opened her eyes as he got up, ‘you’re getting dressed? Are we going somewhere?’

‘I have to go for the water.’

He took a bucket from the kitchen and went outside. The air was pure and the moon shone from between the clouds. He could see several lights in the depths below him and on the hillside opposite the woods were darkening and becoming lost in the distance.

Why on earth am I here?

He could set off through those woods which went on and on, maybe right to the coast, a pack on his back, in the pack two blankets, bread, sausage, ersatz coffee. And he could even take his own potatoes and wouldn’t have to beg any from a farmer. And instead of a slide-rule — what would he take in place of a slide-rule? He couldn’t think of anything as indispensable. He had nothing of the kind; that was his disadvantage. But on the other hand, he could walk alone, escaping his guards and his fellow-prisoners; he could sit, lie, change direction when he felt like it; he could go forward, retrace his steps, light a fire, drink from springs, stay among the rocks; he would not have to leave his chosen place, or wait, or answer, or beg, or promise, or have mercy, or do harm, or listen to lies, or think up excuses, but could rid himself of fears, put up his tent and walk right to the coast. So many possibilities and he was stuck here.