Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

As they looked back, it is certain that many felt pangs of conscience. They would happily have done something to atone for the past, not just for everybody’s sake, but for their own. And some of them had had the good fortune to be sent this emaciated wretch who had come back from somewhere or other. His state of neglect was so great that at the age of fourteen he had no idea what the square on the hypotenuse equalled or when Charles the Fourth died. But was it his fault? Did he not merit magnanimous indulgence?

It is unlikely that my teachers had conspired among themselves; they had taken their decision independently and sent me off on my life’s journey with — in place of the learning I had missed — a little bit of their own guilt in the shape of a faked school report. Perhaps they believed it was some atonement at least for their silence over the previous five years, those five years when they had had to teach lies if they wanted to teach at all, and that through this action they might redress the injury I had undoubtedly suffered. In fact it merely fostered in me the mistaken notion that I enjoyed some kind of special privilege, love and consideration, and served to alienate me even more from my peers, who sensed that their efforts had been cheapened by that single bogus report. My teachers failed to realise that nothing in life can be redressed. Our former actions remain as irrevocable as bygone days. At best we can try to forget what happened. On condition that we find sufficient human forbearance within ourselves and a trace of the nobility of spirit which we sense to be a divine attribute.

2

Father was never over-attentive towards me. On the odd occasion, he would give into my wheedling and play a game of chess or draughts with me, or help me with my maths homework. What is the sine of sixty degrees? Fear grips me as I struggle in vain to remember. I remain silent. Father is patient. Not to worry, I can work it out, after all. On his instruction I draw an equilateral triangle. What am I supposed to do now? I have no idea. Why did I draw the triangle? he asks. In order to work out the sine of sixty degrees, I mutter, because if I said I didn’t know for a second time, Father’s wrath would most likely blow me off the face of the earth. Of course it was to calculate the sine of sixty degrees, but that wasn’t the question. Why an equilateral triangle? I look at the drawing in front of me. Most likely because all the sides are the same length, but I realise I mustn’t say so. I say nothing. What do I require? How will I work out the sine of sixty degrees — what does sine mean? I mutter the definition. Right-oh, then, so what do I need? A right angle , of course! Yes, that’s obvious, a right angle. So what do I do now? I’ve no idea, but I say I’ll bisect one of the sides. Excellent. And what’s that called? A perpendicular, of course. I drop a perpendicular. Quite right. What is the cosine of sixty degrees? Father watches me expectantly. From his expression I surmise that every numskull, every country bumpkin, every retard knows the value of cos 60°. All I have to do is look. Father is raising his voice and getting red in the face. I must surely see it, let me not dare to say I don’t know; I’m only pretending not to see the relationship. My mother rushes in and begs my father not to shout at me, can’t he see it’s only terrifying me. But how is my father to keep his temper when this nincompoop fails to see he must divide a half by one. He most likely doesn’t know what that makes. A half divided by one is a half. Well, at least that, then. So what is the cosine of sixty degrees? I surmise it must be a half. But how is that something so meaningless, so imaginary, so inconceivable as the cosine of an angle of sixty degrees can be at the same time so tidy and balanced as to be expressible by the two words ‘a half’?

But very soon after, when the war had been over for almost a year, I got measles and was confined to bed for a long time in a high fever. When at last I was able to get up, Father himself suggested (what had he got out of my childhood, in fact? We had passed each other by, been torn apart at the very moment when we could have become attached to each other, and deprived of so much time that we never managed to make up, never managed to become close) that we go and play football in the yard together. Metal washing-line posts formed the goals. It was the first time since my early childhood that my father had gone out to play ball with me. We kicked the ball from one goal to the other and I played with all my might to show my father that by now I was a worthy opponent. Then suddenly, in the middle of the match, just as Father was getting ready to shoot, my forehead went cold and I started to lose control of my arms and legs. I could see the ball flying past me into the goal, hear my father shouting ‘Goal!’ I grasped the red-painted metal post and tried to reach the ball that lay only a few paces away from me.

The doctor was small and ruddy-cheeked with gold-framed spectacles. He spent a long time listening to my heart and his repeated request for me to hold my breath aroused my anxiety.

When he finally let me go I went and sat in the waiting room. It was still a private practice, which meant that even the waiting room had a particular character of its own, and I sat there in the company of several dozen ticking clocks of different shapes and sizes while Mother and Father remained in the consulting room. When they finally emerged, my mother’s eyes were red from weeping.

Back home they put me to bed, explaining that I had developed a slight heart condition and the only remedy was bed rest. I might have to be patient for a few weeks or even months and stay in bed without moving too much. (Oddly enough, while I recall it I relive the feeling of regret that when my father wanted to give me a treat the match should have come to such an inglorious conclusion. And I can see the ball flying past my suddenly enfeebled hands, and hear my father’s voice gleefully — no doubt to show how seriously he took the game — shouting ‘goal!’, and I wish a miracle might happen to let us finish that interrupted match.)

The period that followed remains virtually amorphous in my memory although it had an undoubted impact on my life. Initially I lay in my corner of the kitchen. Later, my father was appointed director of a nationalised factory in Brno and his room was empty on weekdays, so I was moved in there. The windows in the room looked out directly on to the square and I was therefore able to hear the sound of strangers’ footsteps on the paving stones, the singing of drunks at night and cooing of the pigeons that roosted in the ruins of the Town Hall. From time to time, something less familiar would happen: a band would play or there would be uniformed parades: Sokol members, scouts and legionaries; I would observe them and envy them their mobility.

I had had no time to form new friendships and my old friends were dead. I remained immobilised in the room’s narrow confines, surrounded all the time by the same old shapes and voices. At least I could listen to the radio, which — maybe there was something fateful in that for me, those repeated encounters with criminal justice — relayed hour upon hour of live broadcasts from the Nuremberg trials, and commentaries on that symbolic act of reckoning with the deeds of the war.

The Protectorate government was also brought to trial. I already knew all the actors by the sound of their voices: the presiding judge, the defence counsel, the prosecutors and the defendants. Oddly enough, the defendants tended to arouse sympathy in me rather than anger. I hadn’t the slightest appreciation, of course, of the tricky doublesided situation that national leaders found themselves in whose country had been betrayed; whose country had betrayed itself and its liberty; and who therefore had had no alternative but to seek some acceptable degree of ignominy. I felt sympathy towards them as people or just as living creatures who had been shackled, stuck behind bars, deprived of their freedom, and were now cornered by the entire machinery of collective hatred. At the same time, the very ceremony of it all fascinated me. Early on the morrow I would eagerly await the newspaper so that I could feast once more on the dead phrases of the previous day’s proceedings. I would search for pictures from the courtroom. Likenesses of the defendants and the judges. And now that the live voices of the defendants were no longer in my ears my sympathy would wane and I would come to share the leader writers’ anger with the traitors who had sold out the nation and people, and hence myself as well.