Judge On Trial

Chapter Three

1

MAGDALENA WAS WAITING at the tram stop by the Chotek Gardens. Her hair-do was meticulous, and she must have had it dyed as well. A rinse in her own shade to hide the coming grey. Shoes with thick heels — it could well be the fashion now, but to his eyes they made her look gawky.

Oldřich bowed and kissed her hand. ‘I think I have some good news for you, dear lady. Admittedly I am not yet apprised of the details of the case, but in principle the necessary intervention could be obtained, so long as your husband’s case does not fall outside local, or at the very most regional jurisdiction.’

Magdalena blushed.

‘I’m sorry to say thai: the comrades’ moral standards are in serious decline,’ Oldřich continued. Meanwhile they had crossed the tram tracks and turned into a broad avenue where cars whizzed past in an unbroken stream beneath mighty chestnut trees. ‘There was a time when they were motivated by ideals such as class justice, revolutionary principle or human betterment; nowadays their motives are entirely materialistic.’

She remained silent. Apparently she had not understood what Adam’s friend had in mind.

‘What Oldřich is trying to say,’ said Adam with distaste, ‘is that getting help might cost something.’

‘But I don’t have any money with me,’ she said, taken aback.

‘That doesn’t matter, dear lady. So far, we’re only at the discussion stage. Maybe it won’t even be to your advantage to accept help.’

‘And how much will they want?’ she asked.

‘That’s one of the things we’re here to discuss.’ They halted in front of a large three-storey art nouveau villa.

‘It might assist matters,’ Oldřich suggested, ‘if the lady conducts the negotiations on her own. The point is that from their side only madam comrade will be present. Let me put you in the picture: madam herself holds no official post, but her husband works in the education department.’

Adam noticed that a curtain at one of the first-storey windows had moved to one side very slightly but he could make out no face. He had never done anything illegal before, or more accurately nothing dishonourable. Even what he was doing now was not for his own benefit. That would hardly constitute a mitigating circumstance in law, though.

The door was opened by a fat, red-faced woman wearing an apron. He was not yet sure whether she was the one they had come to negotiate with, or only the maid. From the kitchen there came a smell of freshly baked buns and burnt oil that made him feel queasy. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ the woman said. ‘My hubby is sorry he can’t be here. You know what it’s like during the holidays. He’s having to do the work of three.’ She attempted a smile; her top teeth were entirely gold.

She led them down a passage. Antlers stuck out absurdly from the walls and baroque statues of saints stood on shelves between crossed swords. In the sitting room they sat down on impractical chairs covered in flowered print. Beneath their feet soft carpets were piled deep. A bust of an author fifty years dead crowned a small bookshelf of collected works. A bulldog dozed in an armchair at the table. It raised its head lazily as they came in, bared its crooked teeth and then fell asleep again without making a sound.

Oldřich said: ‘You have a lot of fine things here, dear lady.’

‘My brother-in-law got hold of ’em for us. He always used to bring a little something when they were closing down a monastery. Them days it’d’ve all gone for scrap or on the bonfire, anyhow. But nowadays,’ she indicated an inlaid bureau, ‘you couldn’t get it for love nor money. Everybody wants to get their mitts on it. Even people who don’t know the first thing about it. Once you’ve got it it’s yours for good. It’s safe from reforms, it’s safe from everything. Except maybe woodworm.’ And she offered them coffee.

He watched Magdalena clasp the handle of the coffee cup in her plump fingers and stare doggedly at the carpets in front of her. Her cheeks flushed. He recalled seeing it happen to her once before. Then, she had said: ‘I feel so ashamed.’ He could no longer remember the reason for her shame; most likely himself or something he had said or done.

‘Last week one of my friends offered me a pewter plate for eight hundred crowns,’ the woman remarked. ‘They must think we’re made of money! And now I’ve got to lay out a thousand for Ben here. As if there was anything wrong with wanting the best for mum’s best friend.’ She got up and heaved the bulldog on to her lap. The dog went on sleeping and she went on complaining. How she had had to cough up for her daughter’s co-op flat, help out her poorly old mother and pay the builders at their country place. About the reason for the visit she said nothing.

After a quarter of an hour or so, Oldřich got up and he followed suit.

He waited alone in front of the house. His friend apparently had another similar meeting to see to that afternoon. He ought to get him something for his services too. At least a bottle of something, or some flowers for his wife, perhaps. He was getting more and more embroiled. It was a mistake to have offered to help Magdalena. So many had lost their jobs that no one would ever know the exact figure; all of them would have to find themselves a living doing something other than the work they had been trained for, or had a vocation for. Magdalena’s husband would get over it too. The problem is that I’ve not been thrown out. I hand down verdicts in the name of the Republic and in return collect my salary in two instalments every month. My services aren’t badly rewarded, considering.

In olden times they fed a single sow, the trough’s a lot more crowded than that now, Russian proverb.

Magdalena appeared half an hour later. She linked her arm in his — as in olden times.

‘How did you get on?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about it all. She explained to me that about five people have to get something. At least three thousand each. She swore that they wouldn’t get a penny out of it, that they were doing it as a favour to your friend and for the sake of justice.’

‘But you’re not going to line their pockets with fifteen thousand!’

‘I don’t know. I feel out of my depth.’

She said it as if he wasn’t. Could she really think he’d sunk so low?

‘We don’t even have that much. I don’t know where we’ll get it from.’

‘Do you think it’d be worth it?’

‘What else can we do? He loves his work. He enjoys teaching. He’d go mad working as a warehouseman or a book-keeper somewhere.’

‘He wouldn’t have to do it for ever. The present climate won’t last long.’

‘Long enough to see all of us buried. And then our children would suffer. They always hound the children when they’ve hounded the parents. I no longer want to spend my life just waiting for things to change.’

‘You’ll be waiting for it to happen anyway.’

‘No, I don’t mean to wait for anything any more.’

He had ten thousand saved up. He was keeping it by in case some unexpected disaster befell him, though he had no idea how such a small sum might save him. Maybe for precisely the kind of situation Magdalena and her husband now found themselves in. Only he would never use it to that purpose on his own account. And what if Alena got herself into this situation? He had to regard half the sum as her property.

‘I could lend you some money. Or you could have it as a gift,’ he quickly corrected himself.

‘Why should you? I’ve not existed for the past thirteen years as far as you’re concerned, so why, all of a sudden… I’m sorry, forgive me, I’m upset. But I could never take anything from you.’

Suddenly something came back to him from the distant era when he was still visiting her flat, the single room where they sat, slept and made love, where he so often perused the books on the shelves, though he had no time to read any of them however much he would have liked to. ‘I’m sure you used to have loads of old books.’

‘Dad left me them when he emigrated. I could hardly sell them, even if I had a mind to.’ A moment afterwards she added, ‘Who’d buy them from me? We live in a small town. The people there buy refrigerators and television sets, not books.’

‘You could sell them here.’

‘I wouldn’t get anything for them anyway.’ He noticed she had tears in her eyes. ‘I wish I were home already. I need to ask Jaroslav what he thinks.’

‘We can drive there if you like.’

‘That’s out of the question. I live near Jihlava.’

‘When we were in America we would sometimes drive that far for supper.’

‘This isn’t America.’

‘You can have a word with your husband and come back in the morning. Or you could come straight back with me if you wanted. There’s plenty of time till morning.’

They drove through Prague and turned on to the motorway. ‘Dad died two years ago,’ she remarked out of the blue. ‘It was completely unexpected. I didn’t even manage to get to the funeral. He’d been living in Germany, but over near the French border. He remarried. He left everything to his new wife. I never met her.’

‘I never saw your father either.’

‘Those books are my only memento of him. I realise they’re only things. People go their separate ways, so why should one hang on to things?’

Darkness fell. When they arrived he would most likely have to go into the flat with her. For a cup of tea, at least. She’d introduced her husband Jaroslav. What did he look like? he wondered. He didn’t care, anyway. And she would introduce him as well. This is Adam. The judge I was in The Hole with. He managed to find someone who can pull some strings for us, so you might be able to keep your job at the school. Don’t start feeling grateful: it’ll cost fifteen thousand… No, it’s not for him, only for the go-betweens. Will it be criminal? There’s no need to worry on that score if he’s the intermediary.

He glanced at her. She seemed asleep. Would this really help her? Rather than aiding one victim wouldn’t he be helping her instead to spin a web that would entangle several others?

We commit crimes, or at least we acquiesce in them, so we can go on leading normal lives. But we can never live normally again once we are implicated.

‘Adam,’ she said suddenly, ‘I know you don’t like doing it, and I’d never ask it of you if it weren’t that I haven’t the strength to go through it all again. To move on to yet another Hole. You know what I mean. It’s not happiness I’m looking for any more,’ she went on. ‘There’s not much happiness left in life for me now, but I would like some peace and quiet. And Jaroslav’sz a kind man. When I met him I was completely alone. He helped me.’

Now they were driving along narrow lanes through a landscape of dark forests, but from time to time they would come out into open country and he would make out gentle slopes bathed in moonlight.

‘I loved you in those days, Adam,’ she said. ‘More than even I supposed; more than you knew.’

‘I loved you too.’

‘No, really, you don’t have to. I knew that you couldn’t love me to the same extent. It might not even have been your fault you weren’t capable of it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They hurt you when you were still a little boy. You couldn’t be like other people afterwards.’

‘Was I worse?’ It was a surprise that she thought of him in those terms.

‘You were different.’ He waited for her to go on, but she said no more.

2

It must have been gone midnight. He had been fast asleep — he had no idea how long the ringing had been going on — and then when he started to come to his senses, it took him a few moments to identify the troublesome sound and decide to get up.

‘Is that you, bro?’ He recognised the familiar voice.

‘Where are you calling from?’ His brother had been away for three years now and in that time they had only exchanged letters.

‘Where d’you think I’m calling from? From here, of course! But the university’s paying, in case you’re worried about the bill. We can chat as much as we like. I didn’t wake you did I?’

‘I’d only just dropped off. In trouble?’

‘What trouble could I be in? It’s ages since I last heard you, but your voice is the same. What’s new your side?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ he said evasively. ‘I’m sure you have a fair idea if you read the papers.’

‘Precisely. It looks a fucking mess to me.’

‘There are fourteen million or so people living here.’

‘There are countries with a lot more inhabitants, and it’s still a fucking mess.’

‘Listen, are you drunk?’

‘I’ve had a couple. So what?’

‘There are some things one can’t discuss over the phone.’

‘You’re right there,’ his brother agreed. ‘Are you playing any tennis?’

‘Not much.’

‘Is your second service still as bad as ever?’

‘Probably.’

‘You should practise more. I don’t play much here either. It costs too much, and anyway… Any mushrooms in the woods yet?’

‘A few maybe.’

‘The park’s the only place you might get some here. The forests have got barbed wire all round, like… you know what I’m talking about. The point is there’s hardly any forests here anyway. They just left a couple for the lords and their jolly old foxhunting. I prefer to stay in and do me sums. And what about you? Not kicked you out of your judgeship yet?’

‘Not so far.’

‘Hang in, then! Even if it’s not exactly a respectable occupation over there.’

