Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

I can also recall bonfires at the edge of the forest or on damp verges, and our warming ourselves at them in company with homeless strangers, roasting potatoes or toasting bread. They used to offer us home-made spirits to drink and the gypsies would sing songs whose words we couldn’t understand.

Then my brother came with the news that there was big money to be made in the Brdy Forest where they were felling trees infested with bark beetle. I rode off to the place on a Thursday evening. I was allocated sleeping accommodation in a semi-derelict wooden hut without any sanitation. I recall waking up in the middle of the night and trying to cover a broken window with a blanket so as to stop the rain falling on my bed. I then worked with a couple of elderly gypsy women and some Slovak re-emigrants from Romania stripping the bark from the tree-trunks. Where the trees had been recently felled the work was easy and the bark would roll off in long (and sweetly scented) strips, but on others it would cling as if nailed on, and my hands would bleed from the clumsy, blunt scraper. The gypsy women would shout things at me that might have been friendly or even teasing: from time to time they would come to fetch stripped bark for burning and as they bent over they would expose their dark, distended breasts to me.

On Saturday afternoon, my brother arrived. They gave the two of us an enormous saw and an axe, and a frowning forester — who, I discovered years later, was a distant relation of my future wife’s — showed us how to fell a tree and where to cut the trunk so that it fell in the desired direction. So we worked there until nightfall and onwards again from first light the following day. We felled, trimmed and stripped five trees, if my memory serves me right. We worked non-stop with two short meal breaks. They brought us the meals out to the forest and I can’t remember any more what it was like, but when the frowning forester came to work out how much work we’d done he announced to us that we hadn’t even earned enough to cover the cost of the meals and we each owed him two crowns. My brother started yelling, waving his arms and abusing him, but the forester just rolled up his tape-measure impassively; shouting and even threats were things he was used to. Then my brother suddenly started to sob. He sat down on the stump that we had only just created — my brother was still frail and skinny in spite of the double portions of dumplings with tomato sauce I had been bringing him from the canteen — his head in his hands and his slender, almost girlish, shoulders shaking with sobs. And when he finally stood up and we were about to abandon this ungrateful battlefield in contempt, the forester came over to us — after all, he was a relation of my so far unencountered wife — and we each had a ten-crown note stuffed into our pocket.

3

After the holidays our material situation improved somewhat. They did not allow my brother to study, but he managed to get on a training course as a radio mechanic, and being dextrous, was able to make some extra money from the start by repairing people’s radio-sets.

I was offered a job as an academic assistant in the faculty library. It was a good library with many thousands of books, although only a few dozen titles were in regular circulation. I received a salary of two hundred crowns a month and my duties were very light — merely to enter the new titles in the catalogue each week and spend half a day, twice a week, looking for requested books and putting returned books back on the shelves. That left me quite a lot of time to myself and I would spend it wandering among the shelves taking out dusty volumes at random, opening them and leafing through them. Sometimes, when one would catch my imagination, I would take it back to my desk and start reading it.

In this way I read all sorts of books, most of whose titles and authors have long since gone from my mind, but they included a well-worn copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan published during the last war, Weyr’s Theory of Law, Kallab’s Introduction to the Study of Juristic Methods , Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which someone had apparently classified as a legal work); however, those were books that no one ever requested. Who could possibly have had any need for reflections on pure law or the supreme legal norm? Who would have had the time to devote themselves to those superb, but abstract achievements of the human intellect when knowledge of a very different kind was now required?

That year, we had to submit our subsidiary theses. The topic I had chosen had rather a long-winded title: Czech Justice in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century as the Legal Expression of the Ideology of Feudal Absolutism. I had not particularly wanted to tackle a historical topic, but had been absent when the topics were given out, so was left with no more interesting choice.

Happily the theses were not expected to contribute anything of academic value nor demonstrate intellectual effort. The author was merely supposed to show that he knew the main authorities and could evaluate them correctly in the light of the new legal teaching. I was determined to toss off my thesis as fast as possible. I read a couple of studies on the restored territorial administrations and the importance of the court of appeal. And then, in the course of my library duties, I happened to come across some recently reprinted entries from the ‘black books’ in which the statements of tortured prisoners were recorded — the collection had actually been compiled by a philologist not a jurist — and started reading it. The book was quite different from any of those I had studied so far for my topic: these were not the words of lawyers, of those who defended or made the laws, but instead the words of those who broke them. By and large, the voice of the accused sounds more human than the voice of the lawgiver, as the first of them is defending his life while the other is defending an abstract justice. Now I was reading the words of actual murderers, or of desperate wretches who had done nothing but steal the honey from a hive or poach the fish out of a pond; seduced servant-girls and milkmaids who had given birth in secret, and who, in order to escape disgrace or threatened by their lovers, had killed their new-born babies; spellbound women who cut off the genitals or fingers of hanged men, cut fringes off altar cloths, pulled nails out of gallows, picked herbs at full moon, made magic ointments and brewed potions to arouse love or charm away a pregnancy; and for it they were hanged or beheaded; women were buried alive and pierced with stakes, usually in the presence of spectators who were more interested in the bloody spectacle than in justice.

As I read, I gradually realised that these were not the delusions of a demented brain but a record of things that had actually happened. A man hung from a ladder with his limbs dislocated while a torturer stood searing his sides, and he had said words which I was now reading centuries later.

So far I had only learned things; I had mugged up on the history of legal ideologies and the ideas of Plato’s Republic just like those of the school of natural law, or the four features of dialectics, or Vyshinsky’s theory of analogy — without relating any of it to myself or my life.

I had studied away unquestioningly, without it ever occurring that it might have anything to do with me. Now I was appalled. What paths had justice taken to get to where it was? What were the laws governing our coexistence? Why did we condemn one form of cruelty and condone another? Why did we extol one form of obscurantism and make another a capital offence?

I pictured that enormous band of bailiffs, scriveners, judges, assessors, executioners, executioners’ henchmen, catchpolls, soldiers, gendarmes, confessors, informers, troopers, policemen, prosecutors and judges all united in the effort to protect humanity from malefactors, or at least from those they designated as malefactors. They had spilled so much blood that no one will ever measure it, but none, apart from rare exceptions, were ever called to account, because unlike the rest they had been able to cloak their craving for violence in the right kind of authority. And for the first time I realised that I too would be one of that band some day, although so far I had not had the faintest inkling of its actual nature.