Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

‘It’s against my principles.’

‘You’re stubborn, Adam. You remind me of an old fellow back home. He made up his mind he wouldn’t let them cut down an old lime tree that was standing in the middle of a field. It wasn’t even his. The field had never belonged to him either. He did it for the principle. He sent letters and protests to all and sundry. Every time I came home he would come and show me all the bumf, because I was studying law.’

‘And did he save the tree?’

‘When the forestry fellows arrived and were cutting it down he went for them and got so steamed up he had a heart attack.’

‘I won’t get steamed up,’ he promised. It crossed his mind to check the drawers of his desk in case he had something in them they might use against him. But it would be better to wait until he was alone in the office.

4

He had managed to phone Alexandra just as she was leaving work and he waited for her by the Powder Tower.

‘I thought you’d forgotten about me.’ She looked extremely sophisticated in her long suede coat. Her face, compared with his wife’s, was full of vitality. ‘A pity you didn’t call me this lunch-time. I had some free time.’

‘I was at an interrogation.’

‘Couldn’t you have postponed it?’

‘Hardly. They came for me.’

‘They were interrogating you? I thought they weren’t allowed to bother people like you.’

‘They’ve bothered bigger fish than me.’

‘Hmm. And then they hanged them, didn’t they?’ She stopped in front of a window display of shoes and stared at them. ‘So they interrogated you. Were they up to your standard?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘That must have got up their noses. Did they beat you up?’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Ruml told me that was routine. Nobody’s going to confess unless they’re beaten, are they?’

‘They confess, don’t worry.’

‘And did you?’

‘I had nothing to confess to. It was more of a caution about my friends.’

‘About Ruml?’

‘Why him, do you think?’

‘He can get really wild. When he figures out you started something with me, he might even kill you.’

‘I think their cautions are based on rather different considerations.’

‘Aha. It never struck me they have their own considerations.’ She had stopped again, this time in front of a display of clothes. She found them at least as interesting as his fate.

He watched her with impatience. He ought to take the tram home. If not for Alena’s sake, at least because of the children. But he wanted to tell her what had happened to him, and how there had even been an oblique reference to her.

That was just an excuse. In reality he wanted to see her because she seemed to him the only glint of light in an otherwise dismal day, if not in an otherwise dismal life.

‘What shall we do?’ she asked when she’d torn herself away from the window display. ‘If you feel like it, I’ve got the key to that little flat we were in the first time.’

‘I’m not sure. I ought to get back as soon as possible today.’

‘Get back where?’

‘Home.’

‘Ah, well, it can’t be helped if you have to rush off to cook the supper.’

‘Alena’s not well.’

‘I don’t ever recall Ruml coming home just because I wasn’t feeling well. He would happily leave me to die if he happened to be playing bridge that evening.’

He tried at least to phone home from a call box, but the line was engaged. She was either chatting with her mother or fixing another date with her poisoner. Another possibility was that she was phoning the doctor. Even more likely, the public phone was out of order. He looked through the glass at Alexandra walking up and down a little way off. Anyone could pick her up and she would go off whenever she felt like it. Meanwhile he was striving in vain to discharge his duties and get through to the house of the dead. He hung up. The apparatus jangled loudly and he rushed out of the box.

They had scarcely closed the street door behind them than she pulled him to her in the dark front hall of the house. He put his arms round her and she kissed him. ‘If you’d have gone home to cook the supper I’d have never wanted to see you again.’

As they climbed the stairs, he could detect among the smells of boiled cabbage and musty potatoes, the sweet stench of coalgas. It got stronger and stronger until it became unbearable.

She unlocked the flat, dropped her handbag on the floor, threw her coat across the half-open cupboard door and kicked her shoes into a corner of the lobby. ‘Come on, quickly. You’ve got to leave soon, haven’t you?’ She’d managed to slip out of her clothes even before they entered the room. ‘What are you waiting for? You want me to freeze?’

And he cast everything off him; the day turned to stone and peeled away from his life, came away from his body, and his body ascended unencumbered into the heights where no voices could be heard, where the air was pure and odourless, where neither poisoners nor bloodhounds roamed. Nor was his wife flying to meet him with her head wrapped in a pillow and her hair impregnated with gas.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Something on your mind?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

Her naked belly was as smooth and pale as a conch shell. A quivering shellfish amidst moist seaweed. He touched it with his lips and noticed how it opened. The gentle hiss of drying stalks on the border between silence and returning sounds. Breathing and the roar of blood.

I’m here. I thought I had a duty to be elsewhere. I ought to be elsewhere, but I’m here with her and don’t know how I got here. Did I come alone, was I brought, was I carried here by the stretcher-bearers of long ago? What day is it? Spring, summer, autumn, winter? What year? Is the war over?

Here I lie. Breathing and the roar of blood. Somewhere nearby a stretcher, snow, I can still feel how my feet are frozen, my little brother raises his head to look at me. Are you here with me? The hiss of stalks, a forest of yucca trees, a thicket of sumacs, the scent of sage, a warm rock table, nothing breaks the silence of the desert, no one calls, no one wants me to listen to them, the birds of prey have not taken off to hunt yet; I’m here and it must have some meaning, it must conceal some intention in other words. I’m not here because I picked up the phone, because we happened to meet; not because today or three months ago she had the keys and the time; not because there are countless men lying with their heads on damp, brownish thickets that quiver as they breathe. I’m here because it’s someone’s wish that I should be — but who was it that I obeyed? Could it be that I finally listened to myself and therefore cannot be anywhere else but here, naked, just beneath the roof, concealed so far from all eyes, with just a few steps to go to reach the summit. Will I then be free and totally unfettered?

There was the click of a cigarette lighter. He flinched, anticipating an explosion, but the air merely started to fill with smoke.

Individual objects started to emerge from the gloom. White roses in a vase on the windowsill seemed to emit their own light. (Who had ever brought roses here?) The cupboard doors were covered in brightly coloured posters. One of them showed an open-mouthed singer facing a flock of sheep. He couldn’t recall having seen the posters before, but they had most likely been hanging there for a long time and he had been too much on edge to take them in. Just above his head there hung a painting. A tall fellow in a grey double-breasted jacket was walking along a deserted street at night. His pale puffy face had no eyes. Where had he seen that picture before?

‘It’s him,’ she said, seeing the object of his gaze. ‘I painted him when I first met him.’