Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Outside college hours, I associated most of all with Plach. There have been many occasions in the intervening years when I thought I once more caught sight of his undistinguished pugilist’s face (with its snub nose, which none of his opponents had yet managed to break) but it has always turned out to be his double.

I would help him with the subjects he found difficult; amazingly enough, they were geography and history. I used to go to his flat in an old house not far from Smíchov Cemetery. He occupied a spacious garret that served him as bed-sitting room, kitchen and, later, as a workshop. (At that time I never even wondered what sort of factory would send a young stonemason to study social sciences.) He still had some of the statues he had carved, set out on a scarlet-painted table. I considered the bust of the president very successful, as it resembled all the other busts that littered the world of officialdom in those days. A sculpture of a metalworker struck me as rather daring, as its proportions were visibly distorted: the hands out of proportion with the head, and the hammer out of proportion with the hands.

Outside the realms of geographical or historical study, Plach held my respect. His opinions astounded me with their tenacity. I regarded his calm and deliberate manner of speaking as a sign of virility. Now and then he would tell me something about himself. During the war, he had belonged to some underground organisation, then during the Prague Uprising he had fought on the barricades and actually destroyed a tank single-handed. He had then received a stomach wound and spent the rest of that spring in hospital. He even showed me the livid scar. He commented that the pigs of doctors had let the wound fester and it was a wonder he survived.

When he was recovered he had moved to Karlovy Vary in the frontier zone and worked there collecting scrap vehicles for some fellow who had been diddling him so much that they had quarrelled and parted. How old had he been at the time? Not very. Eighteen or thereabouts. Then they had persuaded him to go and work as a mechanic in a lace factory. There had been lots of German girls working there at the time. They had included some good-looking ones and he had been able to choose whichever he fancied, as they had thought they would be allowed to stay if they managed to hook him. But none of them had. Anyway he had always kicked them out afterwards. Then the wife of the national administrator had fallen for him in a big way. The husband had almost shot him with a rifle when he found him in his bedroom. But his administrative career had come to an end as well, and he had already spent more than a year in prison, as someone had exposed in time the way he was administering national property.

And what about the wife? Plach made a dismissive gesture. He had already forgotten her name, though not the name of the cognac she had feted him with.

Oddly enough, in his stories, no one was ever mentioned as being close to him in any way. As if he had no friends, as if no one had conceived him or given birth to him, and he had been thrust alone into the world by impassive forces, and had had no option from the very start but to fight for survival.

There was one person, however, he did refer to rather more favourably — although I might have only imagined it: his master mason. The old gaffer, as he called him, still lived not far from Plach’s house in the direction of Košíře. When they had confiscated his workshop two years earlier, he had used his age as an excuse — he had been over seventy then — and ostensibly given up the trade, but in fact, my friend declared, he was still carving stone angels in a toolshed in the backyard of his house.

As the exam season approached, we were joined by Josef Nimmrichter. He had never shown any interest in me before, but I had not noticed him to have much contact with anyone else either. He never had anything to say for himself during seminars. If he was directly asked a question, he would slowly stand up, turn his small head, surmounting gorilla-like shoulders, first to one side then to the other, his low, pale brow would wrinkle and his little grey eyes would stare into space; then, in a high falsetto voice, he would start to weave an endless, convoluted sentence whose sense would sooner or later elude even the most attentive listener. It was impossible to either agree or disagree with him. Nor could one take up from where he left off; what he said had the merciless finality of death. People preferred not to ask him for any explanation.

He would arrive in the garret room with a shabby shopping bag containing a notepad and at least half a dozen bottles of beer. He would join us at the table and watch us as we indicated things on the map to each other. Now and then he would have a swig of beer from the bottle and not utter a word. In a little while, as if weary from observing us, he would withdraw into himself and his attention became fixed on something unspecified outside his present surroundings. Once he had finished his last bottle he would emerge from his gloomy taciturnity and start to ask questions. Where was he to find the Arctic? Why wasn’t the Arctic next door to the Antarctic, seeing they had the same climate? Why did they call Nero a cruel barbarian? Wasn’t he right the way he dealt with the Christians? Had we noticed that the economics professor smiled in a queer way when he was talking about the Five-Year Plan? He could do with a couple of press-ups too!

That was his cherished fantasy. All those who had done something to earn his displeasure would be lined up in a row and he’d start giving the orders for press-ups: down, two, three, up, two, three, down… until at last they broke down, softened and recognised their depravity, the error of their ways and the blindness of their attitudes.

He hailed from a village in southern Moravia. He said his father had been a coachman on a church estate, and as a child he himself had acted as server for some dirty old fat priest up to the day when he discovered that the filthy swine was assaulting his little sister. He had told his father and his father had waylaid the priest after mass and beaten him up. But afterwards it was his father who was convicted, of course. He was only a coachman and no one could give a damn that his daughter had been shamed. His mother had almost gone off her head with shame and they had to put her in the asylum. An hour from their village there was a Premonstratensian monastery and the monks had suppliers in different towns who used to get hold of virgins for them, preferably girls from poor families, or orphans whom no one was looking for, and the monks would thrust them into underground dungeons without windows so not a sound could escape and no one could hear the screams of the poor victims whom they chained to iron beds so they could indulge their desires on them. When they chucked the monks out of the monastery after the war and opened up those cellars, they had discovered a pile of children’s skeletons with broken limbs, hands pierced with nails, fingers crushed and some of the skulls still had gags shoved in the holes where the mouths had been. My fellow-student dwelt on the ghastly details, and his almost womanish voice became even shriller as he thrust red-hot pokers and blacksmith’s tongs into women’s wombs, tearing out the flesh, and then all of a sudden he would be back with us in the present. His eyes, which during his narration seemed to float out of their sockets, would abruptly start to move again and search our faces. I would be terrified each time that happened lest he find something inappropriate in my countenance: lest he decipher from it my church membership, my insecurity or my inadequacy, for which he would exact punishment.

Of his recent past I knew very little. He said he had worked as a prison warder, but had had to leave the job on health grounds. He never spoke about it and I hadn’t the courage to ask him. All I could grasp was that he was bound by a strict secrecy which shrouded that entire area of his life.