Judge On Trial

Chapter Five

1

HE WAS WOKEN next morning by the children’s loud whispering: ‘Martin! Wake up! Guess who’s here!’

‘Take your hands away from my eyes, then!’

‘No! Guess!’

‘Honza!’

‘Don’t be silly; he can’t sleep here!’

‘So it’s someone sleeping here? It’s Daddy, then. Hooray, Daddy! When did you come?’

‘Stop yelling! Can’t you see Daddy’s sleeping?’

‘We can go swimming, then, now that Daddy’s here.’

‘Don’t be silly! Honza can’t go in the water.’

‘So what, now Daddy’s here?’

‘You’re a nice one. When Honza made you a boat you sucked up to him then.’

‘No, you’re the one that sucked up to him. And you played cards with him.’

‘Fibber!’

Thump. Thump.

‘Hey, Manda! Can you hear? Honza’s getting up.’

The bed next to him was empty. He got dressed. Not only was Alena already up, but breakfast was ready on the table. Five mugs and plates (why five? oh, yes, five, of course: they had a guest), five egg cups, and what’s more a knife and two spoons at each place. He couldn’t recall when his wife had last laid the table in such exemplary fashion. Wasn’t she rather overdoing it just on account of some student? He gave her a kiss. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’

‘I’d slept enough.’

‘It’s just that I thought we went to bed quite late…’ Above, the stairs creaked; her guest was apparently coming to join them for breakfast.

He entered at the same time as the children, rather as if they had carried or propelled him through the door. They danced all round him. The student seemed even taller and skinnier than the night before — there was something about him Adam found inimical. But it was less his appearance than the fact that it was here he had decided to take his overdose, or even taken the pills at all. He didn’t like people who couldn’t even see out the few years one was allotted on earth.

‘Good morning!’ the student bellowed, as if addressing an entire platoon.

Alena was pouring the tea. ‘How did you sleep?’

‘It’s nice of you to ask, Alena, but you know I don’t sleep very much.’ He buttered himself a slice of bread. ‘But I did see the sunrise.’

‘Honza, you promised you’d tell us about how you jumped with a parachute.’

‘Shush, Martin!’ Alena scolded him. ‘You know you mustn’t talk with your mouth full.’

‘You did parachute jumping?’ asked Adam incredulously.

‘Yes, when I was taking flying lessons,’ he said, blushing slightly.

Why did the student tell lies? He was used to all sorts of people lying to him; indeed most of the people he met in court did. But they generally lied to some purpose — to conceal or fabricate something. Those people were trying to avoid suspicion or punishment, but what could this young fellow hope to achieve, apart from the admiration of a six-year-old boy?

Alena got up from the table. Though normally she took even longer over her food than the children, this morning she had been the first to finish her breakfast — if she’d eaten anything at all. And now she was hurrying to wash the dishes.

He sensed the tension in the room and would happily have done something to ease it if he’d known the cause. The only thing he could do was to leave the table and go out.

The elm outside the window was bathed in sunlight and the scent of flowering meadows wafted in. He stood up. ‘I think I’ll go and see if there are any mushrooms growing. Coming with me?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She was making such a clatter with the washing-up that he scarcely heard her. ‘I thought I might drive Honza to the bus stop now.’

‘The bus doesn’t go till this afternoon.’

‘Oh, yes, I hadn’t thought of that. But what about the children? And here…’ She gave the student a disconcerted look.

‘Off you go, Alena!’ Honza replied condescendingly. ‘I’ll look after them.’

They walked along a grassy path that sloped up steeply towards the forest. He took her hand; he knew she liked him to. She walked without speaking at his side — she always panted when going uphill.

He could still feel tension in her silence. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No. It’s just I’m still het up about what he did.’

‘The student?’

‘Why do you keep calling him a student?’

‘Sorry.’

‘I got a terrible fright. But there’s no need for you to upset yourself.’

‘It peeves me that you’re in a bad mood on his account.’

‘I’m not in a bad mood.’

It seemed to him she was fighting back tears. ‘Look, you don’t have to come with me. I know you’re not interested in mushrooming.’

‘That’s not true. Why are you always getting at me?’

He stopped. They had almost reached the brow of the hill. When he turned round, he could see a broad hollow below him. On the horizon, the ruins of Trosky stood up like two monster teeth. ‘But I don’t get at you.’ He sat down on a flat, warm stone. She stood over him in confusion for a moment, then put on her sunglasses and sat down also.

‘When I was at Petr’s it struck me things can’t go on much longer like this.’

‘What things?’

‘I mean I can’t go on hanging around with them all, acting as courier for money and messages, and continue working as a judge.’

‘Why not?’

He caught a surprising note of relief in her voice.

‘So what do you want to do? They are your friends, after all.’

‘I’m giving it a lot of thought. I can’t see how I’ll manage to keep my position, but then I can’t imagine what else I’d do if I had to leave.’

‘We’d make a living somehow,’ she said absently.

‘That’s not what worries me. Everyone manages to make some kind of living. And I might not even have to measure water like Matěj — but what would be the point of being an industrial lawyer, filing suits about delivery dates and damages? It’s something that never interested me.’ He sensed that her thoughts were elsewhere. She never was one to share his concerns particularly, but on this occasion he had clearly chosen the wrong moment.

‘It’s wrong to desert anyone,’ she said. ‘Even your friends!’

‘I’m not deserting them. It’s just that I felt odd in their company all of a sudden. Not because I was still somewhere that they had had to leave, but it seemed to me that with them I would be going back to somewhere I never wanted to see again.’

‘Where didn’t you want to return to?’

Her voice sounded to him just as indifferent as before. ‘To the ghetto. That state of constantly waiting for miracles and liberation. But at the same time, among the ones at work I feel even worse. A complete alien. It suddenly hit me that I didn’t belong anywhere. It was an odd sensation.’ He waited for her to say: But you belong here, or something similar, but she remained silent.

‘In the past I always thought I knew where I belonged and what I wanted. Maybe I was wrong. But now…’

‘People should act according to their conscience!’

He glanced at her in surprise. ‘I’ve always tried to, my whole life!’

‘No you haven’t… Your decisions have always been to do with tactics. One should be true to oneself.’

‘That’s something I was told in that place — when I was a little boy. A clown said it to me.’

‘You think you have to be a clown to be honest.’

He noticed that tears were trickling from under her sunglasses. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘We never talk about anything but you,’ she sobbed. ‘You’re only interested in yourself.’

He couldn’t remember when they last talked about him, but before he could respond, she stood up and dashed down the hillside.

2

He arrived at the courthouse direct from the country. He was in a bad mood and felt tired. He had had to get up early and on such occasions he always woke up even earlier than necessary. During the two days he had spent at the cottage, he had not had much chance to relax — the tension he had felt on his arrival had not dissipated. Perhaps it had only been his impression, only the presence of the Honza fellow getting on his nerves. It might well have been that the others had felt nothing.

He found a number of letters on his desk and a note to say that this morning’s hearing had been cancelled because the defendant was ill. That news helped raise his spirits slightly.

There was a letter from Karel Kozlík addressed to him. The defendant urgently requested a meeting. He promised to reveal a number of new, important facts about the case.

What new information could he have for him? From the very start he had guessed that he would have nothing but trouble with this case.

An air letter from his brother Hanuš in England (he’d already written telling him to send letters to his home address, for heaven’s sake) and a postcard from America: handwriting unfamiliar; the picture showing several hideous skyscrapers in Dallas: Best wishes, bit of a headache on the way home. Sorry if I caused any bother. Jim. Who was Jim? The name meant nothing to him, nor the message. He spent a few moments trying hard to recall his short stay in Texas. It could possibly be a university colleague who happened to be passing through Dallas. Why was he writing to him about headaches, though? And what sort of problems could this Jim have caused him?

There was no point bothering his head about it; Americans were strange people; in their striving to be friendly, they sometimes became incoherent.

In addition, a message from his colleague Alice: Adam, a woman called just after you left. She didn’t say who she was and left no message.

Honza had departed mid-day Saturday. Alena had made him two large sandwiches for the journey (when had she last made him a packed lunch?) and then they all drove with him to the bus stop.

There had been something obsessive about the way the young fellow had looked at his wife after he boarded the bus. Had it not seemed ludicrous to Adam (the fellow being ten years younger than her) he would have said he was in love with her. But he had no wish to be prejudiced against Honza; he didn’t want to think about him at all. He just couldn’t stand people who turned up in places he wanted to keep for himself — and where he had hoped to find a bit of peace.

That was one thing he didn’t need at a time when he was stuck in court from morning to night: someone visiting the cottage, carving his children boats and taking overdoses in front of them like a hysterical wife who’d just been jilted by a husband or lover.

His bad mood started to come back.

His brother Hanuš apologised for having been too talkative on the phone (no doubt he was about to atone for it by repeating the error in the letter), saying he had merely chanced to be in that kind of mood. Now and then he suffered an attack of homesickness and couldn’t even say what for exactly. For instance, he would be walking along a street named after some lord or admiral he had never heard of and he would suddenly long for the red signs at the street corners. Incredible sentimentality. You were talking about freedom, his brother continued, and you’re bound to have some fantastic, classic definition. I, of course, never forget the morning when they rang our doorbell (how they came during the war, I fortunately don’t remember) and took our father away, and I know that something of the kind is most unlikely to happen to me here, and I’m grateful for the fact. But I can’t go into the woods, they’re fenced in, and a week ago a landowner was going to shoot me for straying on to his river bank. People here can think freely about whatever they like, but their brains are assailed by the advertising slogans that are drummed into our heads from dawn till dusk: Hennessy was in vogue when Wellington was still in bootees. Generation gap? Jim Beam never heard of it. Now birth control is as easy as the tampon. There is no way of shaking them out of your mind, except by escaping to the Sahara or a desert island. But who’s going to run away? What, in fact, is essential to a feeling of freedom? People will always lack something and have to make do with what they’ve got. Who knows the right scale of values? It struck me not long ago that freedom is in fact an infinite set. If I try and compare your freedom with my freedom, for example, I am comparing two infinite sets. Or if I try and compare the limits of my freedom here with the limits of my freedom back home: if I call the original factor of my limits here LF, then the limits of my freedom back home start at about LF + 20, or some such figure. Do you see what I mean?

