by Ivan Klíma
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1
HE WAS ALONE at home with the children. Alena was out for the evening with some old school chums; she had decided at the last minute. It did not matter to him that his wife would be returning late. If anything, he was relieved, because at least she would not be there to remind him he had lied, and he would have no difficulty putting off the moment when he would tell her about the other one, and he could even retain the hope that he might postpone that moment indefinitely, that the other one would disappear from his life before having a chance to change it irreparably.
He peeled the hot potatoes, poured melted butter over them and added a piece of curd cheese. His daughter was washing lettuce in the sink. Martin was already at table and banging the plate with his fork.
‘When’s Mummy coming?’ Manda asked.
‘Late this evening, I expect.’
‘Mummy’s always out these days.’
‘Maybe she’s gone to see Honza,’ Martin interjected with his mouth full.
‘You’re stupid. What would she be doing there?’
‘She’s got to look after him, of course, because of his broken leg.’
‘Why should she? Daddy, she doesn’t have to, does she?’
‘No, of course she doesn’t.’ So far he had said nothing to his wife, but she must suspect something by now. She seemed to be wary with him; sometimes he had even had the impression she was about to ask him, but in the end she had said nothing, maybe suspecting the answer in advance. Whenever he tried to embrace her she had been bound to feel his coolness, which only masqueraded as affection, and she too had remained cool.
He had made an effort not to add further infidelities to the one he was already concealing and had deliberately avoided Alexandra – just once taking her out to lunch. Then she had left town for a fortnight, and it seemed she had retreated from his life and he would forget her, as one forgot a disturbing dream.
His daughter had got herself off to bed on her own, Martin he had to help wash. ‘Mummy always sings with us before we go to sleep,’ his son said in an effort to influence him.
‘Well there’s no chance of me singing with you; you’ll have to sing on your own.’
‘So tell us about something!’ Now Martin lay in the metal cot that was getting too small for him. He stuck his feet through the rungs at the bottom of the cot and waggled them. ‘Tell us what you did today, f’rinstance.’
‘Nothing special.’ She was supposed to be coming home by yesterday evening and he had spent the whole of today knowing that he had the chance to phone her. The obligation, even. ‘Mrs Richterová told me about some lads who had been stealing cars on a housing-estate,’ he recalled. ‘There were four of them, and they had a perfectly equipped workshop . . .’
‘Daddy, are you sad?’ his daughter interrupted him.
‘What makes you ask?’
‘I don’t know. You don’t have to tell us about it if you’ve got too much to do.’
‘Don’t you worry!’ He went on with the story about the car thieves and took care afterwards to concentrate on what he was saying.
‘Daddy, can I show you what I painted?’ She got out of bed and ran barefoot to the desk. She rummaged for a while in the drawer before pulling out a large sheet of paper with a painting on it: seven brightly coloured ponies dancing on a dark-blue field, their movement and bright colours imparting happiness, maybe tenderness as well.
‘You made a really good job of that one.’
‘You can take it, if you like it.’
‘Thank you. I’ll put it under the glass on my desk-top at work.’ He stroked her hair and then his son’s and went off to his own room.
He was right not to have phoned her. He liked his home – and it would not take much to destroy its fragile structure. He hoped that so far he had not endangered it.
Just before midnight he made up both beds. On his wife’s bed he left a note saying:
The children are all right. I hope you are too. Sleep well!
It was still dark when he awoke. There was no need to look at the clock. He was able to guess the time at whatever hour of the day. It was three in the morning. He realised he was still alone in the room. To make sure, he reached out to the next bed, but it was empty and cold. His fingers touched the note on her pillow. He was more surprised than alarmed. He got up and had a look in all the rooms. In the kitchen, he drank a glass of water and as he was returning to the bedroom, he heard the sound of familiar footsteps in the passage outside. The footsteps halted in front of the door. He imagined her searching through her handbag in tiredness and desperation, then at last the key found the lock and the door slowly opened.
She switched on the light, caught sight of him right in front of her and cried out as if she’d seen a ghost.
‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘What happened to you?’
She came up to him, laid her head on his shoulder and started to sob.
‘Did something happen?’
‘Haven’t you been asleep? You’ve been waiting all this time? I love you, Adam. I do love you,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Pretty late,’ he said. ‘You’ve been out with your friends all this time?’
‘No, I wasn’t with them at all. I lied to you, Adam.’
‘Where were you then?’
‘With Honza,’ she said. ‘I was at his place, but it was the last time. It’s over between us, Adam, I’ll never see him again.’
‘What’s over?’
‘Let’s not stand out here.’
They went into the kitchen: he in his pyjamas, she in her evening dress of dark-brown silk. Her eyes were red. From smoke, or maybe from weeping.
‘Adam,’ she said determinedly, ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time, but never had the opportunity.’
‘Hold it there a moment.’ He went off to the bathroom. He had never owned either a bathrobe or a dressing-gown. So he put on a jumper and some trousers.
