Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

But what had they been capable of understanding at all? What had he ever managed to understand? What had he managed to truly feel and experience? So what good would it do to promise her now that he would remain at her side, to remain with her the way he was?

‘Ten years ago, we made that trip to Slovakia and slept in that dismal hostel-type place. Do you remember?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did you think at that time that we weren’t a good match?’

But that wasn’t the point, the problem was elsewhere — if only she were to ask. For a moment he hoped she would: where are you now and where do you want to go from here? Have you still any capacity at all to live and act as a free individual? And if you have, will you still want to come back to me?

‘Are you not going to say anything?’ And then, as if all her determination had gone, and all her strength, she froze and the tears just streamed from her eyes, soaking the tablecloth.

He felt torn with remorse. He was now walking alone with just a pack containing his two blankets, a loaf of bread and a sooty mess-tin — where was he bound? Perhaps we’ll encounter each other again in some distant place that you’ll set off for too with your own knapsack. We’ll catch sight of each other between the sand dunes in the coastal forest and run to each other, or on the contrary — we won’t know until then — we’ll pass each other by considerately.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘They were happy times for me.’

3

Dear younger brother, perhaps you’re still waiting for me to come up with some advice for you after all, and instead you’ve not heard a thing. As I’ve already explained, I can’t give you any advice or decide for you, the best I can do is to tell you something about myself. What am I actually doing at this moment? I am in the park on my way from the courthouse to the hospital. It’s five in the afternoon and it’s getting dark. It’s a real English day: damp and dreary. There’s no one sitting on the benches. I dealt with three cases today, the last one a twenty-year-old nurse caught stealing drugs. Opiates, of course. I think she was pretty, but she cried the whole time so her face was all puffy. People try to steal bliss and end up weeping. Just recently I’ve had people weeping all round me. I’m used to it in court, but not elsewhere. I always wanted the people round me to be happy. I did my best to make them happy, or at least I persuaded myself I was doing my best. People persuade themselves of all sorts of things and in the rush of everyday life they don’t realise they’re merely nursing illusions.

Now I’m out of the park and could take a tram to where I used to tell myself I had a nice home. But instead I’ll walk down to the Botanical Gardens, where, you might recall, there’s another stop. I am just looking at a house where, for the past weeks, I have been meeting with the wife of a man who seems to have persuaded himself that I am his friend. I think I loved her. I daren’t say it for sure — but I did feel real pangs when, one evening recently, I glimpsed a light high up under the roof, a light that was not shining on my account. Maybe it’s shining again; I’d have to go through to the courtyard to find out, but there is no reason why I should. I don’t enjoy seeking out evidence these days or sitting in judgement on others. I don’t think I ever did enjoy it very much; I used to judge others mostly to avoid judging myself. Nothing boosts one’s confidence more than judging someone else. You start to persuade yourself that their weaknesses and faults are beneath you. Admittedly reality never fails to put you right on that score, but most of the time it’s easy enough to ignore its evidence. And when the worst comes to the worst you can always run away from it. Escaping doesn’t solve anything though and always leaves cruel traces. That’s something I do know and I expect it’s the reason why I am here in a place that so many people run away from. Don’t think I’m condemning anyone; I’ve run away enough times in my life. Every time some verdict was hanging over me. Instead of starting to think about myself, I have always started to think about a reprieve and a possible escape. It was during the war that I first learnt to hope for liberation and believe in a lucky escape. And I escaped from The Hole to evade my responsibility as a judge and get away from Magdalena, if you still remember her. I escaped to America when I got into deep water. I found a wife, but I used to find escape at work rather than face up to the possibility we were estranged from one another. When I discovered that my work, like my marriage, was going nowhere, I escaped to another woman — actually persuading myself that I was at last challenging my fate. Of all forms of escape, love itself conceals escape best of all. But what sort of existence is escapism? You start to act like a criminal: constantly looking over your shoulder and feeling pleased that no one has cottoned on to you yet. You regard your escape as freedom and don’t realise you’re a fugitive. You’ll never challenge anything again: you weigh up the circumstances instead of yourself. You look to others for help and protection, instead of looking to yourself. In fact, even when you offer help and protection to someone else, you don’t know whether you’ll be really capable of it, because you yourself are on the run and your help could easily be transformed into its opposite. So you increasingly keep your thoughts to yourself and just nod. Before sitting down anywhere you take a good look round for an escape route should the need arise, and only then do you start to listen, but in a different way than if you weren’t on the run. You listen circumspectly, eager not to miss any possible warning or hint; you try to ingratiate yourself with those who have given you refuge. You’re not living your own life any more, you’re living by the grace of others: those whose silence covers up for you, those who turn a blind eye or couldn’t care less; by the grace of your fate.

And what if you have already fathered children? They look up to you and regard you as a source of strength, wisdom and life, while in fact you are living by grace, and all you have to offer them is your weakness, your confusion, your caution and your anxiety.

Now I’ve walked down as far as the Botanical Gardens. They say they’re to be transferred somewhere else. For the time being, they announce on their gate an exhibition of exotic birds. Now I recall that just after the war you begged our parents to buy a pet. A kitten or at least a canary. But in the end Father bought a projector, a screen and two films: one was a cartoon about a fox and the other was a natural history film about the Danubian salmon. He must have thought that films were more permanent than live animals and didn’t require so much attention. But they were confiscated along with the projector when the police searched the flat — Father was wrong about that too.

It sometimes strikes me how often he was mistaken, for all that he was strong-willed, precise and down-to-earth and in spite of all he had experienced and endured. After all, he had lain on a blanket in that coastal forest, conscious that he was holding on to life with the last of his strength and already thinking about how we would get by in life without him. But even at that moment he was unable to abandon, even for one second, his fond illusion that the world would be a completely different place once his party came to power. Or was it in fact that moment which confirmed him in that illusion and banished the good sense he showed elsewhere and at other times? Is there any moment in our lives when we are permitted at least to glimpse the outline of the real world? I have a feeling that no person or thing will give you such a moment, you have to fight for it yourself, you have to resist everything that would tempt you into a fool’s paradise and hide from you the truth about your situation. You have to set out on your own for that coastal forest, and stay there not because you’ve been brought there by armed guards, not in hope of being liberated and led out of it, but stay there in the knowledge that if you fail to liberate yourself you’ll come to a miserable end: as a convicted person who has sentenced himself — together with his nearest and dearest — to perpetual exile.