Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

When I replied that my father was a civil engineer I sensed right away that it did not meet with his approval.

We painted still lifes, fish, our homes, and attempts at nudes, though I, of course, painted concentration-camp prisoners queuing for dinner, and meanwhile he rushed up and down between the desks, telling us that throughout history the rich had held sway and so the rich had decided what was beautiful. They paid the artists and thereby enslaved them too. Artists who had stood up to them and painted according to their lights rather than to order, languished in poverty, even the greatest geniuses, such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh or Aleš. But the salvo from the cruiser Aurora in 1917 had marked the beginning of a new era. The degenerate nobility and the surfeited bourgeoisie were chased out of their palaces, and the people took the government into their own hands. The people — and this he could declare from his own experience — suffered and went hungry, it was true, but deep in their souls, unseen, they yearned for beauty; indeed they created splendid artefacts, albeit anonymously. And he dashed into his study and brought out a traditional vase, exclaiming with admiration how splendid its shape was, and functional at the same time! What would the people create now, now that the well-springs of knowledge were being opened for them, now that they were being accorded all the opportunities that only the bourgeois had exploited so far? We would live to see it; we would live in a beautiful land and in a favourable age, when beauty would become part of life.

His words — their intonation as strange as his appearance — probably struck most of the class as ludicrous, but I was enthralled. He had expressed precisely what I had been striving to say myself and had been incapable of formulating so convincingly, so perfectly. My admiration for him was such that I started to paint in earnest. I persuaded my parents to buy me some oils, and from that day forth I trudged along suburban footpaths with my little case, painting houses and fences, ochre meadows and birch groves under blue skies, and then brought my creations into class.

One day he invited me to bring my pictures to his study. I entered in trepidation, practically in reverence, aware that this might be a turning-point in my life. The room was filled with plaster models, stacked easels and dusty rolls of paper, and the walls were hung with reproductions of still lifes by Cézanne, and Van Gogh’s sunny landscapes. On a table alongside tubes of colour were scattered photos of the master’s wife and his five children, and similar images gazed out of portraits that were leaning against a wall in a corner of the room. I unrolled a bundle of my paintings and he spent a few moments absentmindedly gazing at them in silence. Then, as if he had suddenly made up his mind, he gripped me by the shoulder and told me he had something to show me. He led me to a large easel that I had not even noticed before as it was covered in a sheet. With a mighty gesture, the art master whipped off the sheet and a painting was revealed to me.

It was a sizeable canvas. It depicted a country farmyard and in the foreground there towered a massive, dazzling red machine.

I realised that it was his own painting, this perfect machine in a deserted, but meticulously detailed yard, and I didn’t know how to react; whether it was the done thing for me, a pupil, to praise my teacher. So all I said was that I’d never seen a picture like it.

Now I expected him to say something about my paintings, but instead he started to tell me about his canvas. He spoke passionately about his efforts to create a new, comprehensible art, but said that it would have problems being understood as all the committees were still formed of advocates of old-style art, the kind that was created for the select few, and they all hated creators like himself. I don’t think I understood too much of what he said.

All of a sudden he exclaimed — pointing at the painting — that a threshing machine like that had been his father’s dream. His father had longed to own one machine at least, but never been able to afford anything, not even his own horse or mule; his father would have been happy to see this picture, because he would understand what it meant, why that machine was oversized and as dazzlingly unreal as a dream. He began reminiscing about his father, how he used to get up at three in the morning and not come home till twilight. He had been unable to read or write, but decorated the outside of their cottage with ornaments, because he had had an innate sense of beauty. Even nowadays, as he worked, he, my teacher, would imagine his father standing in front of his picture. And he tried to paint in such a way that his father might say: ‘ Dobro , my son!’

I noticed all at once that tears were streaming from his grey watery eyes. I realised that his father was dead. Wanting to say something to cheer him up, I told him laboriously that I wanted to be like him, and deliberately I said ‘be’ and not ‘paint’.

He taught us for almost three years. In spite of my partiality for him, my artistic efforts and the fact that I was one of only three like-minded pupils in his class (even he won no converts) he only gave me a grade two for art on my report.

About a year before our school-leaving exam he disappeared from the classroom. I thought he was on sick-leave, but then a young supply-teacher arrived to take his place. She was accompanied by the headmistress, who told us in severe tones that Mr Ivandelič had been arrested and would be tried for acts hostile to the republic and to socialism. She tried to speak impersonally but she herself seemed disquieted by the news. She went on to tell us that what had happened should stir us to vigilance and serve as a warning that a cunning enemy could hide behind even the most enthusiastic words. The word enemy astounded me. I put up my hand. I wanted to ask if everything I had heard him say was no longer valid, but I could not utter a single word. I just stood there with my head bowed.

3

At the end of that winter (during that last school year I was elected — appointed, I ought to say — chairman of the class committee of the sole permitted youth organisation) the head-mistress summoned me to her office. She sat me down in a leather armchair intended for inspectors and other important visitors, and told me I enjoyed her confidence. She knew that I was a good, politically aware comrade and did not need to explain to me the complexity of the times we were living in. Enemies could breach our western frontier at any moment and attack our homeland. And they relied for this on the assistance of all opponents of socialism. Admittedly the latter had been crushed not long ago and some of them had indeed changed their attitudes, but there were others who had gone underground and were only waiting for a chance to infiltrate various important institutions and be ready to do damage when the opportunity arose. And it was our job to prevent it.

I nodded to say I had heard, understood and agreed.

She said that was the reason she had called me in. In a few months’ time we would be leaving school and in the places we went from here they would know nothing about us. Even those whose hostile attitudes were not in doubt would have no difficulty winning the confidence of others. To avoid anything of the kind happening, it was necessary to write a true report on each of us. Our teachers would make their reports, but they tended to know only one aspect of us, mostly to do with the subject they taught; besides which, many of those who taught us in the past had now left — had rightly left — and the new ones hadn’t yet had time to get to know us well enough.

Over the years, we pupils had come to know each other very well and were therefore well placed to make a just and truthful judgement of what each of us was truly like.