Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Magdalena remained at my side. Everyone chatted excitedly, only she remained silent. I sat with eyes closed leaning against the side of the lorry. I was overcome with tiredness and a sense of being a foreigner in that strange, far-flung, indecipherable world, and then I suddenly felt a kind of pressure on my shoulder and the touch of someone’s hair on my face. I opened my eyes but nothing could be seen in that darkness but the glow of several cigarettes.

When we reached the square of our own town, someone suggested that we should immediately report to the police and someone else wanted us to go straight to the Party secretariat. In a quiet voice, Magdalena asked to be excused as she felt unwell. I offered to see her home.

Sleet continued to fall and the clock in the tower struck the hour. It was only nine o’clock, though I had the feeling that most of the night had gone. She lived in a bed-sitter in one of three newly built blocks of flats.

As I entered her sitting room I was taken aback. Part of the left-hand wall was taken up by bookshelves containing large, leather-bound old volumes. Two tall Chinese vases containing stems of reedmace stood either side of the bookshelves. The wall opposite was hung with a painting by some romantic master showing a girl on the shore of a storm-tossed sea, and an old map of Mexico with the rivers and deserts coloured by hand. I stepped over to the map and found the blue stream of the Rio Grande. I suddenly heard someone say something in a strange, croaking voice. I was startled, but it turned out to be only a parrot in a cage talking to me. I sat down in an armchair. The Persian carpet beneath my feet was thick and soft, and the light in the room was also soft and green-tinged. I had the impression it was shaking, so that tiny shadows like showering grain swirled round the walls. I heard the sound of water running into a bowl or a kettle and then the aroma of coffee reached my nostrils.

She came into the room wearing a long red dress. Her hair, whose colour recalled the reedmace heads, was tied with a green ribbon. The parrot and I roused ourselves at the same moment and it screeched: ‘Go away, you loony! Good night!’ I went as far as the bathroom, which smelt of soap and violets. In the mirror I saw a tired, unshaven face. It was a long time since I had last noticed myself as a person: the rather stocky figure, the left shoulder always slightly higher than the other, the short neck, the nose that looked as if it was broken at the root — a nose that lent me a resemblance to the caged parrot. All the time I was being told from the next room to get out, but I returned to my armchair and to Magdalena. I needed only to reach out in order to touch her. She stood up and covered the cage with a sheet of steel-blue velvet. The parrot’s name was Theo and the words were addressed to her, not to me. There was no one else for him to talk to, as there were just the two of them. She repeated those words several times with vehemence: Go away from here. Get away from this town, where she had been posted as I had. Get out of this country! And go where? A long way away. Somewhere so far away that she wouldn’t have to hear of this country again; so she could forget about it and everything connected with it. Why? Because living here was dreadful and depressing. How could one live in a constant state of torture? I had no idea of the hour, having lost all sense of time. I knew it was my duty to contradict her. It would also have been a good idea to say something about myself, but I was too overcome with desire to say anything. At last I made up my mind. I touched her hair with my fingertips and stroked her neck. And then she looked up and waited for me to kiss her.

3

I don’t know whether I loved her, but I desired her so much that in the middle of a hearing I would suddenly realise I wasn’t taking in a word of what was being said around me. I was missing making love to her, missing the touch of her slim body, the kisses from her large mouth, I was missing her voice, though probably only because it was so long since I had heard anyone speak to me tenderly.

I don’t know whether she loved me, but I am sure she needed me. She was lonelier than I. Her mother had died during the war and her father (he had been a doctor in Brno and had I been from that city, I would certainly have known his name) had fled abroad nine years before. She could have left with him, of course; they had all left then, including her uncle. She had been twenty at the time and studying aesthetics and music and she could not see why she should have to abandon her studies. Apart from that, there was someone she had not wanted to leave behind.

She had remained alone in a superbly furnished apartment with lots of valuable paintings, carpets and Chinese porcelain, as well as a piano and some old books. They had moved her out of the apartment, and I don’t know about the fellow she had stayed behind for. They must have split up, or maybe he fled too. In any event she never told me anything more about him.

She was unable to make a career in her chosen field: how could she have, with a background like hers! They had posted her to the school here. She taught geography and history and ran the school choir, singing folk songs (some of which she had collected and arranged herself). She had a feel not only for music but also for literature and painting, having come from a home where art was part of life, not just a topic of conversation. With my obsession for politics and my readiness to talk about everything under the sun, whether I understood it properly or not, I must have seemed to her an uncultured ignoramus.

Her world seemed to be governed by another law and another time. She tried, at least briefly, to draw me into it. She taught me to sit down and drink tea; to stay calm and say nothing. To listen to music without talking and without thinking about anything but the music. At such moments as those I used to feel we were close, that she was closer than anyone else to me, and that she felt the same; but I expect I was mistaken.

I remember waking one night to discover she was not lying at my side. I waited for a long time and when she failed to return, went to look for her. She was sitting half-dressed in the kitchen. I asked her why she was not sleeping. She told me to be quiet and leave her alone. When I insisted that she come back to bed, she told me she didn’t want to sleep any more. She didn’t want to live any more, she couldn’t go on living like this. What did she mean, she couldn’t go on living? Not like this and in this place. Because it was not human to live a lie, to live surrounded by lies, to live in a country enclosed with barbed wire which was impervious even to ideas. Everything was empty and mindless, and I was mindless too, I was the embodiment of emptiness. She hated me, she said through tears. Why? Because of what I had done with her, what I was doing to people, to the whole of this country. And what was I doing? I was pushing it deeper and deeper into the void, casting it into darkness. I and the rest of my ilk; we were just like insects, like locusts, like flies. We had flooded the land with our paltriness; we were a swamp into which one could only go on sinking deeper and deeper.

I was cut to the quick. I got up, got dressed and made to leave. But she held on to me in the doorway. She hugged me and begged me not to leave her there all alone; I wasn’t like all the rest; I at least listened to what she told me, even if I didn’t understand her.

Then we made love. With passion and with hate. We made love out of loneliness and despair, out of pain and aspirations which eluded each other.

So what did she want? I asked her. What did she want to do?

To leave, of course. To cross the sea. To go anywhere where one could still live without lies and dissimulation. And would she take me with her? She might; maybe I would change there. But she knew I wouldn’t leave. She may have been right and I wouldn’t have left: after all I had my parents and brother here; and besides, I had never dreamt of going off to live under a foreign system. Of course I hadn’t! This was my system. The most I had dreamed of was changing it a little bit, improving it: that much she knew about me already. But how would I change it? Remake it in what image? I had no real image inside me anyway.