Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘Do you think it’ll warm you up?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So wait a while and sit down. I’ll put a blanket round you.’

‘No, please don’t, Honza. No. I really have to go back.’

‘I love you so much. This moment will live for ever, I’ll never ever forget it, I can tell I’ll remember it always. Are you still cold?’

‘No, not any more.’

‘Shall I blow the candles out?’

‘No, leave them burning. It’s just like Christmas. I like it when I can see you. Your eyes, they’re so childlike.’

‘It’s because I’m not wearing my glasses. I’ll blow it out now, OK? Anyway, I can still see you in the dark.’

‘I can see you too. But don’t. You mustn’t.’

‘Alena, don’t you love me any more?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, but please be careful.’

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

For four years I had imagined my homecoming. Home meant the Renaissance house on the square with its wooden staircase, the old crucifix in the alcove with its rusting Christ, my green couch and the ‘timetable’ of my day hanging above it (painted on Bristol board with the departure to Slumbertown marked in red), the china cabinet with the silver fruit-bowl and the cobalt-blue glass vase, the clattering tramcar under the window and my little grandfather with his nicotine-stained moustache alighting from the tram and bringing me razor-blade wrappers in his tiny scuffed briefcase or a packet of advertising comics drawn by Artuš Schneider. Home meant going back to the place where my childhood had been interrupted.

Now we were entering the building I had hungered for. The staircase seemed to my eyes shabby, different, smaller; the crucifix had been removed and when Father unlocked the flat (the locks were the only things left. The neighbours said: the tenant who came in after you took everything away and redecorated. Who was it came after us? Some bigwig in a uniform; a chauffeur in a Mercedes used to call for him every morning) I set eyes on a familiar space filled with unfamiliar furniture. Father approached the mammoth great cupboards and opened doors here and there. I waited in excitement to see what we’d discover. But the cupboards contained nothing: neither time-bombs nor treasures; only in the kitchen did there remain a few dozen wine goblets and glasses. Father took his red notebook out of his pocket and noted something in it. I watched his face, emaciated beyond recognition, and his shaven scalp. It looked almost horrifying silhouetted against the bright window. I glanced at my mother who was leaning tiredly against the wall by the door. (A few days earlier, after examining her thoroughly, the doctor had discovered she had a heart condition and told her with almost exaggerated directness that any exertion, or any illness, even the slightest, could kill her.) And suddenly the depressing realisation dawned on me that this would never be my old home again. I turned and ran out of that alien room. My father had possibly felt something similar. He came to me and told me that everything would be fine once more; we would furnish the flat again and it would be even better than before the war. Then he asked me where I would like to sleep. Nowhere, I replied, so they gave me a corner for myself in the kitchen: a new iron bedstead and a small table where I was supposed to study.

The next day, I had to go to school, even though there were scarcely three weeks of the school year left. I was fourteen, so they sent me into the fourth year. I have no detailed memory of that class. I am unable to recall a single teacher or single fellow-pupil, I remember only the feeling I had: awe combined with disappointment and uncertainty. I could understand nothing of what was going on around me. For the first time in my life I entered a gymnasium, and while everyone else was swarming all over the place, exercising on the parallel bars or doing arm swings on the horizontal bar, I stood to one side, aware that I would never manage any of it. The teachers used to bring the strangest objects into chemistry and physics lessons and speak in a language full of symbols whose meaning was a mystery to me. I was not even capable of concentrating on those things I might conceivably have understood, such as history and geography lessons.

Two or three attempts were made to get me to answer questions on the previous lesson. Even though they asked me the simplest and friendliest of questions I maintained a terrified silence. Everything set me apart from the rest, even my appearance. I could not relate to them in any way. I was waiting for them to make the overtures (after all, I was superior, having undergone exemplary suffering of the kind then held in high esteem). But they had no reason to. They had no use for me.

I was waiting for Arie. Whenever I found myself alone at home I would take out his photo and the picture he had given me and sit looking at those two relics, the only mementoes of his existence. Once I took the cloth off the kitchen table, set up some goal-posts, took out some buttons and played a game of button-football. In it I played for myself and my pal — playing fairly for him, since I beat myself in his name. But there was no point in it, so I put the buttons away and went out to wander around the streets instead.

That first month, Father had given me a hundred crowns to spend. I bought my first illustrated magazine ever. It smelt fresh from the press. I sat down on a bench behind the Rudolfinum and read some concentration camp story. Then I continued on my way. I took a tram as far as Košírěv and was amazed to discover that the woods began so soon. A bilingual street sign lay in a narrow ditch, but apart from that, nothing recalled the war. After so many years, I had trees above my head once more. I lay beneath one of them and listened to the sounds of the forest. I no longer remember what I thought about, but it must have been one of the most telling experiences of my childhood as it turns up again and again in my dreams: I get on a tram that takes me through an unbelievable cluster of houses and eventually arrives at the edge of a wood. I get off and find myself in a silent landscape. I walk along a soft footpath, alongside which runs a narrow ditch often full of junk, and start to climb upwards. The trees about me begin to change; I walk through a birch grove and between dreamy pines like fluffed-up parasols, and mountain spruce at whose dark feet the strawberry-red caps of toadstools peer out of the moss, until at last I emerge into a realm of total calm, and in my dream I can hear the musical sound of wind blowing and I am happy.

Strangely enough I did not fail school that time, but came through with flying colours. I didn’t pay any attention to the school report; I couldn’t have cared less about it. I had yet to adopt either the mores or the competitiveness of civilisation. Only years afterwards, when I turned up that already yellowing document among my papers, did I realise that it was a testimonial not to myself and what I knew, but to the era when it was issued and most of all to the people who issued it.

The war was finished — and so was the regime of occupation. Its most hated representatives had either fled or wound up in prison while their victims had been proclaimed martyrs. But all that concerned just a tiny section of the population: most of the people had not died, fled or gone to gaol, but merely gone on with their lives. Overnight, they had entered a world which commended actions that yesterday’s laws had identified as crimes, a world whose laws declared yesterday’s crimes to be acts of heroism. They naturally regarded this change as a victory for historical truth and agreed that guilt must be assessed, wrongs put right and society purged.

But what was to be identified as guilt and what condoned, seeing that they had all lived under the former regime, however hated and imposed it was? Seeing that the existence and actions of the regime had also depended on their own existence and behaviour. Who was to be the defendant, who the witness and who the judge? At the trials that were to take place, would not those who confronted each other in the courtroom be equally guilty and equally innocent? The very will to cleanse oneself of evil and to atone for guilt conceals within it the risk of new crimes and new wrongs.