Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

Aaa, aaa, aaa,

Doktor Schlanger ist schon da.

It all seems equally real and equally unreal, only a gathering of bloodless shades, without feeling. Sometimes it strikes me that they have had nothing to do with my fate, and then I find it incredible they were once part of my life.

I can’t even remember the name of that woman, not even her face, just the fact that she made a little table out of suitcases, and covered it with a tablecloth. On the tablecloth there stood a vase, and in the vase artificial flowers — marguerites I think they were. That woman — only women and children lived in the room — was kind to me like all the others, and because our mattresses were only separated by a narrow aisle and we lay feet inwards, whenever I went to bed I could see her, her lips, whose shape I no longer recall, of course, as they tried to form themselves into a reassuring smile.

Once I woke up in the middle of the night. I slept fitfully in those strange surroundings full of noises, loud sighs, snores and sobs, and I heard a moaning that filled me with anguish. I sat up. On the bedside table made of suitcases there shone a lighted candle and that woman was sitting with a cushion folded between her back and the wall, her grey hair falling about her livid, sweat-beaded brow. I gazed at her, unable to move or say anything, and as I watched her wiping the sweat from her forehead, writhing and giving out inarticulate moans, my terror grew.

Worst of all, no one else woke up; I alone shared the woman’s wakefulness. I knew I ought to get up and ask her what she needed, or wake someone else, seeing that she hadn’t done so herself. Instead I pulled my blanket over my head and blocked up my ears. I had no inkling yet that there are sounds that cannot be escaped so easily. Curled up beneath the blanket with my eyelids squeezed shut, I heard and saw her more clearly than in reality. When I woke the next morning, she was already lying motionless, her face covered with the sheet, and on the sheet the bunch of artificial marguerites. Women were walking by with cups in their hands and my brother was building something out of the few bricks he’d brought with him, someone was yelling that coal was to be handed out, and on the table made of suitcases the precious candle was still burning. Then two men appeared with the first stretcher I’d seen in my life. They loaded the dead woman and shortly afterwards I saw them passing through the barracks gate and disappearing along a snow-covered street.

That evening, I escaped into the courtyard. It was the only place from where I could see the sky. A cold and almost imperceptible light filled the darkened yard with terrifying shadows. Until that moment — it was only a few months after my tenth birthday — I had only played. Even my stay here had only been a game. I had played at queuing for food with a dinner bowl; I had played at transports; I’d even tried to play at being afraid — though my fear of those men in uniform was genuine. But how could I suspect the depth of the chasm into which we had been thrust? Now I realised that a single, irrevocable moment could interrupt the game. Now I too was being loaded on the stretcher, my head carefully put straight and the sheet being pulled over again and again. Just cover the lad’s eyes, he can’t see any more anyway. Anguish quietly crept out of the nocturnal shadows. I yearned to escape from the barracks, not just from here: to escape from a world in which everything ended so hopelessly. Lord God come! Jesus Christ appear to me! Give me a sign that You know about me, that You hear, that You are still the Redeemer, tirelessly redeeming still. I looked up at the sky. The stars could be seen more clearly here than in the town where I was born, they seemed to me to fill the sky far more. Amidst all those stars, each of which was supposed to be bigger than the Earth and was ablaze with enormous flames, God was swimming like an enormous invisible fish. He didn’t hear anything — He couldn’t through all the roar of flying stars. It seemed to me that I could hear the distant crackling sound of that mass flight of stars.

I was at the age when one is too bound up in one’s own feelings to be able to notice the feelings of those who seem more powerful and hence exist in order to afford one protection. It was only years later that it struck me how dreadful it must have been for my mother. She was so delicate that even before the war she scarcely coped with living. Now she was assailed by calamities and tribulations — each more terrible than the next.

She had been one of a large family. I remember how many there were of them in Grandad and Grandma’s flat on Anenské Square: Mother, Auntie Anita and Uncles Ivan and Jakub, and the youngest of all — the pale, and to my eyes, very beautiful Auntie Marta. They had all grown up together in that flat, which had just one room and a kitchen, so I couldn’t fathom how they all squeezed in, let alone the lodgers my mother told me used to live in the kitchen. My mother was the second youngest.

I think she loved her brothers best of all. They were both absorbed in politics and had become professional revolutionaries (something which at that time might have been rash, and certainly was not as profitable as it is nowadays). And she adored her diminutive father who, while he never rose higher than the rank of a municipal official, was a self-taught intellectual, had mastered several languages and studied the still rather unfamiliar works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Bebel. He was well versed in both mythology and history (our continent’s, at least: he would tell me stories of Odysseus, Cromwell, the incorruptible Robespierre, and of Napoleon, the genius who had buried the revolution); and he had visited — mostly on foot — a large part of the empire of his birth, even meeting, in the course of his travels, the Emperor himself, whom as a socialist and republican he could not of course admire, and whose right to govern he denied; yet he regarded him as such an important personage that fifty years later he could describe exactly what the Emperor was wearing at that moment. Grandad also played the fiddle and could blow the bugle, and if I implored him he would take it out of the cupboard, insert the mouthpiece and blow a tattoo or play the Radetzky March.

On the first night of one of the many occupations of our country, when Hitler’s army was nearing Prague, Auntie Marta gassed herself. I still don’t know if it was the only reason or just the last straw on top of some personal misfortune, but before we even held the funeral, both uncles turned up in our apartment, not to join in the mourning, but to seek refuge for the one night. They were wanted by the police. I remember them talking for a long time, and clearly hearing through the wall my mother’s sobs. She begged them to give it up and not abandon her. And I heard the calm, deep voices of my uncles (they addressed her as Mousie) trying to console her. I fell asleep. Next morning the uncles had gone from the flat and I never set eyes on them again.

A few months after Auntie Marta’s funeral, Auntie Anita disappeared. Mother knew only that she wanted to flee to the Soviet Union with her fiancé Karel, but she did not learn whether they actually succeeded or not.

Then both uncles were arrested. The court, which only ever delivered one verdict and hence lost all right to be called a court, pronounced the inevitable sentence and shortly afterwards they were executed. That was probably one of the reasons why my mother fell ill. She lay for several days in high fever. She was only slightly recovered when they summoned my father to the transport. I remember her packing Father’s things into two big suitcases they had bought at the beginning of the war. Linen and high boots which I’d never seen him wear, several boxes of grape sugar, medicine against typhus and lots of socks. (Who would he have to wash them for him, and would they ever meet again, in fact?)