He didn’t particularly see. He hoped that it would be no less mystifying to any possible censor and didn’t feel that the letter’s importance justified his seeking out an expert on set theory to explain it to him.

I am therefore comparing an infinite set with its sub-set, his brother continued, and they are, as everyone knows, equivalent. At first sight it struck me as a beautifully absurd paradox. But that’s what the comparison of any infinite set with its sub-set looks like at first sight. It made me wonder whether I was really in the thrall of some commonly shared prejudices. Only the joke is, I suppose, that freedom cannot be expressed in mathematical terms.

The phone rang. It was Alexandra. ‘I’m not disturbing you, Adam?’

‘No, it turns out that my court hearing has been cancelled.’

‘Why can’t I be that lucky? Why do they never dismiss one of our cartoons for lack of evidence, and set us all free? But I’d like your advice on something.’

‘So long as I’m up to it.’

‘I’m sure you are. It concerns a flat.’

‘I’m not really an expert on flats. Oldřich is bound to know more than me.’

‘If it was something I fancied asking Ruml about, I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?’

‘Fine. Do you want to come here, or would you rather I came to see you?’

‘It’s not as urgent as all that.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘Maybe I’ll drop by after work. I’ll call you from the front desk. You do have a front desk there, don’t you?’

3

She walked up the stairs ahead of him. In her bright clothes, which covered her as little as possible, she seemed to him like a migrant from a southern clime. Right at the top of the building, where he expected there to be nothing but a loft, they stopped and she searched for the right key. The advice she was looking for concerned this flat. It belonged to her mother, but the lady had already lived outside Prague for several years and was apparently afraid it would be taken from her. He could have given her the answers to her questions in five sentences, and he certainly had no need to see the flat in order to advise her.

The lobby was spick and span and the smell of a familiar perfume hung in the air. ‘There is only this room,’ she indicated, ‘and the kitchen next to it, if you fancy having a look.’ She opened the glass door. The motor of the refrigerator came to life, noisily. ‘It’s fairly tolerable at the moment; it doesn’t get hot in here. But it’s not so good in winter. The sun doesn’t reach it from one end of the year to the other.’ She showed him round the flat casually as if he was one of many people interested in a flat-exchange, while he was unable to think of anything but the fact that he now found himself — at her behest — alone with her in an enclosed space, which, he assumed, no one ever entered but those she brought here.

‘Did you live here once?’

‘After Dad died.’ She opened the refrigerator. ‘Shall we have a drink?’ She reached inside blindly and brought out a bottle. Then she took some glasses from the battered sideboard.

The walls of the attic room slanted inwards. The furniture seemed shabby to him and the carpet threadbare. A vase of wilting carnations stood on the window ledge. A number of pictures hung on the walls, but he was unable to register their details. He walked over to a low window and tried unsuccessfully to see something from it. From far below he could hear the sound of sheet metal being beaten and the faint whine of some machine or other. He oughtn’t really to be sitting here, and certainly not drinking wine. He shouldn’t stay longer. At last he noticed the slender spire of the Emaus church towering behind the houses opposite.

‘Open the window, would you, so we can breathe. And take off that jacket, for heaven’s sake.’ She poured the wine into the glasses. ‘Or are you in a hurry?’

He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. He leaned out of the window. In the backyard two fellows were bashing a sheet of tin while coloured rags blew about above their heads.

‘You can sit on the chair or the armchair, or stretch out on the settee.’ She slipped off her shoes and sat down on a corner of the settee with her legs crossed beneath her. ‘It’s a nice place, isn’t it? It’d be a pity to lose it.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘When I was a little girl we lived in the country — near Cáslav. Dad was the local policeman. When the comrades took everything over in February ’48, he shot himself. But he made a bad job of it and just shot a hole in his lungs, and then went through the most terrible suffering for the next three years till he died. Then we moved here. Different fellows would move in from time to time, but Mum would always kick them out again in the end. One of them had studied to be a priest and he always used to tell me the kinkiest stories about the saints: fantastic horror stories. He also carved me a great big nativity with really weird figures. All the animals had human heads. They’re still in a box up in the loft. Another one of them was a railwayman, he used to spend his evenings at home making locomotives out of wooden skewers and coloured paper. I slept in the kitchen and I was desperate for somewhere to put my paints and paper and a bit of space for myself, but there were his models everywhere. But they were pretty good, and I even helped him paint some of them. He used to bring me loads of paper and gave me a box of Pelican oil pastels. I can’t think how he came by them; I expect he pinched them. In the end they arrested him along with a gang of fellows who were stealing from railway wagons. We chucked all his models into a box, but I packed them in wood shavings first so they wouldn’t get squashed, otherwise he’d be sad when he came for them. He didn’t come for them anyway; he kicked the bucket inside. It wasn’t you who sent him down by any chance, was it?’

‘What was his name?’

‘Well now you ask me, I can’t remember. We used to call him Joey. After he landed up inside, Mum didn’t have any other lodgers. But then she started going out with some gent. I never set eyes on him as he never came here. He must have been well heeled, because he used to buy Mum lovely clothes. He was probably married and could only manage to see her once a week and then she would come home after midnight. She was so regular I could even invite my David here every Wednesday evening. He was two years above me in school and used to make fantastic sculptures, with long bodies like he had himself. He also used to make some real weird things from old sheets of tin. He would paint them with car enamel and other sorts of paint and then fire them. They had a kiln at home because his dad was a blacksmith. Once he got dreadfully burnt and spent almost a month in hospital. He said that if ever he decided to end his life, he’d jump in a furnace. But he didn’t burn himself to death, that was left for someone else.’

He tried to concentrate on what she was saying but it was impossible: her presence distracted him. Why had she invited him here? Why was she confiding in him? ‘How old were you at the time?’

She reflected for a moment. ‘I must have been at least fifteen. And one of my teachers was in love with me too. He was always terrified in case someone saw us. When he first came here, he was shaking all over because he’d bumped into some woman on the way in. He always had to get drunk first. Then he used to tell me all about how he fought in a foreign army, how his wife took all his money, and also about his beautiful daughter who was the only reason why he couldn’t leave his family, otherwise he would have married me. I never understood why he said it because I naturally had no desire to marry him. He assured me I had talent and would go far with it. I just enjoyed painting: daubing on paint. In those days I hadn’t the faintest idea colours had numbers, or that one day I’d be issued with an industrial-sized bottle of pink to do five hundred dogs’ muzzles. I thought it was so fantastic that in a world where everything was precisely regulated and planned, I could paint what I wanted. Trees growing roots upwards, for instance. Or a girl walking naked along the street with everyone enjoying it and no one going after her, because in my world there’s no such thing as police.’

‘You’d like to walk along the street naked?’

‘Why not, if I felt like it? I remember once we got terribly drunk and climbed out on the roof and stripped off. We were still at school. I bet you wouldn’t like that, would you?’

‘I don’t know, but I’ve never run about a roof naked in my life.’

‘That’s a pity; you might have turned out differently.’

‘Do you think it would have improved me?’

‘You’d have started to relax a bit and not think so much about your paragraphs all the time.’

‘I don’t think about them at all, except when I really have to.’

‘Who are you kidding? You’re always thinking about what you ought to be doing, or not doing. Right now you’re thinking about whether it’s right for you to be sitting here listening to this crap I’m spouting. Have a drink, at least!’ She pushed the glass towards him. ‘I like people who jump off a bridge, say, just because they feel like it. And I can’t stand people who have to weigh it all up beforehand and then live accordingly. Like Ruml, for instance.’

‘Your criteria are a bit one-sided.’

‘You’re bound to think that way. Or you wouldn’t be in that job you’re in.’

‘There’s nothing particularly bad about what I do, is there?’

‘You don’t think so? You can’t see anything dreadful about helping them sustain their disgusting system? Doesn’t it turn your stomach?’

An unexpected note of anger suddenly entered her voice, or of personal interest, more likely. He didn’t know she had some experience of the courts. But what did he know about her?

‘Ruml told me they put you in prison when you were small, and it was something I liked about you, the fact you’d been through something — unlike him, who used to get taken to school by car. But I just couldn’t fathom out how you could then go and send some other poor devil to a lousy, dirty hole somewhere.’

‘That was different, though, wasn’t it?’

‘What? Just because they weren’t children? Or because you didn’t get sent down with them this time?’

‘Why are you getting so hot under the collar? All over the world they have laws, and someone has to try people under them.’

‘All over the world they have laws that say it’s a crime to want to live like people and not slaves? That’s news to me. And why should it be you who does it?’

‘And what should I do, according to you?’

‘Something that would allow you to be free.’

‘Not everyone can be an artist. We’d all die of hunger.’

‘We’ll die anyway.’

‘It’s too late, I don’t know how to do anything else.’

‘Maybe you’re wrong; maybe you just haven’t hit on it yet. You could be a rabbi, for instance,’ she suggested. ‘No, I don’t mean a rabbi, I mean the one who does the singing. I happened to be by the synagogue not long ago and there was a fellow there with a big nose just like yours and he sang so wonderfully he mesmerised me. Afterwards I caught sight of him outside chatting to some girl and she was completely knocked out by him too. Or you could be a mendicant friar. You could wander around the villages in the Bohemian Forest preaching to the people. I bet you’d enjoy that — preaching. They’d give you bread and wine in return and a place to sleep for the night. And you would creep into some girl’s bed, have a fantastic time and the next morning you’d be gone with the wind. You could be a sailor, outward bound from Hong Kong to Honolulu, and there’d be beautiful native girls waiting for you everywhere.’

‘You talk as if I didn’t think about anything but girls.’

‘You struck me as one of those — though I’m not sure any more. I doubt if I’d get to Hawaii with you.’

The wine was finished and she took away the empty bottle; as she passed him he finally made up his mind and took her in his arms.

