Judge On Trial

Chapter Six

1

HE WAS ALONE at home with the children. Alena was out for the evening with some old school chums; she had decided at the last minute. It did not matter to him that his wife would be returning late. If anything, he was relieved, because at least she would not be there to remind him he had lied, and he would have no difficulty putting off the moment when he would tell her about the other one, and he could even retain the hope that he might postpone that moment indefinitely, that the other one would disappear from his life before having a chance to change it irreparably.

He peeled the hot potatoes, poured melted butter over them and added a piece of curd cheese. His daughter was washing lettuce in the sink. Martin was already at table and banging the plate with his fork.

‘When’s Mummy coming?’ Manda asked.

‘Late this evening, I expect.’

‘Mummy’s always out these days.’

‘Maybe she’s gone to see Honza,’ Martin interjected with his mouth full.

‘You’re stupid. What would she be doing there?’

‘She’s got to look after him, of course, because of his broken leg.’

‘Why should she? Daddy, she doesn’t have to, does she?’

‘No, of course she doesn’t.’ So far he had said nothing to his wife, but she must suspect something by now. She seemed to be wary with him; sometimes he had even had the impression she was about to ask him, but in the end she had said nothing, maybe suspecting the answer in advance. Whenever he tried to embrace her she had been bound to feel his coolness, which only masqueraded as affection, and she too had remained cool.

He had made an effort not to add further infidelities to the one he was already concealing and had deliberately avoided Alexandra — just once taking her out to lunch. Then she had left town for a fortnight, and it seemed she had retreated from his life and he would forget her, as one forgot a disturbing dream.

His daughter had got herself off to bed on her own, Martin he had to help wash. ‘Mummy always sings with us before we go to sleep,’ his son said in an effort to influence him.

‘Well there’s no chance of me singing with you; you’ll have to sing on your own.’

‘So tell us about something!’ Now Martin lay in the metal cot that was getting too small for him. He stuck his feet through the rungs at the bottom of the cot and waggled them. ‘Tell us what you did today, f’rinstance.’

‘Nothing special.’ She was supposed to be coming home by yesterday evening and he had spent the whole of today knowing that he had the chance to phone her. The obligation, even. ‘Mrs Richterová told me about some lads who had been stealing cars on a housing-estate,’ he recalled. ‘There were four of them, and they had a perfectly equipped workshop…’

‘Daddy, are you sad?’ his daughter interrupted him.

‘What makes you ask?’

‘I don’t know. You don’t have to tell us about it if you’ve got too much to do.’

‘Don’t you worry!’ He went on with the story about the car thieves and took care afterwards to concentrate on what he was saying.

‘Daddy, can I show you what I painted?’ She got out of bed and ran barefoot to the desk. She rummaged for a while in the drawer before pulling out a large sheet of paper with a painting on it: seven brightly coloured ponies dancing on a dark-blue field, their movement and bright colours imparting happiness, maybe tenderness as well.

‘You made a really good job of that one.’

‘You can take it, if you like it.’

‘Thank you. I’ll put it under the glass on my desk-top at work.’ He stroked her hair and then his son’s and went off to his own room.

He was right not to have phoned her. He liked his home — and it would not take much to destroy its fragile structure. He hoped that so far he had not endangered it.

Just before midnight he made up both beds. On his wife’s bed he left a note saying:

The children are all right. I hope you are too. Sleep well!

It was still dark when he awoke. There was no need to look at the clock. He was able to guess the time at whatever hour of the day. It was three in the morning. He realised he was still alone in the room. To make sure, he reached out to the next bed, but it was empty and cold. His fingers touched the note on her pillow. He was more surprised than alarmed. He got up and had a look in all the rooms. In the kitchen, he drank a glass of water and as he was returning to the bedroom, he heard the sound of familiar footsteps in the passage outside. The footsteps halted in front of the door. He imagined her searching through her handbag in tiredness and desperation, then at last the key found the lock and the door slowly opened.

She switched on the light, caught sight of him right in front of her and cried out as if she’d seen a ghost.

‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘What happened to you?’

She came up to him, laid her head on his shoulder and started to sob.

‘Did something happen?’

‘Haven’t you been asleep? You’ve been waiting all this time? I love you, Adam. I do love you,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the time?’

‘Pretty late,’ he said. ‘You’ve been out with your friends all this time?’

‘No, I wasn’t with them at all. I lied to you, Adam.’

‘Where were you then?’

‘With Honza,’ she said. ‘I was at his place, but it was the last time. It’s over between us, Adam, I’ll never see him again.’

‘What’s over?’

‘Let’s not stand out here.’

They went into the kitchen: he in his pyjamas, she in her evening dress of dark-brown silk. Her eyes were red. From smoke, or maybe from weeping.

‘Adam,’ she said determinedly, ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time, but never had the opportunity.’

‘Hold it there a moment.’ He went off to the bathroom. He had never owned either a bathrobe or a dressing-gown. So he put on a jumper and some trousers.

‘You got dressed?’

‘Shouldn’t I have?’

‘As you like. It really doesn’t matter. Adam, I’ve been unfaithful to you.’

‘Just now?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, almost crossly. ‘Well, yes, as it happens,’ she corrected herself, ‘but that’s not what I meant. This was the last time. We’ve ended it. Adam, I’m so sorry, I didn’t want it in the first place; I just wanted to help him. But we’ve ended it now. It’s completely over; we won’t see each other again.’

‘With that student?’

‘Adam, I love you. That’s why I broke it off with him. He cried when I told him, but I couldn’t go on living that way.’

In his mind’s eye he suddenly saw her coming up the platform at the station in the company of two young men and a girl with bare feet. Then he had given him a lift out to Veleslavín or somewhere. ‘Already by the time you came from Bratislava?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Are you cross with me? I didn’t mean it that way. I was just sorry for him. I wanted to help him over his sadness. But I love you. That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought it would be over straight away. Do you love me too?’

He wasn’t sure whether he loved his wife. Over the years they had been together, he had become accustomed to her, but it meant he was no longer sure of his feelings towards her. There was one thing he had admired about her, however: her childlike innocence, her inability to deceive.

‘Why don’t you say anything, Adam?’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re cross with me. But after all, you went with Magdalena and whatever the others were called. Say something, for goodness sake! I didn’t want to hurt you. Don’t you believe me? Won’t you ever believe me again?’ Tears streamed from her eyes once more.

That was the way of i: he world. It had been absurd of him to believe that his wife was quite different from everyone else. He started to laugh.

She stared at him in amazement: ‘You’re laughing.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It struck me as funny.’

‘What did?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Everything. The fact it never once crossed my mind you might have a lover.’

‘But I haven’t any more,’ she corrected him. ‘Are you cross? Are you cross with me?’

‘No. “Cross” is hardly the word to describe it.’ Then he said: ‘I’ve been unfaithful to you, as well.’

She looked at him in alarm. ‘I don’t believe you! You’re only saying it to pay me back. It’s not nice to say things like that when they’re not true.’

‘I don’t want to pay you back.’

‘Who is she then?’

‘It’s immaterial.’

‘You see? You don’t even want to tell me who it is. You’re making it up just to get even with me.’

‘I’ve never wanted to get even with anyone in my life.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Her chin was beginning to tremble. ‘You could never have kept it secret. It’d have slipped out, for sure!’ Then she asked: ‘Has it been going on for a long time?’

‘No. It was only once… And it was after you started.’

‘And how am I supposed to know you’re telling the truth now? If you were lying to me before, how am I to know that you’re not lying to me now?’

He shrugged. ‘There is no way of knowing for sure whether anyone is telling the truth. That’s something I do know about!’

‘Adam,’ she blurted, ‘tell me it isn’t true. You made it all up just to pay me back. Just because you were fed up with the way I’d behaved.’

‘No, I didn’t make anything up at all.’

‘Will you tell me her name?’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’

‘I’d never have thought it of you, Adam, that you could be so — nasty. Oh, God, how vile it all is. What shall we do now?’

‘I don’t know.’ Then he said: ‘We’ll go to bed.’

2

Next morning, he drove his wife to work.

‘Will you phone me?’ she asked as she got out. She was pale and her eyes were inflamed.

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’

He parked in the street that ran past his old faculty. He was supposed to go to work too, but today he couldn’t care less if he got ticked off for being late.

He walked down the steps to the river. The deserted towpath was littered with enormous concrete pipes and building panels. He climbed up on to one of the pipes and leaned against the stone wall of the embankment. The hillside opposite, once chosen to become the footstool for the tyrant’s statue, was now bathed in sunlight. A tug moved slowly along the river towing several barges full of sand. Beneath his feet, water rushed past, cloudy from a distant rain storm, and he caught sight of a branch floating just near the bank. He watched it surface and then sink again and waited to see what the current would bring next. It had been a long time since he had stood on the river bank just watching the water flow by.

There had been a time he had come here with his colleagues. They had talked about something or other but he could not remember a single sentence of it any more. As if it had been someone else entirely — someone with the same name.

He would be standing here in twenty years’ time and would know nothing about his present wife, he would not even recall last night; the words they had spoken would have been forgotten. Only a vague memory would remain that they had tried to solve a problem — but let me see, what problem was that?

He arrived at his office an hour late, but nobody took any notice. Magdalena had written to him:

Dear Adam,

I must let you know how things turned out for Jaroslav. I’ve been putting it off because I find it hard to write a letter to you. I needed a drink to get in the mood. So here I am drinking wine (after all that expense, Gamza is the best I can treat myself to) and writing to let you know it all turned out well. They were as good as their word and didn’t cheat me. As a result I am happy, and grateful to you. I should leave it at that, but it occurs to me you might be offended if I were to fob you off with just a couple of lines.

So what should I tell you? That my daughter Tereza is very good on the piano? That I’ve been reading a Graham Greene novel? But what would be the point seeing that I’ve never written to you about any of the other things I’ve read over the last thirteen years? So instead I’ll say thank you once more. I know things like that are against your principles and someone in your profession is at greater risk than anyone else.

He screwed up the letter and threw it in the waste-paper basket unread. However could she really write such rubbish in a letter? — get drunk, spout all sorts of nonsense and get herself and others into trouble.

It was time he got on with something but work was the last thing on his mind. He picked up the telephone and checked whether the two lay judges for the Kozlík case had been asked to attend the next day. Thinking about the Kozlík case was definitely not the best way to improve his mood. (Happily there were still three weeks to go before the trial; he had been unable to book the courtroom for two consecutive days any earlier.)

On this occasion he had been very careful in his choice of lay judges; in a system in which the right to take decisions had, by and large, been superseded by the right to participate, and participation meant paying lip-service, one underestimated formalities at one’s peril.

As his two assistants he had chosen Mrs Pleskotová, the pharmacist, and Mr Kouba, the fitter. He had often shared the bench with Mrs Pleskotová, whom he considered a wise and sensitive person. And although he had never talked to her directly about the subject he assumed that she would find it very difficult to despatch someone to their death. Apart from that, she worked not far from where the murder was committed and he thought it a good idea to find out what the local people felt about the case.

Old Kouba was a manual worker turned official, and a reliable one at that. He had been sitting on committees recently, assisting with the purges. He had mercilessly handed down verdicts not against criminals but against upstanding and defenceless fellow-citizens. It would have been best to steer clear of such people, but if Adam remained a judge how could he avoid them? With someone like Kouba on the bench, at least their joint decision would have political authority. So long as Kouba didn’t realise that on this occasion the court did not represent the authority to which he was accustomed to paying lip-service. If he did, he would start to resist the proposed verdict and would make it difficult to reach a decision.

But it was a risk he had to take. It was necessary to include at least one of Them.

One got caught up with people one didn’t trust and whose views and attitudes one regarded as abhorrent. One argued with them but they were deaf to one’s words. The only possibility was to try to outwit them, to soften or defuse their belligerence; but they would have their own way in the end anyway, for theirs was the kingdom, the power and the law. The sovereign of a Commonwealth, be it an assembly or one man, is not subject to the civil laws. Thomas Hobbes.

He retrieved the crumpled letter from the waste-paper basket.

