Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Shortly before the trial, the Presiding Judge called me in to ask about the details. After listening to my misgivings, he informed me that ‘our comrades’ (the term we used for the district officials) attached great political significance to the case. He merely wanted to forewarn me that the comrades would be keeping a close eye on what I did.

They clearly did not trust me and felt the need to let me know it. I felt hurt.

I went to see the prosecutor. Admittedly, he was no friend of mine, but we were of the same generation. He always treated me affably, with the faint superiority of someone who is senior in the profession and has greater experience. We would often chat together in our one local pub about this and that. (Like our Presiding Judge he had only taken a one-year course in law, so on the day I started my practice in The Hole, he was just completing his third year there.) On this particular occasion, as usual, we started by talking about wine, football and the nationality question. Then I raised the matter of our joint case. Was it really so important? What did my colleague think?

He shrugged. It was better not to think, he said.

I voiced the hope I would meet with some understanding. No one had the right to expect savagery from us in the name of justice. A sentence of a few months would be adequate punishment for what the man had done. My companion’s immediate reaction was to explain that this was no time to go in for unnecessary heart-searching. We were required to take action. Our enemies were already acting, as the case showed. If we didn’t convict them they would soon start to put us on trial and none of us would escape with our lives!

But in this trial it would be a matter of very specific guilt, I objected; surely it could not merit such harsh punishment?

The same was true of every trial, he told me. We had taken their property, which had formed the basis of their power. But they had not given up and wanted to get back their property and with it their power, Our power was therefore at stake. We had to defend it, that was why we were there. If we were weak we would lose our right to keep our posts.

Yes, I agreed, but strength did not mean cruelty. He replied that nothing we did could be cruel to them , we could only be cruel towards the people. It would be cruel if we let the people fall into their hands again.

I spent the whole night before the trial debating with myself how to behave. The defendant had acted on the understanding he was in the right. After all, they were his things he was hiding and therefore in his own eyes he was the one protecting them from appropriation not the one who had appropriated them. But even if I took no account of his subjective conviction, what had been the objective effect of his action? What of value had been destroyed or misappropriated? How was I to bring in a verdict of guilty in all responsibility? The trouble was that I was not responsible solely to myself. The moment I joined the Party I had voluntarily accepted Party discipline. Now, those who represented the Party, for reasons that were not (and did not have to be) clear to me, were demanding the stiffest penalty. Was it for me to resist? Whom or what would I be helping if I were to do so? What was I able to influence, in fact? The defendant’s fate. Hardly. My fate? Undoubtedly. They would classify me as unreliable, as a friend of the other side. But I wasn’t, for heaven’s sake! I had never felt the least sympathy for shopkeepers or big farmers, nor for any of those we now classified as class enemies. All I wanted was to respect justice. But what was justice?

I gradually stopped worrying my head about the circumstances of the case and the defendant’s guilt or otherwise. Instead I thought about myself and the consequences the case might have for me personally.

I sentenced that man to three and a half years’ imprisonment, even though I knew full well that the sentence was unjust, and although I was fully aware that the majority of those who had worked themselves up to some post or other in The Hole and had some hand in the exercise of power accepted bribes and committed fraud, that at least half of all the illegally distilled liquor found its way into the cellars of those who ought to be setting an example, who represented the law or at least the authorities, and that where liquor was not enough, money changed hands. I convicted a victim. The only thing I can advance in my defence is that I lived in a vacuum and lacked courage.

I had not been a faithful servant of justice. All I had managed to do was to assist the existing state of lawlessness, sometimes aggravating and sometimes attenuating its mistakes, while acquiring experience and trying to discover what the law was. But the more I learnt about the true state of affairs, the less acceptable I became for the existing regime.

In the same way that people who start ruling stop being people and become masters, a servant of arbitrary power who starts to think stops being its auxiliary and starts to become its enemy.

2

Conditions that day were extremely harsh. Low, cold clouds were sweeping in from the Polonina Carpathians in the north and now and then they would shed large, sticky flakes of snow.

We drove to a village right on the border to persuade the peasants not to withdraw from the recently created cooperatives. The vehicle — an old retired Praga lorry with a ripped awning — belonged to the town council. Eight or nine of us sat inside. Most of the people I knew at least by sight. Local council officials, men and women teachers, district administrators and even an army officer. I remained silent although the rest of them talked. I lacked the matter-of-factness and confidence of people convinced of the rightness of their actions. Admittedly I was convinced that what we were asking of people was sensible, necessary and in their own interest, but why should I be the one to explain it? I was born in the city; their language and their way of thinking were alien to me. Moreover I was reluctant to enter people’s homes uninvited, particularly at a moment of the day when people had the right to their privacy and relaxation. During visits I would let my partner do the talking (not only was he a local, he also knew the local language and usages) while I would just sit on a chair and embody the authority and dignity of penal power. Remember thai: the law supports those who obey and assails those who rebel.

It was dark when we came to a halt on the muddy village square. Yellowish lights in two or three of the windows, a paraffin lamp swaying in the wind in front of the pub. I jumped down from the lorry and caught sight of several men in light-coloured trousers and dark hats going into the pub.

I did not know the place, being there for the first time. All those villages seemed alike to me: wooden houses with moss-grown thatched roofs. I was the last one in line, behind a woman in a short quilted jacket, whom someone in the lorry had addressed as Magdalena. I couldn’t recall having seen her anywhere previously.

Suddenly, behind us, the pub door opened and several men came out on to the village square, which was dimly lit by the swaying lamp. They shouted something, though I couldn’t understand a single word. Someone from our group said something angry in response, at which one of the men in front of the pub picked up a stone and threw it in our direction. The shouting immediately intensified: abuse and curses which I also did not understand, but their gestures left me in no doubt as to their meaning. The woman in the quilted jacket turned to me as if asking for help; I took her by the hand and led her back to the lorry.

I don’t know where those people had managed to find them so quickly, but now they were armed with pitchforks and other implements, and one of them was clutching a long woodcutter’s axe. It was he who now barred our way, shouting something or other, and I told him to let us pass, that we would be leaving immediately. He went on shouting but I walked past him, together with the woman I was leading, and he let us go, perhaps because what I had said was foreign to his ears or because I had a woman with me, or because I spoke calmly and quietly. They let us pass and the rest of the party straggled along behind. After climbing on to the lorry I scanned the scene and that moment printed itself on my memory: unshaven faces, threatening fists, upraised pitchforks and sticks and a deafening roar of voices that seemed to me scarcely human.