4

Even though he had given them advance notice of his visit and arrived on time, the prisoner hadn’t been brought to the interview room yet. The tiny room was stiflingly hot, which increased the depressing emptiness of the place.

He was sleepy. Although it had only just gone midnight when he arrived home and he had been physically exhausted from lovemaking, it was dawn before he fell asleep. And even then he could not stop hearing it, a woman’s voice he did not know by heart yet. Passionate moans, which excited and terrified him, drowned out all other sounds, cutting him off from the world he had so far inhabited, a world that rang to the voices of other people, the voices of his wife and children. When he woke up, he had been incapable of telling whether it was despair, fear or desire that dominated his emotions. He had a heavy head, that was certain, and he could sense the grains of sand trickling through it in a constant, silent stream.

At last the first member of the escort entered and behind him he saw his prisoner for the first time.

‘You can take a seat, Kozlík,’ he said when the warders had left.

The young man was on the small side; he had large ears that stuck out either side of his high cranium. He seemed to have a cataract in one eye, while the other stared straight at him.

‘You requested an interview.’

‘I did, your honour. I want to withdraw the statement I made during the investigation.’

‘Why did you confess, then, if now you want to withdraw everything?’

‘I wanted to get the investigation over as quick as possible. What other option have you got, once they’ve got you in their hands!’

‘Do you intend to file a complaint against any aspect of the investigation into your case?’

‘No, that’s not it. It’s not so easy to get out of it once they decide to drown you. That’s all I meant.’

‘Are you trying to say that you did not commit the deed you’re charged with?’

‘I didn’t commit it, your honour.’

‘So who do you think did? How do you explain it?’

‘I’ve no idea, your honour. After all, it’s not my duty to know.’

‘No, you’re right there. So what is it you want to tell me?’

‘I didn’t do it, your honour. I know nothing about it. It didn’t have to be anyone else’s fault. She could have done it herself.’

‘Someone wiped the tap and put a saucepan of water on the gas.’

‘But she could have done that herself. She never stopped wiping the taps. She couldn’t stand dirt.’

‘You think the water put out the flame?’

‘I don’t know, your honour.’

‘It’s more likely that the gas under the saucepan was never lit, don’t you think?’

‘That’s possible, your honour. She was getting confused. It was something she done several times before: turn the gas on and forget to light it.’

‘Did she? And weren’t you worried she’d poison you as well?’

‘I always used to go in and check before going to bed.’

‘And you didn’t go in that evening?’

‘I wasn’t there that evening!’

‘I thought you were seen leaving the flat.’

‘No one could have seen me, your honour, because I wasn’t there!’

‘Your neighbour is sure she saw you.’

‘That woman’s almost blind, your honour.’

‘They found the murdered woman’s savings book on you, Kozlík.’

‘She gave it me herself, your honour. She asked me to take some cash out for her. She had trouble walking.’

‘It’s rather a coincidence, don’t you think?’

‘If I’d stolen the savings book there’s no way I’d have kept it on me, is there? I had plenty of time to hide it somewhere, if I’d known about what’d happened.’

‘Did she often send you to withdraw cash for her?’

‘I don’t think she often touched her savings. She had her pension and my rent money.’

‘She seems to have trusted you, if she sent you to the savings bank for her.’

‘She liked me, your honour.’

‘You said something entirely different in your earlier statement.’

‘I want to withdraw the whole of my original statement. I made it all up.’

‘You made it up very convincingly.’

‘If it’d been unconvincing, they wouldn’t have accepted it.’

‘Save your insolence, Kozlík! Why didn’t you bring your landlady the cash, if she’d given you the book?’

‘She only gave it to me that day, your honour.’

‘So you were there that evening, then?’

‘In the afternoon. When I got home from work.’

‘And then you went off to the cinema with your fiancée?’

‘That’s right, your honour.’

‘Your landlady gave you the savings book when you were going off to the cinema?’

‘I was supposed to draw the cash the next day and bring it to her.’

‘You knew you wouldn’t be coming back that evening?’

‘I was meaning to stay at my fiancée’s, your honour. Her folks were supposed to be on night-shift.’

‘And did you?’

‘One of them changed their shift, I can’t remember which one.’

‘What time did you actually go to the cinema?’

‘At eight o’clock, your honour.’

‘What were they showing?’

‘Some American film. About some woman who told several men that they had given her a baby. She was an Italian and they went on paying her for years like idiots.’

‘What did you do after the film?’

‘I walked my fiancée home.’

‘What time did you part from your fiancée?’

‘Around midnight. We stood for a while outside the house.’

It was at least an hour before midnight that she had suddenly wriggled out of his arms. I’ve got to go. Your friend Ruml might beat me up otherwise.

She was standing in front of the now darkened window, lit only by the dim light of a table-lamp. Her naked, tanned body seemed so strange to him, so unlikely, so unfamiliar, that he wondered if he was dreaming. Then she leaned over him and gave him a peck. Get up, darling!

They left together in a taxi; she laid her head on his shoulder and he was aware of that unfamiliar perfume. They stopped the taxi at the corner of her street. When shall we see each other again? He knew it was up to him to ask, even though he was not sure at that moment whether he really did want to see her again. She just said: Call me! Then he saw her run along the narrow alley between the villas: a stranger, yet close; desired, yet feared. She turned round just once and waved. But by then the car had already done a U-turn and was moving away from her. The astonishing realisation sank in that no car could now take him away entirely from what had just happened.

‘Is that something you often did: stay out all night?’

‘Fairly often, your honour.’

‘All right, so you used to spend nights at your fiancée’s. But why didn’t you go home, when you couldn’t stay with her?’

‘I didn’t feel like it, your honour. It was too far to go. I’d just missed a tram, and there wasn’t another for an hour. I got fed up waiting for it.’

‘So where did you go?’

‘I just walked about.’

‘You didn’t even go to a pub?’

‘It was too late, they were all closed.’

‘Or to some friend’s?’

‘No, your honour.’

‘So you just walked the streets?’

‘I sat on a bench for a while.’

‘Weren’t you cold, out all night?’

‘I’m used to the cold, your honour.’

‘So you spent the whole night walking the streets for no good reason?’

‘Yes, your honour. I’d done it many times before. Nobody ever noticed because no old ladies got poisoned those nights.’

‘Don’t be insolent, Kozlík!’

‘I’m only telling the truth, your honour.’

He had returned to his empty flat where everything was exactly as he’d left it that morning, but where everything seemed unfamiliar, as if he had returned as an old man to his childhood home.

I knew you were like that, darling.

Like what?

You know very well. You just want to hear me say it.

I didn’t know until now.

You didn’t know who you were till now.

The bathroom shelf was full of his wife’s bits and pieces. Creams, powders, the mascara pencil she used on her rather ill-defined eyebrows. He felt regret as he looked at it all.

He had run a bath and immersed himself up to his chin in the hot water: heat and regret permeated him.

With his wife he had never felt the ecstasy he had felt tonight, his wife was not endowed with the gift of total abandonment, but on the other hand she was pure and incapable of deceit, and he had no wish to hurt or deceive her. And he never had deceived her before; something like that would have broken the code he lived by. But what was that code?

He went to bed; a cool night-time breeze blew in through the window but waves of perspiration washed over him again and again. A voice which previously he had never accepted as his own started to speak to him, asking him questions and demanding answers. He tried to drive it away but it remained stuck in him like a splinter or a pin, and went on goading him. What reply should he give? Was it possible he had been mistaken up to now about who he was and what he wanted? Was he a strolling rabbi or, more likely, a schnorrer wandering a strange country, in search of — what? A hot supper, a good companion, freedom or even God’s grace, maybe?

In a few days’ time he was to go and pick up his wife. What would he tell her? The truth, of course; he wasn’t going to tarnish her or himself by lying into the bargain.

From the twilight of the bedroom a harlequin leered at him while outside an eagle flew softly and silently past the window on its journey to freedom; he felt a pin-prick and the blood trickling slowly and uselessly from his finger into the void, while she stood naked on the roof of the house opposite. Her unfamiliar, fondled body was bathed in moonlight so that the minutest details were visible to him.

‘You went back to your fiancée in the morning?’

‘Yes, as soon as her old man left for morning shift.’

‘You didn’t have to go to work?’

‘I would still have made it, your honour.’

‘Weren’t you surprised that they came for you that morning, seeing that you knew nothing about it?’

‘You get used to all sorts of things, your honour. They were always after me. Even at the place I work.’

‘What did you say to them when they charged you with this crime?’

‘I told them I didn’t know anything about it.’

‘But then you admitted it. Why did you admit to it, if you hadn’t done anything, Kozlík?’

‘I already answered that, your honour. There’s no point in not admitting it, once they start working on you.’

‘You’ve already stated that you have no complaints about the way you were questioned.’

‘I haven’t, your honour!’

‘So you can keep such comments to yourself, Kozlík. You know very well there is no sense in someone confessing if they are innocent. If they really are innocent.’

‘I am, your honour!’

‘Some splinters from broken perfume bottles and some spilt face powder were found in the entrance hall.’

‘That’s possible, your honour.’

‘So there was some truth in your original statement?’

‘That was an unfortunate accident. I’d bumped into that shelf on the way in.’

‘I see. And what was your landlady’s reaction?’

‘I can’t remember, your honour.’

‘Try to remember! Wasn’t she cross with you?’

‘She might have been. I don’t remember any more.’

‘Was she often cross with you?’

‘No, your honour. She liked me.’

‘Surely you can recall whether she was cross with you on the evening she died.’

‘She might have been a bit cross.’

‘How soon afterwards did you go out?’

‘Soon!’

‘What does “soon” mean? How much later?’

‘About half an hour.’

‘And during that half-hour she handed you her savings book. You made her cross and immediately afterwards she entrusted you with her savings. All right, have it your own way! When you came home from work was your landlady’s granddaughter already there?’

‘I didn’t notice. I was only home for a short while.’

‘Half an hour!’

‘I was in my room!’