But maybe such things don’t offend you so much by now. You could well have changed. For the better I should say. You seemed to me more adult or manly than you were in The Hole. There were times there that you behaved like a little boy. Sorry! You wanted to be loved. And you wanted to make love too, but were unwilling to see that it implied any responsibility or duty as far as you were concerned. Above all you felt no duty, nor any need even, to be heedful of others and try to understand them. You did not notice that other people lived according to different values from yours, that they might have hated the thought that their very work assisted the ‘construction’ (as you people called it) of the society you believed in. You knew very well I was unhappy in The Hole. And you weren’t happy there either — you felt slighted and wasted. But you knew that it would soon come to an end — for you, it was just a brief passing phase, a heroic episode that you would quite enjoy looking back on one day. You didn’t notice that they were making me do something other than what I wanted, that they had taken away all my rights. You didn’t notice and you made not the slightest effort to save me from the place. Of course you didn’t have to marry me if you didn’t love me enough, but you could have helped me. Or tried to, at least. Why am I writing to you about it? After all, it makes no difference any more. But I’ll never tell you if I don’t tell you now. When you left I felt terribly lonely. I spent several days convincing myself you’d turn up again, that you wouldn’t just disappear for ever like that. You would be sure to come and take me away.

So now I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you after all, and if I do then stick the envelope down and send it to you you might even read it: I did travel to see you. About a month after you left, because I had to do something and had no one at all in the world. I took two days off work and caught the night express. I didn’t sleep a wink the entire journey, thinking about what I would say to you. I got off at the other end and checked the time of the next train back. I found my way to your square — it must have been about seven thirty in the morning. I gazed at the house you had never shown me, at your home that you had never invited me to, and I shivered at the thought you might suddenly come out or look out of the window and see me standing there. But you didn’t look out. On the journey back I met Jaroslav in the train. He was much older than you and I didn’t find him attractive but I was in such a mood I told him, a total stranger, about the way I was living and he, a total stranger, offered to help me in some way. And he did. He never told me how. He must have known somebody somewhere — he was in the same party as you. They transferred me to Moravia and let me teach singing, which was something.

Don’t go thinking I want to reproach you with anything. I realise it was against your nature and your convictions to help anybody. In your view, it wasn’t just. In your view justice decreed that everyone who wasn’t enthusiastically in favour should be repressed. Maybe I do you an injustice. You just didn’t fancy taking any action, you always disdained anything that distracted you from your work, from your private self…

He took the letter and started to tear it into little bits. There were still a few lines at the end which he hadn’t bothered to read; he’d have to live without the knowledge of what they contained.

He stared at the small pile of white scraps for a moment before sweeping them into the waste-paper basket. If only he could do the same with the day, with his previous life. Make a clean break. But making a clean break with life meant to die — was there any other way for one to escape from one’s own life?

He tried dialling the number, at least, and waited for the connection.

‘I thought you’d call me ages ago,’ she said.

‘I’m calling you now.’

‘I’ve got visitors coming tonight. Unless you’d like to come as a visitor.’

‘Not much, no. Particularly if Oldřich is at home.’

‘I expect he will be. Why, aren’t you friends any more?’

‘We could take a trip together somewhere,’ he said, ignoring her impudence. ‘How about spending the weekend with me somewhere?’

‘Oh, I’d have to discuss it with Ruml,’ she said. ‘Or leave Lida with a friend. Where would we go, anyway?’

‘I don’t know yet. Does it really matter where?’

‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘OK. I’ll try and fix it somehow.’

He still had to call his wife at the library.

‘Adam, I’m so glad it’s you. I tried calling you a moment ago, but your line was engaged.’

‘Did you want something?’

‘I was really miserable. I feel so lonely here. You didn’t give me a chance to explain it all to you. And you didn’t explain anything to me either.’

‘I will explain it to you some time when you are not so tired.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about it. What time will you be finished today?’

‘Very late.’

‘I’ll wait for you. Will you call for me?’

‘I doubt it. I think I’d sooner be alone.’

‘So you won’t be coming home at all?’

‘I don’t know. I expect I will. Some time during the night.’

‘But I wanted to talk to you!’

‘Some other time. We’ll explain everything to each other all in good time.’

‘I also wanted to hear everything about… her. If you and she… Adam, can you hear me?’

‘Of course I can; why?’

‘You’re reacting as if you couldn’t.’

‘I’m not reacting at all.’

‘That’s precisely the trouble. How can you not react when I’m talking to you about this? And last night you joked about it.’

‘I’m not joking any more.’

‘Come home early, Adam. I want to talk to you. I need you.’

‘You’ll tell me some other time.’

‘I love you, Adam. If you don’t come home you will hurt me.’

3

At four o’clock, Alice came in with an obvious need to get her day’s cases off her chest. So she regaled him with stories of marital infidelities, deceptions and dirty tricks. He was surprised to find himself listening to what she was telling him, and actually feeling a sense of relief; as if the sufferings and peccadilloes of these strangers, however banal, revealed him to himself as merely one among many, and helped distance him from his own sufferings and peccadilloes. Half an hour later, Alice left and he was alone once more.

The children were probably home already, and Alena too.

From time to time when they quarrelled he would sulk: deliberately staying longer at work and not telephoning home. The thought of them waiting for him, the children asking where he was and when he was coming, Alena quickly regretting how unfair she had been, used to give him a sense of satisfaction. But it had only been a game: it was playing at quarrelling, playing at sulking. He had had his own home, where he belonged. Where they used to wait for him. The realisation that this was no longer so, and never would be again, more likely than not, filled him with dismay.

It was drizzling outside. He wasn’t dressed for rain — even the weather had taken him by surprise. He could go to the cinema or visit his parents — he’d not been to see them in a long time. He could also go home. Back to his flat, he corrected himself. He could talk to the children. That is if he could manage to talk to the children on this particular evening.

He loved the children. He took care of them, played with them, took them on long walks sharing the little he knew about trees, flowers and birds, or continuing his ever extendable story about the hedgehog that travelled to see the world. He undoubtedly spent more time on them than his father had on him and he was pleased that they had a better childhood than he had had.

He stopped in front of a pub. It was one he passed almost every day, but he had never set foot inside. People who rushed to drown their senses at moments of affliction struck him as weak-willed. But he would have to shelter somewhere from the rain.

Inside it was crowded and the clientele had an unfriendly look so he remained in the tap-room. He ordered a small glass of beer, though he did not particularly like beer. He knew nobody here and nobody knew him. If he could summon up the courage to get drunk he would be able to unbosom himself by telling his story to a random listener. The trouble was, knowing himself, he would not get sufficiently drunk and would then end up having to listen to the stranger’s troubles instead. He ordered a cognac and settled up.

The telephone box at the street corner was empty and the telephone was working, amazingly enough.

‘Ruml here.’ Adam held the receiver, which was demanding to be told who was calling, at arm’s length. Only when the other hung up did he bring the receiver close to his mouth once more and say into it: ‘Dr Ruml, one of your friends is seeing your wife. Would you like me to describe him?’ He started and looked round quickly, but there was no one standing outside the box.

He went back into the pub, drank another cognac in the taproom and drove off to visit Matĕj, who was having one of his illicit breaks from water measuring.

His friend turned off the television. ‘An occupational disease,’ he said apologetically. ‘I stare at the thing and listen to the enormities they come up with, and then I go over them all again in the newspapers. It fascinates me how they do it.’

The room contained nothing but books and pictures, a writing desk with a chair, and an armchair under the window. He sat down on it and watched the sky darken behind the wet roof of the block of flats opposite.

‘Actually, I’m making excuses for myself too,’ Matĕj admitted. ‘I always imagined all the things I’d write if I had a bit of free time. Now I come back from the caravan and have plenty of free time but I don’t feel like writing — there’s no one to write for. Or maybe I’m making excuses again, to avoid admitting I’ve got nothing to write about. I would never have realised that in the past. Life was too hectic for me to notice there was nothing in my head. But now I have plenty of time in which to work out what would be important to tell people. I’m hardly going to go and add more redundant words to the enormous heap that’s engulfing us.’

The last time he had sat here had been with Alena. She was fond of Matěj, or at least she had always said so. But then she had said the same thing to him. Only in Matěj’s case there would have been no reason for her to lie; lying would have gained her no advantage.

‘I could, of course, console myself with the thought that I wouldn’t be poisoning people’s minds like them, but I think I’ve tried that one a bit too often. Telling myself I’m not the worst of the bunch, I mean. Two days ago, would you believe it, a German came out to the caravan to see me. A really nice guy. He expressed his sympathy and told me he wanted to record an interview about the situation I was in and the state of the world. He just couldn’t grasp that I had no great thoughts to share with him, and I don’t feel like just griping about things. Besides, what right have I to gripe, seeing that I was in on it back at the start…’ He stopped, puzzled. ‘Is there something wrong, Adam? Problems at work?’

‘No, none there so far.’

‘I see. Wait a second.’

He was alone. One of the pictures on the wall seemed new. He tried to concentrate on it. Children’s voices could be heard through the open door, then the sound of a violin. He was able to make out a broad field, the brown of which was as mournfully autumnal as the grey of the sky above it. In the middle of the field stood a solitary, bare tree. From one of the branches hung a length of rope.

Matěj returned with a bottle and two glasses.

Now a rook had landed on the treetop, or was it a raven? He wasn’t very good at birds or wild flowers, not having made up for those five years when he had been kept out of the classroom and the woods. As far as flowers and birds were concerned he had never managed to make up the gap in his knowledge. And what about other areas? He had always thought that what he had failed to gain in knowledge he had made up for with his unique life experience. But what had that experience taught him? That it was possible to live even in degrading conditions, deprived of all rights; that one just had to go on living in order to survive the dismal present somehow, and see freedom in the end.

Matěj filled the glasses.

He drank his and said: ‘I think I’ve fallen in love.’

‘Does Alena know?’

‘I told her.’

‘Has she kicked you out?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘Then why do you look so miserable?’

He shrugged.

‘When something like that happens, one ought to enjoy it at least.’

‘I’m enjoying it the best I know how.’

‘A real strong point of yours, that. Do you remember our first evening at Magdalena’s? We were singing away and the look on your face was as if you were giving us life sentences.’

He was incapable of enjoying himself. Nor was he capable of tenderness; concern was the most he could express. Alena longed for tenderness. Maybe that student, who was probably incapable of anything worthwhile, knew how to show tenderness. He felt a vague surge of remorse. He could see his wife in some half-forgotten green dress hanging out nappies in a country backyard, her back to him as he arrived; there was a little child toddling about her feet; and there was he, overawed at the miraculous truth that the child was his own daughter. Her fur coat turning white from the falling snow, snowflakes settling on the hair not covered by her hat. She leaning against a tree-trunk as he kissed her; her lips cold, her cheeks also — shivering all over. Your hands are so warm. You’re all warm, you’re my fire. You’re my sunshine. She standing on a footpath in the meadow, singing. I like the way you sing. I’m singing because I’m happy with you. I always wanted someone to be happy with me.

‘Is she pretty?’ Matěj asked with interest.

He nodded. ‘I’ve had something inside me since I was very small: the feeling that there are limits to what people are allowed. In that place I had to live, the ones in charge were allowed to do what they liked, but then they weren’t people as far as we were concerned.’

‘Surely that was a completely different situation.’

‘Maybe I was sure of it even earlier. My mother has always been morose; I can’t remember her ever showing any enjoyment, she’s always lived in a state of anxiety about what life might have lined up.’ He was starting to ramble but couldn’t stop himself. ‘In your caravan that time you talked about the inner voice that one should listen to. I’ve been making an effort to catch at least a few sensible words — but it’s no good. I don’t know whether I’ll ever manage. All I’ve managed so far is to find a mistress; if I hear anything in the silence, then it’s her voice.’

The crow at the top of the lonely tree had spread its wings ready to fly away. Beneath the tree there now sat a clown wearing a costume in the colours of the old Spanish kingdom, and he could tell that there was sorrow in the dark Jewish eyes. Outside the rain had stopped and the moon shone between scudding clouds. ‘It seems to me one should not desert another person,’ he said, ‘on top of everything else. But I don’t know whether it is my inner voice talking, or a voice from outside.’

‘I think so too,’ his friend agreed. ‘I’m just not sure at what moment one deserts the other person. But it could well be before the actual moment of moving out.’

