Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

And I really did feel better straight away. I don’t know if it was the injection or whether the illness simply receded, but I was suddenly seized by the conviction, the blissful premonition, that it was in my power to do something to redeem myself. I tried to communicate my feeling to Magdalena. I know now what I’m going to do!

Yes, she said. You’re going to leave.

1

IT WAS STILL light when he arrived home on Sunday. The place seemed unusually empty and untidy. The quilts were still spread out to air over the backs of chairs and several pairs of shoes were scattered around the front hall. On his desk he found a letter from his brother. Cups from their last breakfast lay unwashed in the kitchen sink and there was a stale, half-eaten slice of bread on the work top.

He had a shower. The water washed off all the unfamiliar smells and caresses that still adhered to him. Alexandra had gradually receded, though had he wanted he could have held on to her. He could, if he wanted, conjure up every detail of her body, could hear her speaking to him, repeating the words that drew him to her and took his breath away, he could embrace her, return those touches that aroused delight in him: such ecstasy that for a moment, at least, he forgot to speculate on the consequences of his actions and his situation, he forgot about past and future. But he let her recede.

He dried himself, put on some old trousers and went into his room.

His brother was writing to him from Edinburgh. That was a city he had never managed to visit, although many people had told him of its charms. But his brother was hardly concerned with the charm of the place. He had flown here, he wrote, to a ‘congress of mad scientists’ who (purely in the abstract) discussed imaginary relationships and hypothetical phenomena, which would then be put to use by equally mad technicians, but mad in a different way, to construct something that would undoubtedly annihilate us all. ‘And in fact it crossed my mind when we were taking off from Heathrow that we ought to have left flying to the birds and the angels. By trying to displace them from the sky as we once took the waters away from the fish and the land from the other creatures, we have overstepped the bounds and our punishment is inevitable.

‘The hotel where the congress is being held is extremely posh. The conference room is all headphones, buttons and air-conditioning, with a projection screen in place of a blackboard. We drink excellent coffee and the local fire-water. The topics, as I was saying, are purely theoretical: A new method for calculating the configurational centring of Green’s function in random systems. Or: A contribution to the theory of multi-particulate phenomena in absorptional and emissive X-ray spectra. Sometimes it crosses my mind that sitting somewhere else in a hotel just like this is a similar little group of happy gentlemen totally dedicated to science listening to a strictly theoretical paper about rays that will end up slicing the earth in two, or about methods to unleash a chain reaction incorporating water-bonded hydrogen. The paper will assume, naturally, that nothing of the kind will ever happen, because who would want to destroy the earth on which they live? The trouble is it’ll happen anyway, either by mistake or some nutter somewhere will decide to do it on a mad whim or out of perversity. Our father always used to say (and I expect he still does) that every major discovery finds some application. Another thing he said, and he is the most thorough and reliable person I could ever imagine, is that everyone makes a fateful error at least once in his life. And while I’m recalling his words of wisdom (though maybe he didn’t lavish them on you to the same extent — you were engaged in something which was scarcely worthy of attention in his eyes) he also used to say that there was no such thing as infallible technical equipment. I was thinking about him as I sat there hearing about translational asymmetrical systems. It just had to happen one of these days and in a split second it’d be the end of this comfortable hall, of posh hotels everywhere, here and in the antipodes. At last there’d be a levelling of the rich and poor, white and coloured, Hiltons and slums and that flawless levelling which would also be flawlessly entropic was something I’d have on my conscience too. So the lecture started to get on my nerves and I picked up my things and went out of the hotel. And in the very next street I found a magnificent pub with a games room. There were lots of gambling machines that would quickly rob you of all your money, without giving you any fun, but also a fantastic car circuit on which the miniature cars raced non-stop. You could bet on one of four cars: the red one paid out 1.5 pence for every penny staked, the blue returned double the stake, the green five times and the white one fifty times the stake. Seemingly everything was run by computer; even the pay-outs were automatic. You could stake from a penny to a shilling. I was utterly absorbed watching those little cars belting round their tracks, and there was no way of telling which would be first. Just at the very last moment one of them would always shoot ahead — most often the red one, as you can imagine — and overtake the rest just before the end. I calculated that the white one should win at least once every eighty races. I managed to sit and just watch fifty-five races and I was terrified I’d enter the game too late, but the white didn’t win once. Then, bro, I started to bet. I bet on fifty races: first a penny, then twopence, then fivepence and when it got to the hundred-and-fifth race, I bet a whole shilling and gave up. Brother of mine, that white car proceeded to win in the hundred-and-eighth, hundred-and-tenth and hundred-and-eleventh races. At that moment I thought it best to leave. My fingers still shake at the thought that I could have had seven pounds and a couple of shillings plus that incredible excitement. I don’t think I should tempt fate — maybe it’s a warning for me. Actually I was intending to say something else about Father. When he was my age he had great hopes, though they were just a big excuse, more likely. For him there existed a higher authority. He exempted his socialism from all laws. It was the only machine that was not supposed to fail because it had the capacity to repair itself. That gave Father the strength to go on zealously making his machines. The world is full of false hopes. But none of them appeal to me. The most I’m prepared to do is bet on a white car and get carried away for an hour with hopes of winning. Apart from that, as you know, I am interested in quite hopeless matters such as amorphous materials, particularly glass. I go on doing my sums the way Father did his, and there really are moments when I feel I’m moving through my own private universe. I am its master and no one may enter it. Then suddenly I sense an enormous pressure on my universe, a pressure so great that it is compressed into a single, solitary ray — which could slice the earth in half with no problem. And I get me such a fright that I say to myself: what’s it for, then? What I’m lacking, bro, is satisfaction and a goal. And I ask myself: what do I possess, what do I have left? Where is my home, where is my universe?’