‘And you didn’t choose it either.’

‘No I didn’t, thank God! Over here, though, judges are highly respected. They wear wigs and they have to be forty or there-abouts before they’re allowed to judge at all. But when they’ve made it nobody’s allowed to interfere with them.’

‘I’m well aware of that; there’s no need to give me a long-distance lecture.’

‘Mother wrote and told me to come home. It’s a daft idea, isn’t it?’

‘You know Mother,’ he said, desperately trying to evade a reply. ‘She wants to have us all together.’

‘But what do you think?’

‘You know you’re duty-bound to return, otherwise…’

‘For God’s sake stop drivelling like a Party speaker, I’m asking you as a brother. Or can’t you even tell your brother what you think over the phone any more?’

He was aware of his inadequacy. He, who was supposed to decide on others’ guilt or innocence, was too scared to give a straight answer to a question from his own brother. He couldn’t help being scared because if they were unlawfully monitoring his conversation, they could with equal unlawfulness see to it that he lost his job. And there was no court he would be able to appeal to afterwards.

‘Mum says I ought to take a leaf out of your book,’ Hanuš went on. ‘Meaning that you came back too. But things were different then, weren’t they?’

‘To other’s word or other’s deed it is best to pay no heed!’

‘You don’t want to talk about it, do you?’

‘There’s no sense me going into details — you know the score perfectly well. You must remember the times we used to go off together to try and earn a few quid?’

‘Yeah, it was great being poor then. There was that time we cut down those trees and they wouldn’t pay us anything. Those woods: do you remember? That’s something I really miss sometimes, the chance to wander through the woods. D’you think things would go the same way for me as they did for Dad?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. But what guarantee can I give you? As a general rule people can never believe that the worst will happen. It was the same during the war.’

‘But I’ve got to make up my mind one way or the other. Isn’t there any advice you could give me?’

‘No there isn’t, really.’

‘And there was the time we sat at the fire with the gypsies. But I was allowed to study in the end.’

‘None of that’s ever coming back — you were sixteen then. The most important thing is to decide what really counts for you in life. Do you get me?’

‘So I’m not going to get any advice from you?’

‘No one will give you any. The important thing is what matters to you most. For some people it’s money, for others it’s freedom. Some people want to be close…’

‘And you’ve no regrets?’

‘No…’

‘You’re saying that on their account?’

‘No, but it’d take me a long time to explain. When you come back I’ll try and explain it to you.’

‘And what if I don’t come back?’

‘Then you’ll come round to it yourself in time.’

‘Thanks for nothing!’

‘Everyone has different priorities. Some people are incurably homesick, others can’t live without freedom…’

But there was no one on the other end any more. Either they’d been cut off or his brother had hung up.

He held the mute receiver for a few moments longer; his hand was shaking. Not so long ago a telephone call like that wouldn’t have bothered him. Or at least not so badly that he’d feel afraid. Either things had taken a turn for the worse or he had. Both, most likely. His fear was beginning to exceed admissible bounds. He was fearful for his position, not so much because it mattered to him per se, but because he expected that this time his fall would be final. Most likely he would end up in a boilerhouse, a nightwatchman’s hut or a trailer; what options would he have left then?

Except that to bring him down they didn’t need to listen in to his conversations, they didn’t need anything at all. And should they need an excuse they’d always find one. Besides which they had already set a trap for him: it was called Karel Kozlík, and he knew full well what would happen if he failed to convict him as the powers that be demanded. And if he did what was required of him? Then they would set him another trap. There was no escape — that he knew: he had been through it before.

Before going back to bed he drank another glass of water; his hands were still unsteady. What sort of life was this? Damn it, he ought to have given his brother some sort of answer. Told him something of his worries; people over there tended to forget the relentless, debilitating pressure that usually ended up crushing one.

Maybe his anxiety about his job also stemmed from his constant worry about what use he could still hope to put his mind to, what might conceivably remain to lend some meaning to his life. He still had his family, of course. On the other hand, his parents were now old and batty, his brother was elsewhere, his wife was increasingly avoiding him, and it was hard to penetrate the darkness that enveloped her.

What was she doing now? he wondered. Sleeping, of course — a great distance away, along with the children. Somewhere in this city Magdalena lay sleeping too; once there was a time she was the person closest to him, though he had never made up his mind to acknowledge her to the world as his wife. And somewhere else in the city slept Karel Kozlík, the bait they had prepared for him. But maybe he too was awake; sleep came hard to one expecting to be condemned to death.

I too was condemned to death, but they didn’t manage to carry out the sentence. How did I sleep in those days? I’ve already forgotten what happens in the souls of the sentenced; what dies or comes to life in their souls during sleepless nights. I used to get up — that I do remember — and creep to the closed and blacked-out window, to catch a glimpse of God’s sign, a glimpse of hope.

Now the window is open and uncurtained, and as I look out, the most that gleams in the darkness beyond is the light from a passing car. Hence my fear.

3

The books on the desk top (he had put them down next to the folder of case notes) gave off a peculiar smell of musty paper and mildew that brought to mind the two rooms that he alternated between when he lived in The Hole.

He opened the first book. Circulis Horologi Lunaris et Solaris authore Wenceslae Budowec, Barone a Budowa. Anno MDCXVI. The author’s name surprised him. He had known it solely in connection with the executions that had taken place below the windows of the house of his birth, long before he was born there. In fact he had never known anything about the man except that he was one of the twenty-eight. (Or was it twenty-seven?) So he had written books. A sad fate for a writer. How much would a prospective buyer pay for a 356-year-old book by one of the executed nobles? And where would he find such a buyer before tomorrow? He’d have to call Oldřich again.

Alžběta Vlková, born Nový Bydžov 6.6.1903; domiciled in Prague at 884/14 Mlandenicova Street:

I know Karel Kozlík only by sight, but would certainly recognise him as he lived in the next door flat at Mrs Marie Obensdorfová’s and I often bumped into him there. On Monday 3rd April at about half past ten at night it must have been as the television news had just finished I heard someone coming up the stairs. As I wanted to see who it was coming in so late I had a look. I used the spy-hole for the purpose and saw Karel Kozlík. On my way out of the lobby I heard a loud noise from the next door flat and the sound of breaking glass. I also heard some cursing going on. The said cursing I could hear through the wall. I could recognise the voice of Mrs Obensdorfova. Among other things I heard the words: you make my life an absolute misery, you scoundrel. You fiend, they should never have let you out. Then I heard the voice of Karel Kozlik shouting abuse. For instance I heard the words: you mean old cow, I’ll smash your face, kiss my a… etc. Then the row calmed down. Later I heard someone opening the door of Mrs Obensdorfová’s flat. I went to see who it might be, because it must have been at least midnight. For that purpose I first used the spy-hole and then a chink in the door and I identified Karel Kozlík, who was going down the stairs dressed in his coat and his checked cap. I had no trouble recognising him, but I don’t think he saw me as he was already several steps below me. Then I went off to bed.

Testimony of another tenant at 884/14 Mladenicova Street:

On 4th April this year I was coming home from work just before three o’clock in the morning as our train was a few hours late. As I came up the stairs I could already smell gas. I dashed into our flat frightened in case my wife had forgotten to turn off the gas. As soon as I made sure there was no gas escaping in our flat I went back out into the passage and discovered that the gas was coming from Mrs Obensdorfova’s flat and I started banging on her door without delay. As soon as I realised that no one was coming to open up I went down to the cellar and turned off the gas at the main. Then I went straight off to phone the police. But as none of the telephone booths in the area were working and all the pubs were closed by then I walked to the casualty post on Koniev Avenue. All that took me about twenty-five minutes. I immediately phoned from there and then the doctor drove back with me in the ambulance, where, with the police officers who had meanwhile arrived, the door was broken in. When asked by the police officers if I recognised the deceased I replied…

He felt like resting his head on the desk top and having a nap. They had reached Magdalena’s home at two o’clock in the morning. Her husband had turned out to be a bald, tubby fifty-year-old, who walked around the flat in baggy trousers and a shirt with a threadbare collar and patched elbows — a fact that Adam found surprisingly gratifying. One only needed to look at the man to see that he would be the last person to take part in subversive activity. To persecute him on political grounds was clearly an act of pure vindictiveness.

Having no wish to be present while the two discussed it, he told them he would like a short rest.

They had left him alone in the room. It was lit by a standard lamp with a familiar lampshade (except that the green had faded to a sort of dirty yellow). Beneath his feet there was a carpet with a familiar pattern and in a corner he was astonished to recognise one of the Chinese vases. Only at that moment did it come home to him that she had really been alive throughout the last thirteen years, continuing her existence somewhere, surrounded by her things.

Then they had come back in to tell him they had decided to sell the old books and if necessary the Chinese vase, and he had rashly offered to help them.

During the body search the following property was impounded:

1. 1 pocket-sized address-book with 20 pages, red covers

2. 1 wallet containing nine hundred and thirty crowns and vouchers for the canteen in Krč Hospital

3. 5 photographs 4x4 cms. showing the faces of a woman and child

4. 1 dagger with a horn handle inscribed To thine own self be true

5.1 postcard of a pornographic nature showing intercourse between a man and a woman

6. 1 Premium Savings Book No. 3286540 issued by the Czechoslovak State Savings Bank in the name of Marie Obensdorfová and registering a balance of 1250 crowns

7. 1 key-ring with four keys

The pornographic postcard was an amateur copy of an original that had obviously been many times reproduced. A fat woman was spreading her mighty thighs in a repulsive fashion. On two of the photographs he recognised the pregnant woman who had visited him a few days before. In the others, a little girl was smiling, her features nondescript. He spent a few moments flipping through the savings book. The first deposit had been made fifteen years ago. Several further deposits followed. Since March 1967, however, there had been only withdrawals, usually four or five hundred crowns once a year before Christmas. On the final occasion someone had taken out two hundred and fifty crowns at the beginning of last December. During those fifteen years, inevitably, no premiums had been won on the book, and at least three thousand crowns in unpaid interest had thereby accrued to the State.

Was it possible that two people had been killed for twelve hundred crowns, when for the mere promise that someone might keep his (essentially paltry) job a sum more than ten times greater was being demanded? In this world anything was possible, but it was more likely that the money was a side issue. But no one could ever prove it. And in fact it would be immaterial, as it did not render the deed any less dreadful.

Having been advised of her right not to take the stand in view of her relationship with the defendant, by whom she was expecting a child, Alžběta Körnerová made the following statement:

I met Karel Kozlik a year ago at Krč Hospital where we both worked. He always behaved decently towards me and often talked about the books he had read. He didn’t say anything about his past and I didn’t know he had a record. On 3rd April, we both went to the evening show at a cinema in Žižkov. I cannot remember either the name of the cinema or the film. It was a colour film about somebody called Mrs Cambálová. After the show I went straight home as my parents insisted. The next day when I was still in bed as I was on the afternoon shift, Karel Kozlík came and asked me to lend him some money because he had the chance of a bargain. I lent him six hundred crowns, not having any more on me. He did not tell me he had done anything. He may have said something to me before about his landlady, but I cannot remember anything definite, except that sometimes she used to take out his light bulbs and did not allow me to visit him. He never told me anything about his friends.