‘Yes, I know. But she, she…’ An icy wave swept up through his body, from his toes to the tips of his hair, ‘she always seemed to me so childlike… so innocent…’ He put his glass down with such force that it tipped over, rolled to the edge of the desk and dropped softly on to the carpet. He had to get up to retrieve it. His head was swimming and his forehead was still glacial. It was high time he went.

The pavement was wet and there was a smell of smoke in the air. He set off downhill from Košíře. It was too late to look in on his parents. He had nowhere to go; all he could do was wander the streets. Like Karel Kozlík, he recalled, though happily I’ve not killed anyone so far. And the weather seemed rather more suitable; the wind was almost warm. He could feel its gusts clearing his head and the iciness draining from his body.

Why did one have to be heading somewhere all the time, rushing off somewhere or to see someone? It was a long time since he’d been all alone; what hopes did he have of hearing his own inner voice, even if it spoke to him?

He was too apt to indulge in hand-wringing — it was something else he had in common with his mother. She had spent her life wringing her hands instead of living. At least Father had enjoyed his work and at Sunday lunch would tell stories and laugh at them; so would his brother Hanuš. Hanuš liked drinking, skiiing, playing billiards, ping-pong and tennis; he also cared about his appearance, had loads of girlfriends and did not think about the war. Or had he only pretended not to? He definitely had a more cheerful nature; he used to have fun tinkering with his crystal sets, and all in all had gone around more freely and lived more lightheartedly, without feeling responsibility for the fate of mankind. There was a time when they had gone off together on bikes in search of odd jobs; he missed those trying times. Not because they’d been difficult, of course, but because of the freedom they had had. In fact it was amazing he had felt so free in the prevailing conditions of unfreedom. Nothing depended so much on one’s state of mind as that feeling of freedom.

He arrived at one side of the Kinský Gardens. The benches were full of courting couples. He was courting too. He could invite her here for a cuddle on a bench.

It was not a good idea to think about her; better to enjoy being here alone; he found a vacant bench with a view of the city. The distant lights twinkled before his eyes and merged into blotches in the dark. Or he could telephone his brother. Today it’s me who’s drunk, would you believe? What if now we dropped everything right now, everything and everyone, got on our bikes and set off, we’d find a job somewhere, though maybe not as easily as in those days: who’d have any use for us? Don’t worry, I don’t intend to blather on; on the contrary I’ll be very much to the point. I can see things quite clearly now, not just the heart-warming silhouette of our native city, on whose roofs the rain has only just stopped falling, so that they still shine slightly, but I can also see clearly the frontier before which you hesitate, though I am unable to define or demarcate it — I lack your mathematical ability and knowledge, though one thing I do remember — Father was always drumming it into my head — that every progression has only one limit. Don’t mock me for being so woefully ignorant, I’m sad today and there is nothing I can see to cheer me up, apart from the thought of us getting on our bikes and going off somewhere in the hope of finding a bonfire to sit down by and listen to the gypsies singing. There are moments — you can’t tell when they’ll arrive: your wife is unfaithful to you or leaves you altogether; you don’t have the courage to believe in God and the things you once believed in have let you down; things don’t seem to matter to you any more, and what do you have left?

I know I haven’t mentioned the thing that Father never stopped telling us was the most important thing of all: one’s work — wanting to do something, to achieve something so you can say you weren’t here in vain, that you’ve left behind some special winding or discovered an unknown wave motion in a crystal, or at least an oscillation within yourself, so that even when God has become distant and turned His face away from you and people have deserted you, something lasting remains: such as a passion for the truth.

I didn’t mention it, because it might easily happen that at the very moment your work starts to become crucial to your life, when the choice is between moving towards the light or becoming eternally bogged down, at that moment some snooper arrives on the scene, some officially sanctioned thicko, you might know him, or you might have never seen him before, and he’ll say No! and you’ll end up being bunged somewhere where the light can’t get in and where the light from inside you can’t get out either.

But I realise too that not even that need be the most important consideration. You’ve forgotten about the snoopers, and you’re missing the forests or the silhouette of your native city; maybe at this moment you too would like nothing better than for us to jump on our bikes and ride off anywhere, even though we don’t have bikes any more, the gypsies probably don’t sing but listen to the radio, and I know what you mean, although I’m sad and have the feeling I’ve nothing left, apart from the last hope: that I will at last fathom something about the strange urge for justice. But they’re even stifling that hope: I have the feeling — and this is precisely the absurdity of every barrier, every restriction — that everything is totally immaterial compared with some urge that emanates from the soul and is therefore incomprehensible to any outsider — it cannot be communicated or even defined in words, only through deeds: such as the urge to jump on a bike with someone you long for, and ride off somewhere, anywhere, taking a path you know or you’ve never been down before, with nothing at the end of it, or, on the contrary, a route whose end is foreshadowed by its very beginning, in other words, what people generally think of as one’s downfall, but despite it all you have to jump on and go, there’s no other way, you just get on and ride away, and therein lies your freedom and your chance to live.

He got up from the bench. His legs felt light and his head was clear; he was in just the condition to go and try the most difficult of cases and he was almost certain of making the best judgements possible.

4

He pulled up in front of the cottage, unlocked the padlocks and switched on the current at the main. Usually he would wind up the big farmhouse pendulum clock as soon as he came in, but this time he did not. Behind the door stood a row of wellingtons: his own, Alena’s and Manda’s.

(‘Hey, Daddy, where are you going?’

‘To mend the fence at the cottage.’

‘I want to go with you!’

‘You can’t. Who’d look after you there?’

‘I’m a big girl now. I can look after myself.’

‘I’ve got some things to see to on the way.’

‘That doesn’t matter, I’ll wait for you in the car.’

‘You can’t wait in the car all day.’

‘I can go to sleep in the car then.’)

A half-full teapot had been left standing on the stove, the water in it covered in a rust-coloured greasy scum. Alena had forgotten to empty it again.

(‘Adam, don’t go. We could all go on a walk somewhere. It’s ages since we’ve been anywhere.’

‘It’s not my fault you were never here.’

‘I was stupid. I regret it, Adam. I regret it awfully.’

‘But I don’t feel like walks at the moment.’

‘We have to talk it over, though. We can’t just leave it in the air like this.’)

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘You should know me by now.’ She was standing in the middle of the low-ceilinged sitting room: a tall, slim, beautiful stranger. He put his arms round her. She snuggled up to him but wouldn’t let him kiss her. ‘You promised me a drink, remember!’

In the dresser he found a bottle of rum. It was covered in dust; he didn’t even know what it was doing there. He poured out two glasses — his own only half-full.

‘I don’t think much of your choice of drink.’

‘I’ll take the car and go and buy something else if you like.’

‘Why should you drive anywhere?’ She picked up the bottle. ‘It’s full: that’s the main thing.’ She sat down at the table in the same place as the student that time.

He opened the food safe. ‘What do you prefer: rice or macaroni?’

‘You’re going to cook?’

‘We’ll have something to eat before going to bed, surely?’

‘I’m not used to being cooked for. A piece of bread would do me.’

He switched on the electric ring and put on some water to boil. On the wall opposite there hung a garland of everlasting flowers. Alena grew them every year in the flowerbed under the window and when she had dried the flowers, she hung them round the house.

He could not rid himself of the feeling he was doing something inappropriate. It was wrong to have brought her here — the house resounded with familiar voices and they were all shouting against her; even his own voice was not sure on which side it belonged. If only she weren’t so perfectly turned out: her elaborate perfume and made-up face were out of place here and only made her seem more of a stranger.

He broke the macaroni sticks in two and dropped them into the boiling water. Behind him he heard the sound of a cigarette lighter and his nostrils were filled with cigarette smoke, an unfamiliar smell in these surroundings. He opened the food safe in search of spices. The jars were labelled in large childish writing: MARJORAM! PAPRYKA DRID MUSH. He took a pinch of dried mushrooms and added them to the saucepan. He couldn’t recall his daughter painting the jars. He also opened a tin of frankfurters and chopped up the sausages.

When they had eaten he would take her into the next room and the two of them would make love in Alena’s bed. That was the way it went. Beds are only things, they couldn’t care less who was lying in them.

‘I’ll give you a hand if you like. Or lay the table, at least,’ she suggested. She had no difficulty finding plates and cutlery. But her movements seemed out of place to him; she was a stranger here, and her presence seemed even to alienate him from himself.

How had he come to be here at her side? Out of love? Out of desperation? So as not to have to find some way of filling the time whose emptiness would otherwise destroy him? The one did not rule out: the other, of course. And the very thing that now seemed out of place and alien to him could well end up seeming totally appropriate and even banal one day. She would be integrated into his life. Always supposing that either of them wanted it or had the courage to go through with it.

‘Have you got a candle somewhere?’ she asked. ‘I don’t like the light here. Or rather, the things I can see in this light. There are too many unfamiliar objects around me.’

He found two candles in the pantry, and what’s more a wooden candlestick.

She placed the candlestick in the middle of the table and put the other candle in an empty jam pot before switching off the light. ‘Don’t you think that’s better?’ The shadow of her head stretched itself along the wall and looked ghostly to him.

He divided the food between the plates.

‘It’s lovely to have someone bring me a plate of food. Where did you learn to cook?’

He shrugged.

‘Were you an only child?’

‘No, I’ve a brother.’

‘You never mentioned him.’

‘He’s abroad. When you-know-what happened, he cleared out.’

‘At the very moment you came back. What made you return? Did you have some girlfriend here?’

‘No.’

‘Or were you running away from one over there?’

‘Alena was over there with me, as you well know.’

‘Excuses, excuses. You’ve never told me anything about your girlfriends either.’

‘I don’t know what there is to tell.’

‘I’m sure you’d remember something if you tried.’

For her it was a matter of course. People make love and deceive each other, just like eating and drinking. Or maybe she was testing him.

She pushed away her plate. ‘That was very nice.’ She got up, picked up his plate as well and carried them over to the sink. ‘What does your brother do?’

‘He’s a mathematician.’

‘A pity. I was hoping he might at least be a rabbi.’

‘He’s nothing like me.’

‘Has he got a small nose?’

‘Yes.’

‘And blue eyes?’

‘Blue-grey.’

‘And is he daft?’

‘No — just a trifle easy-going.’

‘Then you must be the daft one,’ she concluded. ‘Sometimes, anyway.’ She wiped her hands, returned to the table and topped up her glass. ‘Like when you chose that Alena of yours. She strikes me as a real dumb cluck. But on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t so daft. Maybe it was just what you needed. No one else would have been able to put up with you.’

‘Do you think I’m as bad as all that?’

‘The way you look at people, it’s as if you were just wondering what you might accuse them of first. I doubt if I could put up with you for long.’

‘You enjoy saying nasty things to people.’

‘I say what comes into my head. Take the way you’re looking at me now. You’re thinking: she drinks too much. She’s not the woman for me. Or for one thing only. It makes no difference. But you’re just keeping quiet. You’re afraid you might rile me, and that would be a shame now that you’ve brought me here.’

He picked up the glass standing in front of her and carried it to the dresser. ‘Happy now?’

‘Yes, darling, that’s the way I like you. When I see you care about me. But you can bring me back that glass. I hate it when someone tries to clip my wings.’ She reached for it herself. ‘I won’t get drunk. This’ll be my last. And now, finally, tell me something about American girls.’

‘I met my first American woman in England,’ he recalled. ‘It was on a pleasure steamer, cruising along Loch Ness.’

‘What was she like?’

‘I couldn’t describe her any more. I thought she looked like my wife. She had fair hair, and when I first caught sight of her,’ he had recalled something after all, ‘she was wearing a nautical T-shirt and shorts. She had tanned legs like yours.’

‘Hair like your wife’s and legs like mine. She must have looked a proper mongrel.’

‘She was travelling round the world with her father, and she told me about it. She told me they once caught a mountain eagle somewhere in Afghanistan. They tied its legs together and were carrying it home in their jeep. But the eagle freed itself.’ He suddenly realised that the story, which at the time had sounded touching and had even moved him, was losing any point it had in the retelling. ‘Her father drove and she kept an eye on the eagle. The eagle freed itself but didn’t have enough space to flap its wings. Or it was afraid to call attention to itself. She claimed that it spread its wings and waited. And then all at once the wind carried it upwards.’

‘And did you make love to her?’ she asked with impatience.