‘You got dressed?’
‘Shouldn’t I have?’
‘As you like. It really doesn’t matter. Adam, I’ve been unfaithful to you.’
‘Just now?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, almost crossly. ‘Well, yes, as it happens,’ she corrected herself, ‘but that’s not what I meant. This was the last time. We’ve ended it. Adam, I’m so sorry, I didn’t want it in the first place; I just wanted to help him. But we’ve ended it now. It’s completely over; we won’t see each other again.’
‘With that student?’
‘Adam, I love you. That’s why I broke it off with him. He cried when I told him, but I couldn’t go on living that way.’
In his mind’s eye he suddenly saw her coming up the platform at the station in the company of two young men and a girl with bare feet. Then he had given him a lift out to Veleslavín or somewhere. ‘Already by the time you came from Bratislava?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Are you cross with me? I didn’t mean it that way. I was just sorry for him. I wanted to help him over his sadness. But I love you. That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought it would be over straight away. Do you love me too?’
He wasn’t sure whether he loved his wife. Over the years they had been together, he had become accustomed to her, but it meant he was no longer sure of his feelings towards her. There was one thing he had admired about her, however: her childlike innocence, her inability to deceive.
‘Why don’t you say anything, Adam?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re cross with me. But after all, you went with Magdalena and whatever the others were called. Say something, for goodness sake! I didn’t want to hurt you. Don’t you believe me? Won’t you ever believe me again?’ Tears streamed from her eyes once more.
That was the way of i:he world. It had been absurd of him to believe that his wife was quite different from everyone else. He started to laugh.
She stared at him in amazement: ‘You’re laughing.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It struck me as funny.’
‘What did?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Everything. The fact it never once crossed my mind you might have a lover.’
‘But I haven’t any more,’ she corrected him. ‘Are you cross? Are you cross with me?’
‘No. “Cross” is hardly the word to describe it.’ Then he said: ‘I’ve been unfaithful to you, as well.’
She looked at him in alarm. ‘I don’t believe you! You’re only saying it to pay me back. It’s not nice to say things like that when they’re not true.’
‘I don’t want to pay you back.’
‘Who is she then?’
‘It’s immaterial.’
‘You see? You don’t even want to tell me who it is. You’re making it up just to get even with me.’
‘I’ve never wanted to get even with anyone in my life.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Her chin was beginning to tremble. ‘You could never have kept it secret. It’d have slipped out, for sure!’ Then she asked: ‘Has it been going on for a long time?’
‘No. It was only once . . . And it was after you started.’
‘And how am I supposed to know you’re telling the truth now? If you were lying to me before, how am I to know that you’re not lying to me now?’
He shrugged. ‘There is no way of knowing for sure whether anyone is telling the truth. That’s something I do know about!’
‘Adam,’ she blurted, ‘tell me it isn’t true. You made it all up just to pay me back. Just because you were fed up with the way I’d behaved.’
‘No, I didn’t make anything up at all.’
‘Will you tell me her name?’
He hesitated for a moment. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’
‘I’d never have thought it of you, Adam, that you could be so – nasty. Oh, God, how vile it all is. What shall we do now?’
‘I don’t know.’ Then he said: ‘We’ll go to bed.’
2
Next morning, he drove his wife to work.
‘Will you phone me?’ she asked as she got out. She was pale and her eyes were inflamed.
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’
He parked in the street that ran past his old faculty. He was supposed to go to work too, but today he couldn’t care less if he got ticked off for being late.
He walked down the steps to the river. The deserted towpath was littered with enormous concrete pipes and building panels. He climbed up on to one of the pipes and leaned against the stone wall of the embankment. The hillside opposite, once chosen to become the footstool for the tyrant’s statue, was now bathed in sunlight. A tug moved slowly along the river towing several barges full of sand. Beneath his feet, water rushed past, cloudy from a distant rain storm, and he caught sight of a branch floating just near the bank. He watched it surface and then sink again and waited to see what the current would bring next. It had been a long time since he had stood on the river bank just watching the water flow by.
There had been a time he had come here with his colleagues. They had talked about something or other but he could not remember a single sentence of it any more. As if it had been someone else entirely – someone with the same name.
He would be standing here in twenty years’ time and would know nothing about his present wife, he would not even recall last night; the words they had spoken would have been forgotten. Only a vague memory would remain that they had tried to solve a problem – but let me see, what problem was that?
He arrived at his office an hour late, but nobody took any notice. Magdalena had written to him:
Dear Adam,
I must let you know how things turned out for Jaroslav. I’ve been putting it off because I find it hard to write a letter to you. I needed a drink to get in the mood. So here I am drinking wine (after all that expense, Gamza is the best I can treat myself to) and writing to let you know it all turned out well. They were as good as their word and didn’t cheat me. As a result I am happy, and grateful to you. I should leave it at that, but it occurs to me you might be offended if I were to fob you off with just a couple of lines.