‘Who swept up the broken glass?’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘When a shelf full of glass falls it makes a racket, doesn’t it? If the child had already been in the flat she would probably have rushed out to see what had fallen. Did she come out, or not? You can’t remember anything because you didn’t come home at all that afternoon. That’s why you can’t say who was there and who wasn’t.’

‘I came home straight from work!’

‘Do you have any witnesses?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But no one has come forward.’

‘Witnesses like that don’t come forward.’

‘Witnesses like what?’

‘The sort that might help you.’

‘What makes you think that they wouldn’t come forward?’

‘They might make problems for themselves.’

‘I think you might be overestimating your importance slightly.’

‘No one looks for the sort of witnesses that might spoil the prosecution case.’

‘So you are sticking to the statement you’ve just made?’

‘Yes, your honour!’ He had a sudden devastating intuition: right now everything that had seemed significant to him in his life was disintegrating. But what was disintegrating in fact: his life or, on the contrary, his delusions about his life…?

So far for him time had taken an orderly course — not a torrent rushing along a river bed or carving out a course between rocks. His wartime experience had actually increased his self-confidence; it had seemed to him that he had been faced with an obstacle such as none of his peers had known, and he had coped with it and stood the test. But what sort of test had it actually been? He had been caught in a trap by one set of people and stayed there incarcerated until another set of people released him. While it was happening, he had neither shaped his own destiny nor had any opportunity of influencing it. And since then, life had had no further trials in store for him, or more accurately, he had managed to avoid them. When others got caught in traps he had always skirted them deftly and pretended not to see them. He had sat in judgement when to others the very word justice was anathema. And here he was still in the same situation, still with the power of life or death over someone else.

But how long would he be able to keep it up? Or: if he did keep it up his whole life, what would he gain by it?

Now there was no skirting the traps, too many had been laid. He would either have to decide on what action to take, or become bogged down. But he was not accustomed to taking any decisive action; not on his own behalf, anyway. Even the thing that had just happened had not been of his doing.

‘Think carefully again about all you’ve told me.’

‘Are you advising me to confess, your honour?’

‘It’s not my function to give you advice. That’s the job of your defence counsel.’

‘It’s the truth I’ve been telling you, your honour.’

‘Do you have a child, Kozlík?’

‘I’ve been paying her maintenance regularly, your honour!’

‘That’s not what I asked. What sort of feeling do you have for your child?’

‘She’s not my child, your honour.’

‘So why do you pay maintenance for her?’

‘The court ordered me to!’

‘The court ordered you to, even though it isn’t your child?’

‘That sometimes happens, your honour!’

‘So you have no feeling for the child?’

‘No, your honour.’

‘And haven’t you ever seen her?’

‘I’ve seen a photo of her.’

‘Why did her mother name you as the father?’

‘She had to name someone. She went with lots of men.’

‘But why did she choose you in particular? Do you think you’re such an ideal father?’

‘I don’t know, your honour.’

‘And you have no feeling for the child’s mother?’

‘Not any more, your honour.’

‘But she has a feeling for you. She would like you to come back to her.’

‘You mustn’t believe her, your honour. She’s a liar. She was always making things up.’

‘And you have never made anything up?’

‘No, your honour! I’ve always told people the truth. Everyone could believe me.’

‘One would think you were a saint to listen to you.’

‘I mean it sincerely, your honour. If one could trust people more, everything would be different.’

5

Whenever the telephone rang or someone grasped the handle of her office door she held her breath. She was frightened it might be him, but also pleased when it was. He called her several times a day. As soon as they removed the plaster he started dropping in. He had only to cross the courtyard. He would sit on a chair and gaze at her, talking to her or saying nothing. He wanted nothing and asked for nothing. He just waited.

This time, she picked up the receiver to hear an unknown male voice. ‘Vlastimil Pravda here. My name won’t mean anything to you, Dr Kindlová, but I would be grateful if you could spare me a few moments. It’s a personal matter.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said in alarm, ‘but where are you calling from?’

‘I happened to be passing the library.’ The voice was sweet with almost a wheedling tone. ‘I’m downstairs in the entrance hall. I wouldn’t want to put any pressure on you if you’re busy.’

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming upstairs.’

It was not clear to her how someone whose name she had never heard before could speak to her about some personal matter. ‘Vlastimil Pravda’ sounded rather like a pen-name from the period of national revival. Then it suddenly dawned on her who this was coming to see her: a blackmailer. Someone had found out about her scandalous relationship, realised that she had managed so far to keep it dark, and was hurrying here to make a deal with her.

She got up from her desk. She did not know what to do. She’d never had to deal with a blackmailer. When Adam talked to her about such people they always seemed unreal to her: both the people and the business they were involved in. Maybe she oughtn’t to receive him at all. But if the man was intending to blackmail her he would track her down. Next time he would come unannounced or would go to the flat and she would only live in a constant state of apprehension.

The only thing that would save her would be to call Adam straight away. But she wouldn’t have the time to tell him anything. She’d call him as soon as the man left. She should have done it long ago. In fact she had wanted to but had not yet found the time or the opportunity.

Finally a knock at the door.

It was an elderly man with a gaunt, sallow face and thinning grey hair. And he also wore spectacles with thick lenses — his vision could not have been good. Although it was a hot day he was wearing a black jacket and beneath it a knitted jumper.

‘Dr Pravda.’ He announced himself with a bow. ‘Dr Kindlová?’

‘That’s right.’

‘May I be sure I’m not disturbing you?’

‘I have no idea what it is about,’ she said. ‘Take a seat, please!’

‘You have a lovely office,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘Peace and quiet, and a grapevine. In one of the places whence Czech learning first emerged. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say: learning in the Czech lands. Because the first Dominican schools used Latin. But then, any other learning was out of the question in those days.’

She couldn’t follow him. She had the impression that when he talked, he opened his mouth wider than was the custom. As if he were on the point of singing.

‘I don’t really know where to start. I should really have gone to see your husband and not you, of course.’

‘Yes, I see that.’

‘But it wouldn’t be proper. You husband probably wouldn’t receive me anyway, when he’d heard what it concerns. He is legally bound, whereas you are not. Perhaps you might be able to let him know something of what I will try to tell you. Should you think it seemly, of course.’

She was still confused, but nodded.

‘It concerns Karel Kozlík. I don’t know whether you have heard about him.’

‘No,’ she said with sudden relief. ‘Do sit down, I beg you. May I make you a coffee?’

‘No thank you. In that place I completely lost the habit of drinking coffee and I never acquired it again.’ He sat down. ‘Your husband is due to try Karel Kozlík for a murder which the fellow may have committed. I know nothing about the offence, of course, but I do know something about Karel.’

‘But it might be better for you to go and see my husband, all the same,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much about his affairs.’

‘Do you think he would see me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said nonplussed. ‘It didn’t occur to me that he might not see you.’ In fact, she had never even thought about the rules that were supposed to govern Adam at work. There was a time when he used to give her his articles to read, but they had not related to the legal code or judicial practice. Or if some of them might have done, she had forgotten them long ago anyway.

‘I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it’s not necessary. What I want to tell you has no direct connection with the deed, only with him as a person. I admit that what I say is a bit contradictory, but only in so far as our judicial system is.’

He told her that, as a clergyman, he himself had been sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment, and tried to describe the dreadful prison conditions. Then he turned once more to the case of the young man whom he had met inside. Apparently his first spell in prison had been for a few minor misdemeanours, but that had not worried anyone, nor the fact he was blind in one eye. They had forced him to work, and when he failed to fulfil the norm they had stopped his spending allowance, forbidden him visits and finally placed him in a punishment cell. The cell was below cellar-level. It was cold and the floor was wet. He had received hot food only every other day and had only one blanket to sleep under, and most of the time a worn one at that. But that youngster had been one of those people that could not be broken or humbled. He had spurned his gaolers and everything they represented. He had returned from that punishment cell determined not to let them force him to do anything again. He had refused to work, abused them and fought with them. So they had sent him back underground again and again and each time he had re-emerged weaker and more dejected, but also more obstinate.

Prisoners who didn’t allow themselves to be broken were dangerous, of course. What could be done with them? Violence could be increased only to a certain point; after that it could only be repeated ad nauseam. Recalcitrants demonstrated that even that level of violence could be withstood, and such demonstrations harboured the threat of revolt for the gaolers. But not only were the tormentors at risk, the souls of the tormented were even more so. They became gradually deformed and filled with incurable hatred, contempt and delusions of superiority.

The telephone rang.

‘Alena, is that you?’

‘I’ve got a visitor, Honza,’ she said.

‘I need to talk to you. It’s important!’

‘But I can’t just now.’ The man opposite her stood up and went over to the window, as if trying to move out of earshot.

‘When will you be free?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll call you later.’

‘OK. But count on this evening… Could you be free this evening?’

‘I don’t know.’ And suddenly it seemed to her that all her worries of recent days had been trivial compared with the things she had just been hearing. ‘I’ll call you later.’

‘I’ll be brief, Dr Kindlová.’ He returned to his chair. ‘It was my ninth year there. They must have known about my innocence by then and were anticipating an order for my release. I had come to be trusted with office work and from time to time the prison chief would deign to speak to me. I took the opportunity to suggest that he transfer myself and Karel to a small cell where I could look after him.

‘He accepted my suggestion. It was certainly not on my account, but they were already at the end of their tether. That fellow was storing up trouble for them. And for my part, I did not make my offer out of any wish to make their job easier. I was sorry for someone they would end up destroying. And whom they did end up destroying anyway, as you can see. First of all they transferred me and then, a month later, him as well. When they brought him to my cell, he was in such a wretched state that he hardly looked human any more. All he could think about was that he was hungry and that he was determined not to give in to the people he hated.

‘Naturally, he didn’t trust me. When they brought the food that first evening, I gave him my portion, and then, after supper, I took his dirty shirt and washed it for him. It sounds trivial, by now it sounds petty even to me: washing someone else’s shirt and fasting for an evening. But inside, you are in a wilderness inhabited by wolves. He didn’t say anything to me, of course, but I noticed he’d become wary, because the first reaction in places like that when someone treats you in a friendly fashion is suspicion: “He’s given me his bread ration twice: maybe it’s because they feed him something more filling. He washed my shirt: maybe he did it because they offered him a special reward for winning my confidence.” Prison is terrible not because it deprives you of your freedom but because it destroys your belief in other people. Maybe I was helped by the fact he knew my vocation. Not that he believed in God, but because happily those who had remained Christ’s shepherds even in that place enjoyed the reputation of being incorruptible.