‘I didn’t have time.’

‘I said you were daft. I bet you were afraid of being unfaithful to your wife.’

‘Does that strike you as so very daft?’

‘No. Sorry! On the contrary, it’s very nice to be faithful to one’s wife. Particularly when she’s as fantastic as yours. I expect she was always faithful to you too.’

He stood up.

‘There’s no need to take offence. You can tell me some more fairy stories. I love hearing about how people love each other and are true to each other till the day they die.’

He started to see red, but there was no sense in arguing. Or rather he had no comment to make and nothing to defend. He went into the bedroom and found clean bedding in the cupboard.

The sense of impropriety remained with him. Feelings of guilt, in fact. But maybe it was only his mind’s conditioned reaction to stimuli, no more than the product of auto-suggestion. Like when an invalid felt pain in a leg long amputated. Whom could he harm? His children? Or himself? How did one do the greatest harm to oneself? When one failed to live according to one’s spiritual needs, or failed to heed one’s inner voice. He had lost the habit of listening to himself so long ago that he would have difficulty recognising his own voice. What he needed now was quiet. The quiet of the desert he had once come to know. He longed to lie down all alone on a sun-scorched rock and stare up into a sky that was quiet, impassive and infinite.

He switched on the electric fire and sat down on the bed he had made, and listened to hear if there was any sound from the next room — but there was none. Only above his head — thump, thump.

Is there something up?

No. It’s just I’m still het up about what he did. I got a terrible fright. But there’s no need for you to upset yourself!

Only others’ voices still.

In a moment he’d bring her in here, press her to himself and start listening to her and yearning to hear her moan at last.

It was wrong to have brought her here. The place was haunted by too many other voices; all he wanted was for one of them to drown the rest — and he also wanted to hug someone and not to be alone. Was this love?

I’d like to experience that miracle and be close to someone, to be so close to you that the world around me falls silent, so close that we are enveloped by a stillness as deep as the Milky Way, a stillness that would pervade us so that we could hear one another without having to talk.

But I don’t know if I’ll be able to accept you, whether I’d still be able to accept anyone in such total intimacy even if I tried.

She was sitting at the table just as he had left her. There was just less liquid in the bottle and more tobacco smoke in the room.

‘Were you wanting to do a bunk?’ she said, turning her gaze to him. ‘To run home to your dear ones?’

‘I was making up the bed.’

‘You’re always finding excuses. It went through your mind. You thought very carefully about how you should behave in order to do the least harm. But you could easily have left me here.’

‘What would you do?’

‘Sleep. Just sleep. I’d make up for all those years that I’ve had to get up at six in the morning. And I might have done a bit of drawing. I caught sight of a drawing pad and pencils here somewhere.’

‘That’s Manda’s. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do some drawing even though I haven’t left.’

‘What is there here for me to draw? Unless I drew you sitting at the table drinking. You’re so beautifully lop-sided. One shoulder up here and the other almost under the table.’

‘OK, I’ll sit for you.’

‘You didn’t take it seriously? But I don’t know whether I’m still up to it. It’s ages since I drew anyone.’

‘You can do a bad drawing of me. When I was a lad I painted too, and it never bothered me when it wasn’t good.’

She took the drawing pad from the shelf and sat down on the stool by the window. ‘It’s yellow paper, the sort I always hated. And the pencil’s a hard one.’

‘Am I to look at you?’

‘No, drink that disgusting rum, or just sit there and look normal.’

‘What way do I normally look?’

‘As if you were just off to the dentist’s. Or about to make a speech. Everyone has a particular look. When Ruml looks at someone, he tries to give the impression he’s just had a world-shattering idea.’ She looked at him intently while making rapid sketches. ‘Perhaps you’d sooner go to bed and I’m only stopping you now.’

‘Why, if it gives you pleasure…’

‘You seriously want to give me pleasure? If you’re not careful I’ll be so touched I’ll draw you with wings.’ She looked again at him but this time her gaze rested on him longer, and he could have sworn he saw tears in her eyes. Could it be that all her talk, all her mocking comments and attacks, were just a way of disguising her vulnerability and her timid hope?

‘I’m not used to people being nice to me,’ she said. ‘All they want is for me to be nice to them. Ruml sometimes gets the idea I’m not nice enough. Then there’s a fantastic row and he wallops me, knocks out one of my teeth or hurls at me everything he can lay his hands on.’ She touched her face where a scar showed through the layer of make-up. ‘I got that from a lead crystal vase. He must have been really pissed off that time to have sacrificed something expensive. He’s very careful with his precious possessions otherwise.’

‘And you just put up with it?’

‘No. I spit at him and scratch him. Unfortunately he’s stronger than I am and I always end up getting a walloping… Maybe I deserve it. Don’t you beat your wife when she deserves it?’

‘I’ve never beaten any woman.’

‘I think I’d better draw you with wings after all.’ She gazed at him, not drawing any more. ‘He did treat me decently once. When they wouldn’t give me a place in art school, I wanted to stay at home for a year and do some painting so I’d learn something on my own and then try again the following year. And then someone denounced me as a parasite and I was in a real fix. Mum’s fellow had put her on to Ruml and he really did arrange it so the whole thing was hushed up. I loved him for it — maybe it was mutual, he married me afterwards. So I stay with him even though he wallops me. Or maybe you think I ought to tell him to sling his hook and then wait for someone to turn up who’ll be so over the moon about me that he’ll take me and the girl? Someone honourable and fair-minded — like you! Don’t lie to me! You’re only too pleased I’ve got Ruml and you won’t be lumbered with me. You can dump me whenever you like. It’s what you were thinking of doing a moment ago, anyway — you think I couldn’t tell? Sometimes I hate you. All you men.’ She stood up, crumpled the paper, opened the stove door and threw the drawing in.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing!’ she snapped. ‘All I can do now is colour in dog’s gobs.’ She sat down on the chair next to the stove, her hands in her lap. She had long, slender fingers and narrow wrists — like his mother.

‘What are you staring at me for?’ she protested. ‘I never said I’d manage it. I don’t pretend to be an artist.’

‘That picture wasn’t important anyway.’ He took her hand. ‘Come out of here — you can have a lie down next door.’

‘Yes, I want to sleep,’ she agreed. ‘I want to sleep and think about nothing. Not even you!’

‘All right.’ He led her into the next room.

‘You really did make the bed?’ She undressed quickly while he stood motionless by the door.

‘Aren’t you going to join me in bed?’

‘I thought you said…’

‘Get a move on. It’s cold in here.’ She cuddled up to him and put her arms round him.

‘Did you like it with me? Just a little bit?’

‘You mean you couldn’t tell?’

‘I got drunk. I bet you think I’m terrible. But I was just miserable.’

‘Don’t think about it any more.’

‘What am I supposed to think about?’

‘Think about us being together.’

‘What’s the point of thinking about us being together? Tell me what you live for, instead.’

‘Why does that occur to you now?’

‘It didn’t just occur to me. No one’s ever able to tell me what they actually live for. And it struck me you might know. You seemed to me a bit of a rabbi.’

‘Do you think rabbis know?’

‘I don’t know whether rabbis do, it struck me that you might know something. That you’d be able to tell me the right way to live.’

‘I think you’ll be disappointed.’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Who can possibly know?’

‘You’re just like the rest! How can you be a judge then?’

‘I judge people according to the law.’

‘How can you judge people when you don’t know how we ought to live?’

‘I don’t like people who think they know the right way to live.’

‘Why don’t you like them?’

‘Most of them force others to live their way.’

‘But they don’t know anything: the ones that force others to do things. They’re just as grotesque as the ones who judge according to the law.’

‘You’re probably right.’

‘You, my darling, are an odd fish. You know more than you feel like telling. David, the one I told you about, once told me that people should radiate light.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘I don’t know. I never asked him. Maybe he only meant it in an artistic sense. He used to love bright enamels. Did nothing of the kind ever strike you?’

‘Maybe. But I’ve never found the time to think about it.’

‘I know; you had to judge people and travel. They all travel and judge people. And want to make love. And none of them knows anything.’

She pushed him away and jumped out of the bed. She went to the window and opened it. ‘At least the moon’s shining out there. Otherwise I’d die of boredom.’ She sat down on the edge of the chest, her naked body bathed in pallid light.

He’d known many people in his lifetime who had seemed to him interesting and educated. Lots of teachers at the different levels of education, lots of judges and lawyers, not to mention quite a number who had considered themselves prophets or at least the successors to prophets. Had any of them radiated light? He was unable to recall even one. On the other hand, his memory was full of people who had spread darkness.

There was one dear figure, however, swaying towards him out of the dim and distant past. Time had blurred his features, but he recognised him none the less as he came closer; even in those far-off days, the murk of the corridors had retreated and the walls opened out; either Arie had radiated light or he had still been capable of perceiving radiance everywhere in those days. Where had that light come from? What did we know about the world at that time? Such light probably had little to do with knowledge but emanated from nobility of spirit.

And one night, on the only holiday we took together, when we were lodging in a small village inn, Magdalena got a bit tipsy and sang with the locals in the tap-room. Actually it got on my nerves and I led her off to our bedroom. She undressed and then sat naked, just like this one now — how long ago it is — on the bed, the coverlet turned back ready. She was holding a small black flute and playing it. I was going to tick her off again for getting drunk and acting in an unseemly way, but my irritation dissipated, and all of a sudden I realised that she was endowed with something I had been denied. However unhappy or even despairing she might feel, she had the capacity to see something that was hidden from me, to sense mysteries I could not penetrate.

And her body glowed gently that night in the darkness of the inn room, although it might well have been the moon shining on her, as on Alexandra now.

Alexandra continued to stare out of the window; perhaps she was trying to catch sight of the land she hungered for, where she would know that she was alive, where people would know why they were alive.

And then the light started to resurge from deep in his memory. First of all it was no more than a frosty oscillation, but then it gradually grew into a gyrating disk, the fiery eye which had once gazed at him from the top of that nocturnal linden tree and pervaded him with its inscrutable grace. Why had he not glimpsed it for so long? What darkness was he walking in?

It was she who was freeing him from it, and only now did he realise the hidden meaning of their encounter. How could he have understood it? For so long he had judged everything in his life as he judged the cases brought before him. Anything that could possibly have been hidden and mysterious he had tried to bring into the open and explain. What if the reason for their encounter was to force him to return. But return where?

To himself.

He got up and went over to her in his bare feet. He put his arms round her.

She jumped. ‘You’ve come to see me? Do you want to make love here on this chest?’

5

She sat on a bench on Petřín Hill at the side of the scenic path. When Adam left she had taken the children to her mother’s and called her friend Maruška (whom she had not seen for months) and made arrangements to meet.

The city towered before her in a haze of smoke. It was a clear autumnal day, the path was littered with damply fragrant yellow leaves and on the grass alongside the bench the dew was still lying, but she was unable to concentrate on anything outside herself.

Never before had she been deserted so cold-bloodedly and cruelly by her own husband, the father of her children. And at the very moment that she needed him most. When she expected his understanding and help.

He had gone off to repair a fence that none of them cared about. She knew the fence had only been an excuse. He had not wanted to stay with her. Maybe he hadn’t gone off to mend the fence at all but was somewhere with her.

He would hardly have lied to her at the very moment she was telling him the truth. But he had deceived her even before that. How could he have? It seemed inconceivable to her that he could have deceived her. Maybe he hadn’t done any of the things he had told her at all. He had dreamt up the nameless woman out of spite and now he had gone off to mend the fence so as to punish her by his absence.

But for what reason would he want to punish her? After all, she had not intended to do anything wrong! Although he was a judge (or precisely because he was one) he was not concerned with the motives of human actions, only the actions themselves. Once she had quoted Voltaire in a letter to him: We judge a man more by his questions than his answers. But she didn’t expect he’d given it a second thought. He ignored anything that did not fit his picture of the world. She didn’t fit either, which is why he had been incapable of getting close to her. But who had ever got close to her, who had ever proved capable of understanding her? She knew no one in the world capable of loving her enough to understand her, and at least try to cross the gulf separating one person from another, and give her a feeling of security.

First she caught sight of the repulsive poodle dog and then the tall, slim figure of her friend.

The dog started to assail her and tried to lick her face.