Hana Obensdorfová testified that she had brought her daughter Lucie at around 18:00 on 3rd April to her mother-in-law, as she and her husband had cinema tickets for that evening and didn’t want to leave the child alone at home. She often used to leave her at her mother-in-law’s without any mishap. Concerning the saucepan of water discovered on the stove, she said that to her knowledge, her mother-in-law never made tea or coffee in the evening, as she was afraid of not being able to sleep. When she left her mother-in-law’s flat everything was all right. As far as Karel Kozlík was concerned, she had happened to meet him on about two occasions when visiting her mother-in-law. He had behaved politely towards her.

He picked up the phone and called Oldřich.

Oldřich did not seem surprised that he should want another favour. He said he knew several people who collected old books. If it was urgent he probably wouldn’t have time to contact them, but he’d tell his wife and she could take Adam to see them.

The prospect of her acting as the go-between cheered him.

4

Alexandra wanted him to wait for her at the Malá Strana end of the Charles Bridge. He arrived ten minutes early and half an hour passed before he caught sight of her in a crowd of pedestrians among the scaffolding on the bridge. At first she looked to him like a foreigner. Her imported clothes were in eye-catchingly bright colours; she wore a leather belt with metal trinkets dangling from it. ‘Your clothes are fantastic!’

She rewarded him with a smile. ‘Where have you got the books?’

She walked at his side and he became aware of the artificial scent that emanated from her. He had left the books in his car, along with a bottle of cognac for Oldřich and a bunch of gladioli for her.

‘But they’ll wilt!’ She insisted that he find a rag (the one for cleaning the windows was all he had) and go with her to soak it in the river. ‘Since when have you been dealing in books?’

‘It’s not for me.’

‘How sweet, you’re doing a good deed. I never guessed you were such a charitable soul.’

‘It’s for an old woman friend.’

‘Old? I don’t care if she’s a hag or a teenybopper. We’ll look in at the Tom Cat. Are you at all clued up about books?’

‘Not in the least. Not long ago I was supposed to try some receivers of stolen goods, but happily they took me off it. Anyway they dealt in pictures.’

‘Old pictures are in now, even the silliest ones, even things daubed by some house-painter in a workshop in Florence or Venice. Anything so long as it’s got patina.’ While she was wrapping the flower stems with the rag, which dripped dirty water, he unwrapped the books.

‘They’re very fine. How much does she want for them, your friend?’

‘At least ten thousand.’

‘You can get her her ten thousand and still return half of them. Mark my words: you’ll be very popular.’ She selected just a few volumes and gave them him to carry.

They entered the pub and she surveyed the tables that were occupied. A man called out to her and she gave him a wave. Then they walked through into the back room and at the furthest table three long-haired young men with their female companions shuffled their chairs together to make room for them. She tried to introduce them to him but their names slipped away immediately.

‘How are you, Alex?’

‘I’m looking for Tobruk. I’ve got something to flog him.’

‘He hasn’t shown yet today.’

‘What’ll you have?’

‘Here, have a sip from mine or you’ll die of thirst waiting.’

‘But I need to find him.’

‘Hey, Freak, any idea where Tobruk could be?’

‘Got something for him?’

‘He’s not been in the last three days. He’s got a new sweetie.’

‘Is that your new sweetie, Alex? Show us. Let’s see the size of you, smooth guy. Cheer up: you look like an ad for the Cremation Society. Have a drink instead.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Don’t say thank you, say yes!’

‘I can’t, I’m driving.’

‘Hear that, Alex? He’s driving. What’s your angle, you creep? Ooh, I bet he’s runs a ministry. Come on, confess: you start your day the natural way with fresh, hygienic yoghurt, don’t you. Where did you find him?’

‘Look, I’ve got to find Tobruk.’

‘He’s broke anyhow. Go and see Yogi; he’s just sold out for mucho moolah. Didn’t you see that hit of his on the box?’

‘Hey, Alex, you’re not going? Oh, come on! With him? He’s gaping at the natives like Dr Livingstone or something.’

Adam was surprised to find it was still light outside. He felt as if in the space of those few minutes he had been kidnapped in the smoke, bloated and yellowed, and cut a pretty poor figure by staying silent. He’d sooner pack it in and retreat home. But he was the one who needed to sell the books, not her.

They climbed the Castle Steps.

She seemed to sense his mood, because when they reached the house where the lad lived who might buy their books she suggested that he wait outside. He sat down on the stone parapet and watched as the first windows lit up. Then the invisible spotlights were switched on and the Castle glowed.

She suddenly reappeared at his side. ‘Why do you think they light up the Castle, seeing they’re sitting inside it?’ She opened her handbag and took out a wad of bank notes. ‘Five thousand,’ she announced. ‘That was all he had on him. He bitched about the Mathioli being a second edition, as if it made any difference to him. A year ago he didn’t even know when printing was invented. He’ll have the rest tomorrow. He’ll bring it to you at the courthouse. I gave him your address. It doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘No, of course not. Its awfully kind of you.’

‘But it isn’t for you anyway.’

‘No, but you did it for me.’

‘Maybe you’ll return me the favour. When I apply for a divorce, you can see they don’t take my little girl away.’

‘Are you intending to get divorced, then?’

‘Everyone gets divorced in the end. Or are you the exception?’

They were making their way back to the car. ‘He kept on trying to make me stay. He had some genuine Scotch,’ she added with regret. ‘But I didn’t want to keep you hanging around here.’

‘If you’ve the time, we could go and have a drink somewhere. I’ll try and make it up to you.’

‘I’ve always got the time for that.’ And it was she who led the way to a little wine bar where naturally he had never been before, and they managed to find a free table.

As soon as the wine arrived she gulped it greedily. ‘I had an awful thirst. Aren’t you even going to have a second sip?’

He took the glass from her and sipped from it. At the next table sat a fellow in an immaculately tailored suit; the girl with him had something in common with Alexandra, or at least her blouse was just as bright. But she was a stranger and he recognised no one at any of the other tables either, and that made him feel easier in his mind.

‘You’re casing the place as if you’d been lured into an opium den. When were you last in a pub?’

He couldn’t recall.

‘Maybe you’ll start making up for it now. What do you do with your evenings? Work?’

‘Quite often.’

‘You enjoy sending people to gaol?’

‘Enjoy isn’t the right word.’

‘So what is the right word?’

‘Satisfaction, perhaps,’ he suggested.

‘It gives you satisfaction?’

‘Sometimes. When I feel we’ve made the right decision.’

‘You don’t strike me as very well suited to the job.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You look too passionate.’ She stared at him as if to assure herself she wasn’t wrong.

‘That’s the first time anyone’s said that about me.’

‘Maybe you chose this dignified vocation so you could pretend to be disinterested. You were afraid of leaving yourself too open to temptation otherwise.’

‘I didn’t choose at all; it’s more that I just came out this way, against my wishes.’

‘You probably didn’t: make your wishes felt very much, then, did you?’

He shook his head doubtfully.

‘There’s no need to defend yourself, I like passionate people. My dad was the same way and he was ashamed of it too. That’s why he joined the police: so he could treat people coolly. When in fact he’d be seething inside. This is good wine. Sure you won’t have another drop?’

‘No, thanks. I’ve had enough.’

‘There you are — you’re even afraid to have a drink. You’re afraid of losing control, is that it? Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I promise. I’ll take you home in a taxi and hand you over unsullied to your wife.’

‘She’s not home.’

‘So I’ll tuck you in myself. You wouldn’t be the first.’ She had come to life, her eyes were gleaming. ‘I don’t mind people getting drunk when they haven’t the strength to stay sober. The type who are happy with their lot are far worse; they don’t even need to get drunk.’

‘Do you think I’m one of them?’

‘I’ve already told you you’re not. But the guys that I hate most of all are the ones that are totally cold inside. All they want is for the woman to warm them up. As if anyone could warm them. And when they get up in the morning they start to snivel. They say they think life is avoiding them; they never guess it’s only death they’re missing out on, death that’s scared to come too close.’

‘Death doesn’t avoid passionate people?’

‘I can’t say. How am I supposed to know? It spent months sitting around at our place when Dad was dying. It scared me. Now I meet it sometimes when I’m coming home in the early hours.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Like a horrible, fat old man in a grey suit carrying a briefcase. And no eyes. So far we only pass each other by, but one day he’ll throttle me; I won’t have the time to squeal. You’ve never seen him?’

‘Yes, but he was dressed differently.’

‘In a uniform?’

‘That’s right, in a uniform.’ All of a sudden she seemed close. As if they’d just discovered they had a mutual friend.

‘I’m a dreadful chatterbox, aren’t I? It’s because you’re saying nothing, and just asking clever questions.’

‘You can ask questions too.’ Death didn’t have to be a bad omen, surely. There was no life without death, or death without life, for that matter. And if one was not prepared to die, one was not prepared to live either. The temptation was to remain in a state of immobility between life and death, as he himself did. How long had it been now, how much longer would it last?

‘I don’t enjoy asking questions. I like people who tell me things of their own accord. You haven’t even told me about your time in America.’

‘Oh, it’s a long time ago.’

‘It might well be a long time ago, and you might well have talked about it loads of times, but not to me you haven’t.’

So once more he landed at New York airport, once more he hiked along the Huron where no Indian riders had cantered in ages, looked out of the window over the cemetery wall where students were playing football among the graves, then smoked marijuana with them, while others made love behind a screen in the same drug-ridden room, crossed the Rio Grande in a punt and drove his Chevrolet along Route 385 through scenic wilderness. Perhaps he caught her imagination or even attracted her because she came and sat next to him, riding alongside into the frontier desert, following the track up the side of the Casa Grande, inhaling the spicy scent of sage, walking among the tall yucca and the sumac bushes, beneath the flowers of the agave trees right up to the level places beneath the summit, from where so many ranges of waterless, desolate mountains could be seen that she became dizzy. And increasingly he felt he was making contact with her, noticed that every moment they went on sitting here together he was drawing closer to her, they were drawing closer to each other, while her image began to fill him: silhouetted against the blue sky, her face with its back-combed hair, long straight nose and short upper lip became frozen into a sculptural stillness that he knew from somewhere:

Remote and trackless, over rough hillsides

Of ruined woods he reached the Gorgon’s land,

And everywhere in fields and by the road

He saw the shapes of men and beasts, all changed

To stone by glancing at Medusa’s face.

(Ovid: Metamorphoses)

It was just before midnight when he paid the bill. She got up and made her way stiffly between the tables. Outside she linked her arm in his. ‘I’m a bit tight. You’re not cross with me, are you? I’ve no sense of moderation in anything.’ She snuggled up to him and he could feel the warmth of her body through two layers of clothing. ‘Will you take me with you?’ She didn’t even ask where to. He could take her home to her place or to his own empty flat. They could make love in his temporarily empty flat.

He opened the car door and she climbed in. He leaned across and held her to him. Her breath was tinged with wine and sage and she was drawing air in hard as if they had just climbed to the very summit of the Casa Grande. ‘Aren’t we going?’ she asked, drawing back into her own seat.

