Judge On Trial

by Ivan Klíma

  I’m made from the same thing as Adam

  I give people food and drink

  I’ve two big ears but cannot hear

  What am I, do you think?

  Someone behind me yelled out: A cooking pot. The clown nodded but went on holding me by the shoulder. Now he wanted me to tell him who is the most useful of men. Everyone stared at me but no one gave me even the tiniest hint. I knew what I ought to reply. I’d already made up my mind, because I’d always wanted to be useful and help people, but the words stuck in my throat and I was scarcely able to whisper them: a doctor.

  ‘Yes,’ said the clown, ‘a doctor is a very useful person, but the most useful one of all, of course, is the man who tells the truth. That’s why even kings had their fools and wouldn’t let any ill befall them.’ He did another two somersaults in the aisle. Everyone laughed, although I couldn’t see what at, and I felt I’d been disgraced. Scarcely had the clown disappeared than I fled the loft, before the show itself had even started.

  Then I received a sign. I wasn’t expecting it, but that is the usual way with signs: they come to those who are not expecting them.

  I woke up in the middle of the night. In wartime, the darkness at night is total so that it not only fills people’s souls, it fills the windows too. Everyone else in the room was asleep; someone was snoring loudly. Commanded by some invisible power I made my way to the blacked-out window. I knew the view by heart. Immediately opposite the window stood some enormous lime trees. Beneath them were stored the wooden components of prefabricated buildings and behind them rose the fortress ramparts, covered on our side with grass.

  I could remember the branches of the lime trees, blossom-covered, or green, or yellowing, or bare or snow-hidden, I had seen them deathly in darkness and terrifyingly alive when lit up by lightning. Now, obedient to the call, I very slightly lifted an edge of the black paper masking the window and went rigid. In the crown of the tree opposite, a light was revolving, a large gleaming eye was swirling round a fiery point. I felt its warm gaze come to rest on me, travel over me, and then penetrate me, reaching depths I knew nothing of, and in sudden awe I realised that it was He: God or Life whose mystery no one could fathom. He passed through me and I beheld Him.

  I released the paper and trembled in terror. No one woke up and I stood motionless facing the blackout: I knew I had to lift the edge of the paper once more and catch another glimpse of that eye, but I was unable to bring myself to do it. When at last I did raise a corner and peered out through the chink, there was nothing there any more, just the dark treetop, quite intact.

  Every night afterwards – I no longer recall how long it continued – I would wake up, trembling with anxious anticipation, and creep to the window to lift a corner of the blackout. But my light had disappeared and never returned, until one day I realised I would never see it again.

  It was around that time that some friends and I managed to get into an uninhabited part of the loft and there, in a dark corner beneath a sharply slanting roof, we discovered a harmonium. The instrument, made from black polished wood, was free of dust as if someone was taking care of it. Goodness knows how the harmonium got there, who had smuggled it in, and when they dared to sit and play it. Olga carefully lifted the lid, had another look round and then started to play. The rest of us lay on the dirty floor of warm bricks. I wasn’t used to listening to music and I remember the strange ecstasy that overcame me. As if I’d been cut off from a world in which one looked forward to ersatz coffee and stewed swede, in which countless unknown people were packed together, a world of shouting, stench, and fear, a world of screeching burial carts pulled by humans. It started to become distant and I found myself elsewhere. I was alone, just myself within my own crystal-clear space. I don’t know why, but at that moment I longed to see a wide desert. Most likely it wasn’t a desert I longed for, but freedom; the knowledge that a desert was in my reach, that one day I could stand on a rock and gaze at the golden sands, be anywhere or anything, anything but a chained beast in a slaughterhouse yard. And it occurred to me that if I wished hard enough I’d manage to escape. I would fly upwards, outwards through the dormer window and clamber up the shafts of light; or else I would burst into flame; I could see myself in the middle of the loft (I expect I’d seen something similar in some picture or other) with flames shooting from me. I felt sorry for myself, but anything seemed preferable to waiting here for the strip of paper with my name on it.

  When she finished playing, she closed the lid, and without a glance in our direction, said it had been nice of us to bring her there.