‘While he was at work I would ponder on him. His soul was seized by a spasm. To ease the spasm it was necessary for him to accept that he was not alone in his cause; that he was not the only one whose suffering was out of proportion to his guilt. I recounted to him how they had arrested me many years before because some man had been caught on the borders with my name in his notebook. I told him how I had suffered months of tortures and interrogations, how I had lost the will to live, and how at that moment I had been helped by the words of Ecclesiastes which I would whisper to myself: “All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean…”

‘I tried to explain to him that one came into the world to save one’s soul and — if one had the strength — to begin to understand life. But that was something one could achieve only when one freed oneself from the ambitions and passions which darkened one’s horizon. If one could achieve this, no tormentor could harm one, because one was dependent no longer on the world they inhabited.

‘Then we discussed our situation together. The weak could never defeat the stronger by physical strength, only through the power of their spirit, by eroding cruel and brutal force and rendering it unnecessary, helpless or desperate.

‘During that period he started to wonder whether his resistance might achieve anything apart from self-destruction, and whether self-destruction wasn’t actually another form of defeat. He started to learn humility and derive satisfaction from his ability to control himself at moments when previously he had been accustomed to indulge in blind resistance. We shared the same cell for scarcely three months, and over that time we managed to talk about a lot of things, including how he was going to live once he was out among people again. He had the best of intentions. I would even go so far as to say that his soul opened up at that time and was open to good. Then I was released. As far as I know, for the remainder of his stay he managed to avoid all confrontations. Even after he left prison. We kept in contact for a while. His home conditions were lamentable and he proved incapable of organising his family life.

‘Don’t imagine that I seek to condone that dreadful deed, if he did commit it. But ever since I heard about it, my thoughts have turned again and again to the lad. What was the extent of his guilt and the guilt of those who killed the man within him and impregnated his soul with hatred? The idea that they might now kill him I find appalling.’

He opened his briefcase and drew out some sheets of paper. ‘I have taken up your time, Dr Kindlová. And now I am taking the liberty of burdening you: I’ve brought some letters that Karel wrote me after his release.’

‘Thank you.’ She took the papers from him.

‘You will find my address on the envelope,’ he said. ‘As soon as you, or maybe even your husband, have had a chance to read them, you need only call me and I will come and fetch them. Or should there be anything else I might be able to assist you with.’

‘Thank you,’ she said once more. ‘I will pass it on to my husband.’

He stood up and bowed.

It was already four o’clock. She picked up the receiver and dialled his number. ‘It’s me, Honza. What was it you wanted before?’

‘I’ll come over to you.’

‘I’ve just been hearing something dreadful.’

‘I’ll come over to you.’

‘No, don’t. I’ve got to go home.’

‘You can’t go home today. I’ll come over to you and explain.’

‘But I have to go home.’

‘There’s a concert on. Alena. You’ve not heard anything like it. And they’re playing just outside Prague.’

‘And you want to go?’

‘Alena, it will be a tremendous experience. I know the band. I’ve been going to listen to them for three years already. I’ve been at all their concerts.’

‘But I’ve got to go home.’

‘Alena, I’d like you to share this experience with me.’

‘But what about the children? I’ve got to get their supper.’

‘Can’t he?’

She saw them as soon as they got on the bus: long-haired, bearded youngsters, lots of army surplus jackets, girls in jeans and well-worn flannel shirts smelling of sweat and tobacco smoke. Then there was an entire hall full of them in the country pub. On a smoke-veiled stage amidst wedding decorations, several youngsters, identical to the ones assembled in the room, were stretching out cables and adjusting microphones. An enormous drummer was setting out his drum-kit. He had a pale, almost white, face and long blond hair.

She had called Adam to say she felt like going to a concert (fortunately the connection was bad, she had an excuse for not saying much) and had only heard about it at the last minute from colleagues at work. Amazingly enough, he had made no objection. He had promised to give the children something to eat and put them to bed, and didn’t even ask what kind of concert it would be and when she would be home; as if he was pleased he wouldn’t see her.

More and more people were piling into the hall; some of them knew Honza and he introduced them to her. It had never occurred to her that he sometimes moved in such circles; she had tended to believe rather too much in his total solitariness.

They sat not far from the stage in a corner opposite the door: he on one side, and on the other a ruddy-faced youth with a broken nose and powerful shoulders. His shirt was painted with enormous flowers and he had a skull embroidered on his tie. She felt conspicuous in her off-the-peg clothes. It must have been obvious to everyone that she didn’t belong. She also noticed a girl wearing a wreath of myrtle in her hair. It must have been her who had got married: she had a bouquet of white roses in front of her on the table.

An obtrusive smell of hot dogs came from the kitchen. She didn’t feel at ease there. She was sure Adam would only give the children a piece of bread and salami and no vegetables. And he’d let them rush around the flat until ten o’clock or later. She ought to call him again.

At that moment they started to play. The torrent of sound deafened her. She watched the pale drummer rocking his enormous body back and forwards as he furiously pounded his two drums. His long hair flashed across his face.

The music seemed to her wild and unfamiliar, with complex harmonies, and there were moments when it verged on the atonal. She didn’t know what to compare it with. She loved music, though she had no great musical understanding; she had never properly learned to read it and for that reason had been obliged to give up the piano. Bach’s compositions both thrilled her and filled her with calm and rapture, and she loved folk songs because they aroused in her a nostalgia for the lost past, when, it seemed to her, relationships were all more sincere and feelings more genuine.

The first piece came to an end. She was deafened by an explosion of shouts, whistles, stamping and applause.

‘How did you like it?’

‘I don’t know yet. Give me time.’ (He asked like Adam. Men demanded constant congratulation for things they took to be their achievement.) ‘I’m not used to it yet.’

Her reticence seemed to disappoint him. ‘They’re fantastic,’ he declared and squeezed her hand.

A singer in jeans stepped up to the microphone; his shirt was open at the chest. She was unable to understand the words and was aware only of the melody. The singer fell silent for a moment, but his body went on moving in rhythm, and then the guitars fell silent too and the enormous drummer seemed to grow bigger still, his arms flickered and his eyes stared somewhere into the void over the heads of the audience. She sensed the flash of the sticks and the drumbeats deep within her; she was swaying from side to side unconsciously, losing awareness of her body; she was flooded by an ecstasy that she had known only at rare moments of total abandon during lovemaking.

Suddenly silence fell. She glanced at him but his eyes didn’t register her. Were he to get up and take her out, somewhere nearby where she could still hear the sounds from the hall, they could make love there to the sound of the drums.

He leaned over to her. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed.

She turned round and caught sight of blue uniforms thrusting their way into the hall through the open door: just like frantic beetles; terrifying messengers from a half-forgotten world. She hadn’t yet realised what was happening. The hall suddenly filled with shouts, and the banging and scraping of chairs. Someone stepped up to the microphone and shouted to the audience to stay calm. The performance had been properly announced and permission obtained.

She turned back to him. He was pale, as pale as the time she took him by car to the hospital. But a bluish vein stood out on his forehead. ‘I’ll kill them; I’ll kill the bloody bastards!’

‘Don’t let yourselves be provoked.’ It was now the turn of the singer in the open shirt. ‘Don’t let…’ He fell silent. Maybe they had switched off his microphone.

And suddenly she found herself in the world she had been hearing about that afternoon. There they were, ready to drag him off to a dark cell without windows or light.

He was capable of fighting, as, clearly, was everyone else in the hall.

‘You’re staying with me,’ she said in sudden panic and gripped his hand. ‘You brought me here and you’ll take me away from here!’

She dragged him to the window. She looked out into the darkness. But before she could make out who the dark silhouettes outside were, she was blinded by the light of a torch. She covered her eyes and could feel her panic give way to a feeling of bitter resentment. How dare they? And why should they?

Someone tugged roughly at her shoulder from behind. She turned round. A small, freckled face — wisps of ginger hair sticking out from beneath a police cap — was staring at her with little blue eyes, above which the eyebrows were almost invisible. ‘Your papers,’ it said in a shrill tenor voice.

She dug her nails into the palms of her hands in her effort to control herself. ‘I would ask you to be civil, or I shall report you!’ she said.

His tiny blue eyes with no eyelashes gazed at her in amazement. And then he, too, maybe, noticed she was different from the rest and was slightly at a loss for a moment. ‘Show me your papers, please!’ he ordered. ‘And don’t waste my time!’

She opened her handbag with trembling fingers; she was unable to control their shaking. What did those letters actually contain? What if they took her away and confiscated that envelope containing letters whose content she didn’t even know? She watched him laboriously copy out her name. ‘What have I done wrong?’ she asked.

‘Why were you trying to escape through the window?’

‘I wasn’t trying to escape through the window!’

‘We’ll see about that,’ he said returning her papers. ‘You may leave this way.’ He indicated the door to the kitchen.

She still had time to notice the bride take her flowers out of their vase, bow to one of the uniformed men and present him with one of the roses. He had apparently received no instructions for such an eventuality and so accepted it. The bride bowed to another policeman, but her flowers were torn off her from behind.

She made her way between the kitchen tables. On a wide work-top lay finely chopped onions and a tall pile of salami slices, alongside enormous jars of gherkins, pickled mixed vegetables and mustard. There were cooking pots giving off steam. She looked back again. He was following her.

Would they send a report about her to the library? What if she was dismissed because of it?

They left through the back door. In the narrow street, which was painfully bright from floodlights, she saw two rows of uniformed men. Vehicles were parked at the end of the street: two dark buses and several cars which were obviously intended for the transport of prisoners.

What if they arrested them now? Adam would probably not know what had happened to her. In fact he didn’t know where she had gone. No one knew. She could disappear into the depths somewhere, somewhere deeper than the cellars and no one would find out.

