Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

I said that it would be necessary to exonerate all those who were truly innocent.

And how did we plan to find out after all these years?

It would be necessary to do all that was humanly possible.

They had all been guilty in their way, my uncle declared. They had hated the new regime and would have happily shot those who supported it.

I said that they had good reason to feel hatred and no one could be convicted for what he would like to do, nor rewarded for that matter. People could only be convicted for what they did, not what they thought. Anyway, he knew very well that savage sentences had been handed out to people who had done nothing wrong at all, not even in their thoughts. Could he have forgotten my father?

He asked me not to bring my father’s case into it. Of course, Viktor had been innocent, but people like him had been, or would be, rehabilitated within the Party; they didn’t need to drag in the courts; that was obvious to every true Communist.

I made the comment that people who had been wrongly convicted by a court must be acquitted of those false charges by a court , even if they themselves did not seek redress.

He replied that I and the rest of my ilk were all mistaken. We were naive and were being taking for a ride by our enemies. We had forgotten that we were in the middle of a life-and-death struggle in our country, not some village brawl.

I tried to explain something but my uncle was not listening. He informed me that if some injustices had occurred, it was necessary for us to accept the fact. It was the inexorable law of every power struggle. But struggle was a matter for men and not for the sentimental sons of the petty bourgeois. They went soppy over every little injustice, every instance of force, even the justified use of force which revolutions always entail. But what injustices had occurred in actual fact? my uncle asked. It had been no more than a case of the losers suffering the consequences of their defeat. I hadn’t known those losers when they were still in power. I didn’t remember their cruelty, when little orphans had been turned away hungry from their doors, while they themselves lived in the luxury of their many-roomed villas, surrounded by servants, chamber-maids, governesses, cooks and tutors. I didn’t remember anything. But the least I could do would be to read about the Jews of old, and to my amazement, my uncle started to quote from the Bible, about how they had been proud of their intransigence, and how, when they conquered enemy cities, they did not leave one soul alive. It never used to strike them that they ought to apologise for their victims, let alone to them! No power on earth could afford such a luxury: to stop in the midst of battle and start examining itself and disavowing the actions which had won it authority.

I said that the only chance the present regime had of obtaining any authority was by seeking to rectify its actions or, rather, its crimes.

My uncle stood up, raised his stick and shouted that I was a subversive. We were all subversives who were undoing the work of whole generations in a few moments.

As if I was not aware that fanatics can only be appeased, never convinced, I tried to explain to my uncle where he was wrong. What was happening was precisely the last attempt to save the work of those generations. I trusted he thought me an honourable person with no ulterior or self-seeking motives. I assured him that it was only now as an adult that I was experiencing for the first time the uplifting feeling that my work not only gave my life meaning, it also served some greater ideal, something that transcended me — an ideal which I represented and which, I believed, was not alien to him.

My uncle froze for a moment, then dropped his raised arm and leaned on his stick. I could hear his heavy breathing. He could see that his visit had been a waste of time. We no longer spoke the same language. I had become a renegade.

He stopped once more in the doorway. He said he was curious what we would make of it. He was curious, though he would sooner not live to see it. Luckily he had hopes of not living to see it. Uncle Gustav made an attempt at ironic laughter and was gripped by a fit of coughing.

I heard his coughing fade into the distance and the sound of his stick on the stairs, and could see again my childhood home: me lying on my bed waiting impatiently for my uncle to arrive and yank me out of my loneliness and immobility with his lively stories. I realised that my uncle would probably never come again, and I mourned the old-fashioned embittered stubbornness of the lonely old man.

As on every evening. I still had work to do and my wife went off to bed before me. For a while, I sat reading some manuscripts and then perusing the magazines that had piled up on my desk.

It was not yet midnight when I fell asleep, and I must have slept very soundly because I was unable to rouse myself, even though the telephone must have been ringing for a long time. Even before I lifted the receiver, I was aware of the roar of some distant machines.

I picked up the receiver. Adam, is that you? Matěj yelled like a madman. Adam, do you know what’s happened? The Russians are here!

I said something like why, or when, and then hung up.

It was a quarter past three; I went into the kitchen and cooked myself some breakfast. Dawn was beginning to break. I wrote a note: They say the Russians are here! I left the note lying on the table.

Then I set off for town. It was light already. Several tanks were standing in front of the radio building surrounded by a throng of people. There was a sound of sporadic gunfire from nearby. The shouts merged. An ambulance siren sounded and I saw two men with a stretcher. Someone was lying on it, but he was covered up, with only the top of his head showing. Oddly enough, I felt no fear at that moment. I elbowed my way through until I was near one of the tanks and could hear the artless phrases which my unknown and unarmed fellow-citizens were using to try to convince the soldiers to go back to where they had come from.

I continued down along Wenceslas Square. There were more and more people about, some carrying flags.

Even on my own square there was a close-packed crowd, some of them singing. Foreign troops stood on guard around the Old Town Hall. I noticed a tall man in glasses get up on a bench (I knew his face from somewhere; most likely we had attended the same conference some time) and start to explain something to the soldiers in Russian. I did not manage to catch what he was saying, but the soldiers listened motionless, or rather, with obduracy. Then an officer appeared and gave an order to the soldiers who then dragged him down from the bench and led him off somewhere.

I made my way into one of the adjacent lanes and leaned against the wall of a house. There was a time when I used to walk this way to school, I realised. A radio was playing loudly from a window above my head, but it sounded distant to me.

The tanks could start to move and open fire at any moment. I remembered my small daughter, who was probably not even awake yet. I thought how in a moment she would wake up — into this cruel, pitiless world: a world of soulless steel and power which never brought anything but destruction. How could I have forgotten, even for a moment, how could I have doubted its essence?

And I had nothing with me, no weapon, not even a knife. And there was no point in screaming, I didn’t know how to anyway, and I’d forgotten how to cry. It crossed my mind that I would soon be thirty-seven and I could well be at the mid-point of my life, and from here people most likely looked backwards — to take stock, and forwards, to try to guess their future.

But what could I have seen, what could I have seen now?