So what should I tell you? That my daughter Tereza is very good on the piano? That I’ve been reading a Graham Greene novel? But what would be the point seeing that I’ve never written to you about any of the other things I’ve read over the last thirteen years? So instead I’ll say thank you once more. I know things like that are against your principles and someone in your profession is at greater risk than anyone else.
He screwed up the letter and threw it in the waste-paper basket unread. However could she really write such rubbish in a letter? – get drunk, spout all sorts of nonsense and get herself and others into trouble.
It was time he got on with something but work was the last thing on his mind. He picked up the telephone and checked whether the two lay judges for the Kozlík case had been asked to attend the next day. Thinking about the Kozlík case was definitely not the best way to improve his mood. (Happily there were still three weeks to go before the trial; he had been unable to book the courtroom for two consecutive days any earlier.)
On this occasion he had been very careful in his choice of lay judges; in a system in which the right to take decisions had, by and large, been superseded by the right to participate, and participation meant paying lip-service, one underestimated formalities at one’s peril.
As his two assistants he had chosen Mrs Pleskotová, the pharmacist, and Mr Kouba, the fitter. He had often shared the bench with Mrs Pleskotová, whom he considered a wise and sensitive person. And although he had never talked to her directly about the subject he assumed that she would find it very difficult to despatch someone to their death. Apart from that, she worked not far from where the murder was committed and he thought it a good idea to find out what the local people felt about the case.
Old Kouba was a manual worker turned official, and a reliable one at that. He had been sitting on committees recently, assisting with the purges. He had mercilessly handed down verdicts not against criminals but against upstanding and defenceless fellow-citizens. It would have been best to steer clear of such people, but if Adam remained a judge how could he avoid them? With someone like Kouba on the bench, at least their joint decision would have political authority. So long as Kouba didn’t realise that on this occasion the court did not represent the authority to which he was accustomed to paying lip-service. If he did, he would start to resist the proposed verdict and would make it difficult to reach a decision.
But it was a risk he had to take. It was necessary to include at least one of Them.
One got caught up with people one didn’t trust and whose views and attitudes one regarded as abhorrent. One argued with them but they were deaf to one’s words. The only possibility was to try to outwit them, to soften or defuse their belligerence; but they would have their own way in the end anyway, for theirs was the kingdom, the power and the law. The sovereign of a Commonwealth, be it an assembly or one man, is not subject to the civil laws. Thomas Hobbes.
He retrieved the crumpled letter from the waste-paper basket.
But maybe such things don’t offend you so much by now. You could well have changed. For the better I should say. You seemed to me more adult or manly than you were in The Hole. There were times there that you behaved like a little boy. Sorry! You wanted to be loved. And you wanted to make love too, but were unwilling to see that it implied any responsibility or duty as far as you were concerned. Above all you felt no duty, nor any need even, to be heedful of others and try to understand them. You did not notice that other people lived according to different values from yours, that they might have hated the thought that their very work assisted the ‘construction’ (as you people called it) of the society you believed in. You knew very well I was unhappy in The Hole. And you weren’t happy there either – you felt slighted and wasted. But you knew that it would soon come to an end – for you, it was just a brief passing phase,
a heroic episode that you would quite enjoy looking back on one day. You didn’t notice that they were making me do something other than what I wanted, that they had taken away all my rights. You didn’t notice and you made not the slightest effort to save me from the place. Of course you didn’t have to marry me if you didn’t love me enough, but you could have helped me. Or tried to, at least. Why am I writing to you about it? After all, it makes no difference any more. But I’ll never tell you if I don’t tell you now. When you left I felt terribly lonely. I spent several days convincing myself you’d turn up again, that you wouldn’t just disappear for ever like that. You would be sure to come and take me away.
So now I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you after all, and if I do then stick the envelope down and send it to you you might even read it: I did travel to see you. About a month after you left, because I had to do something and had no one at all in the world. I took two days off work and caught the night express. I didn’t sleep a wink the entire journey, thinking about what I would say to you. I got off at the other end and checked the time of the next train back. I found my way to your square – it must have been about seven thirty in the morning. I gazed at the house you had never shown me, at your home that you had never invited me to, and I shivered at the thought you might suddenly come out or look out of the window and see me standing there. But you didn’t look out. On the journey back I met Jaroslav in the train. He was much older than you and I didn’t find him attractive but I was in such a mood I told him, a total stranger, about the way I was living and he, a total stranger, offered to help me in some way. And he did. He never told me how. He must have known somebody somewhere – he was in the same party as you. They transferred me to Moravia and let me teach singing, which was something.
Don’t go thinking I want to reproach you with anything. I realise it was against your nature and your convictions to help anybody. In your view, it wasn’t just. In your view justice decreed that everyone who wasn’t enthusiastically in favour should be repressed. Maybe I do you an injustice. You just didn’t fancy taking any action, you always disdained anything that distracted you from your work, from your private self . . .