Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

4

In the middle of a not particularly important trial a man entered the courtroom — he was a fairly portly fellow in his thirties, wearing a white shirt and checked trousers, from which it was immediately obvious to me he was no local.

He made a rather stiff bow and sat down on the last of our three benches. He wore old-fashioned spectacles with slender frames that reminded me of the pince-nez my grandfather used to wear.

His presence perturbed me. It is true that our trials were public, but I was able to tell in advance the likely or possible visitors. This man was not one among them.

Had I done something wrong, perhaps? Had my sentencing been a bit too lenient of late? Or had someone denounced me for leading a dissolute life?

I became nervous and stopped acting naturally. In fact I started to shout and act in a severe and peremptory manner, while at the same time stumbling over my words and losing my concentration, so that it was almost impossible for me to dictate properly for the record.

He was waiting for me at the end of the trial. He said his name was Matěj Kožnar and he worked as an editor for Prague Radio. He had come to our district to do some research for a programme. He had heard about me and he was sure I would be able to tell him something interesting about local life. Would I be prepared to spare him a little time?

I felt relieved, and even pleased that someone should be interested in my experiences and opinions.

I took him on a walk through the town. The day was hot and everything seemed bleached under the mountain-blue skies. I gave him a guided tour of the building site where the new hospital was under construction. The new hospital was supposed to have been opened the previous year, but they had been unable to complete it because again and again most of the building materials would disappear. I could even show him cottages which everyone knew had been built from stolen materials.

He quoted a Russian proverb to me: In olden days they fed a single sow, the trough has got a lot more crowded now. Then he asked whether everyone really did know that the cottages we were looking at had been built out of stolen material, and I confirmed that was the case. He asked whether theft which was public knowledge could still be regarded as theft. I replied that theft was a term we used to describe the fact of something having been stolen and not the concealment of that fact. He said he hadn’t expressed himself properly. What he wanted to know was whether a theft which was common knowledge and went unpunished did not begin to lose the character of an illegal action. For some time already, he had been observing an interesting transformation. Things which in the past had been punished as dishonourable and unlawful were now condoned or at least tolerated, while on the other hand, things which had once been considered honourable and lawful were now being punished. In his view this was deliberate policy — we were all supposed to be obedient subjects of the state, we were supposed to live in the awareness that we owed our every breath and our very existence on this earth to the benevolence of the state. And how better could the state demonstrate its benevolence than by pardoning us our crimes? And what more effective way was there of rendering us dependent on the state than allowing us to walk freely only thanks to its indulgence? That was why the state tempted us to break the law and actually goaded us to.

Magdalena invited us to dinner.

The parrot was so put out by the stranger’s presence that it withdrew to a corner of its cage and remained obdurately silent, while we drank wine and talked late into the night. Matěj was a native of Moravia like Magdalena, having been born in a village to the north of Jihlava. All his forebears on his father’s side had been Protestants and stonemasons for as long as anyone remembered. One of them, following the Emperor Joseph’s decree of religious tolerance, decided that he would endow his newly created congregation with a dignified church, one that would equal the other churches in the area. The congregation had raised some funds and Matěj’s great-grandfather set to work. He himself drew up the plans, dug the foundations and started the building, working from dawn till dusk. And in the space of three years, he had completed a church with a mighty vaulted ceiling and a tower with a belfry.

The church was standing to this day and Matěj promised to show it to us when we returned from Slovakia.

Afterwards, he and Magdalena reminisced about their childhood and he enthused about the days when loudspeakers did not blare through the village at six in the morning, when folk in their part of the world used to cut cellars out of a rock face instead of installing electrical boxes for making ice, when only people and animals walked the roads and people lived in harmony with an age-old rhythm, when the calendar still retained its ancient astrological significance. And they sang together:

Now is Eastertide

The keys where did she hide…

When he departed the next day, I felt a sense of loss as if a close friend had left me.

5

In the way that prisoners talk most of all about freedom, Magdalena most of all enjoyed talking about travel. She would relive in words her one and only trip abroad. Shortly after the war, her father had taken her with him to Rome where he was to attend some doctors’ congress. Afterwards, they had gone on a sea cruise and anchored several times on the coast of Africa. She had viewed the mouth of the Nile, the temples, the pyramids and the sphinxes and had also seen the desert. Astonishingly enough, it was the desert which had made the greatest impression on her. She voiced the opinion that I, too, would be different if I were to find myself even once in a landscape resigned to death. Maybe then I would discover true humility and realise the need for meditation. She would also talk about how one day we would go off together on a European journey, visiting the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach had been the organist, and the art galleries in Madrid and Bern. Then we would travel together right down to the south of France, as far as Provence, and walk the streets of Aries; we would take a steamer up the Rhine which Heine and Broch had written about. She knew lots of places she had never actually set eyes on and I expect she would be disappointed if she ever saw them as they really are — criss-crossed with motorways and befouled by motor cars. But life never gave her the opportunity.

Her holidays were longer than mine, besides which I squandered my own allocation on occasional trips home (two days’ journey by bus and train, a day sitting at home with Mother and Father and a day rushing around Prague visiting friends and bookshops, before managing to snatch an evening in the theatre and wearily observing scenes from a life very different from my own) so I was only left with five days in the summer. It wasn’t enough for a journey to Provence, or to the Czech lands, but I wanted to give my girlfriend a treat. I bought myself a large rucksack, and packed it with spare clothes, boots and a billy can. She had a small army knapsack made from calf-skin, and apart from her spare clothes took a flute, some music and a camera, and we set off for the Beskid Mountains.

I recall us walking along a deserted fieldpath with the sun rising over us; we pass by villages scattered over the hillsides, herds of cattle that look like brown patches, and shepherds’ huts (we sat in one of them and ate bread with ewe’s milk cheese) while the fragrance of distant fires reaches our nostrils and we catch the sound of barefoot children yodelling; we are walking on moss among mountain thyme and Carthusian pinks, and along dry-stone walls that radiate heat, and along a valley up which the sound of bells is carried. I can see Magdalena in her light flowered dress; for the first time I saw her happy; she laughed and remembered her childhood and people she had never mentioned before.