Adam looked around him. Everything was in its place: shelves packed with books, the radio, the legs of his dark trousers projecting from the half-open wardrobe door. Was this his home?

Things had never interested him. They seemed to fill the emptiness but they didn’t really. He knew too well that they could be taken away from him at any moment. Things and people. And then what was left?

We never ever talked together about such things, you and I, little brother. We ate at the one table and played chess and tennis together, but we never talked about anything of that kind. There was never enough time, or maybe we had the feeling that it would only be empty talk anyway. It was I who was always doing the talking: about beauty and goodness, about the parallelism of the deity and humanity, about the knowability and non-knowability of the world, about liberty as loving obedience to eternal truths, about free will, about the one and only ethical doctrine for a virtuous and noble life, as well as about the moral imperative and the moral code. We would lie there in a hayloft or by a pond with a friend whom I have heard nothing of for twenty years or more; he disappeared into the world even more irretrievably than you, and with him went those categories and a way of thinking which struck me then as far too abstract. In real life, it seemed to me, other considerations prevailed. First they gaoled Father, then I had to go and take a judge’s post in the back of beyond, which meant handing down verdicts, attending meetings, fighting for peace, making speeches (agitation they called it in those days) and generally defending the interests of the Party. I had to be aware all the time who was the first, second and the last secretary, who had me under surveillance, who was reporting on me, who was vetting me; I had to consider very carefully whom I could talk to frankly, and who was best avoided, who was to be praised and who ignored, and think about how to get myself promoted to a better position in which it would be possible to do at least some of the things I wanted. Living like that, one forgets about abstract categories and high moral considerations; in fact moral considerations go out the window. Only from time to time, and mostly at night when one can’t get to sleep, there comes a feeling of regret or even dismay at how one has forgotten the old aspirations. One marries, of course, and has children. One maintains them and rears them, teaching them to speak the truth, not to steal, not to use bad language and to brush their teeth. One sends them to be taught to read and write, to play the piano and the guitar. One takes them for walks so that they get the chance of seeing a running deer, if only at a distance, or one of the last horses still grazing on a meadow. But in spite of it all, one knows that there is something else of importance that they ought to have, that one lacks a code to bring them up in, or to offer them, at least. But all the same, one loves them and does not want them to be no more than well-fed, well-dressed simpletons, happy because they have an electric train-set and a dolly that cries and drinks out of a bottle. One wants to share something profound with them, something they will retain for life, something they will be able to return to and cherish when things are hard, something that will foster their love and their capacity to relate to people.