‘Ferdy, leave the lady alone! You do look under the weather, Ali. Been ill?’

‘No, just haven’t been getting enough sleep. I’m not dragging you away from something, am I?’

‘You must be joking! I’d only be ironing, and this way Katy will do it.’

‘Katy must be quite grown up by now. What is she doing?’

‘What do you think? They wouldn’t let her into university. Top marks in everything, but they wouldn’t take her on account of our being expelled from the Party.’

‘That’s awful!’

‘And what about your Mandy?’

‘She’s only just nine.’

‘I know. Lucky thing; you’ve got another four years. God knows what the situation will be like in four years’ time.’

‘And have you appealed?’

‘Yes, but what’s the point? It’s a joke. And then they write in the paper about the poor blacks in America.’

‘I am sorry!’

‘It’s hardly your fault, is it? And how about the two of you? How’s Adam? Still managing to hold on to his job?’

‘So far. But he says it won’t be for long.’

‘Let’s hope he keeps it. At least there’ll be one decent judge. And you’re still in the library?’

‘So far.’

‘There you go! Most of the girls managed to keep their jobs. I was always bloody unlucky, that’s all. Sometimes I think I can’t stand it, that I’ll end up standing in the middle of Wenceslas Square screaming something nonsensical. You know what I’m doing now? Shop assistant in a florist’s. It’s fascinating: I’m learning loads about flowers and artificial fertilisers. And I get practice in Latin: tradescantia viridis or strobilanthes dyerianus maculatus or laurus nobilis. Straight away that reminds me of Virgil:

Ipsa ingens arbos faciemque simillima lauro,

et si non alium late iactaret odorem

laurus erat…

Those were the days. Do you remember? The awful thing is that my legs ache terribly in the evening. And I’m so tired I haven’t the strength to read. When did I last read a decent book? Where’s that dog gone again? Ferdy! Do you want mistress to spank you? And how about you? You’re not going to tell me anything about yourself? Are the children well?’

‘Yes. Martin sings beautifully. Manda is good at drawing.’

‘But you’re a bit under the weather. You haven’t been ill?’

‘No, thanks be!’

‘Thank heavens for that, at least. That’s the worst thing of all, when you start having health problems on top of everything else. My heart plays me up a bit. But I always say it’s nothing but nerves. Sometimes I get the feeling that it’s all insane. And then I say to myself: why, for heaven’s sake, do I still live in this insanity? You know all the work we put in to get our degrees. And what was the point of it? But I got the impression you wanted to tell me something. Over the phone I could tell there was something on yout mind.’

‘No. Not particularly. I just wanted to see you.’

‘That’s sweet of you, Ali. I often remember you too. What great times they used to be. I hardly get to see anyone these days. And whenever I do, everyone’s got a bellyful of their own problems and the last thing they want is to listen to someone else’s bloody misfortunes. But you always managed to be happy. Don’t think I don’t envy you. I’m glad that at least someone can be happy…’

Only four o’clock. She could hardly go home yet. Unless Adam had got back already. Her heart gave a sudden leap. If he was back by now, they would be able to talk it over and sort things out, and peace would be restored between them.

She entered a telephone box and dialled the number of her own flat. She waited for a long time (in case he was sleeping) before hanging up.

There was a patisserie next door to the theatre. She lingered for a moment in front of the window display. She had a taste for cream cakes and sweet things in general, but she had never indulged her appetite. Since her childhood she had always regarded it as debauchery to sit down in a tea shop and eat cakes. But what was wrong with her treating herself to a bit of luxury today?

There were two young men in front of her at the counter. They were not buying anything, just chatting to the assistant. One of them glanced round at her as she entered. He was a broad-shouldered youth with a high pink forehead and a dapper moustache. A black belt with a skull-shaped buckle showed from beneath a short military jacket.

She ordered a whipped-cream dessert. Without looking at her, the young man said: ‘Will you allow me to pick up the tab, madam?’

‘No, thank you.’

But he was already tendering the money to the counter assistant. He ordered a coffee for himself.

She drew a ten-crown note from her purse. ‘I’ll pay for myself. I am not used to letting strangers pay for me.’

‘You’ll soon get used to it, kiddo,’ he declared. He picked up the ten-crown note, leaned over to her and tucked it into her blouse pocket. She felt his hand touch her breast and she reddened.

He sat down next to her at the small table and observed her.

She swallowed a spoonful of whipped cream, but was totally unaware of its taste.

‘You from Prague, darling?’ he asked.

She made no reply. How could he be so familiar? He was bound to be at least ten years her junior. Like Honza. But Honza had a boyish look, whereas this fellow looked like manhood personified.

‘’Cos I’d show you around,’ he offered. ‘I know every joint in town.’

She quickly finished her dessert, without looking at him. Then she pushed aside the empty dish and left the shop.

He caught up with her. ‘There’s a great little bar right next door.’

The thought struck her: what was there to stop her going anywhere with anyone, seeing that she had nowhere to go anyway? ‘I have to make a telephone call,’ she said.

‘Who to?’

She didn’t reply and entered a phone box. ‘Just watch it. I can hear you!’

She tried to close the door, but he held it firmly. She once more dialled the number of her own flat and waited.

‘Wasn’t he in?’ he asked. ‘Or wasn’t it a real number?’

‘Where are you taking me? I don’t have much time.’

It was a small wine bar; just a few tables in a single basement room which they entered down a dirty staircase. The noise of passing trams could be heard from outside.

‘What’s your drink?’

‘I don’t drink.’

‘Well, you will today!’

‘As you like.’ At last, after so many years, here was someone ready to decide for her.

‘Do you drink wine or something stronger?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not a drinker.’

He ordered a cognac. It tasted vile to her. Like drinking soapy water. She knew nothing about drinking but she decided that she would drink and drink quickly, so as to get drunk as soon as possible.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, and told her his name was Karel. But she expected he was lying. Everyone lied — even Adam lied. He’d gone off somewhere with her. She picked up her glass and took as big a mouthful as she could stand. She shivered with disgust.

He started to chat her up; he told her how he went in for small-bore rifle-shooting, drove cars and motor-boats and flew light planes. He rode horses too. Maybe he was lying again. It seemed to her laughable that people were capable of boasting about so many things. It mattered less and less what the fellow was talking about and whether he was lying or telling the truth. Then she even started to enjoy herself.

Adam was sitting somewhere with her — sitting, or lying or driving. He was telling her about all the things he could do, all the things he knew, boasting to her about riding on horseback, driving cars and even driving down to Texas, but she couldn’t care less at this moment.

Honza was sitting somewhere too. Or walking. Or writing. She imagined him sitting at a table writing to her yet another of his repetitive grandiloquent outpourings of loyal devotion. And all at once she could see the funny side of it: Adam lying somewhere with her, and most likely declaring his love to her; the other one sitting at home writing a letter saying how much he loved her. Meanwhile she herself was sitting here with a third man whom she didn’t love at all, listening to him explain to her how to hit the centre of a target at fifty metres. As if there as any sense in hitting targets.

He leaned towards her and tried to kiss her. She might even have put up with it — what was wrong with her kissing some fellow when Adam was somewhere kissing that woman? — but the man’s breath stank so offensively of sardines or rancid oil that she felt sick and sweat broke out on her forehead.

She staggered out into the passage. Fortunately, the toilet was vacant. She bent over the bowl and vomited. Then she splashed herself with water and stood for a few moments staring at her ashen face in the mirror. The feeling of disgust stayed with her. There was no way she could go back in there. But where would she go?

Outside, the street lamps were already on. It was cooler and a wind redolent with rain was blowing from Petřín.

She lurched over to a telephone box, stood in it for a moment, leaning on the glass of the side panel. Then she lifted the receiver. It was dead. Maybe he was already home, but it made no difference anyway, nothing would alter what had already happened.

She felt sick again. She dashed out of the box, bent over a drain and vomited once more.

She eventually reached the main street, though she had no idea how long it had taken her. Fortunately a tram was just coming. She got on board without knowing where it was coming from or going to. The car was almost empty and she could sit wherever she liked. She sat down in the back seat and covered her mouth with the back of her hand, as if she could hold in her drunken breath somehow. Her sleeve seemed to stink of bad fish. She felt sick again. She got off and stood a long time at the tram stop. The wind was now keen and contained fine drops of rain; she turned her face to them.

One needed to be washed, it struck her. One needed baptism. And confession. One needed God. But she had nothing.

She got on another tram and got off at the stop where she had alighted from time to time in recent weeks. She was not entirely sure how she had come to be there, but now she was there, she set off in the familiar direction.

‘Is it really you, Alena?’ He almost hurled himself at her. ‘I’ve been expecting you. I’ve been expecting you for three whole days. I knew you’d come. I even prayed for you to come.’

She sat down on a chair in his small sitting room, the only chair there. ‘Oh, Honza!’

‘I knew you’d come back,’ he repeated. ‘I was convinced you’d have to come, since I couldn’t live without you.’

‘I haven’t come back!’ Her head ached and her throat was dry. ‘Would you bring me something to drink?’

He went off to make her some tea.

It was a very small room with windows on to what was almost a village street. The windows of the house opposite always had their blinds down; perhaps no one lived there. In a box on the window ledge some perlargoniums were in flower and under the window there was a gas-fired radiator that they had never had to switch on, as their relationship had started and ended while the weather was still warm. Just beyond the radiator was a battered old metal bed like the ones which these days could be found only in hospitals. Its springs creaked and she had always thought that passers-by in the street were bound to hear it as distinctly as she heard their footsteps.

The tea was hot and burnt her throat, but she drank it none the less. She welcomed the pain which each mouthful caused her.

‘I wrote you a letter. Mother went away on Friday and I’ve been writing it ever since.’ He picked up a sheaf of papers from the table. ‘Will you take it?’

She shook her head. ‘No. There would be no point.’ Then she tried to tell him about Adam’s infidelity. But it sounded so trite and she was incapable of actually saying the words betrayal or infidelity. She just told him he’d gone off with another woman.

‘But I love you,’ he said, as if incapable of understanding why any of it should make her unhappy. She replied that she had had enough. She didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to live with anyone any more, didn’t want to live at all.

He tried to console her. There was nothing for her to worry about. She could move in with him, into this little house, or he could swap the flat for something bigger; she would live with him and her children and would be happy again. At one point he tried to put his arms round her, but she slipped out of his grasp, jumped up from the chair and escaped to the other corner of the room. She looked at him with such disgust that he started to stammer an apology.

Then she returned to her chair and listened to his voice, although she couldn’t really follow what he was saying. He loved her and could not live without her; he’d tried to explain it to her in his letter. He had decided to die, to leave quietly without leaving any trace in her life. He realised that to live with her would be too great a happiness and he was not destined for such bliss. But now, now he’d understood what was on her mind, he wanted to stay with her at this fateful moment and leave at her side. Even that would mean greater happiness than he had dared hope for just moments before.

She said nothing. She looked at the window, veiled by a net curtain, beyond which night now held sway.

‘We’ll die together, Alena! My love! My love! Tell me if you want to. It’ll be quick; I’ve thought about it so many times before. This is a tiny room and we’ll feel no pain. We’ll just fall asleep. We’ll fall asleep together, my love, and no one will be able to hurt us any more.’

She still said nothing.

‘Say something, Alena! Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, I can hear you.’

‘Did you hear what I was saying to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good. I’ll turn it on then, Alena. If you say no, then I’ll keep you company wherever you want to go and then I’ll turn it on alone, Alena. Because I couldn’t if you didn’t want me to, if it wasn’t what you wanted.’

He locked the door and knelt down by the heater. Then she heard quite a loud hissing sound; she had never realised how loud the hiss of gas was.

She sat motionless on the chair while he lay down on the metal bed. ‘Alena, are you going to come and join me?’

She didn’t reply. She was only aware of the acrid stench of gas. Her eyes were open but she could see nothing. Perhaps Adam had come home already and was actually looking for her, but it didn’t matter any more, she thought with relief. It had never struck her this way before: the relief inherent in the state of not-being. She became aware of a blissful torpor that pressed against her eyes, now even the offensive stench was beginning to slip away, and a soft, opaque veil clouded her vision. All of a sudden the window opposite lit up like a flash of lightning and flew open. She was able to gaze into the high marble hall of the crematorium and in the front row could see them, her children, she could make their faces out clearly, they were coming nearer, growing bigger, like a film camera zooming in until the picture filled the whole screen, the entire horizon, the faces of her children swelled and then shrank until in the end there remained only their eyes: huge, gruesome eyes staring at her.

