Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘Who told you it would be me?’

She started and fell silent.

‘What do you want from me?’

‘I thought… They told me that if he’s expecting a baby they’re not allowed to…’

‘Such concessions don’t extend to an expectant father. Apart from that, anything you want to tell the court you can say during the trial. Your fiancé’s defence counsel can propose you as a witness.’

‘But I…’ she protested, ‘but you can see for yourself, I might not even be able to.’

‘If your testimony might throw light on some essential aspect of the case, the trial would be rescheduled. Counsel will explain all those points to you.’

‘Yes, I beg your pardon,’ she said, getting up. ‘Thank you.’

He noticed she had unusually fat, or more likely swollen, calves.

‘It’s not his fault.’ It was clear the sentence had been prepared in advance and she uttered it staring at the floor. ‘He didn’t mean to do anything wrong, everyone was always against him. He couldn’t take no more.’

‘Mrs Körnerová,’ he said, standing up, ‘your husband stands accused of a double murder. One of the victims was seventy years old, the other twelve.’

‘Everyone says they’ll hang him,’ she said, continuing her prepared statement, still staring at the floor. ‘But surely they can’t do it if we’re expecting a baby, when he’s the father… What would people call it afterwards?’

‘You’ll be able to tell all of that to the court at the trial.’

‘I just wanted to tell you that none of it is his fault. He just couldn’t stand it no more.’

‘There’s no point explaining anything now.’ As if there would be any point in anything she might explain later.

2

His wife had taken the children off on holiday (two days later than she originally intended, of course) so he didn’t need to rush off anywhere after work. Usually when he was left alone for a few days, he felt a thrill: as though a whole crowd of interesting prospects were suddenly opening up. This time he was also aware of a sense of relief. Recently he had started to find the ordinariness of family life tiresome. Maybe life had always been like that, but previously he hadn’t had time to notice the dreariness. He had channelled his interest, feelings and activity elsewhere, into developments he assumed were going to transform the world. It was from that quarter too that he had looked to see fulfilment coming. But with his unavoidable withdrawal from such involvement, he was shocked to find that he had nothing to fill the vacuum left behind. He found nowhere to turn his restless soul; nothing and no one to fix his expectations on.

At half past four, he left his office. The street was still burning hot and surprisingly deserted. He noticed three girls standing at the tram stop like three brightly coloured parrots. They were probably going off swimming somewhere. If he approached them and offered them a lift they might accept. He toyed with the idea for a while but three were too many — even as an idea. There would be two left over and they could easily become dangerous witnesses.

When would he be grown up enough not to let his imagination run away with him like that?

Imagining a course of action has the advantage of allowing one to escape its adverse consequences. Its disadvantage is that it denies one the possibility of changing anything oneself. But what hope has one of changing anything for the better? Only, a very slender one, to be sure, but he had nursed the hope throughout his life, even though he had associated change more with the world than his own life.

He got into his car. There’ll probably be room on the tennis courts now in the summer. But he usually played tennis with his brother, and his brother was inaccessible. And he’d not even taken his racquet with him; he should have thought of it that morning. If he went home now, he wouldn’t bother to go anywhere else.

He’d also been promising Matěj for ages to go and see him at the caravan; at least he’d get a chance to talk to someone without having to mind what he said.

He had no problem finding the caravan — it stood alone in the middle of a meadow. He could also make out the massive figure of his friend trudging across the field in his gumboots. A short distance away stood a small drilling rig with several pipes running from it. The water fell into a wooden tub and then out of it again and ran away unseen in the grass. Apparently there was a brook meandering through the undergrowth somewhere nearby.

Two sets of bunks occupied a third of the caravan. Half-naked models and film-stars had been pinned up on the walls amidst a rich array of advertising stickers. ‘Those two beds are free,’ Matěj said. ‘You can take your pick. There are three of us here on and off. We’re supposed to be all here at the same time, but that would mean losing one of the job’s main advantages. This way I do my week and then have a fortnight’s break.’

Beside the carefully cleared table, on a kitchen chair that was almost picturesquely old and scruffy, there stood a typewriter.

‘Mr Putna stuck all that up,’ Matěj said, pointing at the pictures covering the wall. ‘He’s the third one of the gang. He’s a beer-label collector.’

Adam leaned over towards the wall. Cedar’s Beyrouth bore the telephone number 221414 and the Tanganyika Tusker label was a red elephant within a green leaf.

‘Tomorrow morning, if you’re intending to stay the night, I’ll show you our storks. They’ve got a nest in a larch not far from here. It’s great to hear them clapping their bills. When they get going, we call it a cabinet meeting.’

‘Aren’t you fed up, having to be here on your own all the time?’

‘Now and then. Otherwise I quite enjoy it.’

‘But you won’t go on working here much longer.’

‘You reckon?’

‘It’s just too absurd.’

Matěj laughed. ‘Absurdity hasn’t been in short supply recently.’ He took a small pail down from the shelf and set off for the nearest spring. Adam walked behind him along a track worn through the long grass — mosquitoes buzzing around his head. They halted by a pipe sticking out of the ground. Matěj placed the pail under it and then timed how long it took to fill. ‘It never varies — at least water continues to have a sense of order. I fantasise that deep down out of reach of our drills there’s a whole enormous lake. The last of the unpolluted lakes.’

They continued along the path through the grass and a bat fluttered over their heads. ‘I can’t say how long I’ll go on doing this job. There’s always someone coming to see me with surefire news that everything’s about to change and we’ll get another reprieve from our lords and masters. They all feel an obligation to bring some good tidings, especially when they see me in my wellies holding a bucket. But would you believe it, the more I come back and forth to this place the more irrelevant everything I’ve done so far in my life seems to me. If a change really does come, I doubt it’ll even affect me any more…’

This was something he could not understand. If it had been himself in this kind of limbo he would be hankering after release like the poor ferryman in the fairy story.

They returned to the caravan and Matěj put a saucepan on the stove. The air was filled with the scent of mushrooms cooking. ‘The meadows around are full of mushrooms,’ he said, ‘and in the woods there are blushers and those deadly agarics. Do you know what,’ he mused, stirring, ‘during the war I had this plan that I’d get into the Führer’s camp in disguise and sell Hitler’s chef a bag of dried toadstools: Das sind die echte Steinpilze. Or I’d sneak by and tip them into the cooking pot. I was sure they must cook for Hitler in a cauldron in front of his tent.’ He poured some soup into a bowl and handed it to Adam. ‘How old were we when we first met?’