He switched on the lights, and at that moment caught sight of him, trapped in the headlights: a yellow clown leaping up and down on the opposite pavement, his huge white mouth spread in a grin. He froze in mid-movement, doffed his clown’s hat, the colour of the flowering sage, gave a deep bow, his white-gloved hands held out on either side. Where had he sprung from and what message was he trying to deliver?

It was only a few minutes’ drive to her home. Before getting out, she leaned towards him and gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘Thanks for the wine. Call me again some time.’

5

Alena turned off the light. ‘Time to sleep now,’ she ordered.

‘What are you going to do, Mummy?’

‘What do you think? I’m going off to bed too.’

‘But it’s too early for you yet, Mummy,’ her son remarked.

‘I’ll have a little read.’

‘In the dark?’ asked her daughter suspiciously.

‘I’ll go and sit in Auntie Sylva’s room.’

‘You’re not going to see Honza?’

‘Get along with you!’ she said with a start. ‘Whatever for, at this time of night?’

‘You ought to go and see whether he needs something,’ her daughter suggested. ‘Seeing he’s got a bad leg.’

‘He’s bound to be asleep by now,’ she said wearily.

‘Oh, no. Honza doesn’t go to bed till after midnight. He only sleeps five hours.’

‘However do you know that?’

‘He said so. And sometimes he doesn’t go to bed at all. Mummy, what does “achieve” mean?’

‘In what sense?’

‘Like when someone wants to “achieve” something.’

‘When you want to achieve something, it means you want to do it. And now be quiet.’

‘Honza wants to achieve something,’ her son declared solemnly.

‘Hush!’

‘But he said so.’

At that moment a chair scraped on the floor upstairs. (The only room where she could put him up was directly over their heads.) The plaster cast came down heavily on the floor. Thump. Thump.

‘You see. He isn’t asleep,’ her son pointed out triumphantly.

She went over to the window. The stars were shining so brightly she was frightened. She had always been afraid of the stars: those radiant masses just hanging there in the void above her. What if one day they came loose and fell to earth, crushing her?

Upstairs the bed creaked, then silence. Martin rolled over in the bed, he had probably fallen asleep. She thought she heard a match strike over her head. She must have imagined it but could see him at that moment, his thin boyish face lit up by the match. Most likely he was waiting for her to come up. But what if Sylva heard her going up to his room at that time of the evening? It was bad enough her taking him in at all. She probably shouldn’t have, though there was nothing wrong in it, of course. She could hardly leave him in the tent with a sprained ankle. Admittedly she could have driven him to the station and stuffed a fifty-crown note into his pocket for a taxi, but she knew this would be to humiliate him. Besides, that crazy leap had been for her benefit, while he was showing off like a little boy. He had already suffered enough humiliation having to lie there helpless below the rock before she and the children had arrived to help him back to the cabin.

Moreover, she wanted him here. The trouble was she was incapable of deception; people always saw through her when she tried to keep anything a secret. This morning her sister-in-law had asked her: ‘How’s your pal?’ She had stressed the word ‘pal’. One was not allowed to treat a person like a human or everyone else drew just the one conclusion.

Upstairs the window creaked. He was quite capable of calling out to her, or whistling, or even plodding downstairs. Something white fluttered outside the window. She was so scared, she couldn’t catch her breath. But it was only a scrap of paper tied to a string. She reached out for it.

My dearest, only one,

I repeat YOUR name all the time and want to die

Come to me!

Come to me! COME TO ME! COME TO ME!!

She tore the note into little pieces and threw them down the toilet. Then she went into the kitchen. Sylva was sitting there playing Happy Families with Lucie. (How much longer would they hang around? It was long past Lucie’s bedtime. Did they intend to go on playing that stupid game till midnight?) She switched on the cooker and put some water on to boil. ‘Will you have some tea as well?’

They did not even look up; maybe they were too engrossed in their game to notice. ‘No, thanks. Tea wrecks my night,’ her sister-in-law replied.

She poured water through the tea leaves in the strainer, put the tea-cup and the kettle on a tray and went out into the passage.

Gingerly she made her way up the stairs, which creaked unbearably. Upstairs there was one single small bedroom in the middle of the loft. Adam had had it fixed up for unexpected visitors. It contained two iron bedsteads and a small table and chair. There was not even room for a wardrobe.

She tapped softly on the door (though he must have heard her coming). He stood there comically with welcoming arms spread wide, as if expecting her to slip into his embrace, tea-tray and all.

For a moment, the feeling overcame her that she was doing something unthinkable, unbecoming. She ought simply to say ‘good night’ and leave (noisily, so that the determined card-players below could hear that she had departed straight away).

‘Darling,’ he exclaimed, and bumped the tray with his chest, making the kettle rattle, ‘at last you’re here!’

She put the tray down on the bed. ‘Quiet! Every little noise can be heard downstairs!’

In a glass jar, in the middle of the table, he had the posy of wild pinks she had picked for him with the children. Otherwise the room was bare.

He put his arms round her. ‘I thought I’d go mad if you didn’t come.’ He bent across the bed and shifted the tray on to the chair, wincing as he did so.

‘Why aren’t you lying down?’

‘I had to wait for you.’

‘Does the leg hurt?’

‘Not now. Not now you’re here!’

‘Otherwise it hurts?’

He made an agonised face and shook his head.

She sat down by him and told him in a whisper where she had been with the children, what her son had said to her and what she had replied. As she ran her fingers through his hair she became aware of his fingers slowly and timidly seeking a path to her body and she found it charming rather than stimulating. ‘I have to go now.’

‘You want to go already!’

She realised almost ruefully that he had not said: ‘Don’t go!’ or even ‘I won’t let you!’ He left it up to her whether she stayed or left. Adam left most of the decisions to her too. She hadn’t been lucky enough to find a man to take the burden of decision-making from her shoulders. Menachem had been the only real man, but he hadn’t possessed enough patience or loyalty to wait for her.

He put his arms round her.

They lay side by side, he kissing her and saying the words she always longed to hear (for years now, her lovemaking with Adam had been wordless), she listening to those words and to the noises in the house. Downstairs they had no doubt finished playing ages ago but they might still be wandering about in the passage. Or Sylva might come to tell her something and enter their room. And what if Manda woke up and came looking for her here! ‘Is the door locked?’

He got up. The plaster cast thumped on the floor.

She closed her eyes. She had never managed to let her mind wander at will when she was happy; instead it tormented her with things she ought to have put aside.

‘I love you!’ he whispered above her. ‘Alena, I love you so much. It would be impossible to love you more.’

‘I love you too!’

He held her to him. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing in the world having you. I remember once when Dad wasn’t even talking to me and Mum was in a bad mood I thought of ending it all. I had my own rock in a quarry not far from Radotìn. A white rock with a path running under it. It looked like a canyon in a western. I’ll show it to you some day if you like.’

‘Of course you will,’ she said, pleased he had changed the subject and that they might just as easily be chatting at table.

‘I wanted to jump off that rock!’

‘How old were you?’

‘It’s so long ago. At least five years. But when I reached the top I could see a couple cuddling in the meadow. It’s banal, but I really did turn back because of that. It struck me I might find someone like that.’ He gulped aloud and she thought he was crying. ‘And now I have. Now I know I did the right thing, that I had something to wait for. You’re my life. I could never be without you now.’

‘Ssh!’ Fear gripped her.

‘I’ve had all sorts of girls but I didn’t love any of them. I was waiting for you to appear. For you to come and take me away.’

She couldn’t see his face, but could hear that his voice was alternating between elation and tears. From the very first moment she saw him, what had attracted her (if anything had at that moment) was his touching hunger for understanding and love. In that respect he resembled her and she felt an affinity for him. She had decided to try to give him some part of what he had been denied till then. At first on that trip she had not even thought about making love, or at least had not considered it consciously (for he was ten years younger than her at least). But being there, so far from everything that made up her usual life and responsibilities, when every evening yet another couple had sloped off for a quiet cuddle in the hotel, she was pleased to discover his love for her.

However, his demand for love had not diminished since that first evening, whereas she knew he ought to disappear from the cottage before Adam arrived, before the children realised that something untoward had happened, and before some irreparable disaster occurred. All assuming, of course, that it had not already taken place.

‘Honza, sweetheart, I must go downstairs now.’

‘I won’t survive up here without you.’ He replaced his arms around her.

‘But you know it’s impossible,’ she objected feebly. ‘You only came to look in on me. And I’ve got my family here.’

‘I know. I really did intend it that way, but now I’ve come to see that I can’t live without you.’

‘Don’t talk such nonsense!’

‘Alena,’ he declared solemnly, ‘I’ve been thinking about it since this morning and don’t know whether I have the right to say it: I can’t think of life without you. I want you. I want to marry you.’

Silence. This could not be happening. After all, she had a husband and children.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be able to provide for you all.’ He was probably about to talk about their future life together, but she put her hand over his mouth. ‘Not now. I have to go now.’ She slid cautiously off the bed.

‘Alena!

She was almost in the doorway.

‘Do you love me, at least?’

‘You know I do,’ she replied wearily. ‘Good night.’

‘I believe you. And I’m happy.’ He stretched his arms out towards her. ‘I’m happy that I’m here with you, that you came, that I have you and you love me.’

‘Good night,’ she said again. Cautiously she opened the door. Then she took the tray with the kettle and the tea cup and quietly closed it behind her. She crept through the attic — a lover who had now been granted everything: an amorous night, tenderness, declarations of love and even vows. As she reached the staircase she tripped on a loose floorboard. She managed to catch hold of the banister, but the kettle and the tea cup slid off the tray with a clatter that must have reached even the remotest corners of the cottage.

She stood motionless at the top of the stairs and waited. Tears, which she did not bother to wipe away, streamed from her eyes. She waited in case someone reacted, in case someone came up and found her out. But the house stayed silent. She picked up the pieces and carried them to the kitchen. She took out of a drawer the pad that she and Adam used for writing down jobs that needed doing or things they needed to bring there or take home, and tore a page out of it. She hesitated for a moment over how she should address him, but in the end wrote:

Dearest Honza,

You must find it odd that I should be writing you a letter when you are only upstairs and I see you several times a day. The trouble is that when I’m with you I find it impossible to say all the things I want to tell you. I’ll start with the offer you made to me just now. Even though it was sincere it was indiscreet and it didn’t only touch me, it horrified me as well. However can you even suggest something of the kind after we’ve known each other for just a few days? Didn’t you even think about the fact that I have two children and a husband? You’ve only just finished university and have everything, everything, in front of you. I know you’ll say you’ve thought it all out, but is it really possible to think everything out in advance? It’s not just a question of the material aspects. You’d have to step into something that is already functioning, with so many stereotypes, friends, relations. You’d have to accept the role of father of two children. Do you really think you’d be able to cope?