She got up and went over to the window as if in a dream. She knelt down and turned off the gas tap. Then she tried to open the window, but the handle was stuck, or was too hard to turn, or she no longer had the strength. She went back to the door. It was locked. She rattled the handle several times before realising that the key was sticking out of the lock. She unlocked the door and went out into the lobby. The hissing in her ears continued but it was much shriller now and sounded like the shriek of many whistles. She opened the door to the next room; it must have been the kitchen. Cool air wafted at her. For a moment she stood in the doorway and then her head started to swim. She sat down on the floor, right under the coat hooks, and wrapped her head in some sort of soft material, wrapping it round her like albumen, and closed her eyes.

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

Sometimes, in the brief reverie preceding sleep I see a landscape: a grassy hillside with scattered juniper bushes and short birch trees, and I fancy I can even hear the clang of sheep bells or glimpse the sharp outline of a horse’s brown neck. It is Vasil’s Antonka which Magdalena and I learnt to ride on. I feel the warmth of a summer’s day on my face, smell the scent of grass, see a wide sky with the single dark circling dot of a bird of prey, and sense the relief of a Sunday afternoon in the stillness, broken only by the sound of a familiar voice. It is almost nostalgia — for days long past, for a remote little town that I certainly didn’t love at the time I was obliged to live there.

I never called it by any other name than The Hole: that country town in the north-east corner of our republic. I didn’t even know it existed until the moment I learnt I was to practise there. There was no place further from Prague in the whole country. I had to travel a night and a day before I set eyes on it and before the soles of my shoes could touch the baking dust of the path that formed the border between the two-storey houses and the large open space regarded in those parts as a square.

Everything there seemed exotic and unfamiliar: the low buildings, the bilingual signs on the shops, the women’s costumes, people’s broad suntanned faces, the storks’ nests on the rooftops, the speech of the locals in the inn where I lived, and the court, which was crammed into one smallish building together with the construction department of the local authority. In my mind’s eye I can still see a corridor like a scene from an Eisenstein film: dozens of women wearing black headscarves and dark-coloured full skirts, men in battered hats and homespun trousers, and half-naked children. A hubbub of voices in which one could make out nothing, neither words, nor weeping nor laughter — a crowd, always including one or two cripples, that respectfully makes way for me as I pass through.

Equally exotic was the area between the courthouse and the inn which I crossed several times a day. In summer it was sunbaked earth covered with a grey film of dust; in autumn it was covered with a layer of mud and in winter with a layer of snow. It was an area which throbbed with the life of the town: horses, buses, markets, costumed processions, demonstrations, young pioneers, funerals, gypsies, motor-bikes, tightrope walkers, drunkards, soldiers, and villagers from the entire district who used to come to do their shopping at the five local shops. It was those villagers, gypsies and drunkards whose disputes and divorces I had to adjudicate, and whom I had to punish for their misdemeanours, quarrels and fights, as well as for their insubordination or their lack of political awareness.

But I looked forward to my work. No situations or surroundings, however strange, were going to catch me unawares. I was full of energy and eager to get on with something. I also had the best of intentions. I wasn’t going to enforce the law mindlessly; I was going to unearth the hidden motives of people’s deeds, precisely differentiate between mere going off the rails and criminal intent; I would educate my neglected brethren and bring the errant citizen back into decent society. Before I was actually told where I would be working, I pictured it in my mind’s eye: a monumental building from Austro-Hungarian days, several distinguished colleagues, whom I would consult or argue with, especially concerning interesting cases. But the building was not monumental by any means and my colleagues did not seem too distinguished either. Presiding Judge Tibor Hruškovič was a former coachman who had fought in the Eastern army and left it to join the State Security, where, after a year’s training, he was deemed qualified to run a court. There were lots of things to talk about with him, but interesting or difficult cases were not among them. He loved anecdotes, food, wine and noisy company. When he got drunk his broad face would go an apopleptic scarlet. In that state he would play the accordion and sing — and force the rest of us to dance. Once, when he was drunker than usual, he pulled out a pistol and started shooting up his office. First he put a bullet through a plaster statuette of a metalworker and then holed the picture on the wall before shooting to pieces a vase of flowers. Then he rolled on to the ground and started non compos mentis to lash out in all directions with his fists and feet.

I waited curiously to see whether someone would draw any conclusions as to his suitability. But his behaviour, if news of it ever got out at all, did not seem to perturb any of our superiors.

He always wanted us impose the stiffest penalties the law allowed, since the longer the criminals and enemies were behind bars the better it would be for society as a whole. This was so contrary to the spirit of even those laws we were supposed to be upholding that I actually managed to protest on several occasions, but he either didn’t listen to me or didn’t understand.

My only colleague, Dr Klement Horváth, had served there for many years. He was an experienced lawyer, having graduated from the rigorous imperial schools, and an expert in Roman, Austrian and Hungarian law. He had been a judge during the first and second republics and the independent Slovak state. Having once tried those who were now in power, all the more willing was he now to try those who used to be in power then. He toed the line; not a word, not a glance suggested that he conformed unwillingly, or that he thought anything but what he was supposed to think.

I felt morally superior. I hadn’t had to change my views, fall into line or turn my coat. I was able to act according to my convictions.

I acted according to my convictions, fought for the new system of justice, defended the nascent new order. I served it with every ounce of my strength. I delivered dozens of verdicts (the Presiding Judge enrolled us in competition: the more cases the individual judge dealt with, the better the assessment), sat on various commissions and committees, and travelled round the villages, cajoling, negotiating and educating.

Occasionally, however, I would be overcome with nostalgia for my far-off home, besides having a permanent sense of not being appreciated. It was out of the question that I, who was destined to achieve something of importance, if not indeed of great significance, should spend the rest of my days in such a godforsaken spot.

I used to write lots of letters in those days (to my parents, uncles, colleagues and even Professor Lyon) with enthusiastic accounts of my selfless achievements, while occasionally complaining — as if jokingly — about my banishment, from which it looked as if only someone’s intercession could release me.

I received comforting replies, written — as I increasingly realised — in another world, and packages from my mother containing carefully wrapped plum slices or pastries filled with ground poppy seeds (goodness knows where she obtained them).

In the course of time, my home drifted further and further away from me, and with it all my former and current notions about the world. My ideals and university precepts started to quake from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. How much longer would they survive the life here?

My favourite person in the courthouse was our clerk, Vasil. He was born locally and was the same age as my father — though, unlike him, he was a powerful man with enormous hands and a broad head on which there was always perched some hat or fur cap. He knew — or made a convincing show of knowing — the backgrounds of all the litigious individuals. He could remember all the sentences passed since the end of the war when he first came to work for the court.

He used to come and see me in my office, a knapsack thrown over his shoulder. He would always have a short chat with me if no more, regaling me with sayings about people, the weather and the ways of the world. From time to time, and especially in winter when it was already getting dark, he would pull a bottle of home-made spirits from his knapsack, pour us both a nip and reminisce about pre-war days before they had a court, a hospital or a factory, when he used to earn money as a forestry labourer or from smuggling cloth into Poland and alcohol out. If he had a good few drinks he would start to talk about the independent state, when he was set to catch smugglers instead, as they appointed him to the local constabulary. And if he got really drunk he would tell me the most fantastic stories claiming that they had really happened: about the mysterious black dog which always appeared behind the cottage belonging to an uncle of his who had inexplicably disappeared, about the golden coach and four which appeared to his father when he was returning from a social. The horses were driven by an eyeless coachman with hair aflame. He was the blind count who had once owned the local estate, and whom God had struck blind during his lifetime as a punishment for his dissolute behaviour. But even blindness did not secure his repentance and he went on to kill his coachman out of spite. So after his death he had been punished thus. That was justice. I was not sure what his intentions were in telling me that story, or whether he believed it or not. He also expounded his own theory about how society was ordered. The world was made up of those who ruled and those who worked. The masters were always changing, however. When new masters came along they would make all sorts of promises to their subjects so as to win them over, but as time went by they would forget about their promises so nothing changed, only the masters. The poor had to work and the only chance they had of getting anything was by cheating the gentry, and it was the people’s God-given right to cheat their masters. That was the way things had always been. And that was the way they would be now, he said, when I tried to explain to him that it was the people, not the masters, who were ruling now. The people couldn’t rule, he told me, because from the moment they were in power they were no longer the people but gentry. Meanwhile those who were ruled and had to do the work were the people, even if they had once been gentry, and the new people would cheat and rob the new masters. And they would get punished for it.

He was the only person I could turn to for advice (not counting those who volunteered advice themselves) and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to quiz him, that both the Presiding Judge and Dr Horváth secretly consulted him too. For Vasil knew in advance the effect which the verdict would have both in town and in the defendant’s home village, how many children the defendant was really supporting and how big and influential his family was. Vasil alone knew how to explain the true motives of crimes, instead of the fictitious ones derived from the literature: not class hatred but ancestral hatred, unhappy loves, inherited jealousies and unpaid debts.

It was only just before I left The Hole that I discovered he accepted bribes from the parties involved in return for intercession on their behalf, and that much of what he had told me, and which I had taken as gospel, was the product of his imagination. In his eyes, I was one of the new gentry (or at least one of their servants) and it was his God-given right to do me down.

That autumn, they assigned me my first politically significant case: that of a former shopkeeper from the village of Vyšná. I was supposed to convict him of concealing (like the majority of the shopkeepers whose shops were confiscated) some of his stock. In cash terms the concealed portion amounted to four thousand five hundred crowns.

I still failed to grasp the logic of a legal system which, knowing that it couldn’t prosecute everyone who broke the new laws, selected certain individuals and punished them severely as an example to the rest. I was amazed that the prosecutor ascribed to the shopkeeper’s action, which was so understandable, a deliberate intention to jeopardise supply, and in aggravating circumstances to boot. (Those aggravating circumstances were the defendant’s origins and the continuing political tension in the region.) What did the prosecutor expect of me? What sort of penalty for a hidden sack of sugar, several bottles of spirits, a few enamelled cooking pots and some axes? Five years? Six years? Or ten, even?

Shortly before the trial, the Presiding Judge called me in to ask about the details. After listening to my misgivings, he informed me that ‘our comrades’ (the term we used for the district officials) attached great political significance to the case. He merely wanted to forewarn me that the comrades would be keeping a close eye on what I did.

They clearly did not trust me and felt the need to let me know it. I felt hurt.

I went to see the prosecutor. Admittedly, he was no friend of mine, but we were of the same generation. He always treated me affably, with the faint superiority of someone who is senior in the profession and has greater experience. We would often chat together in our one local pub about this and that. (Like our Presiding Judge he had only taken a one-year course in law, so on the day I started my practice in The Hole, he was just completing his third year there.) On this particular occasion, as usual, we started by talking about wine, football and the nationality question. Then I raised the matter of our joint case. Was it really so important? What did my colleague think?

He shrugged. It was better not to think, he said.

I voiced the hope I would meet with some understanding. No one had the right to expect savagery from us in the name of justice. A sentence of a few months would be adequate punishment for what the man had done. My companion’s immediate reaction was to explain that this was no time to go in for unnecessary heart-searching. We were required to take action. Our enemies were already acting, as the case showed. If we didn’t convict them they would soon start to put us on trial and none of us would escape with our lives!

But in this trial it would be a matter of very specific guilt, I objected; surely it could not merit such harsh punishment?

The same was true of every trial, he told me. We had taken their property, which had formed the basis of their power. But they had not given up and wanted to get back their property and with it their power, Our power was therefore at stake. We had to defend it, that was why we were there. If we were weak we would lose our right to keep our posts.

Yes, I agreed, but strength did not mean cruelty. He replied that nothing we did could be cruel to them, we could only be cruel towards the people. It would be cruel if we let the people fall into their hands again.