And what would happen to the children? She was seized by the horrifying thought that They might arrive at the flat as unexpectedly as they had arrived here, pour in like a relentless tide and take away her children. She would never set eyes on them again. She would be cruelly punished for having betrayed them, for having abandoned the family home, for not standing by them when they needed her.

She walked between the rows of police unable to make out individual faces; instead they merged into a single, unreal, scowling waxwork figure. ‘I want to go home,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Oh, Lord, let me get home.’

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

The faculty building stood on the embankment and from the windows of the west wing there was a view of the Castle and an even clearer view of the torso of the monstrous monument that grew there during the course of my studies and which they knocked down shortly after I graduated. The south wing almost joined on to the conservatoire and on warm summer evenings when the windows were open, we could hear endless repetitions of piano studies as well as the bellowing of trombones, interspersed with choral singing. The next street to the east marked the beginning of the Jewish Quarter with the cemetery and the Old-New Synagogue, which I was aware of but never set foot inside in all the four years.

When they erected the building they took it as one article of faith that architecture should be modern and airy, and as another that the legal system should be founded on principles of justice, freedom, equality before the law, and harmony. Everything had changed since those days — only the building remained. And in order to conceal its true aim they had hung up in the entrance hall a red banner with a slogan extolling socialist law as ‘an auxiliary in the construction of the socialist homeland’.

I vividly recall the sense of apprehension that gripped me as I first entered the faculty’s spacious entrance hall.

I stood there surrounded on all sides by groups of unknown people. I caught snatches of conversations and unintelligible sentences. What discouraged me most of all was that they at least knew something of what I was totally ignorant of: the subject of my new area of study. Once again I was about to find myself in my old situation: the only non-initiate amongst the initiated, though now bereft of a martyr’s halo, with no hope of sympathy or indulgence.

My sense of unsuitability for my chosen area of study was so powerful that it continued to give me nightmares years later. Again and again I would find myself before a panel of gowned examiners, incapable of answering the most basic questions: ‘What is the object of law? What is natural law? What is material law?’ I had no idea. But gentlemen, I would say, seeing an escape route though also aware of the ineptitude of what I was saying in the light of what I had just proved — I’ve already graduated, you don’t have too examine me any more. And then the examiners would burst into surly laughter; on one occasion, I recall, they pulled out musical instruments from under their long gowns: trumpets, flutes and trombones, and in order to seal my ignominy, they played a fanfare. That dream continued to hound me even when I had come to realise that my ignorance of the basics of law was the best grounding I could have had for my course; after all, some of my teachers knew no more than I did, and if they did, they made an effort to forget it, in order to make space in their minds for the new, revolutionary constructions.

My new colleagues differed from my previous colleagues and comrades both in appearance and in spirit. Their clothes seemed to me unusually elegant and in most cases their minds were more on football, the pub and the girls’ halls of residence, than on the questions which I regarded as important and worthy of interest. I felt isolated among them by virtue of my views and my past. People who have suffered rejection tend to return to that experience over and over, whatever reasons they find to do so.

There were also practical reasons for my solitude in those days: I just didn’t have the time to make friends; I had to earn my keep. About six months after my father’s arrest, my mother called my brother and myself in and asked us through tears what our plans were. She said that she would be taking a job, of course, though she knew it would be the death of her, because she could scarcely drag herself up to the first floor. She would go out to work none the less; she could hardly go on living off Uncle Gustav who was himself an invalid and anyway, she wanted us both to be able to finish our studies. Hanuš, who was just fourteen, declared without a second’s thought that there was no need for him to study. He suggested that he should go off and live in some apprentice hostel, thereby not costing us a penny. On the contrary, he would earn some money during his very first year, particularly if he went to train as a miner. I don’t know whether he meant that suggestion seriously but he only managed to provoke a still more explosive fit of weeping in my mother. It was then that I declared with a sense of importance that I would take over the running of the household. I decided that I would eat in the student canteen twice a day and that my brother would have school lunches. I promised that I would bring bread from the canteen and sometimes maybe soup. I said we would both apply for student grants and would both take weekend jobs, as well as finding holiday employment, naturally. Maybe in addition I would manage to find some odd jobs during my afternoons. I then totted up our expected income and expenditure and was surprised to discover it balanced on paper. The purpose of those calculations was above all to appease my mother. I didn’t believe for one moment that I would receive a grant, let alone my brother, just because our father was in prison. But I was wrong. They awarded us grants and moreover a social worker called who helped Mother apply for a special allowance for my brother, since he had not yet reached school-leaving age. And every single evening just after seven I would dash to the student canteen with an old oilcloth satchel. By then the cooks all knew me and knew the poor old battered mess tin, still black from the times Father had boiled soup and tea in it over a fire during his previous imprisonment, when he was being marched through Germany. The cooks treated me generously. Usually I would come away not only with bread and soup but also buttered potatoes or dumplings with gravy poured over them.

Before the canteen closed for the weekend, the cooks would give away any left-over buns or fruit bread. I would stand a little way off with my eyes glued to the low hatch for fear of arriving too late and missing the precious booty. I don’t know whether I was aware at the time how the pattern of my life was repeating itself: that docile queuing at a kitchen hatch, waiting like a dog for scraps. But my subconscious apparently registered it. It registered not just the congruence of the situations but also the difference between them, the marked change for the better — as far as the leftovers were concerned. It explains why my situation did not depress me but, quite the opposite, filled me with a sense of satisfaction at my expertise in coping with life’s adversities.

2

In point of fact my expertise was all self-deception. I hadn’t the faintest idea how money could be made in the society in which I lived. I still had too much faith in all those public statements: not the ones about justice alone, but the others too, about the generous rewards for honest toil.

And so, impelled by undying hope like two prospectors with gold-fever, my brother and I took one job after another. I remember loading beet one Sunday in autumn on a distant state farm. We each of us earned ten crowns for the whole day’s work, but as a bonus, we were allowed to go to a nearby orchard and pick as many plums as we could carry. That was our most successful venture. On another occasion, we helped with the threshing at some other farm. The corn was stacked in a rick that was beginning to rot and we had to fork it off laboriously. I was stationed by the thresher until I got an attack of hay fever and others had to take my place while I sat gasping at the foot of the corn rick, in despair at the earnings I was losing.

We would set off for distant destinations on our bikes, or our earnings would not have even covered our transport costs. It meant we saw quite a bit of the country and what stuck in my memory at the time were deserted villages, unreaped fields and overgrown meadows; the dismal sight of abandoned dung-covered farmyards full of wrecked vehicles and rusting farm machinery; houses with dilapidated roofs, the glass gone in the windows, and half-naked gypsy children racing around in the mud. Most of all, I remember the mud, seemingly infinite quantities of it, that we would have to wade through on our trips out and back.

I can also recall bonfires at the edge of the forest or on damp verges, and our warming ourselves at them in company with homeless strangers, roasting potatoes or toasting bread. They used to offer us home-made spirits to drink and the gypsies would sing songs whose words we couldn’t understand.

Then my brother came with the news that there was big money to be made in the Brdy Forest where they were felling trees infested with bark beetle. I rode off to the place on a Thursday evening. I was allocated sleeping accommodation in a semi-derelict wooden hut without any sanitation. I recall waking up in the middle of the night and trying to cover a broken window with a blanket so as to stop the rain falling on my bed. I then worked with a couple of elderly gypsy women and some Slovak re-emigrants from Romania stripping the bark from the tree-trunks. Where the trees had been recently felled the work was easy and the bark would roll off in long (and sweetly scented) strips, but on others it would cling as if nailed on, and my hands would bleed from the clumsy, blunt scraper. The gypsy women would shout things at me that might have been friendly or even teasing: from time to time they would come to fetch stripped bark for burning and as they bent over they would expose their dark, distended breasts to me.

On Saturday afternoon, my brother arrived. They gave the two of us an enormous saw and an axe, and a frowning forester — who, I discovered years later, was a distant relation of my future wife’s — showed us how to fell a tree and where to cut the trunk so that it fell in the desired direction. So we worked there until nightfall and onwards again from first light the following day. We felled, trimmed and stripped five trees, if my memory serves me right. We worked non-stop with two short meal breaks. They brought us the meals out to the forest and I can’t remember any more what it was like, but when the frowning forester came to work out how much work we’d done he announced to us that we hadn’t even earned enough to cover the cost of the meals and we each owed him two crowns. My brother started yelling, waving his arms and abusing him, but the forester just rolled up his tape-measure impassively; shouting and even threats were things he was used to. Then my brother suddenly started to sob. He sat down on the stump that we had only just created — my brother was still frail and skinny in spite of the double portions of dumplings with tomato sauce I had been bringing him from the canteen — his head in his hands and his slender, almost girlish, shoulders shaking with sobs. And when he finally stood up and we were about to abandon this ungrateful battlefield in contempt, the forester came over to us — after all, he was a relation of my so far unencountered wife — and we each had a ten-crown note stuffed into our pocket.

3

After the holidays our material situation improved somewhat. They did not allow my brother to study, but he managed to get on a training course as a radio mechanic, and being dextrous, was able to make some extra money from the start by repairing people’s radio-sets.

I was offered a job as an academic assistant in the faculty library. It was a good library with many thousands of books, although only a few dozen titles were in regular circulation. I received a salary of two hundred crowns a month and my duties were very light — merely to enter the new titles in the catalogue each week and spend half a day, twice a week, looking for requested books and putting returned books back on the shelves. That left me quite a lot of time to myself and I would spend it wandering among the shelves taking out dusty volumes at random, opening them and leafing through them. Sometimes, when one would catch my imagination, I would take it back to my desk and start reading it.

In this way I read all sorts of books, most of whose titles and authors have long since gone from my mind, but they included a well-worn copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan published during the last war, Weyr’s Theory of Law, Kallab’s Introduction to the Study of Juristic Methods, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which someone had apparently classified as a legal work); however, those were books that no one ever requested. Who could possibly have had any need for reflections on pure law or the supreme legal norm? Who would have had the time to devote themselves to those superb, but abstract achievements of the human intellect when knowledge of a very different kind was now required?