Maybe what I’m saying will surprise you and you’ll ask me how it was I didn’t know all this beforehand. Darling Honza, believe me that what I started, or what I permitted at least, wasn’t the flirtation whose upshot now worries me. What attracted me to you was your life-story, your personality. I realised that you were a really nice person but an unhappy one, and that what you lacked most of all was kindness and tenderness from those around you, and the ability on your part to relate to them in turn. I thought to myself that I would help you learn to communicate normally with other people and make friends with them, and that the only way I could do it was to establish such a friendship with you myself, and, as your friend, prove to you that you were as capable as anyone else of relating to others. I thought that as soon as you realised it yourself, you would be able to live and love like everyone else. But things went further than I’d anticipated. My fear now is that I have possibly freed you from your isolation but only in order to cause you even greater distress or at very least the sort of disappointment that will wound you, and leave you bitter. It would be lovely if you could continue to come and see me, continue to trust me and seek my help and comfort, or my advice as a close friend who loves you, but whose life cannot possibly take the same path as yours. Believe me that if I were to decide otherwise, I would only blight your journey through life — the only conceivable happiness you might have would be during the very first days of our togetherness.

And now I’m stroking your lovely thick hair.

Your A.

It was already two in the morning. But maybe for that very reason (they were all bound to be asleep by now) she dared to climb once more the creaky staircase. She slid the note under the door of his room. She had now said everything, everything was now coming to an end. From that moment on, all those disturbing and depressing indiscretions started to become things of the past. She returned to her room, reassured herself that her children were still sleeping peacefully, and immediately fell asleep herself.

‘Mummy, Mummy! Are you awake?’

She had no idea what the time was, but the room was already flooded with light. ‘Have you had breakfast yet?’ she asked her daughter.

‘Ages ago. Auntie Sylva made us fried eggs.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Mummy, Honza sent you a letter.’

‘Show me!’ She took the envelope from her daughter. There was nothing written on it. She still couldn’t pull herself together properly. Why ever was he sending her messages? Had he left, maybe? No, he couldn’t have, with his leg in plaster.

‘Uncle Robert came.’

‘Is he here?’

‘No, he went fishing this morning. Aren’t you going to read the letter?’

‘Later. I have to get washed first.’ She had a quick wash. After she had dressed, she realised that her daughter was watching her expectantly. With a sudden premonition of bad news she immediately tore open the envelope.

Alena,

My goddess, my love, MY HOPE,

my everything,

I feel as if my heart and head will burst. Maybe I’m going mad. Maybe I’ll die. I’m suffocating with the love I’ll never tell you now. I understand you, I UNDERSTAND YOU, and that’s why I’m dying! I’m leaving, my love, my love, MY LOVE! I’m holding the posy of pinks you gave me yesterday and crying. I reach out to you though I know I’ll never touch you now. LIGHT OF MY LIFE, MY SUNSHINE! But it can even be a consolation to die now I know who and what I’m dying for.

I’m YOURS for my now very short ever, my one and only, my dearest, my only love.

Your, your, your,

H.

She was unable to conceal her reaction. ‘Mummy, did Honza write something horrible?’ Manda asked.

‘No!’

‘Didn’t he write anything about those pills?’

‘No!’ and she realised that nothing had been consigned to the past. What was she going to do? What would she tell Adam? What would become of the children? ‘What pills?’

‘He had some pills to help him go to sleep. And now he’s eaten them. Martin saw him through the window. He said he took one pill, and then he had a drink of water, then he took another one and had another drink of water. Martin said he took fifty of them, but he doesn’t know how to count!’ she added scornfully. ‘And then he said…’ She listened no longer but dashed up the stairs. He was lying fully dressed on the bed. His face looked even paler than usual. The tube lay empty on the table:

Phenobarbital 10 tablets 200 mg.

1 tablet contains:

Phenobyrbitalum 200mg.

She had no idea what sort of tablets they were. She had a horror of all pills and she would probably have been just as alarmed by an empty tube of penicillin.

‘Honza!’

He opened his eyes. He tried to sit up but immediately fell back again.

‘What have you done?’

‘Sorry,’ he said in a fading voice. ‘Sorry!’

‘Get up immediately!’ she said with a brusqueness that concealed her anxiety. ‘Immediately!’

This time he really did raise himself. Thump, thump went the plaster cast.

Bob’s Renault was standing in front of the cottage, wet from the rain.

While her sister-in-law searched for the keys, she opened the car door and helped him on to the back seat.

‘Mummy, we want to go with you.’

‘You’ll stay here!’

‘You promised you’d take us this morning…’

‘Well get in then, but quickly, we can’t wait.’

‘Mummy, have you got your licence?’

‘Daddy says you mustn’t drive without your licence. Don’t rev so much, you’ll wear out Uncle’s battery.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, it won’t start. What’s wrong with it?’

‘Alena, I’m sorry!’

‘Mummy, when Uncle starts the car, he pushes in the choke.’

‘What choke, Martin?’

‘That switch.’

‘I’m sorry, Alena!’

‘Mummy, you can change to third now.’

‘Mummy, how far is it to the hospital?’

‘Firty minutes, stupid. It’s firty minutes to town. Daddy said.’

‘Mummy, what if Honza dies before then?’

‘Mummy, you can push the choke in now.’

‘Mummy, I don’t think Honza’s breathing any more. Did he make a suicide?’

‘What’s a suicide, Mummy?’

‘It’s when someone doesn’t want to live any more, isn’t it, Mummy?’

‘Why didn’t Honza want to live any more, Mummy?’

‘Because his leg hurt, stupid!’

‘Stop talking to Mummy. Can’t you see she’s driving? And she’s bothered. Aren’t you bothered, Mummy?’

‘Mummy, Honza touched me with his hand and it’s freezing.’

‘His hand must be freezing if he’s not breathing!’

‘But he touched me with it.’

‘He couldn’t have touched you if he’s not breathing!’

‘But he did.’

‘So what? So he touched you, but he’s still not breathing, though.’

‘You should have turned off by the shop to go to the hospital.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No, but there was a signpost.’

‘What signpost?’

‘One with a big blue H. Daddy said it means hospital.’

‘Mummy, Honza is terribly, you know, pale. I think he really will die! I’m frightened.’

Inside the hospital grounds, she wasted five minutes trying to find the proper wing and another five looking for an orderly with a stretcher. Maybe it was less, but every minute she waited seemed endless to her. Then she was left standing alone on the black and white tiles of the corridor.

She walked up and down. What if he died and it was all her fault? Please God, if you exist, don’t be so hard on me. Other women do it too. Without thinking twice, just for fun, or out of boredom.

Ten minutes. Back and forth.

They have lovers and talk about them as if they were talking about television. They love describing how they deceive each other. And nothing happens. You don’t punish them in any way, God. I did it for his sake. I wanted to help him. If he dies, what shall I do? What shall I tell his mother?

She heard a door open on the corridor and then caught sight of a doctor. He was small, old and fat. ‘Was it you who came with that young fellow?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No, just a friend.’ And she felt the blood rush to her cheeks. He was beating about the bush, so it meant bad news. Prepare yourself for the worst, madam… ‘We’re here on holiday together.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ the doctor said. ‘He’ll soon be well, but the problem is he might try again. One can never be too careful in these cases. Have you any idea why he did it?’ And it seemed to her he shot her a meaningful glance.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. Her cheeks blazed as if she had a fever. But he surely couldn’t suspect anything. It was merely his duty to ask. But that wasn’t even important. The main thing was that he’d recover. She felt a sudden sense of relief and tears came to her eyes. ‘I just happened to have the car, so I brought him.’ And she was amazed at the strangeness of her voice. She wasn’t: used to lying.

‘And the place you brought him from: does he have any relations there?’

She shook her head. Then she said: ‘He only has a mother, and she is in Prague.’

‘OK, we’ll have to send word to her. It might be better if she came for him. Could you leave us her address?’

‘But I don’t know it. He… he’s sure to tell you later.’ Her throat was dry and burning. ‘And he really is out of danger, Doctor?’

‘You need have no further worries.’

‘Thank you, Doctor!’

‘If you like, you can come for him yourself the day after tomorrow.’

So he’d twigged at last. That is if he hadn’t known from the very first.

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

It must have been some time in the fourth year of grammar school that I decided it was high time I set down in writing my ideas about how the world should be run. The essay was entitled ‘The Ideal State’. When, some time ago, I opened the black exercise book with its copperplate title and the dedication, To My Friend Miroslav Vozek, I was amazed to find that most of the pages were missing. Had I torn them out myself? Why? When? Apart from the few remaining pages that deal with justice in the ideal state, I can no longer recall what my essay said. But I can still remember how zealously I filled the narrow lines of the school exercise book with borrowed wisdom that I believed to be my own, and the anticipation with which I presented it for comment to the friend whose name it bore.

My friend’s likeness I still have, preserved on the class photograph they took of us in the fourth year (my parents had wisely resisted the advice of my first post-war teachers and entered me two classes lower than my brilliant report would have permitted); Mirek is standing alongside me in the back row, a tall boy with curly hair and a long face.

His father owned a shoemaking workshop in Dlouhá Avenue; you had to go down steps to get to it and the windows hardly reached to street level, so that inside the lights were kept on the whole day. I used to visit their ground-floor flat just behind the shop. Mirek had a small bedroom, no more than a box-room in fact, with a window on to the airshaft. I can only remember two pictures from that room: the first president and a reproduction of a portrait of Kant, whose severe face I can still see, with its high forehead and a moustache too long in proportion to the small chin. And shelves full of books.

My friend read untiringly: in Czech, French and German. His German was so good that it irritated me. What point was there in using the language of those who wished to annihilate us?

The language was not at fault, he explained. Every language could be used to express good or evil, in the same way that a cup could contain good beverages or bad ones. Even so, most people, when they drank, paid more attention to the cup than what it contained.

During our last summer holiday but one we went on a bicycle tour in the then backward regions north of Prešov (little did I suspect I’d return there one day against my will). Most nights we slept in haylofts or in wooden barns on bits of straw. We each took with us only the bare necessities that would fit in the packs fixed to our carriers. His bare necessities included several volumes of the Henriada series, the books stuffed in the side-pockets of his pack where matches, tinned rations and soap properly belonged. Each morning at daybreak when outside the bells were ringing their summons to morning mass, the dogs beginning to bark and the primitive pump starting to shriek, he would sit up in his sleeping bag, open the book he had left ready next to his head the previous night, take out his two-colour pencil and transport himself to distant worlds. Sometimes he would even read aloud to me as I lay there still half-dreaming:

God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

That sentence stuck in my mind at the time, along with another statement:

Nietzsche, that candid and persuasive writer, overlooked the truth that in history only one code of decent and noble behaviour has ever applied, the code that was laid down by Homer, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, the medieval knights and their gentlemen successors…

He used to lend me books, and I would then hump them around with me everywhere like he did. And one scene springs to mind. We are lying on some lakeside or river bank somewhere reading Seneca or Rádl, surrounded by tantalising scantily clad female bodies. This was a better and more valuable activity, more spiritual than just lolling around and doing the same as everyone else. Besides, Buddha abandoned everything and everyone and went off into exile.