I spent the whole night before the trial debating with myself how to behave. The defendant had acted on the understanding he was in the right. After all, they were his things he was hiding and therefore in his own eyes he was the one protecting them from appropriation not the one who had appropriated them. But even if I took no account of his subjective conviction, what had been the objective effect of his action? What of value had been destroyed or misappropriated? How was I to bring in a verdict of guilty in all responsibility? The trouble was that I was not responsible solely to myself. The moment I joined the Party I had voluntarily accepted Party discipline. Now, those who represented the Party, for reasons that were not (and did not have to be) clear to me, were demanding the stiffest penalty. Was it for me to resist? Whom or what would I be helping if I were to do so? What was I able to influence, in fact? The defendant’s fate. Hardly. My fate? Undoubtedly. They would classify me as unreliable, as a friend of the other side. But I wasn’t, for heaven’s sake! I had never felt the least sympathy for shopkeepers or big farmers, nor for any of those we now classified as class enemies. All I wanted was to respect justice. But what was justice?

I gradually stopped worrying my head about the circumstances of the case and the defendant’s guilt or otherwise. Instead I thought about myself and the consequences the case might have for me personally.

I sentenced that man to three and a half years’ imprisonment, even though I knew full well that the sentence was unjust, and although I was fully aware that the majority of those who had worked themselves up to some post or other in The Hole and had some hand in the exercise of power accepted bribes and committed fraud, that at least half of all the illegally distilled liquor found its way into the cellars of those who ought to be setting an example, who represented the law or at least the authorities, and that where liquor was not enough, money changed hands. I convicted a victim. The only thing I can advance in my defence is that I lived in a vacuum and lacked courage.

I had not been a faithful servant of justice. All I had managed to do was to assist the existing state of lawlessness, sometimes aggravating and sometimes attenuating its mistakes, while acquiring experience and trying to discover what the law was. But the more I learnt about the true state of affairs, the less acceptable I became for the existing regime.

In the same way that people who start ruling stop being people and become masters, a servant of arbitrary power who starts to think stops being its auxiliary and starts to become its enemy.

2

Conditions that day were extremely harsh. Low, cold clouds were sweeping in from the Polonina Carpathians in the north and now and then they would shed large, sticky flakes of snow.

We drove to a village right on the border to persuade the peasants not to withdraw from the recently created cooperatives. The vehicle — an old retired Praga lorry with a ripped awning — belonged to the town council. Eight or nine of us sat inside. Most of the people I knew at least by sight. Local council officials, men and women teachers, district administrators and even an army officer. I remained silent although the rest of them talked. I lacked the matter-of-factness and confidence of people convinced of the rightness of their actions. Admittedly I was convinced that what we were asking of people was sensible, necessary and in their own interest, but why should I be the one to explain it? I was born in the city; their language and their way of thinking were alien to me. Moreover I was reluctant to enter people’s homes uninvited, particularly at a moment of the day when people had the right to their privacy and relaxation. During visits I would let my partner do the talking (not only was he a local, he also knew the local language and usages) while I would just sit on a chair and embody the authority and dignity of penal power. Remember thai: the law supports those who obey and assails those who rebel.

It was dark when we came to a halt on the muddy village square. Yellowish lights in two or three of the windows, a paraffin lamp swaying in the wind in front of the pub. I jumped down from the lorry and caught sight of several men in light-coloured trousers and dark hats going into the pub.

I did not know the place, being there for the first time. All those villages seemed alike to me: wooden houses with moss-grown thatched roofs. I was the last one in line, behind a woman in a short quilted jacket, whom someone in the lorry had addressed as Magdalena. I couldn’t recall having seen her anywhere previously.

Suddenly, behind us, the pub door opened and several men came out on to the village square, which was dimly lit by the swaying lamp. They shouted something, though I couldn’t understand a single word. Someone from our group said something angry in response, at which one of the men in front of the pub picked up a stone and threw it in our direction. The shouting immediately intensified: abuse and curses which I also did not understand, but their gestures left me in no doubt as to their meaning. The woman in the quilted jacket turned to me as if asking for help; I took her by the hand and led her back to the lorry.

I don’t know where those people had managed to find them so quickly, but now they were armed with pitchforks and other implements, and one of them was clutching a long woodcutter’s axe. It was he who now barred our way, shouting something or other, and I told him to let us pass, that we would be leaving immediately. He went on shouting but I walked past him, together with the woman I was leading, and he let us go, perhaps because what I had said was foreign to his ears or because I had a woman with me, or because I spoke calmly and quietly. They let us pass and the rest of the party straggled along behind. After climbing on to the lorry I scanned the scene and that moment printed itself on my memory: unshaven faces, threatening fists, upraised pitchforks and sticks and a deafening roar of voices that seemed to me scarcely human.

Magdalena remained at my side. Everyone chatted excitedly, only she remained silent. I sat with eyes closed leaning against the side of the lorry. I was overcome with tiredness and a sense of being a foreigner in that strange, far-flung, indecipherable world, and then I suddenly felt a kind of pressure on my shoulder and the touch of someone’s hair on my face. I opened my eyes but nothing could be seen in that darkness but the glow of several cigarettes.

When we reached the square of our own town, someone suggested that we should immediately report to the police and someone else wanted us to go straight to the Party secretariat. In a quiet voice, Magdalena asked to be excused as she felt unwell. I offered to see her home.

Sleet continued to fall and the clock in the tower struck the hour. It was only nine o’clock, though I had the feeling that most of the night had gone. She lived in a bed-sitter in one of three newly built blocks of flats.

As I entered her sitting room I was taken aback. Part of the left-hand wall was taken up by bookshelves containing large, leather-bound old volumes. Two tall Chinese vases containing stems of reedmace stood either side of the bookshelves. The wall opposite was hung with a painting by some romantic master showing a girl on the shore of a storm-tossed sea, and an old map of Mexico with the rivers and deserts coloured by hand. I stepped over to the map and found the blue stream of the Rio Grande. I suddenly heard someone say something in a strange, croaking voice. I was startled, but it turned out to be only a parrot in a cage talking to me. I sat down in an armchair. The Persian carpet beneath my feet was thick and soft, and the light in the room was also soft and green-tinged. I had the impression it was shaking, so that tiny shadows like showering grain swirled round the walls. I heard the sound of water running into a bowl or a kettle and then the aroma of coffee reached my nostrils.

She came into the room wearing a long red dress. Her hair, whose colour recalled the reedmace heads, was tied with a green ribbon. The parrot and I roused ourselves at the same moment and it screeched: ‘Go away, you loony! Good night!’ I went as far as the bathroom, which smelt of soap and violets. In the mirror I saw a tired, unshaven face. It was a long time since I had last noticed myself as a person: the rather stocky figure, the left shoulder always slightly higher than the other, the short neck, the nose that looked as if it was broken at the root — a nose that lent me a resemblance to the caged parrot. All the time I was being told from the next room to get out, but I returned to my armchair and to Magdalena. I needed only to reach out in order to touch her. She stood up and covered the cage with a sheet of steel-blue velvet. The parrot’s name was Theo and the words were addressed to her, not to me. There was no one else for him to talk to, as there were just the two of them. She repeated those words several times with vehemence: Go away from here. Get away from this town, where she had been posted as I had. Get out of this country! And go where? A long way away. Somewhere so far away that she wouldn’t have to hear of this country again; so she could forget about it and everything connected with it. Why? Because living here was dreadful and depressing. How could one live in a constant state of torture? I had no idea of the hour, having lost all sense of time. I knew it was my duty to contradict her. It would also have been a good idea to say something about myself, but I was too overcome with desire to say anything. At last I made up my mind. I touched her hair with my fingertips and stroked her neck. And then she looked up and waited for me to kiss her.

3

I don’t know whether I loved her, but I desired her so much that in the middle of a hearing I would suddenly realise I wasn’t taking in a word of what was being said around me. I was missing making love to her, missing the touch of her slim body, the kisses from her large mouth, I was missing her voice, though probably only because it was so long since I had heard anyone speak to me tenderly.

I don’t know whether she loved me, but I am sure she needed me. She was lonelier than I. Her mother had died during the war and her father (he had been a doctor in Brno and had I been from that city, I would certainly have known his name) had fled abroad nine years before. She could have left with him, of course; they had all left then, including her uncle. She had been twenty at the time and studying aesthetics and music and she could not see why she should have to abandon her studies. Apart from that, there was someone she had not wanted to leave behind.

She had remained alone in a superbly furnished apartment with lots of valuable paintings, carpets and Chinese porcelain, as well as a piano and some old books. They had moved her out of the apartment, and I don’t know about the fellow she had stayed behind for. They must have split up, or maybe he fled too. In any event she never told me anything more about him.

She was unable to make a career in her chosen field: how could she have, with a background like hers! They had posted her to the school here. She taught geography and history and ran the school choir, singing folk songs (some of which she had collected and arranged herself). She had a feel not only for music but also for literature and painting, having come from a home where art was part of life, not just a topic of conversation. With my obsession for politics and my readiness to talk about everything under the sun, whether I understood it properly or not, I must have seemed to her an uncultured ignoramus.

Her world seemed to be governed by another law and another time. She tried, at least briefly, to draw me into it. She taught me to sit down and drink tea; to stay calm and say nothing. To listen to music without talking and without thinking about anything but the music. At such moments as those I used to feel we were close, that she was closer than anyone else to me, and that she felt the same; but I expect I was mistaken.

I remember waking one night to discover she was not lying at my side. I waited for a long time and when she failed to return, went to look for her. She was sitting half-dressed in the kitchen. I asked her why she was not sleeping. She told me to be quiet and leave her alone. When I insisted that she come back to bed, she told me she didn’t want to sleep any more. She didn’t want to live any more, she couldn’t go on living like this. What did she mean, she couldn’t go on living? Not like this and in this place. Because it was not human to live a lie, to live surrounded by lies, to live in a country enclosed with barbed wire which was impervious even to ideas. Everything was empty and mindless, and I was mindless too, I was the embodiment of emptiness. She hated me, she said through tears. Why? Because of what I had done with her, what I was doing to people, to the whole of this country. And what was I doing? I was pushing it deeper and deeper into the void, casting it into darkness. I and the rest of my ilk; we were just like insects, like locusts, like flies. We had flooded the land with our paltriness; we were a swamp into which one could only go on sinking deeper and deeper.

I was cut to the quick. I got up, got dressed and made to leave. But she held on to me in the doorway. She hugged me and begged me not to leave her there all alone; I wasn’t like all the rest; I at least listened to what she told me, even if I didn’t understand her.

Then we made love. With passion and with hate. We made love out of loneliness and despair, out of pain and aspirations which eluded each other.

So what did she want? I asked her. What did she want to do?

To leave, of course. To cross the sea. To go anywhere where one could still live without lies and dissimulation. And would she take me with her? She might; maybe I would change there. But she knew I wouldn’t leave. She may have been right and I wouldn’t have left: after all I had my parents and brother here; and besides, I had never dreamt of going off to live under a foreign system. Of course I hadn’t! This was my system. The most I had dreamed of was changing it a little bit, improving it: that much she knew about me already. But how would I change it? Remake it in what image? I had no real image inside me anyway.

4

In the middle of a not particularly important trial a man entered the courtroom — he was a fairly portly fellow in his thirties, wearing a white shirt and checked trousers, from which it was immediately obvious to me he was no local.

He made a rather stiff bow and sat down on the last of our three benches. He wore old-fashioned spectacles with slender frames that reminded me of the pince-nez my grandfather used to wear.

His presence perturbed me. It is true that our trials were public, but I was able to tell in advance the likely or possible visitors. This man was not one among them.

Had I done something wrong, perhaps? Had my sentencing been a bit too lenient of late? Or had someone denounced me for leading a dissolute life?

I became nervous and stopped acting naturally. In fact I started to shout and act in a severe and peremptory manner, while at the same time stumbling over my words and losing my concentration, so that it was almost impossible for me to dictate properly for the record.

He was waiting for me at the end of the trial. He said his name was Matěj Kožnar and he worked as an editor for Prague Radio. He had come to our district to do some research for a programme. He had heard about me and he was sure I would be able to tell him something interesting about local life. Would I be prepared to spare him a little time?

I felt relieved, and even pleased that someone should be interested in my experiences and opinions.

I took him on a walk through the town. The day was hot and everything seemed bleached under the mountain-blue skies. I gave him a guided tour of the building site where the new hospital was under construction. The new hospital was supposed to have been opened the previous year, but they had been unable to complete it because again and again most of the building materials would disappear. I could even show him cottages which everyone knew had been built from stolen materials.

