Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

No one shouted me clown, and my interrogated fellow-pupil, instead of rebuffing me, quietly replied that if I had in mind the time he happened to attend a meeting, he had only gone there as a guest.

With the feelings of a hunter who had shot into a bush and hit his prey by luck, I asked him how often he had attended those meetings and why, and what attitude he had adopted to the things he had heard there. I repeated my questions while he started, in a faltering voice that became quieter and quieter, to give evasive and contrite answers. He was lost, he could no longer remove the stigma of having belonged somewhere he ought not to have belonged. He apologised for something for which it was improper to apologise, thereby admitting that he knew his actions to have been improper in the first place.

The last of the three whose future I had decided to thwart was the best pupil in the class. I don’t think even our teachers liked her, though they could count on her rattling off the correct answer every time, in her monotonous voice.

She spent her time amongst us as a loner; she never made friends with anyone as far as I recall. I would even go so far as to say she found contact with others intolerable. None the less, either from lack of imagination or in an effort to ingratiate herself with her teachers, she had written on the compulsory questionnaire that she wanted to teach herself.

I informed her that we (the class tribunal) were prepared to recommend her for further education, but not teacher-training. She gazed at me in amazement (she wore spectacles whose bottle thickness lent her eyes even more horrified proportions) and declared that she definitely wanted to be a teacher.

I replied that we were unable to give our consent to it. And she, alone out of the three, actually asked a question. ‘Why?’

I said that we did not think she was suited to that profession.

She burst into tears. She shattered the silence of the classroom with loud sobs, and her fellow-pupils, who until that moment had probably shared my opinion, found themselves forced to support her and join her in her hatred of me. Then she started to scream at me hysterically, telling me to leave her alone, that she knew very well why I hated her, why I wanted to ruin her life. She loved children, she shouted, and wanted to devote herself to them. After that she just sobbed. Now the headmistress took a hand in the proceedings for the first time and told us to continue, saying that the teaching staff would deal with her case and decide who was suited to which profession, so I quickly read through the remaining five or six sheets of paper. Then everyone stood up. I was expecting someone at least to come up to me (after all, we had been indulgent towards so many of them) with a word of thanks or perhaps criticism, but they walked out past me as if I had the plague, or more accurately, as if I didn’t exist. The headmistress noisily ushered out the hiccuping guest and the teachers left without comment. Even colleague Švehla made himself scarce and I — only now conscious that my hands were trembling — returned my papers to their file and put the file back in my bag, before being the last to leave the classroom.

5

About three or four days later (in the course of them the others started treating me more or less as usual again, which put my mind at rest and confirmed me in my conviction that I was a fair judge), Vlastirnil Polák came and asked me if I would spare him a few moments.

I was full of good will and affability. So we set off together in the direction of his home near the church of St Francis. I listened to my companion, as he tried (though the matter suddenly seemed abstract and trifling) to explain that he had never been a member of that organisation, as I had accused him of being, that he’d only attended two or three meetings and afterwards he’d given it up because it was always too noisy and they spent too much time on politics which he didn’t enjoy — and anyway he had only gone there on account of Marie. Surely I knew he had been going out with Marie, he asked, and I gave no reply, as I never willingly admitted there was something I didn’t know.

Then he suddenly blurted out that he was sure the accusation hadn’t come from me, because I had no way of knowing he had been at those meetings, and even if I’d known about it, I had no score to settle and no reason to use it against him. Who knew he’d been at those meetings? Why, Marie, of course! And he asked me in amazement whether I couldn’t see the connection. I couldn’t, as I was unaware that Marie was now engaged to Švehla, and I couldn’t even understand the connection when he told me how his erstwhile friend had stolen his girl, the reason being that I had no idea at the time that hatred can be motivated, not only by the feeling we have been wronged, but also by the feeling we have wronged someone else.

By now we were standing in front of the house where he lived and he invited me in. I hesitated. I was shy of entering a strange flat and I was certainly afraid of meeting his parents. But there was no way I could let him think I was afraid to stand by what I had done, and so I followed him inside.

He unlocked the door. I knew nothing about his family apart from the few facts that each of us was obliged to enter on that questionnaire. (Father former civil servant, now retired, mother housewife.) I walked gingerly on the clean carpet. He opened one of the doors and we entered a little bedroom which had apparently been his since childhood, for everything had remained small-scale and brightly coloured: a table, chairs and a cupboard, on which an enormous teddy-bear still sat. But in front of the teddy-bear, clean and white as if it had just been brought from the shop, a plaster bust of Lenin was enthroned. I gawped at that sculpture and as he became aware of the object of my attention, he blushed and asked me whether I might like to take a look at his bookshelf. He opened the cupboard, and there in a neat row stood his books, painstakingly covered in yellow paper and with titles and numbers written on their spines. He took out one volume after another — they were mostly medicine or chemistry — and quickly said something about each. He told me his greatest interest was in medical chemistry and he wanted to make it his career. And he opened a door into some sort of grey cubby-hole, which immediately exuded an unpleasant animal smell. I was able to see a space so small that there was only room for two UNRRA boxes and a small table with test-tubes, beakers and a hypodermic syringe. He lifted the lid of one of the boxes and I caught sight of several white mice running around on a layer of sawdust at the bottom. He told me he practised on them and conducted experiments. He pulled one of the mice out of the box, picked up the hypodermic with the other hand and told me he would demonstrate to me anaesthesia using procaine, but at that moment, his mother entered and he quickly put the mouse back and introduced me to her. (Only later did I guess that she had been expecting me, and that they had agreed not only on his bringing me home, but also on what would be said and done during my visit.) She told me she was pleased I had come, though she had imagined someone rather different.

I didn’t know what to reply or why she had imagined someone different and what sort of person she had imagined me to be (probably like some kind of wild animal, instead of a stripling with tousled hair and elbow patches on my coat). Worst of all I had not imagined her at all; had not given a single thought to her when I was spouting about her son. But here she stood — a strange woman with a fine, transparent — almost girlish — complexion and thick white hair, and she was asking me whether she might offer me coffee, or maybe I preferred tea. Once more we walked along the passage with its scrupulously clean carpet and entered a room that was their sitting-cum-dining room. The walls were hung with enormous showy pictures in golden frames and the china-cabinet contained sparkling porcelain, along with a single silver bowl and a vase with Chinese ornaments. At a black desk, in a three-wheeled invalid chair, there sat a bald, sallow little man with a ginger moustache and small active eyes, who straight away came forward to greet me. His father. Only now did I notice that on the desk there stood another bust, identical this time to the one I had at home, right down to the colour. I sat down as I was bid. His father welcomed me in the manner reserved for friends whom one has not seen in a long time, or opponents one is seeking to win over. Then he asked whether I had already seen Vlastimil’s little creatures. He quickly answered for me that of course I had. And then the man asked whether it was true that I had suffered in a camp during the war, and without waiting for a reply he declared that it must have been an awful experience, that it was a terrible world that wreaked vengeance on children and could subject them to torture.