Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

And what about when the children fell ill? Alena wanted to know. Didn’t they even take them to a doctor? Nature knew best, as it always had. My wife was captivated and had tears in her eyes, whereas I distractedly opened the book with the newspaper cover and discovered that it was Marx’s Das Kapital .

The next day we finally reached our destination. I left the family, tired from the long journey, at the presbytery, and set off further south on Route 385, which ran through wilderness. All around me stood the grey-brown wrecks of mountains, yellowing prairie grass stuck up through the rocks, as well as low clumps of cactuses. The road was bordered by a monotonous barbed-wire fence; no buildings anywhere, only the occasional hand-written signpost indicating not towns but individual ranches.

I drove as far as the tourist centre beneath the majestically towering peak of the Casa Grande. I hired myself a small cabin, took a shower and drank a glass of milk. After lunch I drove to the banks of the Rio Grande. It was an ordinary river, fairly narrow, in fact, in whose bed a turbid stream flowed lazily along. I crossed it on a punt (no one asked me for my passport) to Mexico. I spent about an hour wandering around the dusty streets of the border village. The huts here were low and squalid. A bunch of half-naked children shouted something at me, but I didn’t understand them. Most likely they were begging for money. It was so pitiful and unromantic and so unlike my childhood notions that I returned disappointed.

The next day, I set off for the mountains with a few sandwiches and an orange in my pocket.

I walked alone. The stony trail rose steeply up the mountainside and as I got higher more and more mountain ranges emerged in front of me. The ones towards the south were entirely bare, just stones, waterless valleys, grey-blue rocks riven with gullies, a non-terrestrial landscape, even more desolate than the one I had seen in the Holy Land. I only stopped when I was just below the peak, and I sat down on a warm stone to gaze at the motionless matter which nothing enlivened. It struck me that the time of a stone must be different from the time of people, animals or plants, and it seemed to me that I was being penetrated by that different time. The present and the past, both distant and recent, all merged, and suddenly I was dismayed, terrified and moved by words and events that had long since lost all meaning, and from the depths of my memory there emerged already forgotten figures, forgotten faces, and I could see Arie (was it really him?); his face was almost inhumanly pale, but the eyes that looked at me, his blue eyes, were full of life. I could say to him: Here I am! and for a moment I stiffened, expecting him to reply and say: Of course — we’re both together! And I was panic-stricken by the thought: what if not only he, but I also am long dead? What if neither of us returned from there, and this is actually my Valley of Death? And I remembered my mother; I saw her as a young woman, still in the days when she would sit at my bedside as I fell asleep: what had she wanted, what had she yearned for in those years? Sometimes she would talk to me about men who had once courted her, but I had received those revelations as I did all the other stories, like fairy tales or something I was read from a book. Her destiny did not affect me. And now I was racked with regret that our worlds had remained so remote from each other, that I knew nothing about my mother, and even if I wanted to ask her now, I could not. How remote I was from everyone. And what had my father actually felt when they arrested him? When he realised that his arrest was not an exception but a manifestation of the new order of things and relations, and that he had been wrong in all he had believed up till then? Had he not, even for one moment, longed to die? Had he ever contemplated death at all? What did love mean to him? Had he had any other women apart from my mother? I don’t know; he never spoke about anything of the kind; I knew only a tiny portion of his world: his enthusiasm for machines and politics. And what did I know about my wife? About my brother? About Magdalena? So she stood there motionless at the bus stop in her dark headscarf, while I left her further and further behind. And I hadn’t taken her with me on this journey though she had longed for it. Why hadn’t I? But it is you I am thinking of, my darling; you were actually my first wife. I am lying on ground which is stony and warm; it’s the day before Christmas; you and your parrot Theo are most likely snowbound, but I, if I look southwards, can see petrified waves and a great big bird of prey soaring above the mountain ridge. Do you recall all those times we would watch a buzzard circling above the valley below us? You yearned to escape. I have so many important things to tell you, all assuming that anything to do with me could still interest you, or if anyone could be interested in what happened yesterday, seeing that we two don’t have a past; and I, in particular, have no past because I learnt to forget it, it was too nasty; but when and where was the past ever good? Here they used to sacrifice youths to the gods, laying them on the altar and cutting their hearts out of their live bodies with stone knives; but that’s not the main thing; I have to tell you the most important thing, what I regard as the purpose of life — at that moment I went numb with horror that I was unable to define it. I didn’t know, I didn’t know the meaning, and that was why I had remained silent all those years. But no, I’m sorry. All I have to do is concentrate a bit more. I always knew it, after all. In fact, at an age when most people had their minds on other things entirely, I was sure I knew what I wanted. Yes, now I recall. When I was lying on that wooden bunk in a town which an empress had built for quite different purposes, I imagined to myself that I was a president or a general with the power of bringing people their freedom. I did not know yet what rights went to make up freedom, but I had come to know what lack of freedom was, I had an inkling what was felt by the youth who was laid upon the altar stone to have his heart cut out and his blood drunk, and, in the name of a god, at that moment impassive and hostile, to lose for ever his one and only — unrepeatable and unrenewable — life. I had an intimation what lack of freedom was: that it was a sacrificial altar on which we lay bound hand and foot and watched with alarm the movements of the sacrificing priest. I wanted to abolish that state of apprehension with a single magnificent decree, to end that state of the world in which victims were dragged to various altars. I know you’ll not be able to believe me, my far-off first wife. For you I was a judge and therefore a sacrificing priest with a knife in my hand; I was like the eagle circling on high not because it is free but because it is following its prey. But that was not me. I had simply made a bad choice. One has to fall in line and submit to another’s will, and if you have chosen badly, it often takes all your energy in order to try to eliminate the consequences. And did I choose at all? Rather I let myself be fitted in to life, by circumstances or fate, or whatever. That is where I went wrong; can you still hear me? I have to explain it to you. I was unable to take decisions; but it wasn’t simply weak-mindedness — I increasingly realised that every decision in this life is wrong from some point of view: fateful and wrong; I always used to spend so long weighing it up that in the end someone took the decision for me. That’s why I’m here now and you are snowbound so very far away. I couldn’t make up my mind to ask you to marry me, I couldn’t make up my mind to say: Let’s leave! But do you really think we would have been happier? After all there is nowhere to go to and no one to go with; we’re all alone; I’m alone and you would have remained alone on the edge of the desert and the bare rocks of the Sierra del Carmen.