He quoted a Russian proverb to me: In olden days they fed a single sow, the trough has got a lot more crowded now. Then he asked whether everyone really did know that the cottages we were looking at had been built out of stolen material, and I confirmed that was the case. He asked whether theft which was public knowledge could still be regarded as theft. I replied that theft was a term we used to describe the fact of something having been stolen and not the concealment of that fact. He said he hadn’t expressed himself properly. What he wanted to know was whether a theft which was common knowledge and went unpunished did not begin to lose the character of an illegal action. For some time already, he had been observing an interesting transformation. Things which in the past had been punished as dishonourable and unlawful were now condoned or at least tolerated, while on the other hand, things which had once been considered honourable and lawful were now being punished. In his view this was deliberate policy — we were all supposed to be obedient subjects of the state, we were supposed to live in the awareness that we owed our every breath and our very existence on this earth to the benevolence of the state. And how better could the state demonstrate its benevolence than by pardoning us our crimes? And what more effective way was there of rendering us dependent on the state than allowing us to walk freely only thanks to its indulgence? That was why the state tempted us to break the law and actually goaded us to.

Magdalena invited us to dinner.

The parrot was so put out by the stranger’s presence that it withdrew to a corner of its cage and remained obdurately silent, while we drank wine and talked late into the night. Matěj was a native of Moravia like Magdalena, having been born in a village to the north of Jihlava. All his forebears on his father’s side had been Protestants and stonemasons for as long as anyone remembered. One of them, following the Emperor Joseph’s decree of religious tolerance, decided that he would endow his newly created congregation with a dignified church, one that would equal the other churches in the area. The congregation had raised some funds and Matěj’s great-grandfather set to work. He himself drew up the plans, dug the foundations and started the building, working from dawn till dusk. And in the space of three years, he had completed a church with a mighty vaulted ceiling and a tower with a belfry.

The church was standing to this day and Matěj promised to show it to us when we returned from Slovakia.

Afterwards, he and Magdalena reminisced about their childhood and he enthused about the days when loudspeakers did not blare through the village at six in the morning, when folk in their part of the world used to cut cellars out of a rock face instead of installing electrical boxes for making ice, when only people and animals walked the roads and people lived in harmony with an age-old rhythm, when the calendar still retained its ancient astrological significance. And they sang together:

Now is Eastertide

The keys where did she hide…

When he departed the next day, I felt a sense of loss as if a close friend had left me.

5

In the way that prisoners talk most of all about freedom, Magdalena most of all enjoyed talking about travel. She would relive in words her one and only trip abroad. Shortly after the war, her father had taken her with him to Rome where he was to attend some doctors’ congress. Afterwards, they had gone on a sea cruise and anchored several times on the coast of Africa. She had viewed the mouth of the Nile, the temples, the pyramids and the sphinxes and had also seen the desert. Astonishingly enough, it was the desert which had made the greatest impression on her. She voiced the opinion that I, too, would be different if I were to find myself even once in a landscape resigned to death. Maybe then I would discover true humility and realise the need for meditation. She would also talk about how one day we would go off together on a European journey, visiting the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach had been the organist, and the art galleries in Madrid and Bern. Then we would travel together right down to the south of France, as far as Provence, and walk the streets of Aries; we would take a steamer up the Rhine which Heine and Broch had written about. She knew lots of places she had never actually set eyes on and I expect she would be disappointed if she ever saw them as they really are — criss-crossed with motorways and befouled by motor cars. But life never gave her the opportunity.

Her holidays were longer than mine, besides which I squandered my own allocation on occasional trips home (two days’ journey by bus and train, a day sitting at home with Mother and Father and a day rushing around Prague visiting friends and bookshops, before managing to snatch an evening in the theatre and wearily observing scenes from a life very different from my own) so I was only left with five days in the summer. It wasn’t enough for a journey to Provence, or to the Czech lands, but I wanted to give my girlfriend a treat. I bought myself a large rucksack, and packed it with spare clothes, boots and a billy can. She had a small army knapsack made from calf-skin, and apart from her spare clothes took a flute, some music and a camera, and we set off for the Beskid Mountains.

I recall us walking along a deserted fieldpath with the sun rising over us; we pass by villages scattered over the hillsides, herds of cattle that look like brown patches, and shepherds’ huts (we sat in one of them and ate bread with ewe’s milk cheese) while the fragrance of distant fires reaches our nostrils and we catch the sound of barefoot children yodelling; we are walking on moss among mountain thyme and Carthusian pinks, and along dry-stone walls that radiate heat, and along a valley up which the sound of bells is carried. I can see Magdalena in her light flowered dress; for the first time I saw her happy; she laughed and remembered her childhood and people she had never mentioned before.

We spent the night in an old farmhouse. The farmer’s wife gave us the marriage bed and we couldn’t get to sleep in the unaccustomed surroundings, in the strangely heavy, musty air of that low-ceilinged room. We cuddled and chatted and lay silent, waiting for sleep, and then chatted again, but about things we had never talked about before. It was as if we had never spent a single day together before, as if we’d only just met and had started to love each other that day.

And I really did love her that night. More than at any other time, I felt a great sense of pleasure at having her close to me. It occurred to me that we should leave The Hole together. I might find a post as a lawyer with a commercial enterprise or there was the possibility of taking less qualified (though also less dubious) work. At least I ought to make an effort to return to the city I had been sent: away from. We might even be happy there.

And once more we spent a whole day rambling along lengthy ridges in a desolate landscape far from the works of human hands and full of peace. That evening we found lodging in a small inn with only two bedrooms. We booked both rooms. The innkeeper insisted on it as we were not married.

We had our supper in a room crowded with drinkers. They were singing at the table next to ours. I wanted to leave as soon as possible, so as to retain the sense of inner peace our rambling had given me. But when our meal was over Magdalena wanted to stay. She made me order a bottle of wine. She was not used to drinking and alcohol went quickly to her head. She got up and asked them at the next table if she might join them, and made me move tables too. She sang along with them, while resentment began to grow in me that she had not sensed my need to leave and instead got drunk and preferred the company of drunken strangers to my own. She noticed I wasn’t singing and asked me to join in too. But I didn’t know how to sing, or how to enjoy myself.

Around midnight, the pub closed. At last everyone got up, the strangers said goodbye and Magdalena hung on to me drunkenly. I was obliged to unlock her room for her. She put her arms round me as soon as we were inside. She wanted to know if I loved her, and why I never sang, why I could never relax and have a good time. She wanted to know if it was because my mind was always on saving the world. And she begged me, while she was taking off her clothes, to sing with her, at least, now we were alone. She pulled out the flute from her knapsack and started to play on it. The scene etched itself in my memory: her slim, almost white body, which seemed to shine in the darkness, the black flute in her big fingers, and behind her the country bed with its striped quilt. When at last we were lying next to each other, she cuddled up to me in that creaky inn bed and started to kiss me and whisper tender words. She was tender to me as never before or afterwards, that young woman who virtually became my first wife, my unbetrothed wife.

I started to feel ill in the train on the way back to The Hole. I shook with fever and was sick several times in the foul toilet. I tried to conceal my sickness but there was no fooling Magdalena. She took me home with her on the bus, and in spite of my protests and assurances that I would be fine by evening, she summoned the doctor. The doctor prescribed me penicillin and Magdalena went off to fetch it from the chemist’s. A stifling silence reigned in the room, broken only by the buzz of flies. I wasn’t used to illness any more, or to having nothing to do. I got up and wandered round the room. On the table by Magdalena’s bed lay a book that she had apparently started to read before our departure. I leafed through the first pages: it was about some anarchists who were sentenced to death, about the fear of those condemned to die. I put the book back down. Why had she been reading it? Probably on account of me. I would ask her what made her read such depressing books.

There was a roaring in my head and I closed my eyes. I picked up my pack and set off once more for the summit. But my legs ached too much. I realised I was once more sentenced to death and was fleeing my gaolers. I was running away, straining to lift leaden feet that sank into the muddy path, and I could hear them coming after me, the stamping of their feet.

I opened my eyes and tried to work out what decade I was in and expel my inordinate fear, but I couldn’t. What if they came, rang the doorbell and took me away? Who? I tried to persuade myself that nobody of the kind existed, but deep down I knew I was only trying to console myself. Nothing has changed. I know them personally, those bailiffs and catchpolls, I’ve sat around with them in the inn, haven’t I? When, where? I can’t say, but I do know them and they know me; they know my faith has been shaken and I have nothing to use as a defence. There is no defence when it comes to matters of faith. There is just faith and rebellion against faith. And with horror I listened as the door downstairs banged and someone came stamping up the stairs.

Magdalena returned, bringing me the medicine and several letters that had arrived for me at my digs while I’d been away. She put a bunch of carnations in a vase and set the vase on the table by the couch where I lay. They were the first flowers I had ever received in my life. I was touched. I would love to have said something tender to that young woman with the big hands, the only person I could look forward to seeing there. But I felt too wretched and it was humiliating to be tender at that particular moment. So I listened to her words with my eyes closed. I said that I definitely felt much better and would get up tomorrow, but for the time being would eat nothing. She sat down by me and talked about how I would soon be leaving, that we would both be going off somewhere where we’d be happier; we’d walk along the sea shore and lie in the sand. I asked where it would be. In Provence, she replied and I said wearily: Never! She fell silent, but I felt her fingers rest for a few moments more on the back of my hand, and then she went off somewhere again.

I picked up the letters from the side-table. One was from my mother, one from my brother and the third bore the letterhead of the Law Faculty. In it Professor Lyon informed me that the academy was advertising for an academic assistant in the field of penal law and he advised me to apply for the job. He asked me to send my curriculum vitae and a list of my articles, both my published ones and the ones I was working on, to him, Professor Lyon.

I put the letter down on the table. Magdalena must have found it there when she came back, because she asked me whether I was pleased.

I couldn’t understand what I had to be pleased about.

Because I would be able to leave, to get away from here. She stared at me; it seemed to me there was something wistful in her gaze and it retreated rapidly from me as if I was already sitting in a departing bus while she remained abandoned at the deserted bus stop.

That evening I could still force no food down me, but I told her not to call the doctor and refused a thermometer, a compress, and all other attention; all I wanted was for her to put on a record and I lay and dozed to the sound of the organ.

And I recall that when, the next day, I was unable to touch anything apart from a little tea, I was suddenly gripped by a realisation of the possibility of death, inescapable death, whether immediately, or in the near future. I strove with my exhausted mind to grasp the void out of which I had emerged and to which I must return, but I was unable to concentrate sufficiently. I also thought about the fact that I had not achieved anything, that I had not managed to put into practice any of the things I’d dreamed of, and that if I were to go now, there would be no trace of me left behind, no memory, nothing apart from a stone with my name on it. And that would soon be overgrown and before long it would fall and sink into the earth. And then I felt a sudden affinity with all those in the world who were dying and it struck me that the worst death of all must be when one is fully conscious and one’s senses are not dulled in any way. And my thoughts went back to my friends who had so recently stood on the tiles of the gas chambers; I thought also about the soldiers who were herded into the final assault and the condemned prisoner being led to the scaffold, and it seemed to me those faces were coming back to life before my eyes. I saw them so vividly that they were more real than real faces. I saw shaven scalps and bloody holes in foreheads and moving jaws that were trying in vain to say some word or other. And I thought about my forebears, my ancient unknown forebears, who once upon a time had also had to live and die though I did not know how. It was certain, however, that many of them had suffered terribly. It seemed to me that I was able to perceive that suffering as a whole: wars from which my great-grandfathers had never returned; escapes during which they had perished; crucifixions and executions and exile in foreign lands, and death on the journey to foreign lands; and I was filled with a growing sorrow about the human lot. I think I must have groaned out loud; I was still in a fever. Magdalena called the doctor again and he gave me an injection.

And I really did feel better straight away. I don’t know if it was the injection or whether the illness simply receded, but I was suddenly seized by the conviction, the blissful premonition, that it was in my power to do something to redeem myself. I tried to communicate my feeling to Magdalena. I know now what I’m going to do!

Yes, she said. You’re going to leave.