Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Now the mere absence of the usual obstacles relaxed me.

I assumed that my wife felt very much as I did. After all it had been her wish to know other countries and cultures. But her longing to visit distant lands was only an expression of her need to escape her humdrum life — and that need remained.

One evening I returned from the university. She was sitting in an armchair looking out of the window.

What was she looking at? Nothing. Had there been any post from home? No, there hadn’t. The children? They were asleep. Was she sad? No reply.

The doorbell rang in the apartment below us, where several girl students lived. I could hear the sound of a noisy welcome and then a door banged. Immediately afterwards a record-player started to bellow. I tried to ignore it and actually managed to, only being disturbed by the repeated ringing of the doorbell downstairs. Then I became aware of the strange silence that reigned in our own apartment. Alena was still sitting looking out of the darkened window.

What could she see there, what was she looking at all the time outside that window?

Where was she supposed to look? At me all the time, perhaps?

In our apartment, silence; beneath us, the sound of drums.

Could I hear the music at all? She wouldn’t be surprised if I was unaware of it. And she had always wanted a husband who could hear music. How could I go on sitting and reading with music like that in my ears? And she added, without any sort of logic, that eighteen guests had already arrived, all young people, and they were most likely dancing while we just sat at home, and if we did go anywhere it was just to sit down again and yak.

What did she suggest then?

She would like to go somewhere where something was happening, where people moved around, made love, laughed, danced.

So I rang the doorbell downstairs and asked if we might come to the party.

We entered a packed room that resembled the one we lived in; even the furniture was the same. The walls, however, were covered in posters and photographs and the floor was strewn everywhere with cans of beer and bottles of cheap Californian wine. The far end of the room was almost lost in smoke.

Some of the guests (most of whom were lying down or sitting on the carpet) told us their Christian names, and two girls made room for us under one of the loudspeakers. Someone handed me a can of beer and asked us what country we had come from. Before I had a chance to reply, he stood up and moved off somewhere else. Then a circulating cigarette reached me. I made the point that I didn’t smoke, but my attitude to smoking was of no interest to anyone, so I passed the cigarette on to my wife. She, to my astonishment, inhaled the smoke before passing the cigarette on. I asked her what sort of cigarette it was and she told me she would find out. She stood up and then I lost sight of her in one of the groups.

Very soon my eyes started to smart from the smoke and I found it hard to breathe, besides which the music deafened me. My age and my mood set me apart from the rest. A girl with long blonde hair (her face immediately merged with the faces of the rest) sat down next to me and asked me if I loved her. She said she loved me, that she loved everyone, particularly the poor little hungry Pakistanis, as well as all animals including polecats, frogs and spiders, she loved everything that lived and moved, and she raised a finger in front of her eyes and said she loved her finger too, because it was alive and moved. Then she went stiff, propped up against the wall, her finger held up in front of her; she had turned into a statue made of warm matter, still breathing.

I closed my eyes slightly and it seemed to focus my perception, as if I were looking from a dark auditorium at a stage and saw actors who had experienced none of the things I had, who had never stood at the gates of death, or even had any inkling of the misery elsewhere in the world: neither the misery of hunger nor the misery of the hypocrisy that buys one’s existence. They had known nothing of that, which is why they could lie here dead drunk, elated and inert: animals born in freedom; what had they done with it — what would people do with freedom?

I got up and went off in search of my wife. She was chatting avidly with some young men. She tried to introduce them to me. I noticed that her eyes too seemed to have acquired a glazed look, that they had been transformed into mirrors and the pupils had expanded and become static. She leaned towards me and asked in a whisper whether I had noticed that they were going off behind that curtain to make love. She would also like to make love. I suggested that we could go home in that case, and she, with a frankness that took me aback, told me that she fancied making love with one of those lads, not with me. But she instantly seemed to take fright and snuggled up to me, telling me she could see a great blue prairie, that was either a field of flax or heather, and we would go to that prairie, and she said that now she was happy among those people, who were innocent, self-sacrificing and unspoilt and thought about nothing but love.

3

One of my new colleagues had a pastor friend in far-off Texas, in a town not far from the world-famous Carlsbad caves. The town itself was of little interest as such, but from there it was scarcely a half day’s drive south to one of the most remarkable national parks. The pastor friend would welcome us as his own.

So during the Christmas holidays — oh, my childhood friends, my murdered childhood friends, I remember how we would walk through the corridors of the barracks and tell each other the stories we had read in books about the Comanches, Apaches and Navahos galloping on their horses, and through them all flowed the Rio Grande; they were unreal names for us and we pinned our thoughts on them because they came from a world where life was different, where one could race through unbounded spaces, and if you were attacked you still had your Winchester rifle to fire at your attackers, and evil and violence were still avenged — I set off on a trip with my family. We drove for two whole days. The only other time we had been so far south was when we visited Menachem in his desert kibbutz; but here an icy wind blew from the mountains and snow lay on the roofs of the Indian puebla. The next morning — we suppressed our urge to drive on straight away — we huddled amidst a group of spectators watching the Indian celebrations in honour of the buffalo. This was where my childhood heroes lived. They took off their ready-made clothes and bared their bodies, now pampered by civilisation, to the cold air. Some of them donned ancient dilapidated, moth-eaten buffaloes’ heads. They walked and danced in time to the drums, their teeth chattering; one of the children was sobbing and one of the youths fainted. I was overcome with a sense of disappointment, or rather sorrow over a world that tried to recall itself in vain, and I willingly acceded to my wife’s request for us to visit instead the world of the future: some nearby communes.

And we did indeed come across a group of huts made out of mud, motor-car chassis and newly felled trees. In the single living room, which was acrid with smoke from burning wood, tobacco and marijuana, several young people sat around and half-naked babies romped about on the mud floor. My wife attempted to take one of them in her arms, but the brat burst into tears and bit her in the hand.

In the communal dining-room, a bespectacled and bearded prophet put aside a book wrapped in newspaper and permitted us to ask him questions. My wife therefore did so and heard everything that she already knew from articles and pamphlets, namely, that the most important thing in this fetish-ridden civilisation, where man and his labour-power had become a commodity, was to seek the love and fellowship of others. In a world of motors, deodorants, flush toilets, artificial insemination and tinned dog-food, in a world where a quarter of humanity went hungry and millions of people were dying of hunger, the only way we could preserve our sanity was by returning to nature, starting to drink spring water and fertilising the soil with what had been used to fertilise it over the centuries; by rejecting all the achievements of civilisation.