Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

When she finished playing, she closed the lid, and without a glance in our direction, said it had been nice of us to bring her there.

I fell in love with her. She was at least two years older than I. It struck me that she resembled my mother as I had seen her in her school-leaving photo. She had a slight limp, which touched me and it also occurred to me that her physical defect improved my chances.

She and I lived on the same corridor. I searched in my case for the only suit I owned which was at all formal — an imitation sailor’s suit which was no longer very appropriate for my age group and whose jacket cut me under the arms — and squeezed myself into it. Then I wetted and slicked down my tousled hair and set off for her door. I could have knocked on it, of course, and a few days earlier would have done so, but now I didn’t dare. For a long time I walked up and down the corridor in the hope that she might emerge, catch sight of me, be astounded at how clean, good-looking and interesting I could look — and fall in love with me.

She didn’t come out and the next day I was ashamed to repeat the same performance. Before I fell asleep I imagined them torturing her. SS-men had thrust her, naked and beaten, into a vile subterranean dungeon already full of countless gnawed human skeletons. In the middle of the night I crept to some inconspicuous window to throw her a crust of bread. Or, again naked, they had put her in an enormous cauldron of water that they were starting to heat up slowly. But disguised in one of their uniforms, I fooled them and came to her rescue. I carried her away, gripping her damp, tortured body, and started to quiver with tenderness and anticipated delight.

She certainly never suspected that I loved her or that I was rescuing her from her torturers night after night. No one suspected it and I confided in no one, not even Arie. They took her away, and being lame she stood no chance. I’ve even forgotten her face. I can only recall her seated in the pale attic light at the black instrument, her long fingers touching the keys. I used to think about those fingers. I would often imagine them gripping the floor tiles, those naked maidenly fingers that had produced music, as her body writhed in its last contorted throes. And I didn’t arrive to rescue her.

Another thing we did was to break into the storehouse. Oddly enough, neither then, nor at any time since, did it occur to me that there was anything untoward about our behaviour, or that we had broken any law. In the midst of universal lawlessness such minor transgressions pall into insignificance. And is it theft at all to take what has been stolen? Now I know it to be so, but deep inside me there lurks this question, whether a society which condones or actually requires the oppression of even one of its members does not in fact forgo the right to demand respect for the law from anyone.

The storehouse was the place where they brought the things left by the dead: pathetic flotsam, meagre chattels from old people’s homes and improvised hospitals, from that one great processing plant for corpses which, in reality, our town was — vulcanised cases with spidery writing, meticulously packed boxes and rucksacks that no one ever opened, trunks with iron mountings, bundles of eiderdowns in the strangest shapes because of the pots stuck inside them. From time to time, a grey-uniformed soldier would arrive with a tractor, men would jump down from the trailer, carry out as much of the luggage as the cart could carry, then close the doors again, fix an enormous padlock on them and drive away.

We pretended to be playing a game. While Osi was trying to pick the padlock with a skeleton key, the rest of us formed an impenetrable wall around him.

It took only a few minutes and he had the padlock open. The others went on pretending to play their game while, in the falling dusk, Arie and I squeezed through the narrow gap between the slightly open doors.

I heard the doors creak shut behind us, the shouts from outside were suddenly silenced and all we could hear was the sound of our own footfalls and breathing. At that moment, in the second before Arie switched on his torch, I felt the sudden onset of fear combined with the equally powerful sense of elation at being there with him. Then a huge shadowy figure was thrown on to the wall and crept further into the room’s interior. My fear was dispelled, replaced by excitement at the things that lay within my grasp. Now I know that the more one is deprived of freedom the greater one’s attachment to things. But at that time, I felt nothing but ecstasy — a peasant in a castle which he had conquered, in a palace before which he had knelt in obeisance only the day before, and I opened the lids of suitcases and rummaged in them, while Arie smiled almost with disinterest and shone the torch for me. I think he had an abhorrence of those things, and years later, it is with a feeling of abhorrence that I recall the wretchedness of shirts worn from a hundred washings, which only a few days earlier had clothed an aged body; flannel underpants and faded petticoats, darned socks and skirts long out of fashion. But at that moment, I was only aware of the number of things for which I might possibly find a use: pyjamas, books (I had no time to investigate what language they were written in), climbing boots (which mountains were they meant for? Or does the downward path, the one to the River Lethe, perhaps descend by cliffs and precipices?), an octavo notebook with plenty of clean pages, an edition of Seneca’s selected letters, a bedside lamp in the shape of a toadstool. I tipped the contents of one of the suitcases out on to the floor and stuffed it with all these valuables. Then I cautiously pushed the case out through the crack between the doors (my mother’s cellar still contains an ochre-coloured leather suitcase whose former — late — owner’s name I scraped off that same evening, and but for that suitcase, that exhibit, I would, by now, doubt that any of it had ever happened, and wonder whether it was just fantasy, something I’d overheard somewhere, or read about and borrowed) and watched it quickly disappear, borne off into safer hiding in the barrack corridors.

But I went back inside, seized by a newly discovered, newly awoken rapaciousness. Now I was looking for food. I rummaged in suitcases while Arie kept silent watch; it was only at the last moment that we heard the agreed alarm signal. I had a bottle of perfume in my hand. I didn’t manage to put it down and was still holding it as I squeezed into a crack behind a pile of cases. Arie squatted down beside me. We tried to hold our breath. For a moment we found ourselves in total darkness, aware only of a mixture of smells: the smell of mould, musty rags, mouse droppings and the reek of perfume because the stopper wasn’t a tight fit, and I could feel the cold liquid running over my hand.

Then the doors creaked and the light from a dark lantern swung up and then down above our heads. They were already dragging us out of our hiding places, leading us along the lane under a bayonet — the disgrace for Arie and his father. And it’s all my fault, all because of my avarice. The rucksacks were already hanging from our shoulders, the earth shaking beneath our feet, the railway wagon already coupled up, the locomotive sounding its whistle, the grating of teeth, the thunder of the sleepers, the raised rifle-butts, the journey, weeping, the darkened sky; I’m walking forwards in a long file, no more mother, no more brother, just me alone; now the darkness is falling, enclosing me; nothing left now but a short moan before I fall down and sleep.

The light disappeared and the doors closed once more.

Has the man gone away for good? Is he waiting outside the doors? I knew I ought to get up and go and have a look, that eventually I’d have to, but I waited in fear. I was afraid of what I’d find. I was afraid of the truth; these days, I’d say the truth of my situation.