Ivan Klíma - Judge On Trial

I stood next to her. I guessed that she was not a professional guide because she was clearly moved by what she was telling them. Fifteen thousand children in total passed through here, some of them babies. They all died in the gas chambers. She took off her glasses for a moment. She had blue eyes set far apart. She wiped her glasses and then wiped her eyes. There were loud expressions of horror from among the tourists and I turned to her — though I don’t know what made me do it, as it was tactless towards her (but it did concern me, after all, having been important for my existence) — and said that some of the children had survived.

She gave me a severe look. How did I know? I told her that there were very few of us who survived, though I appreciated that for other people or for history, the numbers were not significant. She asked me whether it was true that I had been there and then told me that her group were members of a Hasidic community from America and were deeply interested in the fate of European Jews. Would I be willing to tell them something about what it was like to be there ? I told her I would be pleased to but that I had almost forgotten everything. Would I at least be prepared to answer any questions which they might have? I replied that I would rather not. She was sorry if she had offended me in any way and asked me to forgive her if she had. I assured her that this was not the case and said that it was I, rather, who owed her an apology for butting into her talk. There was nothing more to be said. I nodded to my charge and we both left the museum. We bought ourselves postcards and then, at a kiosk which made the place look even more like a mere tourist attraction, we treated ourselves to lemonade and sat down on a bench by the entrance to the fortress. My visitor wrote one postcard after another, using his knee to lean on (to all the world as if sitting beneath the Great Pyramid), while tourists walked past us. Then I caught sight of her again. She was leading her charges to the waiting coach. The coach was a roomy one and they were scarcely twenty in number. I jumped up from the bench and went to ask her if she had room for two more passengers.

She remained standing in the doorway until we climbed aboard, then directed us to one of the double seats over the rear wheels, told the driver to start and came and sat down opposite me: my future wife.

3

She was in the final year of a librarianship course while also studying at the language school, which was how she was able to earn herself some extra cash interpreting. (Her parents were civil servants and she also had a brother; ever since she started university, she had managed to earn enough to buy her own clothes.)

At the age of nineteen, she had interpreted at a student congress where she came to know the Israeli delegate, Menachem. He was an engineer from a kibbutz and was thirteen years her senior. Compared to the youths she had gone out with previously, this was a mature man. He had been wounded twice, first by the English, then by the Arabs. He lived on the edge of the Negev Desert which he was helping to irrigate. After ten days’ acquaintance he proposed marriage to her and a life together on a kibbutz. She took off her glasses and cleaned the lenses while she was telling us this. She did not once look at me. Maybe she was shy, or was afraid that the glasses spoiled her looks, but at this moment she turned her face away from me so that I wouldn’t see her crying. He would certainly have kept his promise. He had already started to see to the formalities in his own country and written to her to say that everyone in the kibbutz was looking forward to her arrival; and it did not matter at all that she wasn’t a Jewess. (That comment had hurt her feelings as she was half-Jewish, but they apparently did not recognise it there, as it was on her father’s side.)

She had also applied for permission to marry a foreigner but the application dragged on and on. She wrote to him complaining about it. He wrote back to say she would have to be patient. He would be too. He would go on waiting until she arrived. She promised to be patient and never to stop loving him; only death could end their love.

In his letters he would tell her about the kibbutz-members as if they were relations. Sometimes he would include photos of them and before long she knew them and could imagine the various little houses, the hall where they all ate together and held celebrations, and the paths that led to the stables or the orange groves. Her passport application was turned down, as well as her appeal. In desperation, she wrote to him to say she would try to enter one of the neighbouring countries and get to him from there. That letter was probably opened by the authorities and she had never been allowed anywhere abroad since.

He continued to vow love and devotion. She now made a conscious effort to win the confidence of the authorities. She joined a youth ensemble in the hope that she would eventually travel abroad with them. She wrote and told him her plan. When her ensemble made a trip to Hungary she alone was banned from going, even though she sang solo in two of their songs.

And then — it had happened only a few weeks before I met her — she received the announcement of his wedding, together with a long rambling letter in which he explained that he had not been able to endure waiting any longer. (How could he possibly not endure? What sort of love was it that was unable to withstand separation!) And most horrifying of all, it appeared that he had lured away the wife of one of his friends in the kibbutz. Surely no decent man could do something of that sort? Could she have been totally deceived in him?

I was touched not so much by the story itself as by her show of feeling. Had I been wiser, I would have realised that it concealed the danger of romantic notions, and a tendency towards categorical demands and judgements. But at that moment I found her childlike earnestness touching.

From the very first she aroused my sympathy. Her cheap spectacles with their thick old-fashioned frames, her tiny hands, almost like a child’s, with stubby fingers, her disproportionately high forehead, and her complexion so pale that the bluish pattern of the veins clearly showed through, not to mention her habit of laughing too loudly in order to conceal her shyness or emotion.

I tried to foster the impression in her that I was educated, successful and amusing. Subconsciously I started to imitate my colleague Oldřich. I became loquacious, tossing around aphorisms, boasting of my knowledge and the people I knew, complaining about all the duties I had. But then it dawned on me there was no sense in blowing my own trumpet this way, as she had a different scale of values. She was not interested in whom I knew or even what I knew. What she wanted was for the person she loved to be kind, sensitive, sincere and attentive, and to love his own family the way she loved hers.

She talked about her family from the very first day we met and wanted me to meet them. Even before we went to the pictures together or were on first-name terms, I found myself standing in their dark front hall, full of enormous cupboards, hangers, buckets, ropes, paddles and bicycles. My ears were assailed by an assortment of noises that seemed to come from every corner of the flat. My wife-to-be had chosen for my visit a moment when all the family would be there together. ‘The family’ meant Mother, Father, Grandad, brother Robert, his wife Sylva and their daughter Lucie, Auntie Mařka, and Sandor the tom-cat. The place was pervaded by a pungent smell of boiled sauerkraut, soapy water and tobacco smoke; the child was crying; somewhere in the bowels of the flat a piano was being played; and from the kitchen came the hiss of a pressure-cooker and the blare of a radio. I suppressed a desire to turn and run. I looked upwards and noticed that hanging from the smoke-blackened ceiling among the fine threads of dusty cobwebs was a banner which proclaimed: WELCOME TO ALL WHO COME IN FRIENDSHIP.