  I fell in love with her. She was at least two years older than I. It struck me that she resembled my mother as I had seen her in her school-leaving photo. She had a slight limp, which touched me and it also occurred to me that her physical defect improved my chances.

  She and I lived on the same corridor. I searched in my case for the only suit I owned which was at all formal – an imitation sailor’s suit which was no longer very appropriate for my age group and whose jacket cut me under the arms – and squeezed myself into it. Then I wetted and slicked down my tousled hair and set off for her door. I could have knocked on it, of course, and a few days earlier would have done so, but now I didn’t dare. For a long time I walked up and down the corridor in the hope that she might emerge, catch sight of me, be astounded at how clean, good-looking and interesting I could look – and fall in love with me.

  She didn’t come out and the next day I was ashamed to repeat the same performance. Before I fell asleep I imagined them torturing her. SS-men had thrust her, naked and beaten, into a vile subterranean dungeon already full of countless gnawed human skeletons. In the middle of the night I crept to some inconspicuous window to throw her a crust of bread. Or, again naked, they had put her in an enormous cauldron of water that they were starting to heat up slowly. But disguised in one of their uniforms, I fooled them and came to her rescue. I carried her away, gripping her damp, tortured body, and started to quiver with tenderness and anticipated delight.

  She certainly never suspected that I loved her or that I was rescuing her from her torturers night after night. No one suspected it and I confided in no one, not even Arie. They took her away, and being lame she stood no chance. I’ve even forgotten her face. I can only recall her seated in the pale attic light at the black instrument, her long fingers touching the keys. I used to think about those fingers. I would often imagine them gripping the floor tiles, those naked maidenly fingers that had produced music, as her body writhed in its last contorted throes. And I didn’t arrive to rescue her.

  Another thing we did was to break into the storehouse. Oddly enough, neither then, nor at any time since, did it occur to me that there was anything untoward about our behaviour, or that we had broken any law. In the midst of universal lawlessness such minor transgressions pall into insignificance. And is it theft at all to take what has been stolen? Now I know it to be so, but deep inside me there lurks this question, whether a society which condones or actually requires the oppression of even one of its members does not in fact forgo the right to demand respect for the law from anyone.

  The storehouse was the place where they brought the things left by the dead: pathetic flotsam, meagre chattels from old people’s homes and improvised hospitals, from that one great processing plant for corpses which, in reality, our town was – vulcanised cases with spidery writing, meticulously packed boxes and rucksacks that no one ever opened, trunks with iron mountings, bundles of eiderdowns in the strangest shapes because of the pots stuck inside them. From time to time, a grey-uniformed soldier would arrive with a tractor, men would jump down from the trailer, carry out as much of the luggage as the cart could carry, then close the doors again, fix an enormous padlock on them and drive away.

  We pretended to be playing a game. While Osi was trying to pick the padlock with a skeleton key, the rest of us formed an impenetrable wall around him.

  It took only a few minutes and he had the pad
lock open. The others went on pretending to play their game while, in the falling dusk, Arie and I squeezed through the narrow gap between the slightly open doors.

  I heard the doors creak shut behind us, the shouts from outside were suddenly silenced and all we could hear was the sound of our own footfalls and breathing. At that moment, in the second before Arie switched on his torch, I felt the sudden onset of fear combined with the equally powerful sense of elation at being there with him. Then a huge shadowy figure was thrown on to the wall and crept further into the room’s interior. My fear was dispelled, replaced by excitement at the things that lay within my grasp. Now I know that the more one is deprived of freedom the greater one’s attachment to things. But at that time, I felt nothing but ecstasy – a peasant in a castle which he had conquered, in a palace before which he had knelt in obeisance only the day before, and I opened the lids of suitcases and rummaged in them, while Arie smiled almost with disinterest and shone the torch for me. I think he had an abhorrence of those things, and years later, it is with a feeling of abhorrence that I recall the wretchedness of shirts worn from a hundred washings, which only a few days earlier had clothed an aged body; flannel underpants and faded petticoats, darned socks and skirts long out of fashion. But at that moment, I was only aware of the number of things for which I might possibly find a use: pyjamas, books (I had no time to investigate what language they were written in), climbing boots (which mountains were they meant for? Or does the downward path, the one to the River Lethe, perhaps descend by cliffs and precipices?), an octavo notebook with plenty of clean pages, an edition of Seneca’s selected letters, a bedside lamp in the shape of a toadstool. I tipped the contents of one of the suitcases out on to the floor and stuffed it with all these valuables. Then I cautiously pushed the case out through the crack between the doors (my mother’s cellar still contains an ochre-coloured leather suitcase whose former – late – owner’s name I scraped off that same evening, and but for that suitcase, that exhibit, I would, by now, doubt that any of it had ever happened, and wonder whether it was just fantasy, something I’d overheard somewhere, or read about and borrowed) and watched it quickly disappear, borne off into safer hiding in the barrack corridors.

