Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

In those days I still believed in it: justice. I still believed in a world whose inhabitants could be sorted out into guilty and innocent, defendants and judges. A fairy-tale world aspiring to the truth.

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During that period, almost all the visitors to the flat were brought in to see me. Often they were people I had never seen before; some of them even spoke Polish or German and were only calling in on their way through Prague. They would sit drinking tea (there was never even the tiniest bottle of alcohol in our home) and talking a great deal about the future of the world, as well as reminiscing about comrades whom I had never known either. I have already forgotten the stories they told, but I remember that some of them would appear quite amusing until all of a sudden there would be mention of the death of arrested comrades or terrifying details of how they were tortured. At such moments, my mother would ask them to stop talking about it or at least get off politics for a while, because the lad merely swallowed everything they said and besides, there were other things to talk about apart from war, death and politics. But they would put her right, declaring that politics was the key to everything: happiness, justice and life in general. Their explanation of the world increasingly took root in my mind and my conviction grew that it was the communist movement which embodied courage, conviviality, wisdom, humanity and all the other virtues of whose real nature someone of fifteen has no idea, which is why they have such power of attraction.

The most frequent visitors were my Uncles Gustav and Karel. Both had spent the war abroad. The first as a private soldier on the western fronts and the second in Moscow, where, in company with Mother’s sister Anita, he performed some mysterious and, as I understood it, very important mission.

I could recognise Uncle Gustav from a distance because his stick would bang loudly on the wooden stairs. He would come and sit by me, resting the leg they had crippled in one of the last battles of the war on another chair, and hanging the stick up on the chair-back, before asking me how I was. Better, I would reply, and at that moment I really did feel better for Uncle Gustav brought life with him. He was one of those people who know something about everything and have an opinion on every possible topic. (Only much later did I realise that his self-confidence stemmed not from his personality and experience alone, but also from his political outlook, which incited him to express views on matters he knew nothing about.) He liked describing his escape to Palestine — the passage in a fishing boat so loaded down with people no space was left for food or drink: how, dying of thirst, they disembarked in the shallows a mile off the coast and waded in through the cold sea water. And then how a British patrol boat had appeared and started firing on them. Uncle had no love of the British, even though he had fought in their army. Not only had they greeted his arrival in freedom with gunfire, they had subsequently arrested him, convicted him of being a communist spy and sentenced him to death. (I now suspect that the story about the military tribunal convicting him of an assassination attempt, when after refusing the defence counsel offered he made a fiery speech, asserting that he was to be sacrificed in order to shroud a shameful colonial plot, and declaring that as a communist he would never stoop to personal terror, was largely my uncle’s invention. Maybe it was intended to lend greater weight to his narrative and furnish me with an object lesson in the partiality of bourgeois justice.) In the end, according to my uncle, he was saved by the war, having found his way to England and then to Africa, where he fought at Tobruk. He told of a desert shimmering in the heat, with lions running around and bourgeois officers doing everything they could to humiliate the private soldiers and himself, Uncle Gustav, who purely because of his convictions had never risen above the rank of sergeant. Often he could do nothing but gnash his teeth at the sight of such stupidity and the occasional deliberate reluctance to win the war and destroy the enemy. Admittedly the international bourgeoisie wanted to get rid of Hitler, he explained, but above all they wanted their real class enemy, the first state of workers and peasants, to bleed to death.

On other occasions, my uncle would tell me stories about the days when he and my father were children in a little town on the Elbe (Father never found the time to tell me anything about himself). Though cruelly class-divided, the town he told me about was a peaceful place which had just welcomed its first motor-car and received its first chance visit from a travelling cinematograph, where fairs were enlivened by dancing bears, clowns with trained monkeys and fortune tellers with parrots; and he related how he and Father had helped to catch a mad bull that had escaped from beneath the knife of Butcher Balun whose shop stood right next door to the Kindls’ cottage. When their father fell in the middle of the war they were poverty-stricken and used to help Mr Balun in his shop. The butcher would exploit them as much as possible and was indifferent to the fact they were war orphans. And Uncle Gustav would deliver a speech attacking butchers, bakers, wholesalers and entrepreneurs who only ever lived in order to squeeze money out of the people; he appealed to me never to become a slave to money or property, but instead to serve the great idea of socialism.

Uncle Karel had a professorial appearance: tall, dry and bespectacled — interestingly grey around the temples. He would always arrive in company with Auntie Anita. He would bring me books — almost invariably translations of Soviet novels. Auntie used to ask me about the plot of the book they brought last time and urge me to ponder on the fate of its heroes, following which she would go off to chat with the adults. She worked in some office or other concerned with resettling the frontier areas and would fume about people no better than bandits who stole carloads of valuables and others who misappropriated property they had only been given to administer; and my aunt would declare firmly that things must not be allowed to go on like this, that such people had to be moved against or they would soon be moving against us.

My aunt bore no resemblance to my mother. She was powerfully built — more like a man. She had a loud voice and whenever she spoke it sounded as if she was quarrelling. In those days she seemed to me like the heroines of the books I had just been reading. She was straightforward, active and undeniably selfsacrificing, working for people’s welfare like a good citizen while also taking good care of my uncle. He was not as loquacious as my aunt and kept his sentences short and to the point. He was a born minute-taker and drafter of resolutions, and I think that he had done exactly that on many occasions in his life.

I was excited at the thought that Uncle had been in the country that was so often spoken about with such enthusiasm here. I begged him to tell me about it, but he referred me to books. He brought me, indeed, a biography of Lenin and an illustrated brochure about Moscow. In it Red Army men paraded in spiked helmets and crop-eared Stakhanovites joyfully flashed their teeth.

I once asked my uncle if he had ever seen Stalin. He had. I was bowled over by the news. Where? At a meeting in Moscow. What had he been like? Wise and modest. I wanted to know more but my uncle changed the subject. And what had it been like in Moscow during the war? He replied that sometimes things had been very bad. Cold and hunger. And as if afraid of disclosing something unseemly he hastened to add that the Soviet people had behaved excellently. During the very first days of the war he realised that they could not lose because their will for victory was invincible. And he told me about the girl pioneer who was killed in action on the roof of their house. Though only ten years old, she had volunteered to man an anti-aircraft battery. And what about her parents? Her parents mourned her but were proud of her deed. That was what the Great Patriotic War was like. People understood what their duty was towards the motherland. And when the fascists drew close to their city, the workers went straight from work to the outskirts to dig trenches; some stayed there till morning and went straight back to work. When did they sleep? Those were days when nobody had the time to sleep. They would doze for a few minutes in the tram or by the fire when they came in for their midnight tea.