Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

More and more people were piling into the hall; some of them knew Honza and he introduced them to her. It had never occurred to her that he sometimes moved in such circles; she had tended to believe rather too much in his total solitariness.

They sat not far from the stage in a corner opposite the door: he on one side, and on the other a ruddy-faced youth with a broken nose and powerful shoulders. His shirt was painted with enormous flowers and he had a skull embroidered on his tie. She felt conspicuous in her off-the-peg clothes. It must have been obvious to everyone that she didn’t belong. She also noticed a girl wearing a wreath of myrtle in her hair. It must have been her who had got married: she had a bouquet of white roses in front of her on the table.

An obtrusive smell of hot dogs came from the kitchen. She didn’t feel at ease there. She was sure Adam would only give the children a piece of bread and salami and no vegetables. And he’d let them rush around the flat until ten o’clock or later. She ought to call him again.

At that moment they started to play. The torrent of sound deafened her. She watched the pale drummer rocking his enormous body back and forwards as he furiously pounded his two drums. His long hair flashed across his face.

The music seemed to her wild and unfamiliar, with complex harmonies, and there were moments when it verged on the atonal. She didn’t know what to compare it with. She loved music, though she had no great musical understanding; she had never properly learned to read it and for that reason had been obliged to give up the piano. Bach’s compositions both thrilled her and filled her with calm and rapture, and she loved folk songs because they aroused in her a nostalgia for the lost past, when, it seemed to her, relationships were all more sincere and feelings more genuine.

The first piece came to an end. She was deafened by an explosion of shouts, whistles, stamping and applause.

‘How did you like it?’

‘I don’t know yet. Give me time.’ (He asked like Adam. Men demanded constant congratulation for things they took to be their achievement.) ‘I’m not used to it yet.’

Her reticence seemed to disappoint him. ‘They’re fantastic,’ he declared and squeezed her hand.

A singer in jeans stepped up to the microphone; his shirt was open at the chest. She was unable to understand the words and was aware only of the melody. The singer fell silent for a moment, but his body went on moving in rhythm, and then the guitars fell silent too and the enormous drummer seemed to grow bigger still, his arms flickered and his eyes stared somewhere into the void over the heads of the audience. She sensed the flash of the sticks and the drumbeats deep within her; she was swaying from side to side unconsciously, losing awareness of her body; she was flooded by an ecstasy that she had known only at rare moments of total abandon during lovemaking.

Suddenly silence fell. She glanced at him but his eyes didn’t register her. Were he to get up and take her out, somewhere nearby where she could still hear the sounds from the hall, they could make love there to the sound of the drums.

He leaned over to her. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed.

She turned round and caught sight of blue uniforms thrusting their way into the hall through the open door: just like frantic beetles; terrifying messengers from a half-forgotten world. She hadn’t yet realised what was happening. The hall suddenly filled with shouts, and the banging and scraping of chairs. Someone stepped up to the microphone and shouted to the audience to stay calm. The performance had been properly announced and permission obtained.

She turned back to him. He was pale, as pale as the time she took him by car to the hospital. But a bluish vein stood out on his forehead. ‘I’ll kill them; I’ll kill the bloody bastards!’

‘Don’t let yourselves be provoked.’ It was now the turn of the singer in the open shirt. ‘Don’t let…’ He fell silent. Maybe they had switched off his microphone.

And suddenly she found herself in the world she had been hearing about that afternoon. There they were, ready to drag him off to a dark cell without windows or light.

He was capable of fighting, as, clearly, was everyone else in the hall.

‘You’re staying with me,’ she said in sudden panic and gripped his hand. ‘You brought me here and you’ll take me away from here!’

She dragged him to the window. She looked out into the darkness. But before she could make out who the dark silhouettes outside were, she was blinded by the light of a torch. She covered her eyes and could feel her panic give way to a feeling of bitter resentment. How dare they? And why should they?

Someone tugged roughly at her shoulder from behind. She turned round. A small, freckled face — wisps of ginger hair sticking out from beneath a police cap — was staring at her with little blue eyes, above which the eyebrows were almost invisible. ‘Your papers,’ it said in a shrill tenor voice.

She dug her nails into the palms of her hands in her effort to control herself. ‘I would ask you to be civil, or I shall report you!’ she said.

His tiny blue eyes with no eyelashes gazed at her in amazement. And then he, too, maybe, noticed she was different from the rest and was slightly at a loss for a moment. ‘Show me your papers, please!’ he ordered. ‘And don’t waste my time!’

She opened her handbag with trembling fingers; she was unable to control their shaking. What did those letters actually contain? What if they took her away and confiscated that envelope containing letters whose content she didn’t even know? She watched him laboriously copy out her name. ‘What have I done wrong?’ she asked.

‘Why were you trying to escape through the window?’

‘I wasn’t trying to escape through the window!’

‘We’ll see about that,’ he said returning her papers. ‘You may leave this way.’ He indicated the door to the kitchen.

She still had time to notice the bride take her flowers out of their vase, bow to one of the uniformed men and present him with one of the roses. He had apparently received no instructions for such an eventuality and so accepted it. The bride bowed to another policeman, but her flowers were torn off her from behind.

She made her way between the kitchen tables. On a wide work-top lay finely chopped onions and a tall pile of salami slices, alongside enormous jars of gherkins, pickled mixed vegetables and mustard. There were cooking pots giving off steam. She looked back again. He was following her.

Would they send a report about her to the library? What if she was dismissed because of it?

They left through the back door. In the narrow street, which was painfully bright from floodlights, she saw two rows of uniformed men. Vehicles were parked at the end of the street: two dark buses and several cars which were obviously intended for the transport of prisoners.

What if they arrested them now? Adam would probably not know what had happened to her. In fact he didn’t know where she had gone. No one knew. She could disappear into the depths somewhere, somewhere deeper than the cellars and no one would find out.

And what would happen to the children? She was seized by the horrifying thought that They might arrive at the flat as unexpectedly as they had arrived here, pour in like a relentless tide and take away her children. She would never set eyes on them again. She would be cruelly punished for having betrayed them, for having abandoned the family home, for not standing by them when they needed her.

She walked between the rows of police unable to make out individual faces; instead they merged into a single, unreal, scowling waxwork figure. ‘I want to go home,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Oh, Lord, let me get home.’