I had no talent for philosophy, however. I had neither the ear nor the patience for it. I saw little sense in contemplating the meaning of concepts such as beauty, happiness, justice, well-being or even truth. Far more important, it seemed to me, was to reflect on how to make sure that people had access to beauty and an opportunity to hear, proclaim and discover the truth. Again and again I would steer the conversation around to consideration of the practical aspects. From the heights of Plato’s Republic I plummeted to the mundane world of newspaper editorials. He tried to win me over to the ideas of the Stoics. One’s first duty was to strive for wisdom and self-improvement. One must act in harmony with nature and not be deflected from the path of tranquillity by matters one cannot influence. When one has achieved all that, when one has attained the state of ‘apathy’, one loses all interest in power, politics and physical passions, and along with them, all worldly anxiety and fear of death.

I did believe, however, that in most of our arguments I had truth on my side, because, after all, I had behind me an unrepeatable experience of life, one that he too acknowledged and respected. But how was I to convince him?

My ideal state was situated on an island that was so cold that people had to work very hard for their living. Work too was a path to virtue and thus also to bliss, as was rapidly understood by Aram, a journalist personally invited to the island by its president, Sylvio Ruskin.

The two of them sat in the simply furnished presidential palace, which contained no more than a heavy wooden table and two wooden armchairs, elaborately carved though of quite simple design, made by one of the president’s ancestors in his spare time. He had been a philosopher-cum-woodcarver by profession.

‘I have been given to understand,’ the journalist Aram declared, ‘that your country has no criminals or even petty delinquents, so has no need of courts, prisons or even executioners. How did you achieve this?’

An inspired smile played on the president’s face. ‘The basis of all crimes,’ he rejoined, ‘— so we believe, at least — is inequality, and material inequality above all. That then leads to poverty and despair, and they for their part arouse envy.’

‘And what about laziness?’ Aram enquired. ‘Is not mankind’s innate laziness perhaps the cause of many crimes?’

‘Laziness is not innate,’ the president smiled. ‘Idleness goes hand in hand with unearned wealth. You may take our republic as proof. We have eliminated material inequalities, and lo and behold, you will find here neither envious nor lazy folk, and no criminals.’

‘But the innate desire for evil?’ the journalist interjected once more. ‘Psychology teaches us that there will always be individuals who do evil solely from a pressing inner need.’

‘Psychology is wrong,’ the president retorted. ‘It ascribes to human nature what the citizen acquires through upbringing, bad example, poverty or ignorance.’

The journalist reflected a moment, before continuing stubbornly with his objections: ‘What do you do when a man is overcome with jealousy that his neighbour is cleverer or possesses a more attractive wife than he does? What if he decides to obtain her for himself even at the cost of something as horrifying as murder?’

‘You are an incorrigible sceptic,’ the president admonished him. ‘However, it is clear that you have not yet understood the spirit of our state. Why should anyone be jealous of his neighbour, when each has the opportunity to excel in something, be it only diligence, truthfulness or physical prowess? And as for wives? Everyone chooses the wife of his taste, and tastes vary.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ the journalist exclaimed with incredulity, ‘that your people never commit misdemeanours, offences or any misdeeds at: all?’

‘Of course they do,’ the president admitted, ‘but we allow for such failings. Once a week — once a fortnight at harvest-time or during other peak work periods — the entire community meets together at district level, and at those assemblies each citizen carefully examines his actions and even his private thoughts, and of his own free will confesses anything questionable he discovers in them…’

Mirek received my composition with interest. He always used to show greater interest in my doings than I in his; therein lay his superiority over me: that he perceived the need I had to be someone worthy of attention. When he had read my essay — I think it only took him a single evening — he told me I had written something very stimulating, albeit rather inductive. General rules were easy to formulate, and they tended to neglect the various contradictions, variables and possible objections that praxis necessarily concealed. He also criticised my excessive trust in reason, saying that I forgot that the human soul sometimes defied all rational explanations; reason was its creation, after all, so the soul was naturally higher and more complex than its product. It was all excusable, however, and I would probably become a politician rather than a philosopher.

His commendation, which, had I been wiser, I would have taken as disparagement, filled me with a sense of elation that as always in my case took the form of talkativeness. We argued into the night about the future shape of the world and I preached about what we must do to achieve a perfect order of things, an order that would confer well-being and happiness on the whole of mankind.

Mankind! Including the African pygmies and the nearly extinct Indians of the Cherokee tribe, and the homosexuals of Greenwich Village — mankind including half a billion Chinese, without me having yet set eyes on a single one of them in my life!

We also decided to go together to a lecture in the main auditorium of the Faculty of Philosophy; the moment a little bald man in glasses came in and started to explain something at the blackboard, I became so agitated that I was unable to take in a word he said. My friend, on the other hand, listened intently and even took notes; when we emerged on the square an hour later and I asked him if he had been satisfied, he replied that he would never again set foot in that undertaker’s parlour. He had realised that philosophy in that building was now dead — all that was left was politics. I protested that philosophy only starts to make sense when it enters the service of progressive politics, and he retorted with uncustomary forthrightness that that was nonsense, that it was an insidious lie on the part of those who feared the intrepid spirit. We quarrelled on that occasion.

In the holiday before our final school year, we made a trip to the Bohemian Forest. In those days the region was depopulated and almost deserted. On the last afternoon of our trip, we climbed a hill from where we could see a pond in the plain below us. Several dozen buildings were grouped around it, and a short way away on a small knoll there stood a baroque church-tower. It was late on a cloudy day, but precisely at that moment the sun came out and the whole area beneath us was suffused with a ruddy glow. The sight of that glowing water and those illuminated roofs in the open landscape, above which the bluish nocturnal mist was just beginning to form, aroused expectations of comfort in us. Then we entered the village. The windows above the muddy road had all been smashed and the houses gave off a musty smell. We went round the whole village from house to house, past broken-down fences, gardens rank with weeds, the village shop which still retained its German signs, and then up to the church. It was locked. Through a hole in the wall, we entered the graveyard which abutted the church. Some of the gravestones lay overturned, others were hidden in an undergrowth of nettles and briar. Stained glass from the church windows crunched beneath our feet. We climbed up a beam to a window and looked in. The nave was bare, although there were pale patches on the walls where pictures had once hung. In the place where the altar stood formerly, there were the remains of a fire. Among the scorched remnants of wood we made out what was left of an arm pointing at us with charred fingers.

When that night we lay down to sleep in an abandoned woodcutters’ hut, my friend told me that we had entered an era of barbarism and soon we would witness the new Vandals strutting about the burnt-out Forum and dancing their war dances in the ruins of the temple.

I felt duty-bound to contradict him, to excuse somehow the havoc we had seen. The real barbarians, I told him, were those who had started the war. Now, on the contrary, we were at the start of a new era, an era of freer people. It no longer mattered who started it, he replied. What mattered now was who had assumed their mantle. He had no way of judging whether the new era would bring greater freedom, but one thing he could see: that it lacked nobility of spirit. And what was the use of freedom without nobility of spirit?

Next morning we went our separate ways, but not before agreeing that he would call in on me on the day before term started.

He didn’t call in, nor did he turn up at school. After a while I heard a rumour that he had managed to make his way to Germany and escape by the Berlin U-bahn.

I liked him. He was the first friend I’d had since the war, and for a long time, the only one. I regarded his flight as a betrayal of me as well. Why hadn’t he hinted to me what he had in mind, at least?

I still have a book of his, the last one he lent me. I could have returned it, of course, but I was shy of entering his parents’ flat, and besides, I was sure they wouldn’t miss it. Not long ago I opened it, probably for the first time since then. It was a paper-back edition of Plato. I found inside it a narrow slip of paper, and written on it in my friend’s legible handwriting, with its large, upright letters, ‘What is required for human welfare and happiness? According to Socrates it is intellectual activity, good memory, straight thinking and truthful judgement.’

2

When we were in the fifth year, I suggested we organise a mock election. (It was the most democratic election I have ever known, even if there was no privacy screen and the ballot slips were only pages torn out of a school exercise book.) Naturally, I was counting on a clear victory for the party which my father belonged to, and of which my martyred uncles had once been members. It was, after all, the only one to defend the interests of all decent people. To my consternation it only received three votes in our class. One was mine, another undoubtedly came from Josef Švehla who had been kept down from the previous year (due to political persecution, he stressed) and was the only communist in the class; he was such an unapproachable individual that even I didn’t like him, though I felt obliged to sympathise with him. I never managed to establish who had cast the third vote.

The election result depressed me. I tried to convince the others with my arguments, but mostly without success. Sometimes Švehla would join in our debates. Unlike me, he was a slow and steady speaker (everything about him was steady; he was also the only one of us to have a steady girlfriend) and had a perfect mastery of the techniques of political argument. But what he said always contained some thinly veiled threat which antagonised the others even more than my incoherent statements.

We never managed to win anyone else for our beliefs, but we were to receive support from an unexpected quarter. A new art master was appointed to the school. His name was Ivanič, Ivanovič, or maybe Ivandelič if my memory serves me right and such a name exists in Serbia, which is where he was from. He entered the art room for his first lesson wearing a long, paint-flecked green overall and scuffed shoes. Reminiscent of an ear of corn with a tousled panicle of hair, he came to an abrupt halt just inside the door and observed us. Then he almost trotted to the desk and informed us in a sing-song foreign accent that fate had given us to him to teach, although he could tell already, just by looking at our faces, our ties, and those brothel-creepers on our feet, that we lacked the smallest smidgeon of sensitivity to art. He could see with his own eyes that he was confronted by young ladies and gentlemen from a better class of home, and he laughed hoarsely. As far as he knew, the well-off only ever drivelled about art or invested in it. But seeing that he was obliged to waste his time here, he would do his best to make honest, conscientious and hard-working people out of us, and cultivate in us a sense of beauty, so that we didn’t have our minds fixed solely on money and careers. And he went on to explain that in the past, during the bourgeois republic, teachers weren’t allowed to cultivate their pupils; all they could do was pour knowledge into them. But times had changed. We were now entering the era we had struggled for: an epoch when even a downtrodden grammar-school teacher had come into his rights, including the right to talk about other things apart from the angles of a triangle or the green tree-frog.

He told us to take out our drawing pads; he said each of us was to paint what we felt like and what would give us pleasure, using whatever materials we liked; and he ran down the row between the desks. He stopped right at the end, just behind me, and ruffled my hair, praising me for not wearing a tie or brothel-creepers (I had scuffed shoes that vied with his own). Then he asked me what my father did for a living.

When I replied that my father was a civil engineer I sensed right away that it did not meet with his approval.

We painted still lifes, fish, our homes, and attempts at nudes, though I, of course, painted concentration-camp prisoners queuing for dinner, and meanwhile he rushed up and down between the desks, telling us that throughout history the rich had held sway and so the rich had decided what was beautiful. They paid the artists and thereby enslaved them too. Artists who had stood up to them and painted according to their lights rather than to order, languished in poverty, even the greatest geniuses, such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh or Aleš. But the salvo from the cruiser Aurora in 1917 had marked the beginning of a new era. The degenerate nobility and the surfeited bourgeoisie were chased out of their palaces, and the people took the government into their own hands. The people — and this he could declare from his own experience — suffered and went hungry, it was true, but deep in their souls, unseen, they yearned for beauty; indeed they created splendid artefacts, albeit anonymously. And he dashed into his study and brought out a traditional vase, exclaiming with admiration how splendid its shape was, and functional at the same time! What would the people create now, now that the well-springs of knowledge were being opened for them, now that they were being accorded all the opportunities that only the bourgeois had exploited so far? We would live to see it; we would live in a beautiful land and in a favourable age, when beauty would become part of life.

