Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Towards noon, my brother fell asleep and I rushed off impatiently for my lunch. I always relished the thought of what the cook might lavish on me; maybe there’d be dumplings with sweet sauce or at least potatoes with mustard sauce, but today I was determined to forgo my lunch and let Hanuš have it instead. He needed his strength. When I returned, he was lying exactly as I’d left him. So I put the plate of food on the floor by his bed and shook him. But instead of looking at me and sitting up, he just opened his eyelids slightly, and behind them I could see nothing but the bloodshot whites of his eyes. I shouted at him to wake up, that I’d brought his food; he had to eat for goodness sake, or at least drink something. But he didn’t move, he couldn’t hear me, and it occurred to me that my little brother was dying. What was I to do? Where was I to run for help? I remembered being told some time that Auntie Simona had once saved her husband by giving him blood. But I didn’t know — I’d forgotten to ask — how one goes about giving someone else one’s blood… I soaked a towel in cold water, as my mother had instructed, and wrapped it round my brother’s small form. Then I found a needle in my mother’s work-box, closed my eyes and pricked my finger as hard as I could. The pain that ran through me made me cry out and then I watched the drop of blood welling up on my finger. I leaned over my brother and pressed my finger to his half-open lips. The blood slowly trickled out, turning his teeth and lips crimson and staining his chin. His appearance startled me. I wiped my finger and took his littler hand in mind. I thought to myself that if I pressed it hard enough my blood would flow into his veins. And maybe that’s what happened. Blood or some kind of power flowed from me into him. He began to breathe more calmly, then opened his eyes slightly and once more I could see his irises, which unlike mine were light grey, not dark brown. I asked if he needed anything and he just whispered to me to tell him a story. But I’d already told him all the ones I knew, so I had to think one up. So I started to dream up my own fairy tale — I knew I had to keep talking to drive away Death who was already standing at the head of his bed, as well as to calm the beating of my own heart, summon up all mysterious forces to assist me and bring me at least a droplet of the elixir of life. And that droplet truly did fall upon his eyelids and he opened them wide and gazed at me in such pain and devotion, so helpless and vulnerable, that I will never forget that look as long as I live.

Soon after that, they started to give puppet shows in the loft of our barracks. Anywhere else, I would have considered it undignified for someone my age to laugh at Mr Punch or watch a wooden Simple Simon fight a dragon, but since there was almost nothing cheerful to see in that place I even persuaded my little brother to come to the show.

Maybe for the sake of us older ones, a clown came out on to the stage at the start of the show. He spread his white lips into a broad grin, stared at us all with dark mournful eyes, then doffed his scarlet hat and bowed. He was dressed in a shiny yellow costume with just one sleeve and one leg the same colour as his hat, and at every sharp movement the bells on his legs jingled. He said his name was Harlequin and he’d come to tell us some stories. He walked towards the front row and tripped but didn’t fall; instead he did a somersault and came and sat on the edge of the stage. Then he asked someone in the front row their name and if they could read. Then he recited:

A little man came visiting

In a jacket brown

But when we took it off him

It made us weep and frown.

We were supposed to guess what it was, but no one guessed that it was supposed to be an onion. The clown did another somersault in the aisle between the chairs and I laughed with pleasure. But all of a sudden he was standing in front of me. I hunched my shoulders and stared at the floor, but he placed his hand on my shoulder and asked my name. When I told him he asked me a riddle:

I’m made from the same thing as Adam

I give people food and drink

I’ve two big ears but cannot hear

What am I, do you think?

Someone behind me yelled out: A cooking pot. The clown nodded but went on holding me by the shoulder. Now he wanted me to tell him who is the most useful of men. Everyone stared at me but no one gave me even the tiniest hint. I knew what I ought to reply. I’d already made up my mind, because I’d always wanted to be useful and help people, but the words stuck in my throat and I was scarcely able to whisper them: a doctor.

‘Yes,’ said the clown, ‘a doctor is a very useful person, but the most useful one of all, of course, is the man who tells the truth. That’s why even kings had their fools and wouldn’t let any ill befall them.’ He did another two somersaults in the aisle. Everyone laughed, although I couldn’t see what at, and I felt I’d been disgraced. Scarcely had the clown disappeared than I fled the loft, before the show itself had even started.

Then I received a sign. I wasn’t expecting it, but that is the usual way with signs: they come to those who are not expecting them.

I woke up in the middle of the night. In wartime, the darkness at night is total so that it not only fills people’s souls, it fills the windows too. Everyone else in the room was asleep; someone was snoring loudly. Commanded by some invisible power I made my way to the blacked-out window. I knew the view by heart. Immediately opposite the window stood some enormous lime trees. Beneath them were stored the wooden components of prefabricated buildings and behind them rose the fortress ramparts, covered on our side with grass.

I could remember the branches of the lime trees, blossom-covered, or green, or yellowing, or bare or snow-hidden, I had seen them deathly in darkness and terrifyingly alive when lit up by lightning. Now, obedient to the call, I very slightly lifted an edge of the black paper masking the window and went rigid. In the crown of the tree opposite, a light was revolving, a large gleaming eye was swirling round a fiery point. I felt its warm gaze come to rest on me, travel over me, and then penetrate me, reaching depths I knew nothing of, and in sudden awe I realised that it was He: God or Life whose mystery no one could fathom. He passed through me and I beheld Him.

I released the paper and trembled in terror. No one woke up and I stood motionless facing the blackout: I knew I had to lift the edge of the paper once more and catch another glimpse of that eye, but I was unable to bring myself to do it. When at last I did raise a corner and peered out through the chink, there was nothing there any more, just the dark treetop, quite intact.

Every night afterwards — I no longer recall how long it continued — I would wake up, trembling with anxious anticipation, and creep to the window to lift a corner of the blackout. But my light had disappeared and never returned, until one day I realised I would never see it again.

It was around that time that some friends and I managed to get into an uninhabited part of the loft and there, in a dark corner beneath a sharply slanting roof, we discovered a harmonium. The instrument, made from black polished wood, was free of dust as if someone was taking care of it. Goodness knows how the harmonium got there, who had smuggled it in, and when they dared to sit and play it. Olga carefully lifted the lid, had another look round and then started to play. The rest of us lay on the dirty floor of warm bricks. I wasn’t used to listening to music and I remember the strange ecstasy that overcame me. As if I’d been cut off from a world in which one looked forward to ersatz coffee and stewed swede, in which countless unknown people were packed together, a world of shouting, stench, and fear, a world of screeching burial carts pulled by humans. It started to become distant and I found myself elsewhere. I was alone, just myself within my own crystal-clear space. I don’t know why, but at that moment I longed to see a wide desert. Most likely it wasn’t a desert I longed for, but freedom; the knowledge that a desert was in my reach, that one day I could stand on a rock and gaze at the golden sands, be anywhere or anything, anything but a chained beast in a slaughterhouse yard. And it occurred to me that if I wished hard enough I’d manage to escape. I would fly upwards, outwards through the dormer window and clamber up the shafts of light; or else I would burst into flame; I could see myself in the middle of the loft (I expect I’d seen something similar in some picture or other) with flames shooting from me. I felt sorry for myself, but anything seemed preferable to waiting here for the strip of paper with my name on it.