Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

The faculty building stood on the embankment and from the windows of the west wing there was a view of the Castle and an even clearer view of the torso of the monstrous monument that grew there during the course of my studies and which they knocked down shortly after I graduated. The south wing almost joined on to the conservatoire and on warm summer evenings when the windows were open, we could hear endless repetitions of piano studies as well as the bellowing of trombones, interspersed with choral singing. The next street to the east marked the beginning of the Jewish Quarter with the cemetery and the Old-New Synagogue, which I was aware of but never set foot inside in all the four years.

When they erected the building they took it as one article of faith that architecture should be modern and airy, and as another that the legal system should be founded on principles of justice, freedom, equality before the law, and harmony. Everything had changed since those days — only the building remained. And in order to conceal its true aim they had hung up in the entrance hall a red banner with a slogan extolling socialist law as ‘an auxiliary in the construction of the socialist homeland’.

I vividly recall the sense of apprehension that gripped me as I first entered the faculty’s spacious entrance hall.

I stood there surrounded on all sides by groups of unknown people. I caught snatches of conversations and unintelligible sentences. What discouraged me most of all was that they at least knew something of what I was totally ignorant of: the subject of my new area of study. Once again I was about to find myself in my old situation: the only non-initiate amongst the initiated, though now bereft of a martyr’s halo, with no hope of sympathy or indulgence.

My sense of unsuitability for my chosen area of study was so powerful that it continued to give me nightmares years later. Again and again I would find myself before a panel of gowned examiners, incapable of answering the most basic questions: ‘What is the object of law? What is natural law? What is material law?’ I had no idea. But gentlemen, I would say, seeing an escape route though also aware of the ineptitude of what I was saying in the light of what I had just proved — I’ve already graduated, you don’t have too examine me any more. And then the examiners would burst into surly laughter; on one occasion, I recall, they pulled out musical instruments from under their long gowns: trumpets, flutes and trombones, and in order to seal my ignominy, they played a fanfare. That dream continued to hound me even when I had come to realise that my ignorance of the basics of law was the best grounding I could have had for my course; after all, some of my teachers knew no more than I did, and if they did, they made an effort to forget it, in order to make space in their minds for the new, revolutionary constructions.

My new colleagues differed from my previous colleagues and comrades both in appearance and in spirit. Their clothes seemed to me unusually elegant and in most cases their minds were more on football, the pub and the girls’ halls of residence, than on the questions which I regarded as important and worthy of interest. I felt isolated among them by virtue of my views and my past. People who have suffered rejection tend to return to that experience over and over, whatever reasons they find to do so.

There were also practical reasons for my solitude in those days: I just didn’t have the time to make friends; I had to earn my keep. About six months after my father’s arrest, my mother called my brother and myself in and asked us through tears what our plans were. She said that she would be taking a job, of course, though she knew it would be the death of her, because she could scarcely drag herself up to the first floor. She would go out to work none the less; she could hardly go on living off Uncle Gustav who was himself an invalid and anyway, she wanted us both to be able to finish our studies. Hanuš, who was just fourteen, declared without a second’s thought that there was no need for him to study. He suggested that he should go off and live in some apprentice hostel, thereby not costing us a penny. On the contrary, he would earn some money during his very first year, particularly if he went to train as a miner. I don’t know whether he meant that suggestion seriously but he only managed to provoke a still more explosive fit of weeping in my mother. It was then that I declared with a sense of importance that I would take over the running of the household. I decided that I would eat in the student canteen twice a day and that my brother would have school lunches. I promised that I would bring bread from the canteen and sometimes maybe soup. I said we would both apply for student grants and would both take weekend jobs, as well as finding holiday employment, naturally. Maybe in addition I would manage to find some odd jobs during my afternoons. I then totted up our expected income and expenditure and was surprised to discover it balanced on paper. The purpose of those calculations was above all to appease my mother. I didn’t believe for one moment that I would receive a grant, let alone my brother, just because our father was in prison. But I was wrong. They awarded us grants and moreover a social worker called who helped Mother apply for a special allowance for my brother, since he had not yet reached school-leaving age. And every single evening just after seven I would dash to the student canteen with an old oilcloth satchel. By then the cooks all knew me and knew the poor old battered mess tin, still black from the times Father had boiled soup and tea in it over a fire during his previous imprisonment, when he was being marched through Germany. The cooks treated me generously. Usually I would come away not only with bread and soup but also buttered potatoes or dumplings with gravy poured over them.

Before the canteen closed for the weekend, the cooks would give away any left-over buns or fruit bread. I would stand a little way off with my eyes glued to the low hatch for fear of arriving too late and missing the precious booty. I don’t know whether I was aware at the time how the pattern of my life was repeating itself: that docile queuing at a kitchen hatch, waiting like a dog for scraps. But my subconscious apparently registered it. It registered not just the congruence of the situations but also the difference between them, the marked change for the better — as far as the leftovers were concerned. It explains why my situation did not depress me but, quite the opposite, filled me with a sense of satisfaction at my expertise in coping with life’s adversities.

2

In point of fact my expertise was all self-deception. I hadn’t the faintest idea how money could be made in the society in which I lived. I still had too much faith in all those public statements: not the ones about justice alone, but the others too, about the generous rewards for honest toil.

And so, impelled by undying hope like two prospectors with gold-fever, my brother and I took one job after another. I remember loading beet one Sunday in autumn on a distant state farm. We each of us earned ten crowns for the whole day’s work, but as a bonus, we were allowed to go to a nearby orchard and pick as many plums as we could carry. That was our most successful venture. On another occasion, we helped with the threshing at some other farm. The corn was stacked in a rick that was beginning to rot and we had to fork it off laboriously. I was stationed by the thresher until I got an attack of hay fever and others had to take my place while I sat gasping at the foot of the corn rick, in despair at the earnings I was losing.

We would set off for distant destinations on our bikes, or our earnings would not have even covered our transport costs. It meant we saw quite a bit of the country and what stuck in my memory at the time were deserted villages, unreaped fields and overgrown meadows; the dismal sight of abandoned dung-covered farmyards full of wrecked vehicles and rusting farm machinery; houses with dilapidated roofs, the glass gone in the windows, and half-naked gypsy children racing around in the mud. Most of all, I remember the mud, seemingly infinite quantities of it, that we would have to wade through on our trips out and back.