His words — their intonation as strange as his appearance — probably struck most of the class as ludicrous, but I was enthralled. He had expressed precisely what I had been striving to say myself and had been incapable of formulating so convincingly, so perfectly. My admiration for him was such that I started to paint in earnest. I persuaded my parents to buy me some oils, and from that day forth I trudged along suburban footpaths with my little case, painting houses and fences, ochre meadows and birch groves under blue skies, and then brought my creations into class.

One day he invited me to bring my pictures to his study. I entered in trepidation, practically in reverence, aware that this might be a turning-point in my life. The room was filled with plaster models, stacked easels and dusty rolls of paper, and the walls were hung with reproductions of still lifes by Cézanne, and Van Gogh’s sunny landscapes. On a table alongside tubes of colour were scattered photos of the master’s wife and his five children, and similar images gazed out of portraits that were leaning against a wall in a corner of the room. I unrolled a bundle of my paintings and he spent a few moments absentmindedly gazing at them in silence. Then, as if he had suddenly made up his mind, he gripped me by the shoulder and told me he had something to show me. He led me to a large easel that I had not even noticed before as it was covered in a sheet. With a mighty gesture, the art master whipped off the sheet and a painting was revealed to me.

It was a sizeable canvas. It depicted a country farmyard and in the foreground there towered a massive, dazzling red machine.

I realised that it was his own painting, this perfect machine in a deserted, but meticulously detailed yard, and I didn’t know how to react; whether it was the done thing for me, a pupil, to praise my teacher. So all I said was that I’d never seen a picture like it.

Now I expected him to say something about my paintings, but instead he started to tell me about his canvas. He spoke passionately about his efforts to create a new, comprehensible art, but said that it would have problems being understood as all the committees were still formed of advocates of old-style art, the kind that was created for the select few, and they all hated creators like himself. I don’t think I understood too much of what he said.

All of a sudden he exclaimed — pointing at the painting — that a threshing machine like that had been his father’s dream. His father had longed to own one machine at least, but never been able to afford anything, not even his own horse or mule; his father would have been happy to see this picture, because he would understand what it meant, why that machine was oversized and as dazzlingly unreal as a dream. He began reminiscing about his father, how he used to get up at three in the morning and not come home till twilight. He had been unable to read or write, but decorated the outside of their cottage with ornaments, because he had had an innate sense of beauty. Even nowadays, as he worked, he, my teacher, would imagine his father standing in front of his picture. And he tried to paint in such a way that his father might say: ‘Dobro, my son!’

I noticed all at once that tears were streaming from his grey watery eyes. I realised that his father was dead. Wanting to say something to cheer him up, I told him laboriously that I wanted to be like him, and deliberately I said ‘be’ and not ‘paint’.

He taught us for almost three years. In spite of my partiality for him, my artistic efforts and the fact that I was one of only three like-minded pupils in his class (even he won no converts) he only gave me a grade two for art on my report.

About a year before our school-leaving exam he disappeared from the classroom. I thought he was on sick-leave, but then a young supply-teacher arrived to take his place. She was accompanied by the headmistress, who told us in severe tones that Mr Ivandelič had been arrested and would be tried for acts hostile to the republic and to socialism. She tried to speak impersonally but she herself seemed disquieted by the news. She went on to tell us that what had happened should stir us to vigilance and serve as a warning that a cunning enemy could hide behind even the most enthusiastic words. The word enemy astounded me. I put up my hand. I wanted to ask if everything I had heard him say was no longer valid, but I could not utter a single word. I just stood there with my head bowed.

3

At the end of that winter (during that last school year I was elected — appointed, I ought to say — chairman of the class committee of the sole permitted youth organisation) the head-mistress summoned me to her office. She sat me down in a leather armchair intended for inspectors and other important visitors, and told me I enjoyed her confidence. She knew that I was a good, politically aware comrade and did not need to explain to me the complexity of the times we were living in. Enemies could breach our western frontier at any moment and attack our homeland. And they relied for this on the assistance of all opponents of socialism. Admittedly the latter had been crushed not long ago and some of them had indeed changed their attitudes, but there were others who had gone underground and were only waiting for a chance to infiltrate various important institutions and be ready to do damage when the opportunity arose. And it was our job to prevent it.

I nodded to say I had heard, understood and agreed.

She said that was the reason she had called me in. In a few months’ time we would be leaving school and in the places we went from here they would know nothing about us. Even those whose hostile attitudes were not in doubt would have no difficulty winning the confidence of others. To avoid anything of the kind happening, it was necessary to write a true report on each of us. Our teachers would make their reports, but they tended to know only one aspect of us, mostly to do with the subject they taught; besides which, many of those who taught us in the past had now left — had rightly left — and the new ones hadn’t yet had time to get to know us well enough.

Over the years, we pupils had come to know each other very well and were therefore well placed to make a just and truthful judgement of what each of us was truly like.

She wasn’t asking me to do anything dishonourable. On the contrary, she was sure that we youngsters would be eminently just towards each other and would manage to rise above friendships or enmities. It was an enormous responsibility, but if we acquitted it honourably, we would help to ensure that in future posts of responsibility would be occupied by the best people. After all, it was going to be our world and how it would be was up to us.

I nodded once more. Everything was clear to me. I understood, and was convinced that I would manage to perform all that was required of me in a totally fair and unbiased manner. After all, my entire life so far, my experiences and my convictions fitted me for just such a role.

And since I had my own notions of justice, and because I had no reservations about the rightness of what I was to do (and maybe also because I delighted in my extremely scrupulous powers of judgement), I had no wish to hide my intended activities under a bushel. I proposed that our committee should draft its reports on individual pupils and hold a discussion about them in class. In that way, we would obtain the fullest possible picture of each of us, and therefore it would also be the fairest possible. I don’t think the headmistress was too taken by my idea. She hesitated, possibly reflecting on some instruction I had no inkling of. Then she said that what I was suggesting would be even more demanding than what she had asked, but if we thought we were capable of defending and asserting the correct opinion, she had no objections and we had her full confidence. (In the end, however, she turned out not to have too much confidence in us, as she assigned our new art teacher to assist us in drafting the reports.)

We held a meeting in the classroom after school: our committee comprised Josef Švehla, two girl pupils and myself. That day — it was a sunny afternoon — I looked out of the window at my colleagues as they trooped out of the school gate and tore off along the sunlit path to the small park behind the school, where they dumped their coats and bags on a bench and started circling round a group of girls before disappearing with them into some flowering laburnum bushes. I imagined the blissful embraces they would now sink into, while I would be stuck in this classroom with its permanent smell of sweaty bodies, in the company of poker-faced Švehla and two girls I didn’t care about. I felt it as an affront that while they were having the time of their lives, larking around irresponsibly or even kissing in the bushes, I would be toiling away, trying to squeeze into a few sentences their attitude to the society which I was protecting for their benefit.

I hadn’t the faintest idea what repercussions each of my sentences and each of my judgements might have. I knew nothing of the existence of the political screeners who were eagerly awaiting our words, which they would use as a basis for their merciless decisions. It never even occurred to me that my activities were based on a fundamental act of tyranny in that I was given the right to pass judgement on the lives of my fellows, while the same right was denied them.

The result of the mock election still stuck in my memory. It was a warning to me that I was hemmed in by opponents, among whom was hidden one friend. Who was it? And who were all the others?

Gone were the days when my fellow-pupils would argue with me or act normally in my presence. I had nothing on which to base my judgements. I could have taken that lack of evidence as a chance offered me by fate to avoid passing judgement. But I wanted to judge. Even at that time, or rather, only at that time, I yearned to sit in judgement. My own irrepressible certainty allowed me to classify people like beetles into useful, harmless and dangerous.

Mine was not to forgive or overlook. I’m sure I would have done both if I’d been acting on my own behalf: but I wasn’t. I was commissioned. I was acting in the name of society which had honoured me with its trust; my sense of duty blinded me.

I was certain that my opinion would be shared by the other members of our strange tribunal, and I was amazed to discover that the two girls in particular, together with the art teacher (but what could she possibly know about us after teaching us for only a few months), were opposing me ever more adamantly in cases which I considered to be open-and-shut. At first I argued, but then took umbrage and remained silent. Let them decide! Let them shoulder the whole blame on the day the false prophets and judges they let through exacted their bloody revenge!

I looked on in resentment while those who were supposed to be eager fishermen like me wreaked such havoc with my net that scarcely three little fishes were caught in it.

4

Two days after our committee’s preparatory meeting, visitors arrived in our classroom. Apart from the headmistress, they included a very portly man, who spent almost the whole time hiccuping under his breath (I never did find out who he was and he uttered not a single word), and the teachers of the other classes in our year, who were apparently there to learn how it was done.

I was sitting in my place in the last but one desk in the middle row, a sheaf of papers in front of me. In the room an apprehensive (now I would say: resentful) silence reigned. I read the first name in the alphabet. It happened to be one of the three I mentioned. I can no longer judge whether that girl really differed from the rest in her opinions and attitudes, but it is unlikely. She was just older than we were, because she had spent a long time in a sanatorium with a disease of the spine. The teachers treated her with the indulgence they had once reserved for me, and in my view she took advantage of it. She was the only one to make frivolous comments during civics classes (and they were always greeted with approving laughter, to my annoyance). What I resented most of all was her total indifference towards socially beneficial activity. She used her medical certificate as an alibi for never once turning up at the salvage collection point (where every Friday I would stand, notepad in hand, carefully recording the kilos of stinking refuse, which my classmates reluctantly dragged there). She had never been among those volunteering for hop-picking or emergency work on the harvest when it snowed. I was sure she was using her illness as an excuse. Had I myself not got over a serious illness? I, too, could easily obtain a medical certificate, but unlike her, I had not done so. Now she got to her feet and her pale sickly face became even paler.

She stood up, which rather threw me into confusion. I stood up too and read the few sentences I had managed to push through that we had all agreed on. The last of my sentences, the only one I am able to recall, read: Zora Beránková’s attitude to our people’s democratic order is largely hostile.

I can still recall the consternation and the deathly hush that followed my words. I turned to her and asked her if she had any objections to the statement. She smiled at me — it really was an attempt at a smile, a courageous smile in the face of intimidation. She said she was grateful for the pains we had clearly taken in drawing up our report, and in total silence, she sat down.

I remained on my feet however, and when the silence around me continued, my self-assurance started to wane. But I represented higher interests, and must not allow myself to fall prey to doubt. I therefore picked up another sheet of paper from my desk-top. Slowly — and now I was grateful to the other members of the committee for imposing moderation on me — I started to deal with the next case. His name was Viastimil Polák. I personally knew very little about him (our interests were quite different), but Josef Švehla suspected him of having been a member of the Socialist Youth several years before. It struck me that membership of such an organisation (even though it had been an entirely legal association) was a very grave charge. Why? That was a question I would not have been able to answer, but nobody asked such questions any more; the only questions asked now were concerned with determining guilt, not ascertaining the truth, and so I too asked them. Why had he joined that organisation? I asked the question in the tones of an incensed state prosecutor, because colleague Švehla had not been entirely sure whether his suspicion was well founded or not, and believed that if we posed the question with sufficient emphasis and confidence (a proven trick of all interrogators when they are on unsure ground), the subject would spill the beans himself.