That year, we had to submit our subsidiary theses. The topic I had chosen had rather a long-winded title: Czech Justice in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century as the Legal Expression of the Ideology of Feudal Absolutism. I had not particularly wanted to tackle a historical topic, but had been absent when the topics were given out, so was left with no more interesting choice.

Happily the theses were not expected to contribute anything of academic value nor demonstrate intellectual effort. The author was merely supposed to show that he knew the main authorities and could evaluate them correctly in the light of the new legal teaching. I was determined to toss off my thesis as fast as possible. I read a couple of studies on the restored territorial administrations and the importance of the court of appeal. And then, in the course of my library duties, I happened to come across some recently reprinted entries from the ‘black books’ in which the statements of tortured prisoners were recorded — the collection had actually been compiled by a philologist not a jurist — and started reading it. The book was quite different from any of those I had studied so far for my topic: these were not the words of lawyers, of those who defended or made the laws, but instead the words of those who broke them. By and large, the voice of the accused sounds more human than the voice of the lawgiver, as the first of them is defending his life while the other is defending an abstract justice. Now I was reading the words of actual murderers, or of desperate wretches who had done nothing but steal the honey from a hive or poach the fish out of a pond; seduced servant-girls and milkmaids who had given birth in secret, and who, in order to escape disgrace or threatened by their lovers, had killed their new-born babies; spellbound women who cut off the genitals or fingers of hanged men, cut fringes off altar cloths, pulled nails out of gallows, picked herbs at full moon, made magic ointments and brewed potions to arouse love or charm away a pregnancy; and for it they were hanged or beheaded; women were buried alive and pierced with stakes, usually in the presence of spectators who were more interested in the bloody spectacle than in justice.

As I read, I gradually realised that these were not the delusions of a demented brain but a record of things that had actually happened. A man hung from a ladder with his limbs dislocated while a torturer stood searing his sides, and he had said words which I was now reading centuries later.

So far I had only learned things; I had mugged up on the history of legal ideologies and the ideas of Plato’s Republic just like those of the school of natural law, or the four features of dialectics, or Vyshinsky’s theory of analogy — without relating any of it to myself or my life.

I had studied away unquestioningly, without it ever occurring that it might have anything to do with me. Now I was appalled. What paths had justice taken to get to where it was? What were the laws governing our coexistence? Why did we condemn one form of cruelty and condone another? Why did we extol one form of obscurantism and make another a capital offence?

I pictured that enormous band of bailiffs, scriveners, judges, assessors, executioners, executioners’ henchmen, catchpolls, soldiers, gendarmes, confessors, informers, troopers, policemen, prosecutors and judges all united in the effort to protect humanity from malefactors, or at least from those they designated as malefactors. They had spilled so much blood that no one will ever measure it, but none, apart from rare exceptions, were ever called to account, because unlike the rest they had been able to cloak their craving for violence in the right kind of authority. And for the first time I realised that I too would be one of that band some day, although so far I had not had the faintest inkling of its actual nature.

I started to hunt out more books related to my topic. Records of cases long closed: absurd indictments by the Holy Inquisition; crimes all the more cruelly punished for being so shamelessly trumped up. I read on out of a self-tormenting need to confirm my original impression, that beneath the veil of time-honoured justice, the mask of redemptive faith and the smile of holy compassion, was hidden the face of the selfsame beast as ever; it had simply been cunning enough to conceal its whims and combine them into a code which it contrived to foist upon humanity. Again and again, it demanded its ration of blood; tearing and ripping flesh with tongs, burning flanks, disembowelling, cutting off breasts, breaking limbs and crushing joints, piercing through tongues, gouging out eyes, burning alive, an eye for an eye, an eye for nothing, purely on a whim, out of injured vanity, out of spite. It murdered as retribution and as warning; it murdered for fear’s sake and for enjoyment’s sake. It murdered for theft of crockery, for infidelity, for banditry; for superstition and because it too was superstitious, for calumny and because it too believed calumnies, for belief and for unbelief; it murdered the sick and the healthy, the sick in mind and the greatest minds of the day. Always with the same conviction and utter faith in the rightness of its actions, until one day it came up with the gas chambers, into which it planned to thrust everyone without distinction: a whole nation and whole nations. What would it think of next so it could eat its fill, so it could do away for good with the entire human race, and with itself?

Happily my thesis had a deadline. I had to finish my reading and start to put it down on paper. But now I could not face copying out abstractions just to prove I could work with source material. It seemed to me I had to solve the contradiction between people’s yearning for justice and the institutions that pretended to be satisfying that aspiration.

But I was unable to pursue my quest with sufficient integrity and impartiality. After all, it was my job to write about the cruelty committed by class justice in the service of power and obscurantist ideology, superstition and unreason. I sought out and ardently extolled the first manifestations of advancing, triumphant reason. I had become an enthusiastic advocate for the Enlightenment. The things it had achieved! It had put an end to religious intolerance, abolished the Inquisition, imposed a ban on witch hunts and torture — and even abolished the death penalty in many countries. Throughout history, the class struggle had assumed the character of a battle between reason and unreason. Bit by bit, reason was displacing unreason — which always promoted belief and blind obedience, and disparaged thoughtfulness, the spirit of conciliation and the opinions of others.

There had been periods, it was true, when reason was suppressed and triumphant fanaticism had destroyed books and ideas, along with those capable of thought or merely eager to think for themselves. Unreason, I wrote, had always unleashed passions and violence and sown fear: such fear that the voice of reason was silenced; both those who doubted and those who knew stayed silent and served unreason, before themselves turning into pitiless murderers in the end.

But human reason was indomitable and had always been humanity’s guide. Hence reason would always find a way out of the darkness; it would emerge from silence and rise from the dead. Only now was I approaching the purpose of my essay. What else was reason’s supreme achievement but my Model State: a society carefully run so as to leave no scope for unreason? What else was the apogee of reason but the idea of socialism? The new judiciary would determine culpability solely on the basis of evidence that could be verified rationally. The sole objective of the court would be to steer citizens who had gone astray back on to the path of rational and useful activity and peaceful coexistence.

The thesis was sixty pages long — twice the required length. Only later did I discover that my teachers had long argued about whether it was a case of extreme naivety, or, on the contrary, extremely subtle insolence, whether I had really got so worked up about an extinct form of justice or whether I had been artfully attacking the present legal system. I don’t know who stood up for me and persuaded the rest to accept the former assessment, but I do recall Professor Lyon bringing me into his office at that time. He wanted to know if I had a particular interest in the history of law, or whether perhaps my concern was the executive, or even, quite simply, the death penalty.

I gave a confused answer of some sort because up to that moment I had had no particular interest. He told me he had read my thesis with interest (it had not occurred to me that he would read it) and asked me if I would like to visit him at home some time.

He was one of the most respected specialists in the field of penal law, so the mere fact of the invitation flattered me.

4

I found it impossible to imagine what went on inside the heads of the older professors. We youngsters could scarcely have any real inkling of what law, legal culture or legal traditions were. We didn’t even know the basic terms. Even had we been aware of the decline, we had no way of gauging its extent. But what about those erudite gentlemen who had still had the opportunity to study Roman law, who still retained, or should have, something of the pride and sense of independence their profession could once boast? Many of them had left, of course, and many had been expelled, but what about those who remained? How did they feel when the faculty was swamped by semi-educated youngsters who immediately started to lecture them on what they should teach, what they should study, what they should believe and what they should condemn? What could have been the feelings of men who had penned truly scholarly works when they read in their journal (one of the oldest in the country) theoretical essays for which they would have failed first-year law students? And here they were signed by their colleagues. What were their feelings when they themselves concocted similar articles or even whole books? Why did they behave the way they did? Were they goaded by fear, or was it only the cynicism of people who had already lived through too many changes? Or did they too believe that there was no direction in which to continue, and that it really was necessary to start afresh and from the bitterest beginnings seek to give legislation and law a new meaning, in the same way that life was being given a new meaning? Or did they have the wisdom to know that it was only a passing phase? Revolutionary fury would always blow itself out, the revolution would start to eat its own and they would be needed to assist the work of auto-destruction. Then they would return to their interrupted work and resume the tradition where it had been curtailed.

I remember my uneasiness on first entering Professor Lyon’s study at his villa in Dejvice. The window filled one wall and the three other walls were covered in pictures and shelves of books. I couldn’t understand why he had invited me, why he had taken a liking to me — if he had at all. But he invited me on several occasions and I would sit there in a deep leather armchair gazing at the wall full of books which were totally inaccessible to me, because, though I had almost completed my studies, I was incapable of reading in even one of the world languages.

The professor would ask me more about my interests. He wanted to know what had made me write as I had, why I had discussed bygone trials and bygone injustices with such fervour. Why was I so incensed by violence which had taken place such a long time before? Then he told me I allowed my feelings to run away with me. It was wrong for a lawyer to let his feelings get the better of him or get carried away with false hopes. Legislation was enacted and its implementation was assured by the rulers, and rulers always used violence; every law was intrinsically an act of violence against human liberty. He asked me whether I believed it was possible to achieve some kind of pure justice. I said I didn’t know (I tended to be humble in his presence) but that maybe we ought to strive for it.

Yes, of course, that was how it always started. Everyone yearned for perfection and purity. As if there existed some collective creative spirit that soared ever higher and higher. However, it soon found itself far above the earth and got lost in the clouds, whereupon it forgot why it had set out in the first place and where it was bound. At that point it could see only itself and became fascinated by its own image. It actually became bewitched by its own face, its own proceedings, its own words, its own form, its perfect logical judgement. That was when concepts of pure reason and justice emerged, along with theories about the absolute norm in art, philosophy and jurisprudence. Whither the spirit then? Where could it soar to now? Then all of a sudden, the spirit would plunge to the depths, where crass, commonplace passions seethed, where teeming crowds consumed rissoles with enthusiasm, and therefore had no time — or, alternatively, were so hungry that they did not have the strength — to register anything of that fallen beauty. There was nothing wrong with my striving for absolute justice if it tickled me to, but I should never delude myself it was attainable. Unless I wanted to assist a further decline, I had always to remember that in reality there was no such thing as justice or the law. What was there, then? All there was was compromise with the rulers as they decreed a greater or lesser degree of injustice — a degree dictated by their self-confidence not their conscience, he stressed.

