Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

The doorbell rang and immediately he recognised Oldřich’s voice from the front hall. This was one of the reasons he had come that evening, but although he listened out for it, her voice could not be heard.

‘You wanted to say something to me before the others arrived,’ he reminded Petr.

‘That’s right. I’m almost embarrassed to bother you again, but there’s no risk involved for you. Are you going to your cottage some time soon?’

‘Tomorrow, I expect.’

‘Do you think you could take some money to a girl who lives out that way?’ It was money for the wife of a student who was recently convicted. The student, who was unknown to him, had been sent down for some leaflets whose content had not been in the least inflammatory.

Petr pulled out an envelope from behind the crockery on the dresser. The green of a hundred-crown note was visible through the paper. ‘It’s only eight hundred.’

Adam stuffed the envelope in his breast pocket. Just recently he had been acquiring practical experience as a part-time currency messenger.

Meanwhile the guests had been congregating in the sitting room. He knew almost all of them. Many of them had been acquiring practical experience in all kinds of substitute employment — though not on a part-time basis, to be sure. They had been digging metro tunnels, washing shop windows, guarding warehouses or drilling wells, just to earn a living. From time to time, they would get together and act as if nothing had changed since the days when they worked in colleges and institutes.

He had indeed been through it all once before. Back in the fortress town, almost no one had been engaged in the work they had done before the war.

He said hello to Matěj and suppressed the urge to start a conversation with Oldřich about his wife. In the meantime, Petr had changed into a clean shirt and was busying himself spreading out his papers on the table. Now he put on his glasses and announced that he was going to read a chapter about manipulation from his latest book.

The barber who used to cut his hair on the ground floor of the barracks had been a professor of ancient languages in peace time. He would tell Adam stories about the Greek gods and enjoyed reciting Ovid to him. It was possible that after finishing his day’s work in the barber’s shop, it had been his custom to get together with other classical philologists or philosophers, who were working then as gardeners, cooks or maintenance men, and organise lectures. He had been too young at the time to have noticed. On the other hand, he could still remember how they had put on a performance of The Bartered Bride in the loft of the barracks. There had been no orchestra, of course, just harmonium accompaniment. Mařenka was sung by an elderly lady — apparently a former member of the Vienna Opera, though what she was employed as in the fortress, he did not know. He could still recall the exalted mood that had reigned in the gloom of the enclosed attic room, as if the singing itself was somehow opening those closed impassable gates.

‘What is distinctive about this new regime is that it derives its legitimacy neither from the will of the gods nor from other external symbols, but instead pretends to express the will of the people, the will of the individual whose subjugation as a free personality it is intent on achieving. For this very reason the hallmark of the regime is arrogance: it recognises no transcendent moral law and hence there are no actions it would not stoop to, or be ashamed of if it thought they served its aims.’

It was possible that the music had opened the gates as far as the soul was concerned, but our bodies continued to sink further into the depths. Did people ever really control their destiny? They certainly made every effort to. To the extent of handing their king over to the executioner when they thought he was trying to hinder their efforts. They had elected parliaments and taken pains over their choice of representatives, but again and again the parliaments would declare a war and leave people no less desperate or hopeless than before. Therefore they had tried getting rid of parliaments and establishing leaders enthusiastically in their place. And what had been the upshot? Even greater disaster.

It was worth asking whether the idea of a world in which people controlled their own destiny was only a foolish dream; quite simply a fable we like to tell ourselves about an imaginary paradise. If I were to accept that, then I might make a better job of taking vital decisions than I have so far. The trouble is I don’t want to accept it: that fable is rooted within me and has taken over my brain; it’s in my blood. I want to assert myself, to struggle; I want there to be ever greater justice in the world; that’s the reason why I studied law, it’s the reason why I do the things I do. The trouble is, bad laws are adopted somewhere higher up, and it’s left up to me to decide whether I accept this state of affairs and try people according to bad laws, while doing what I can to get round them a bit and lessen their impact, or whether I protest and attempt to prove the possibility of adopting better laws. Protest without any hope of my protest being heard, though in the certain knowledge that sooner or later I will provoke the legislators. Then not only will they remove me as a judge, I’ll also lose the opportunity to make any meaningful protest. At most it would be a gesture, and then the memory of a gesture. Perhaps one day it might encourage someone, or encourage their false hopes, more likely.

Maybe there was a flaw in this way of thinking. He ought to try to identify it, otherwise he’d never reach a decision on anything.

‘This new étatisme — I shall call it police étatisme because the police become its chief agent and support and in the end proclaim themselves to be the state and their interests to be the interests of the entire community — has created a new form of exploitation, which we might describe as intellectual exploitation.’ Petr looked up from his paper and took off his glasses. It looked as if the interval had arrived.

He helped himself to a sandwich and moved away to the open window. The sound of voices came from all around him. He overheard encouraging stories, all sorts of encouraging stories about how the present status quo could never be maintained and changes for the better were therefore inevitable. If only some of them were true the decline would be halted, the resurgence would begin again and paradise would be in sight after all. But this too brought to mind the days when he was in the fortress town. Every day parched souls would be refreshed by a shower of good news: the German front would be collapsing and twice a week the Allies would be making landings on the French coast. Hope never ceased to shine and its sunny rays accompanied the multitudes all the way to the ramps where they were selected for the gas chambers. The only thing that puzzled him was that some part of the hope had been fulfilled after all: the war had come to an end and the decline seemed to have been halted, and it really had seemed to him that he held his destiny in his own hands. Most likely it had been the greatest mistake of his life.

It was probably important to know who or what embodied one’s destiny at a given moment, whether king, party, God, leader or police. But the thing he’d like to know above all was how one should live in the knowledge that destiny is irreversible.

He suddenly became restless; there was no sense in his staying; he wouldn’t listen anyway.

At the corner of the street he found a telephone booth. Before entering it he looked back at Petr’s house. Oldřich was just coming out of the front gate. Fortunately he set off in the opposite direction.

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