Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘You made a really good job of that one.’

‘You can take it, if you like it.’

‘Thank you. I’ll put it under the glass on my desk-top at work.’ He stroked her hair and then his son’s and went off to his own room.

He was right not to have phoned her. He liked his home — and it would not take much to destroy its fragile structure. He hoped that so far he had not endangered it.

Just before midnight he made up both beds. On his wife’s bed he left a note saying:

The children are all right. I hope you are too. Sleep well!

It was still dark when he awoke. There was no need to look at the clock. He was able to guess the time at whatever hour of the day. It was three in the morning. He realised he was still alone in the room. To make sure, he reached out to the next bed, but it was empty and cold. His fingers touched the note on her pillow. He was more surprised than alarmed. He got up and had a look in all the rooms. In the kitchen, he drank a glass of water and as he was returning to the bedroom, he heard the sound of familiar footsteps in the passage outside. The footsteps halted in front of the door. He imagined her searching through her handbag in tiredness and desperation, then at last the key found the lock and the door slowly opened.

She switched on the light, caught sight of him right in front of her and cried out as if she’d seen a ghost.

‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘What happened to you?’

She came up to him, laid her head on his shoulder and started to sob.

‘Did something happen?’

‘Haven’t you been asleep? You’ve been waiting all this time? I love you, Adam. I do love you,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Pretty late,’ he said. ‘You’ve been out with your friends all this time?’

‘No, I wasn’t with them at all. I lied to you, Adam.’

‘Where were you then?’

‘With Honza,’ she said. ‘I was at his place, but it was the last time. It’s over between us, Adam, I’ll never see him again.’

‘What’s over?’

‘Let’s not stand out here.’

They went into the kitchen: he in his pyjamas, she in her evening dress of dark-brown silk. Her eyes were red. From smoke, or maybe from weeping.

‘Adam,’ she said determinedly, ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time, but never had the opportunity.’

‘Hold it there a moment.’ He went off to the bathroom. He had never owned either a bathrobe or a dressing-gown. So he put on a jumper and some trousers.

‘You got dressed?’

‘Shouldn’t I have?’

‘As you like. It really doesn’t matter. Adam, I’ve been unfaithful to you.’

‘Just now?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, almost crossly. ‘Well, yes, as it happens,’ she corrected herself, ‘but that’s not what I meant. This was the last time. We’ve ended it. Adam, I’m so sorry, I didn’t want it in the first place; I just wanted to help him. But we’ve ended it now. It’s completely over; we won’t see each other again.’

‘With that student?’

‘Adam, I love you. That’s why I broke it off with him. He cried when I told him, but I couldn’t go on living that way.’

In his mind’s eye he suddenly saw her coming up the platform at the station in the company of two young men and a girl with bare feet. Then he had given him a lift out to Veleslavín or somewhere. ‘Already by the time you came from Bratislava?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Are you cross with me? I didn’t mean it that way. I was just sorry for him. I wanted to help him over his sadness. But I love you. That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought it would be over straight away. Do you love me too?’

He wasn’t sure whether he loved his wife. Over the years they had been together, he had become accustomed to her, but it meant he was no longer sure of his feelings towards her. There was one thing he had admired about her, however: her childlike innocence, her inability to deceive.

‘Why don’t you say anything, Adam?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re cross with me. But after all, you went with Magdalena and whatever the others were called. Say something, for goodness sake! I didn’t want to hurt you. Don’t you believe me? Won’t you ever believe me again?’ Tears streamed from her eyes once more.

That was the way of i: he world. It had been absurd of him to believe that his wife was quite different from everyone else. He started to laugh.

She stared at him in amazement: ‘You’re laughing.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It struck me as funny.’

‘What did?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Everything. The fact it never once crossed my mind you might have a lover.’

‘But I haven’t any more,’ she corrected him. ‘Are you cross? Are you cross with me?’

‘No. “Cross” is hardly the word to describe it.’ Then he said: ‘I’ve been unfaithful to you, as well.’

She looked at him in alarm. ‘I don’t believe you! You’re only saying it to pay me back. It’s not nice to say things like that when they’re not true.’

‘I don’t want to pay you back.’

‘Who is she then?’

‘It’s immaterial.’

‘You see? You don’t even want to tell me who it is. You’re making it up just to get even with me.’

‘I’ve never wanted to get even with anyone in my life.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Her chin was beginning to tremble. ‘You could never have kept it secret. It’d have slipped out, for sure!’ Then she asked: ‘Has it been going on for a long time?’

‘No. It was only once… And it was after you started.’

‘And how am I supposed to know you’re telling the truth now? If you were lying to me before, how am I to know that you’re not lying to me now?’

He shrugged. ‘There is no way of knowing for sure whether anyone is telling the truth. That’s something I do know about!’

‘Adam,’ she blurted, ‘tell me it isn’t true. You made it all up just to pay me back. Just because you were fed up with the way I’d behaved.’

‘No, I didn’t make anything up at all.’

‘Will you tell me her name?’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’

‘I’d never have thought it of you, Adam, that you could be so — nasty. Oh, God, how vile it all is. What shall we do now?’

‘I don’t know.’ Then he said: ‘We’ll go to bed.’

2

Next morning, he drove his wife to work.

‘Will you phone me?’ she asked as she got out. She was pale and her eyes were inflamed.

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’

He parked in the street that ran past his old faculty. He was supposed to go to work too, but today he couldn’t care less if he got ticked off for being late.

He walked down the steps to the river. The deserted towpath was littered with enormous concrete pipes and building panels. He climbed up on to one of the pipes and leaned against the stone wall of the embankment. The hillside opposite, once chosen to become the footstool for the tyrant’s statue, was now bathed in sunlight. A tug moved slowly along the river towing several barges full of sand. Beneath his feet, water rushed past, cloudy from a distant rain storm, and he caught sight of a branch floating just near the bank. He watched it surface and then sink again and waited to see what the current would bring next. It had been a long time since he had stood on the river bank just watching the water flow by.

There had been a time he had come here with his colleagues. They had talked about something or other but he could not remember a single sentence of it any more. As if it had been someone else entirely — someone with the same name.

He would be standing here in twenty years’ time and would know nothing about his present wife, he would not even recall last night; the words they had spoken would have been forgotten. Only a vague memory would remain that they had tried to solve a problem — but let me see, what problem was that?