Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

The death’s head smiled at him with its white toothless mouth and suddenly he saw in it the face of that student, that unrelenting poisoner who had entered his life, or rather the life of his wife. The dead face now goggled at him. What had she seen in him to have pursued him? How had he bewitched her? She wouldn’t have been the first. We could assign any colour to empty eyes, plant our own ideas in an empty head, our own dreams, even. He felt sorry for her, for the way she must have wandered home alone late at night, a lost sheep wagging her fluffy, sweetly pungent, tail. Maybe she really had been looking for him, while he was out of earshot, hidden in the very lap he now caressed.

He should leave! It was not right for him to be absent from home tonight, even if one day this would be his home and not the place that was currently his home. But that wasn’t important now. What was important was that his wife was in distress. Possibly he wasn’t to blame for her situation, but the right thing to do was to be at her side and stop looking for excuses. Anyway it was impossible to make excuses for himself as he had long learned how to see through alibis, even ones that sounded supremely plausible and honourable.

He sat up and reached for his shirt.

‘Are you cold? Shall I get out a blanket?’

And yet he made love to her and she to him so totally that the entire previous day, his entire previous life, fell away from him like a crumbling rock from a cliff-face, and here he was about to get rid of her like shaking a stone out of his shoe. ‘No, stay where you are!’ He still held the shirt in his hands.

‘Do you want to leave already? What is wrong with your wife, as a matter of fact?’

He hesitated.

‘Or was it just an excuse so you wouldn’t get home late?’

‘She tried to gas herself.’

‘Aha. And you turned off the gas.’

‘No, I wasn’t there at the time.’

‘Who turned it off, then?’

He shrugged.

‘Wasn’t it at your place, then? You mean your wife goes to strangers’ houses to gas herself?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a stranger.’

‘She tried to gas herself on account of her lover?’

He said nothing.

‘So why are you so upset? They put on a show for you and you get upset.’

‘I don’t think it was a show.’

‘No? So what was it, if she came home safe?’

He would have liked to tell her she was wrong, but his nerve failed.

‘There’s no sense your worrying. She won’t do it a second time. She’ll wait and see what effect she had on you.’

‘That’s not the point. The children are there and she might be ill.’

‘Buzz off then! I’m not stopping you!’

‘I’m glad I’m with you.’

‘Are you really?’

In a moment he would leave. Then he would find himself in a cage far narrower than this attic room and he would be surrounded by a fine cloud of gas that would gradually stupefy him. In the end he would feel that peculiar, almost drunken, satisfaction at being where he ought to be, at having done his duty at least. But for the time being he was still here, with her, the heights were still open above him, ready to accept him into their pure silence.

‘Yes, I really am.’

‘Why don’t you come closer, then?’

She stubbed out her cigarette and he folded her in his arms.

For a split second it was as if he could see his wife’s jutting chin, the nose projecting sharply from her pallid face. As if from out of the depths somewhere he could hear the sound of lamentation and an icy hand ran down his back. Then he felt the hot touch of the other’s fingers, her long fingers wound round him like membranes, transforming him into a single, dazzling cocoon, in whose soft, dark interior he evidently still rested, though ceasing to be aware of it.

She switched on the lamp above the settee and the room was bathed in dim, purple-coloured light. ‘Darling, if you’d be so kind: there’s a blanket in the cupboard.’

The cupboard contained a jumble of folders with drawing paper and canvases. On one of the shelves, amidst brushes and tubes of paint, he saw a crumpled blanket. He took it out gingerly — it seemed to him to give off a faint odour of turpentine. ‘Those are your paintings?’

‘They’re things I did at school.’

He pulled out a painting at random. Above a forest that appeared orangey-brown in the purple light there shone two scarlet suns and between them flew a twin-tailed comet.

‘Put it back,’ she told him. ‘They’re pathetic daubs.’

‘Why?’

‘I should have chucked them out ages ago — but I would have to come here on my own, and that’s something I don’t fancy.’

He bent over her and covered her carefully.

‘You’re not coming back to me?’

He knelt on the floor by the settee and laid his head on her breast. ‘Did you want to see more suns once?’

‘Why not? You have to live in hopes that something will happen. In heaven, at least, if not here on earth.’

‘Would that help you?’

‘It would be great.’ Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling at the same time, though not at him, most likely. ‘I always wanted to see a comet; one that would suddenly turn night into day. Or see two stars collide. Or see an enormous stone fall from the sky. And I wanted to see a unicorn or something of the sort — it’s all silly nonsense, eh?’

‘Miracles, more like. Or divine manifestations.’

‘I don’t care what you call them. I was waiting.’

‘Aren’t you any more?’

‘I’m too tired these days. Like at this moment. I can’t even open my eyes. Even though I’d like to see you.’

‘Sleep. You’ve a chance to sleep.’

‘I don’t want to sleep. It would be a pity to sleep now I’ve got you here. Now I’m feeling great.’

‘You feel great now?’

‘Yes. I have the feeling I know why I’m alive.’

‘Why are you alive?’

‘So I can be. So I can be now.’ She opened her eyes and stared at him fixedly. ‘Maybe I needed to meet you; you didn’t even have to be a rabbi. To meet you was enough. I’ve just read a book by some Latin American, and in it they’re all trying to find out what they’re living for and they waffle on about it for nights on end and are mad about some writer that none of them has ever met. Then one of them happens to see some unknown old man knocked down by a car and he realises that the old man is all alone so he and a friend go to visit him in hospital, and there they discover that the old man happens to be none other than the writer they are mad about. They chat to him and they’re happy because something they had never believed would ever happen, had happened. And even though he told them nothing and even though meeting him must have lost all its significance by the next day, they were happy anyway.’

‘Do you think one lives in order to meet someone?’

‘I was only telling you something I’d read.’

‘And then to stay with them?’

‘Why to stay with them? Didn’t I say that the next day it might not mean a thing any more.’ She sat up. ‘I told you. I’m all right now. I’ll get up and pamper you a bit.’

‘The way I see it, it was I who met you.’

‘I don’t understand. Could you pass me my clothes?’

He gathered up her things and also dressed himself. In a relationship, the one who was on the taking end usually talked about him meeting the one he was doing the taking from. Sometimes it was difficult to tell. But it seemed to him that it was he who had been doing the taking so far. With her he had entered an empty space, a landscape where more than one sun shone, so that even he had started to thaw. And what had he given her ? What could one do for another, if one loved them? Not burden them with one’s own problems, be with them when night was falling. Or listen to them, at least?