Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

I’ll have to write to Allan, he’ll be only too pleased to get hold of books. But what if they read the letter? It would be better to find someone I can trust to take the list over to him.

At that moment the phone rang.

It was a woman’s voice but he did not catch the name. ‘Adam, I’m in Prague. I was last here five years ago, but they told me then that you had just gone off abroad somewhere.’

‘Magda,’ he exclaimed, as he recognised her voice, ‘it can’t be you, surely?’

2

Her slim and almost angular frame had filled out. Her features, which he had once found unusual and interesting, were beginning to sag. Her dark eyes, which for some unknown reason he used to think of as Greek — at the time when they were capable of watching him with rapt or even slavish attention for minutes on end — were now constantly on the move, furtively measuring every nook and corner of the room, as if there might be some absconding schoolkid hidden there, or possibly an enemy snooper, who might give himself away with a sudden movement. It was odd that he had once loved this woman, had yearned for her body, had caressed her and known rapture when making love to her.

‘What will you have to drink?’

She ordered white wine and asked him, ‘Where were you abroad?’

‘In America. I got as far as the Rio Grande. Remember the map that used to hang in your bedroom?’

‘Why did you come back?’

‘It’s normal to come back from one’s travels.’

‘Were you alone there?’

‘No, I went with the family. I’ve got two children.’

‘And your wife wanted to come back?’

‘It was four years ago. We had no desire to emigrate.’

‘I didn’t know you were a patriot.’

‘Nor did I.’

‘How old are your kids?’

‘Eight and five,’ he replied, realising that he had deducted a year from their ages. ‘The boy is the younger one.’

‘I’ve got two girls. Ten and eight.’

‘And what about your husband?’

‘He teaches at agricultural college — or rather he used to,’ she corrected herself quickly.

She poured herself another glass. The muzak was dreadful. She must find it repulsive, he thought, recalling her tastes. She had been thirty when he left. That meant she was forty-three now. She was older than him. She had older children too, but they were still quite young for a woman of her age. He remembered how she had not wanted to have children. She had given him a whole lot of reasons why not, but had apparently changed her mind since. Or maybe she had not wanted him to be the father.

‘What were you doing all that time?’ she asked. ‘No, forgive me, that was a silly question. What’s the Rio Grande like?’

‘A dirty little river, something like the Laborec. I hiked alongside it through a canyon till I came to open country. There was a fellow there taking two white horses for a dip. Later I crossed over to Mexico in a little punt. I didn’t have the right papers but luckily nobody asked me for any. I walked for about an hour through a village of mud huts. It felt like being at that gypsy colony behond Trebišov.’

‘I appreciate your efforts to make it familiar to me.’

‘I used to think about you in those places,’ he recalled, ‘all the time I was there, but most of all on one particular day when I climbed a peak in the Chicos Range. It was Christmas Eve, and suddenly I started to regret it all.’

‘What did you regret?’

‘That you weren’t there with me.’

‘You needn’t make anything up for my sake!’

‘Why should I?’

‘You’re right. Why should you?’ she agreed. ‘Were they beautiful, the Chicos mountains?’

‘They were desolate. I felt happy there. That’s probably why I thought of you.’

‘Do you really think you were happy with me?’

He tried to think whether he had been happy with her. He tried to remember at least something of what he had felt that time, but it would not come.

‘I’m glad you’re making the effort to work it out. It proves you really did think of me when you were sailing down the Rio Grande in that dinghy.’

‘It wasn’t a dinghy,’ he corrected her, ‘it was a punt. And I wasn’t sailing down the river, I was going across it.’

The waiter refilled her glass and stood waiting for her to order her meal. Adam could not remember her drinking so much those years ago. Except on that one occasion. ‘Do you remember the time we hiked round Wallachia?’

‘Are you scared I’ll get drunk again?’ She ordered veal medaillons and a mixed salad. He ordered just a plate of cold ham. A heavy meal in the evening never agreed with him.

‘You came down with something on the return trip,’ she recalled.

‘You brought me flowers.’

‘Did I really?’ Then she said, ‘Theo died last year.’

For the life of him he could not remember who Theo was.

‘The girls liked him, even though he stopped speaking towards the end.’

Ah, that was it. Theo had been her parrot. It used to scream at him: ‘Go away, you loony, go away!’ ‘He didn’t know what he was saying, anyway.’

‘That didn’t stop you doing as you were told though,’ she said.

‘I wrote you several letters, but I never got any reply.’

‘Probably because I didn’t send you any.’

Their meals arrived. ‘It looks delicious,’ she exclaimed, and turned her gaze to him, at last managing to keep her eyes on his face. Maybe it was the wine. The way she looked at him reminded him of the way it used to be — sitting in a grotty country pub and being in love with her.

She ate very slowly. ‘I found it impossible to write back after you went off and left me there like that.’

‘But I wrote to you to come and join me.’

‘No you didn’t. You wrote and asked me whether I didn’t feel like joining you.’

‘There’s no difference, is there?’

‘A lot more than between a punt and a dinghy, that’s for sure. What was it you actually had in mind, anyway? I had a job and a flat out there. That was all I had, then.’

‘But I told you we could get married, after all.’

‘No, you asked me whether we shouldn’t perhaps get married,’ she corrected him. ‘Or perhaps you think that’s the same as well.’

‘But you said no!’

‘What else could I have said?’

‘It was only my daft way of putting things, you know that.’

‘When it came to certain other things, you had no trouble saying what you meant — to say the least! If you had really wanted to marry me, you would never have asked.’

‘I don’t think you’re right, you know.’ The entire argument seemed fatuous to him. After all, she could hardly have come to see him after thirteen years — during which time they had not exchanged a single sentence — just to criticise the way he had behaved then.

‘And why didn’t you go abroad?’ he asked.

‘My husband didn’t want to!’ At last she drained her glass. ‘Will you drive me home?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

When he had paid the bill, she said: ‘Do you realise that this is the first time ever we’ve been for a decent meal together? Thank you.’

‘I don’t think we had the opportunity in those days.’

‘We didn’t try and find one. It was against your principles to sit somewhere quietly and enjoy a good meal.’

He had to take her as far as Vysočany. She was staying there with some relative of her husband’s. He should maybe ask her about her husband. But what was the point? He couldn’t care less about her husband. ‘Are you staying in Prague long?’ He had no idea, of course, where she now lived. He had never thought of her living anywhere but in The Hole, though no doubt she had fled the area years before.