And on another occasion, when he knew me better and could talk more openly, he said that many intellectual disciplines might vegetate in our country, but two could not exist at all: philosophy and law. I waited for him to explain, but he either considered the statement self-evident or simply intended it as an aphorism. He merely added that law was superb as a code. And the more perfect and logical a code was, the more magnificent it was. But this was at the cost of increased artificiality, rendering it less capable of existing in reality. Hence the opportunity to study and reflect on law offered the greatest satisfaction while the requirement to implement it was the saddest or most painful fate that could befall one. The practice of law led either to cynicism or madness. We could see examples of the former all around us, and as for the latter, suffice it to recall Kafka, who, though few realised it, was a Prague lawyer. I didn’t know who he was talking about and was ashamed to ask.

I hung on his lips; I was grateful for his noticing me and for his efforts to enlighten me. Only years later did it occur to me that his words during our meetings were first and foremost a skilful and poignant apology for his own degradation.

5

My mother and brother accompanied me to the station. Mother asked me to tell Father, if I got to see him at all, that she was still thinking of him all the time but was in no fit state to undertake such a long journey. She was also afraid that the agitation might kill her. Moreover we couldn’t afford so many tickets. But in all events we would soon be seeing each other again; after all, the lawyer had written to say that we could expect Father home as soon as the trial finished. My brother gave me a statuette he had made out of wire, screws and coloured tin cans. I expected that Father would never be allowed to take something like that back to his cell if he was convicted, while if he was released it would be pointless dragging a sculpture to the other end of the republic, but I took it just to please my brother. I also took a kilo of oranges from Uncle Gustav, as well as a cake and a strudel from Mother. I took for myself an Edgar Wallace thriller to help shorten the day-long journey. I well remember standing on the open platform of the stopping train, my briefcase between my knees, avidly devouring the gruesome details of the ill-contrived story while the train bore me onwards towards a real-life adventure.

The old fortified town lay in flat terrain on the River Morava. Autumn was just beginning. I roamed along the rounded cobblestones. In the park, begonias and dahlias bloomed in the flowerbeds and two old ladies in folk costume sat on a bench. The defence lawyer had the face of a genial Mickey Mouse. He invited me to the local coffee-house and repeated the joyful news he had already sent us: that the prosecutor would only be indicting Father under ‘para 135’ which virtually guaranteed his release (though he was sure he didn’t need to explain that to me). The maximum penalty possible was three years’ imprisonment and my father had already served twenty-two months on remand, but the court was unlikely to exceed half the maximum. That’s what he was hoping to achieve; after all my father was a first offender and moreover he had resistance activity to his credit. Every so often, the defence counsel would glance over to the neighbouring table though it was as yet unoccupied. Even so, he lowered his voice until he was scarcely audible. He started to complain, telling me how things were difficult for him here, sometimes as many as twenty cases a month. He had received the brief for Father’s case only a week ago: all nine hundred pages of it! But it was a blessing that the times had improved. It was not so long ago that sentences of ten and even fifteen years were handed down for things like this. What did he mean by ‘things like this’? He smiled at my question.

I said I knew my father, and it was inconceivable to me that he might fail to fulfil his duty, let alone deliberately neglect it. My father was a remarkable man and no one could even imagine just how much he loved his work and how much time he devoted to it… I realised how trite my words were and how shallow my portrait of Father; they could have fitted anyone. At that, the counsel leaned over so far that his mouth almost touched my face and whispered: But my dear colleague, you know very well that what you say is totally immaterial. How can one talk about innocence or guilt in the present climate!

The next day I got up at about five, slipped out of the hotel and made for the prison. The streets were empty. Beyond a high wall rose the grey, gloomy walls of the prison itself. I had no idea which was the window of Father’s cell, and that wasn’t what mattered. His could be any one of them. Suddenly I realised the complete absurdity of Father being there. I strained to catch any sounds from inside but the windows were too far away for any to reach my ears.

I entered the still empty courtroom and sat down on the rearmost bench. Then it occurred to me that I would be better occupied finding the defence counsel and trying to have another chat with him, to plead with him to do everything in his power. But what power did he have? It would make more sense to go and see the judge or the prosecutor, or whoever it was who decided on the actual level of sentence. I stood up, but at that moment several strangers came in and sat down on the bench in front of mine, and then I caught sight of Father. He was coming through the door escorted by two warders. I was still standing while the rest were seated, so he noticed me immediately. I raised my hand in a small wave and gazed at my father’s pale features. He seemed to me incredibly small and slight, almost lost in his best suit, the black one with the blue stripe. He nodded to me too: just a motion of the head, like the one he made the day they took him away, and smiled. One of the guards said something to him and Father nodded and now looked the other way, so that he was staring at the wall, or at the portrait of the President, to be precise; he was not allowed to look at the son he had not seen for two years. But I looked at him. That slight, gaunt man with his high forehead and still thick head of hair had fathered me in a moment of love, had engendered me in a moment of freedom and delight, and now here he was sitting like a trapped rabbit, not for the first time in his life. Why? And there was I sitting just a few yards from him and not allowed to speak to him. And why not? I wasn’t doing anything to help him — what kind of son was I? And I felt tears welling up in me. Then the judge entered and at last I was able to hear Father’s voice after so long. The prosecutor read out the indictment: a list of absurd offences that Father had not committed. I found it impossible to follow however hard I concentrated. So this was justice, I could not help repeating to myself, when one person was trapped between two guards and was not allowed to turn his head towards his own son; this was justice: one was the defendant — why? — one was the judge — why? — and one was the warder — why? Why, when their roles could be switched around and reallocated? The defendant would be the judge, the judge would be only a warder and the warder would be the defendant, or the warder could be the judge, the defendant the warder and the judge would be on trial — all of that would be equally conceivable, and that was how it had certainly been on so many occasions, and it would still be justice. I tried to discover something from the judge’s face. He too must know it, I thought to myself, the same thought must have struck him too, he must have realised at some time the arbitrariness of what he was doing, this pretence of being a model individual judging a malefactor. And for a moment I actually managed to delude myself that the judge would have to acknowledge Father’s integrity and conclude that he was incompetent to pass judgement on a man who had suffered so much in his life, who knew so much and had worked so hard for the good of others. Once more I heard Father’s voice saying no, he didn’t feel guilty, and then they ushered us out of the room, having declared, contrary to the spirit of the law, that the entire hearing would be held in camera.

They convicted Father on the grounds that some enormous machine in Poland had not worked as it was supposed to, which could have been as experts testified, either a fault in the manufacture or the assembly; in addition, on the grounds that he habitually gave his instructions orally and not in writing, thereby making it impossible to check his work; and lastly, on the grounds that he had not paid sufficient attention to the training of younger engineers. They sentenced him to twenty-five months’ imprisonment. The judge read out the verdict as if it was a report about shoe production or the potato harvest, not once raising his eyes from the paper, never once looking in the direction of Father or the public benches. He didn’t raise his voice and made no pretence of feeling or thinking anything at all. Appeals could be lodged against the verdict within eight days of receipt of the verdict in writing.

They permitted me a visit that same afternoon.

I was let in through a gate which closed behind me, led across a yard and then along gloomy prison corridors. I held tightly to the bag with my brother’s statuette, the oranges, the strudel and cake (and I had been out to a buffet and bought a fresh schnitzel and a length of salami to add to them). I was shown into the visiting room, which made an ineffectual show of trying to look civilian. I sat down and took out the sculpture and the food. I felt a sense of total emptiness growing within me, an absence of everything — pain or tears or reactions of any kind. I put the statuette away again and stood up, but then I remembered it was against the rules and I sat back down. At last my father appeared.

They sat him down opposite me. Father gave a slightly bemused smile and said he was glad to see me. And then suddenly his voice quavered and I saw his Adam’s apple give a leap. He asked what was the matter with Mother, why hadn’t she come?

We had been expecting him to be released, we had not counted on those extra three months. And I started to give him the news, relating almost with relish how we lived on an abundance of student-canteen buns and soup and talking about my studies and how we would all be together for Christmas, and how Hanuš had built a new bookshelf above his desk, and Father was relieved. His gaunt face seemed to me youthful, almost boyish, a little boy scout erecting a tent in an old grey photograph in the family album unaware of what life held in store for him. The same eyes, the same person.

He asked me whether I had a girlfriend yet and how Hanuš was getting on with his studies. Our time was running out; the guard looked at his watch and announced five minutes more. Then he got up, took several paces away from us and started to look out of the window. It was almost blatant permission. Father leaned towards me and said rapidly: ‘Adam, it’s all lies and falsehoods. Lies and falsehoods.’ The guard at the window turned round.

This, then, was Father’s message, the most important thing he had to tell us, the essence of months and months of reflection: the whole of life in a single sentence, one little word, in fact –

Lies

That evening, as I took the train home, alone in the compartment, the landscape beyond the window swallowed up in a cascade of sparks, I realised that Father was just falling asleep in that alien town, inside a tomb-like building with barred windows; and I thought of a whole landscape that, like a tomb, was quietly devouring thousands of its children and waiting for more innocent bodies, a landscape full of tombs, full of malevolent witnesses, a landscape to which at any time I too could be taken, hands above my head, a pistol at the nape of my neck, a pistol aimed at my forehead, the shots were already ringing out, I could no longer hear them anyway, my blood was flowing, dogs were running up, the sound of shovels on stone, shots, funeral carts with cold outstretched arms and contorted heads protruding stiffly from them; the carts were wending their way in procession through the world, my realm of freedom, my slaughterhouse, my model state, my camp, my prison, my tomb, my dead landscape bathed in moonlight.

And when at last I started to fall asleep, lulled by the rasp of iron against iron, the conviction took hold of me that I would change it, I had to change it.