Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Mankind! Including the African pygmies and the nearly extinct Indians of the Cherokee tribe, and the homosexuals of Greenwich Village — mankind including half a billion Chinese, without me having yet set eyes on a single one of them in my life!

We also decided to go together to a lecture in the main auditorium of the Faculty of Philosophy; the moment a little bald man in glasses came in and started to explain something at the blackboard, I became so agitated that I was unable to take in a word he said. My friend, on the other hand, listened intently and even took notes; when we emerged on the square an hour later and I asked him if he had been satisfied, he replied that he would never again set foot in that undertaker’s parlour. He had realised that philosophy in that building was now dead — all that was left was politics. I protested that philosophy only starts to make sense when it enters the service of progressive politics, and he retorted with uncustomary forthrightness that that was nonsense, that it was an insidious lie on the part of those who feared the intrepid spirit. We quarrelled on that occasion.

In the holiday before our final school year, we made a trip to the Bohemian Forest. In those days the region was depopulated and almost deserted. On the last afternoon of our trip, we climbed a hill from where we could see a pond in the plain below us. Several dozen buildings were grouped around it, and a short way away on a small knoll there stood a baroque church-tower. It was late on a cloudy day, but precisely at that moment the sun came out and the whole area beneath us was suffused with a ruddy glow. The sight of that glowing water and those illuminated roofs in the open landscape, above which the bluish nocturnal mist was just beginning to form, aroused expectations of comfort in us. Then we entered the village. The windows above the muddy road had all been smashed and the houses gave off a musty smell. We went round the whole village from house to house, past broken-down fences, gardens rank with weeds, the village shop which still retained its German signs, and then up to the church. It was locked. Through a hole in the wall, we entered the graveyard which abutted the church. Some of the gravestones lay overturned, others were hidden in an undergrowth of nettles and briar. Stained glass from the church windows crunched beneath our feet. We climbed up a beam to a window and looked in. The nave was bare, although there were pale patches on the walls where pictures had once hung. In the place where the altar stood formerly, there were the remains of a fire. Among the scorched remnants of wood we made out what was left of an arm pointing at us with charred fingers.

When that night we lay down to sleep in an abandoned woodcutters’ hut, my friend told me that we had entered an era of barbarism and soon we would witness the new Vandals strutting about the burnt-out Forum and dancing their war dances in the ruins of the temple.

I felt duty-bound to contradict him, to excuse somehow the havoc we had seen. The real barbarians, I told him, were those who had started the war. Now, on the contrary, we were at the start of a new era, an era of freer people. It no longer mattered who started it, he replied. What mattered now was who had assumed their mantle. He had no way of judging whether the new era would bring greater freedom, but one thing he could see: that it lacked nobility of spirit. And what was the use of freedom without nobility of spirit?

Next morning we went our separate ways, but not before agreeing that he would call in on me on the day before term started.

He didn’t call in, nor did he turn up at school. After a while I heard a rumour that he had managed to make his way to Germany and escape by the Berlin U-bahn.

I liked him. He was the first friend I’d had since the war, and for a long time, the only one. I regarded his flight as a betrayal of me as well. Why hadn’t he hinted to me what he had in mind, at least?

I still have a book of his, the last one he lent me. I could have returned it, of course, but I was shy of entering his parents’ flat, and besides, I was sure they wouldn’t miss it. Not long ago I opened it, probably for the first time since then. It was a paper-back edition of Plato. I found inside it a narrow slip of paper, and written on it in my friend’s legible handwriting, with its large, upright letters, ‘What is required for human welfare and happiness? According to Socrates it is intellectual activity, good memory, straight thinking and truthful judgement.’

2

When we were in the fifth year, I suggested we organise a mock election. (It was the most democratic election I have ever known, even if there was no privacy screen and the ballot slips were only pages torn out of a school exercise book.) Naturally, I was counting on a clear victory for the party which my father belonged to, and of which my martyred uncles had once been members. It was, after all, the only one to defend the interests of all decent people. To my consternation it only received three votes in our class. One was mine, another undoubtedly came from Josef Švehla who had been kept down from the previous year (due to political persecution, he stressed) and was the only communist in the class; he was such an unapproachable individual that even I didn’t like him, though I felt obliged to sympathise with him. I never managed to establish who had cast the third vote.

The election result depressed me. I tried to convince the others with my arguments, but mostly without success. Sometimes Švehla would join in our debates. Unlike me, he was a slow and steady speaker (everything about him was steady; he was also the only one of us to have a steady girlfriend) and had a perfect mastery of the techniques of political argument. But what he said always contained some thinly veiled threat which antagonised the others even more than my incoherent statements.

We never managed to win anyone else for our beliefs, but we were to receive support from an unexpected quarter. A new art master was appointed to the school. His name was Ivanič, Ivanovič, or maybe Ivandelič if my memory serves me right and such a name exists in Serbia, which is where he was from. He entered the art room for his first lesson wearing a long, paint-flecked green overall and scuffed shoes. Reminiscent of an ear of corn with a tousled panicle of hair, he came to an abrupt halt just inside the door and observed us. Then he almost trotted to the desk and informed us in a sing-song foreign accent that fate had given us to him to teach, although he could tell already, just by looking at our faces, our ties, and those brothel-creepers on our feet, that we lacked the smallest smidgeon of sensitivity to art. He could see with his own eyes that he was confronted by young ladies and gentlemen from a better class of home, and he laughed hoarsely. As far as he knew, the well-off only ever drivelled about art or invested in it. But seeing that he was obliged to waste his time here, he would do his best to make honest, conscientious and hard-working people out of us, and cultivate in us a sense of beauty, so that we didn’t have our minds fixed solely on money and careers. And he went on to explain that in the past, during the bourgeois republic, teachers weren’t allowed to cultivate their pupils; all they could do was pour knowledge into them. But times had changed. We were now entering the era we had struggled for: an epoch when even a downtrodden grammar-school teacher had come into his rights, including the right to talk about other things apart from the angles of a triangle or the green tree-frog.

He told us to take out our drawing pads; he said each of us was to paint what we felt like and what would give us pleasure, using whatever materials we liked; and he ran down the row between the desks. He stopped right at the end, just behind me, and ruffled my hair, praising me for not wearing a tie or brothel-creepers (I had scuffed shoes that vied with his own). Then he asked me what my father did for a living.