  But I went back inside, seized by a newly discovered, newly awoken rapaciousness. Now I was looking for food. I rummaged in suitcases while Arie kept silent watch; it was only at the last moment that we heard the agreed alarm signal. I had a bottle of perfume in my hand. I didn’t manage to put it down and was still holding it as I squeezed into a crack behind a pile of cases. Arie squatted down beside me. We tried to hold our breath. For a moment we found ourselves in total darkness, aware only of a mixture of smells: the smell of mould, musty rags, mouse droppings and the reek of perfume because the stopper wasn’t a tight fit, and I could feel the cold liquid running over my hand.

  Then the doors creaked and the light from a dark lantern swung up and then down above our heads. They were already dragging us out of our hiding places, leading us along the lane under a bayonet – the disgrace for Arie and his father. And it’s all my fault, all because of my avarice. The rucksacks were already hanging from our shoulders, the earth shaking beneath our feet, the railway wagon already coupled up, the locomotive sounding its whistle, the grating of teeth, the thunder of the sleepers, the raised rifle-butts, the journey, weeping, the darkened sky; I’m walking forwards in a long file, no more mother, no more brother, just me alone; now the darkness is falling, enclosing me; nothing left now but a short moan before I fall down and sleep.

  The light disappeared and the doors closed once more.

  Has the man gone away for good? Is he waiting outside the doors? I knew I ought to get up and go and have a look, that eventually I’d have to, but I waited in fear. I was afraid of what I’d find. I was afraid of the truth; these days, I’d say the truth of my situation.

  A few days later that same summer, Arie suddenly came to tell me he had to say goodbye. They had been summoned to a special transport. I can remember my consternation, the chilling dismay that he too was subject to the same inexorable fate as ourselves. But he didn’t strike me as afraid. Maybe he thought that his father would retain some of his old privileges in the new place, though more likely he had the gift of self-control and knew that the greatest virtue before Him whose name be forever blessed was humility; so he was capable of smiling even at that moment.

  And so once more, for the last time we walk together down the long, grey corridor that I had run along that night when I realised I had a friend; the light shines in through the bay windows; we pretend that it’s not goodbye, agree where we’ll meet later when it’s all over; promise faithfully not to lose each other’s addresses: we’ll be bound to meet again. I have a growing feeling of dread, but I can already see us walking through the streets and crossing the thresholds of our homes. We exchanged photographs of each other. His was an ordinary passport photo, at least three years old; I remember it clearly, although I haven’t managed to bring it safely all the way from then to now; however, in those days, I would bring it out whenever I felt lonely and gaze at it with undiminished longing and nostalgia, and I could picture him moving away from me with his slightly shaky gait. It’s such a long time ago and I am sorry I cannot tell more, though I loved him dearly. But I don’t want to let my imagination run riot. When the war was over, I looked forward not only to seeing my father, who had also disappeared somewhere in Poland, but him too. I still used to take out his photo and was loath to believe that I would never set eyes on him again.

  Some time later I heard that they didn’t even take them to another camp. They stopped somewhere in the middle of fields, forced them out of the train and shot them on the spot. But it’s possible that the story wasn’t true, and they murdered them some other way.

