Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘He won’t. Why should he?’

‘You didn’t even have a look at the children.’

‘I did. Before you came in!’

Thump. Thump. (Oh, goodness, why doesn’t either of them feel like sleeping?)

Thump!

‘Is he going to walk around like that all night long?’

‘I don’t know. How should I know?’

‘You brought him in here!’

‘That’s neither here nor there.’

Above them there was the sound of water running into a wash-basin or somewhere else. Thump. Thump. The bed.

‘I love you,’ he whispered.

‘Why?’ she asked wearily.

‘People sometimes depress me,’ he said. ‘I get the feeling that everyone is ready to betray his fellow or harm him somehow. I know you to be different.’ He pressed her to him and caressed her breasts with his fingertips.

She felt she was falling. It was an insistent awareness of falling through pure, empty space. She should cry out or try to catch on to something. But she remained silent even when she realised, painfully, that he was entering her body. Surprisingly she felt nothing: neither shame nor remorse, but no pleasure either; just a total emptiness that engulfed her and pervaded her.

He asked: ‘Didn’t you enjoy it?’

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

If only I had a trace of my father’s singlemindedness. When he was only seven years old, he apparently connected some uninsulated wires to a lamp and used the electricity to drive a set of cog wheels. He could have killed himself in the process, or anyone else who touched the wires, but amazingly, nothing happened to him, and his little motor worked.

With his phenomenal memory for names, numbers and figures, my father knew what he wanted to achieve, and he knew he wanted to achieve more than anyone else. And achieving more, in his system of values, meant knowing more and working more.

But what about me? What was I good for? What was my ambition?

Right back at the time of my lengthy illness, my father bought me a (no doubt rare and expensive) set of miniature electrical devices. It included a number of resistances, a telegraph key, a buzzer, a rheostat and a DC motor. The components could be connected together in various different combinations. The telegraph key could be used to operate the buzzer, start the motor or ring the bell. Out of love and respect for my father, I made a conscientious effort to find some pleasure in building circuits, but to no avail.

I tried to find pleasure in mathematics, at least, and indeed I outshone the others and did get some enjoyment from working out a not-too-sophisticated cryptic solution to a school trigonometry exercise — but maths remained a foreign medium to me. I lacked the sort of imagination that enables one to transform the material world into numbers or (vice versa) see the world in them.

I had no idols of my own — only borrowed ones. I bought myself a small bust of Lenin; it was one of the first things bought with my pocket money, but up to that moment I had never read a single line of the man’s writings, I only knew I had to revere him if I believed in Father’s improved world order.

That was the only thing 1 knew I wanted: an improved world order, my ideal state, to change reality to look like my island where reason held sway, where I ruled alone for the good of everyone, where I had eliminated all the inequality, depravity and immorality of the present-day world, along with want and unhappiness and all other untoward phenomena, and created a realm of love, trust, peace and happiness.

As soon as my friend Mirek had returned my manuscript I mentioned my exemplary composition to my father. Father had little spare time in those days and spent less and less time with the family, coming home only one day a week. So we scarcely saw each other. He took the exercise book containing my text from me, leafed through it — I couldn’t even tell whether he’d noticed the title — and then put it away in his briefcase.

I waited impatiently for his opinion, and would rush home from school each day, convinced that Father would let me know what he thought by letter.

The following week he arrived home, kissed Mother as usual, asked Hanuš and myself our news from school and then started to talk about his own affairs. They had entrusted him with setting up a new research factory. It was a grandiose project at a time when so many specialists had fled abroad, and of those who remained, some had been gaoled and others labelled as unreliable. Father complained that he had been assigned youngsters who were incapable, unwilling, insolent, ambitious, vain and only eager for power and money. He said they were hatching plots and forming cliques, in opposition to him and the handful of people who were capable of anything and wanted to get on with their work in peace.

After lunch I was unable to suppress my impatience any longer and I asked him about it. Father fetched his briefcase, took my exercise book out of it and said that many similar things had already been written. It might be better for me to concentrate on something more substantial. Most of all, I would be advised to read a lot and improve my mind.

So what should I concentrate on? What could be more substantial than reflecting on how best to organise human society?

He agreed, but told me that the organisation of society and politics were now a science. I would have to study a great deal. Gone were the days when people could just dream noncommittally about ideal societies. He did not want me to turn into a mere windbag like those youngsters he was surrounded with.

So what if I went on to study politics? He shrugged his shoulders. It was up to me what I wanted to study.

I had no difficulty in passing my interview for the political science faculty.

It was a strange sort of college. Most of the professors were not much older than myself. Their lectures were all impassioned affairs, irrespective of whether they were called atheism, Marxism-Leninism or logic, and at first I was enthralled. What a marvellously convincing picture of the world it presented us with. A weird and splendid lunar landscape. A sea of luminosity on the one side, the Mare tenebris on the other. Freezing cold craters and sun-warmed plains. One could not lose one’s way in such a landscape, nor hesitate which side to choose…

The way I see it nowadays, our teachers carefully concealed from us everything that had happened in the social sciences since the death of those they regarded as the unchallengeable authorities. We lived in the deep shadow of the idols of social revolution, they were our measure of everything. Trapped within the past century, we spoke their language and solved their extinct dilemmas.

There were at least a hundred of us studying ‘social sciences’ in our year, but we were divided up into several smaller groups within which we were supposed to fraternise, and assist each other with consciousness-raising and study. We would go as a group to the cinema and exhibitions, sing and chant slogans at the May Day rally, and at demonstrations against the Korean war we would yell ‘Go home!’ at the Americans (of whom we had none); we took part in labour brigades in the fields, we attended interminable meetings. And we would all address each other informally using first names or alternatively ‘Comrade!’ I was entranced. I entered into the spirit I knew from literature — I saw myself as a member of a large family whose links were far stronger than any blood relationship. Even at moments of hardship in my life, all I needed to do was call out and a like-minded person would answer: a comrade, who was striving for the same noble goals as I. Could there be anything more noble in this life, could anyone feel happier than I?

Many of my fellow-students were already married. The older and more staid among them astounded me with their self-confidence and assurance. They didn’t hesitate to argue with our teachers for whom I had hitherto maintained a mandatory respect.