No one shouted me clown, and my interrogated fellow-pupil, instead of rebuffing me, quietly replied that if I had in mind the time he happened to attend a meeting, he had only gone there as a guest.

With the feelings of a hunter who had shot into a bush and hit his prey by luck, I asked him how often he had attended those meetings and why, and what attitude he had adopted to the things he had heard there. I repeated my questions while he started, in a faltering voice that became quieter and quieter, to give evasive and contrite answers. He was lost, he could no longer remove the stigma of having belonged somewhere he ought not to have belonged. He apologised for something for which it was improper to apologise, thereby admitting that he knew his actions to have been improper in the first place.

The last of the three whose future I had decided to thwart was the best pupil in the class. I don’t think even our teachers liked her, though they could count on her rattling off the correct answer every time, in her monotonous voice.

She spent her time amongst us as a loner; she never made friends with anyone as far as I recall. I would even go so far as to say she found contact with others intolerable. None the less, either from lack of imagination or in an effort to ingratiate herself with her teachers, she had written on the compulsory questionnaire that she wanted to teach herself.

I informed her that we (the class tribunal) were prepared to recommend her for further education, but not teacher-training. She gazed at me in amazement (she wore spectacles whose bottle thickness lent her eyes even more horrified proportions) and declared that she definitely wanted to be a teacher.

I replied that we were unable to give our consent to it. And she, alone out of the three, actually asked a question. ‘Why?’

I said that we did not think she was suited to that profession.

She burst into tears. She shattered the silence of the classroom with loud sobs, and her fellow-pupils, who until that moment had probably shared my opinion, found themselves forced to support her and join her in her hatred of me. Then she started to scream at me hysterically, telling me to leave her alone, that she knew very well why I hated her, why I wanted to ruin her life. She loved children, she shouted, and wanted to devote herself to them. After that she just sobbed. Now the headmistress took a hand in the proceedings for the first time and told us to continue, saying that the teaching staff would deal with her case and decide who was suited to which profession, so I quickly read through the remaining five or six sheets of paper. Then everyone stood up. I was expecting someone at least to come up to me (after all, we had been indulgent towards so many of them) with a word of thanks or perhaps criticism, but they walked out past me as if I had the plague, or more accurately, as if I didn’t exist. The headmistress noisily ushered out the hiccuping guest and the teachers left without comment. Even colleague Švehla made himself scarce and I — only now conscious that my hands were trembling — returned my papers to their file and put the file back in my bag, before being the last to leave the classroom.

5

About three or four days later (in the course of them the others started treating me more or less as usual again, which put my mind at rest and confirmed me in my conviction that I was a fair judge), Vlastirnil Polák came and asked me if I would spare him a few moments.

I was full of good will and affability. So we set off together in the direction of his home near the church of St Francis. I listened to my companion, as he tried (though the matter suddenly seemed abstract and trifling) to explain that he had never been a member of that organisation, as I had accused him of being, that he’d only attended two or three meetings and afterwards he’d given it up because it was always too noisy and they spent too much time on politics which he didn’t enjoy — and anyway he had only gone there on account of Marie. Surely I knew he had been going out with Marie, he asked, and I gave no reply, as I never willingly admitted there was something I didn’t know.

Then he suddenly blurted out that he was sure the accusation hadn’t come from me, because I had no way of knowing he had been at those meetings, and even if I’d known about it, I had no score to settle and no reason to use it against him. Who knew he’d been at those meetings? Why, Marie, of course! And he asked me in amazement whether I couldn’t see the connection. I couldn’t, as I was unaware that Marie was now engaged to Švehla, and I couldn’t even understand the connection when he told me how his erstwhile friend had stolen his girl, the reason being that I had no idea at the time that hatred can be motivated, not only by the feeling we have been wronged, but also by the feeling we have wronged someone else.

By now we were standing in front of the house where he lived and he invited me in. I hesitated. I was shy of entering a strange flat and I was certainly afraid of meeting his parents. But there was no way I could let him think I was afraid to stand by what I had done, and so I followed him inside.

He unlocked the door. I knew nothing about his family apart from the few facts that each of us was obliged to enter on that questionnaire. (Father former civil servant, now retired, mother housewife.) I walked gingerly on the clean carpet. He opened one of the doors and we entered a little bedroom which had apparently been his since childhood, for everything had remained small-scale and brightly coloured: a table, chairs and a cupboard, on which an enormous teddy-bear still sat. But in front of the teddy-bear, clean and white as if it had just been brought from the shop, a plaster bust of Lenin was enthroned. I gawped at that sculpture and as he became aware of the object of my attention, he blushed and asked me whether I might like to take a look at his bookshelf. He opened the cupboard, and there in a neat row stood his books, painstakingly covered in yellow paper and with titles and numbers written on their spines. He took out one volume after another — they were mostly medicine or chemistry — and quickly said something about each. He told me his greatest interest was in medical chemistry and he wanted to make it his career. And he opened a door into some sort of grey cubby-hole, which immediately exuded an unpleasant animal smell. I was able to see a space so small that there was only room for two UNRRA boxes and a small table with test-tubes, beakers and a hypodermic syringe. He lifted the lid of one of the boxes and I caught sight of several white mice running around on a layer of sawdust at the bottom. He told me he practised on them and conducted experiments. He pulled one of the mice out of the box, picked up the hypodermic with the other hand and told me he would demonstrate to me anaesthesia using procaine, but at that moment, his mother entered and he quickly put the mouse back and introduced me to her. (Only later did I guess that she had been expecting me, and that they had agreed not only on his bringing me home, but also on what would be said and done during my visit.) She told me she was pleased I had come, though she had imagined someone rather different.

I didn’t know what to reply or why she had imagined someone different and what sort of person she had imagined me to be (probably like some kind of wild animal, instead of a stripling with tousled hair and elbow patches on my coat). Worst of all I had not imagined her at all; had not given a single thought to her when I was spouting about her son. But here she stood — a strange woman with a fine, transparent — almost girlish — complexion and thick white hair, and she was asking me whether she might offer me coffee, or maybe I preferred tea. Once more we walked along the passage with its scrupulously clean carpet and entered a room that was their sitting-cum-dining room. The walls were hung with enormous showy pictures in golden frames and the china-cabinet contained sparkling porcelain, along with a single silver bowl and a vase with Chinese ornaments. At a black desk, in a three-wheeled invalid chair, there sat a bald, sallow little man with a ginger moustache and small active eyes, who straight away came forward to greet me. His father. Only now did I notice that on the desk there stood another bust, identical this time to the one I had at home, right down to the colour. I sat down as I was bid. His father welcomed me in the manner reserved for friends whom one has not seen in a long time, or opponents one is seeking to win over. Then he asked whether I had already seen Vlastimil’s little creatures. He quickly answered for me that of course I had. And then the man asked whether it was true that I had suffered in a camp during the war, and without waiting for a reply he declared that it must have been an awful experience, that it was a terrible world that wreaked vengeance on children and could subject them to torture.

His wife spread a lace cloth on the table and brought the coffee in tiny little cups with gold handles, together with a cake on a glass plate, and asked me whether I was aware that her husband had been an airman. And her husband interrupted her, saying I was sure to know, and in his cage on wheels he rolled back to the desk, opened a drawer and took out an ordinary cardboard box. When he took off the lid, there, on the base of red velvet, lay a round piece of metal with a coloured ribbon, looking much like a coin; he held it up for me to see and told me that that was what they had given him for his legs.

My classmate intervened to say that his father had been shot down over London and blushed once more. Then they invited me to help myself, and in general to make myself at home. And the man in the invalid chair asked his son if he’d shown me the safety-lamp. And when my classmate, still red-faced, shook his head, his father ordered him to fetch it, and he brought over some kind of old, but brightly polished miner’s lamp, and the white-haired lady explained that her husband’s first job was in the pits and he had kept the lamp as a souvenir. He said that it was back in the days of Austrian rule, and offered to show me a photograph. He rolled back to his desk once again and fetched a yellowing photo showing a group of young men in miners’ helmets standing in the yard of the mine, with the winding gear looming in the background. He explained to me that it was taken in Ostrava, where he worked for three years down the pits and spent his evenings studying. In those days he still had the strength, now he had neither strength nor courage, and what use would they be to him anyway? When they had told him that they must amputate his legs, he had thought there was no sense in living any more, but he had wanted to come back here to see his wife and boy. But now he was only a burden on them anyway, and could no longer give them the help they needed. A tearful note came into his voice and my classmate scolded him for talking that way. The coffee on the table was getting cold and the cake smelt inviting, but I didn’t dare help myself with the others taking nothing. The man in the invalid chair declared once more that he had nothing left to live for, adding that he had hoped, at least, to see his son become a doctor, and asking whether he had shown me his books.

My classmate blushed yet again and without looking at me muttered yes, he had. Now at last his mother noticed I wasn’t eating and told me to be sure and help myself. And she addressed me as Comrade Adam. I got up from the table and announced that I really had to leave and ran out of that flat without having said a single word: either of explanation, apology or justification of what I had done.

The following week — as if as a reward for my services (though in fact the timing was a coincidence as they had offered me membership several weeks earlier) — they admitted me into the Party. The meeting took place in the art room, which still reminded me of the gaunt, once beloved Ivandolič, and put me in mind of a vault in which still lifes by Cézanne had been forgotten on the walls. Apart from Švehla, all the other members were teachers. I was not accustomed to moving in such circles on an equal footing. I sat there at a paint-stained desk, scarcely able to take in what was happening around me. They read out my application and the recommendations of my guarantors. Then the history teacher, a small woman with a hunch back, spoke about my class-consciousness, devotion and selflessness. She said — and I remember her words — that I could serve as an example to many Party members too. Then they approved my application unanimously and they all clapped. I stood up and stuttered my thanks to them for their trust, with the worrying feeling that I had been through it all before.

I tried to feel as if there was something to celebrate but instead all I felt was the depressing realisation that my future was now irreversibly restricted. I had become a foot-soldier, and though I had chosen my destiny freely and even enthusiastically, now that my uniform was being brought to me, I was overcome with anxiety.

It was about that time that the telephone once rang unexpectedly in the middle of the night. I picked up the receiver and heard someone in the distance whispering to someone else that it was me. And out of that dry, quiet crackle, an unfamiliar, strident female voice started to hurl abuse at me, calling me a stinking, communist pig of a Jew.

I stuttered something into the mouthpiece, but that voice went on hurling insults without pause, threatening to string me up, cut off my genitals, hang me by my legs from a strong wire, until at last I realised that while I might not be able to silence it, at least I didn’t have to listen to it.

As I remember, scarcely had I hung up than the phone rang again, but I no longer had the courage to pick up the receiver, and for fear of waking my mother I covered the telephone with a cushion and placed it on the carpet, kneeling beside it until the phone bell’s muffled rattle finally stopped.