  3

  During the final days leading up to the end, prisoners from camps of every description were brought to our town from places undoubtedly more horrifying than our fortress. In the streets there appeared haggard shaven-headed individuals in grey and blue striped clothes, and we tried to find out whether my father wasn’t amongst them, or whether someone at least had news of him. But even more than the living, it is the dead who stand out in my memory. The poor things died in such numbers that they stacked them on carts as if they weren’t people, only wax models or dummies. It took several men to push the carts, with the two in front steering. Stiffened limbs hung out of the cart and motionless eyes stared out of the shaven skulls. I would give those carts a wide berth, but I also found them fascinating. I would shuffle along the opposite pavement. From that distance, the dead appeared harmless to me and only vaguely reminiscent of ex-human beings.

  One day, on just such an occasion, a cart got stuck. One of the men pushing the cart called across to me: Come and give us a hand, young ’un! The nearer I came to the cart, the weaker I became, and I was convinced I wouldn’t be of any use to them anyway. By the time I was just a few paces away, I detected an odour unknown to me and it filled me with violent disgust and revulsion.

  As soon as I put my shoulder to the side of the cart it occurred to me that I had not been summoned by chance. After all, what actually attracted me to those dismal carts, though I wouldn’t admit it, was a desire to find out whether one of them wasn’t carrying my father’s body. In fact, the whole time I was convinced that if they really did carry him past me I would receive some sign that would actually allow me to find him amidst that tangle of bodies. And now that I had received a sign I was afraid to believe it and did not dare raise my eyes. I leaned with the others against the wooden sides of the cart which indeed started to move again and I was able to take my leave. For a split second I looked up and immediately above me caught sight of a pair of dark eyes, fixed in a ghastly glazed stare. I didn’t even cry out. I shuffled to one side where there chanced to be a patch of grass and I sat down on it. I could still feel the saccharine sweet aftertaste in my mouth as consciousness left me.

  That very evening,
or maybe the one after, I was just falling asleep when I was woken by the unfamiliar persistent roar of nearby engines. I got up, pulled back the blackout and opened the window. There was still a chance that our gaolers would drive through the town shooting at us. But now there were other things for them to worry about. Like us, they found themselves on the border between being and not being, on the threshold of freedom which required them to flee, not to murder. And so I stood by the window as night fell, my mind on the passing roar. There was also the sound of gunfire and the deep-throated explosions of artillery grenades. Then I heard something utterly out of keeping with the gloom of the place: a shout of joy from myriad throats and people yelling hurrah over and over again. And someone was running around beneath our window bellowing like a lunatic: The Russians are here!

  My mother got up, and hugged and kissed me. I picked up my brother Hanuš and took him to look out into the darkness where at that moment several rockets flared up and the smell of smoke and gunpowder wafted towards us. So this was the moment we had talked about for the past five years. We were free. We had been liberated.

  The next day, I stood by the half-demolished fence that divided this place from the world and watched the moving columns of tanks, vehicles and horses – the vehicles decorated with pictures of statesmen like icons – all going in the same direction in an unstoppable tide, like a river, lava, a swarm of locusts – a natural phenomenon. And soldiers in filthy, dusty uniforms would occasionally toss a handful of cigarettes or sweets out of a vehicle and the crowd would dash forward into the road.

  And I recall the moment when one of the men in striped clothes tried to reach a carton of cigarettes which was left lying in the middle of the road. In his desperate rush and eagerness to snatch the booty entirely for himself, he didn’t manage to get out of the way in time and so we all saw him fall and metal tank tracks pass over his body. They pulled him back by his legs and as they carried him past me I could see the bloodstained brains running out of the burst skull. I could feel myself going limp but I didn’t budge from the spot and so, in the short interval between two columns of vehicles, I was to see a crowd in pursuit of a thin little fellow. He was barefoot but his black trousers were of good quality and his shirt was very white. He was carrying a briefcase and doing a very good job of evading his haggard pursuers. But there were too many of us there by the fence and he suddenly found himself encircled. I tried to get as close as possible, but they quickly had him surrounded and hurled him to the ground anyway. For the first time I witnessing a people’s court; I heard shrieks, curses and supplications in German, then blows and a death rattle. Shortly afterwards they were carrying him away as well, now shirtless and his face obliterated; they carried him feet first towards me and I could see the deathly yellow shining through the layer of dust. I must have found it terribly shocking, for the scenes to have remained in my memory in such detail, though not shocking enough to prevent me looking on in jubilation. There were too many corpses for the shock effect to be sustained.