Judge On Trial

Chapter Seven

1

IT WAS STILL light when he arrived home on Sunday. The place seemed unusually empty and untidy. The quilts were still spread out to air over the backs of chairs and several pairs of shoes were scattered around the front hall. On his desk he found a letter from his brother. Cups from their last breakfast lay unwashed in the kitchen sink and there was a stale, half-eaten slice of bread on the work top.

He had a shower. The water washed off all the unfamiliar smells and caresses that still adhered to him. Alexandra had gradually receded, though had he wanted he could have held on to her. He could, if he wanted, conjure up every detail of her body, could hear her speaking to him, repeating the words that drew him to her and took his breath away, he could embrace her, return those touches that aroused delight in him: such ecstasy that for a moment, at least, he forgot to speculate on the consequences of his actions and his situation, he forgot about past and future. But he let her recede.

He dried himself, put on some old trousers and went into his room.

His brother was writing to him from Edinburgh. That was a city he had never managed to visit, although many people had told him of its charms. But his brother was hardly concerned with the charm of the place. He had flown here, he wrote, to a ‘congress of mad scientists’ who (purely in the abstract) discussed imaginary relationships and hypothetical phenomena, which would then be put to use by equally mad technicians, but mad in a different way, to construct something that would undoubtedly annihilate us all. ‘And in fact it crossed my mind when we were taking off from Heathrow that we ought to have left flying to the birds and the angels. By trying to displace them from the sky as we once took the waters away from the fish and the land from the other creatures, we have overstepped the bounds and our punishment is inevitable.

‘The hotel where the congress is being held is extremely posh. The conference room is all headphones, buttons and air-conditioning, with a projection screen in place of a blackboard. We drink excellent coffee and the local fire-water. The topics, as I was saying, are purely theoretical: A new method for calculating the configurational centring of Green’s function in random systems. Or: A contribution to the theory of multi-particulate phenomena in absorptional and emissive X-ray spectra. Sometimes it crosses my mind that sitting somewhere else in a hotel just like this is a similar little group of happy gentlemen totally dedicated to science listening to a strictly theoretical paper about rays that will end up slicing the earth in two, or about methods to unleash a chain reaction incorporating water-bonded hydrogen. The paper will assume, naturally, that nothing of the kind will ever happen, because who would want to destroy the earth on which they live? The trouble is it’ll happen anyway, either by mistake or some nutter somewhere will decide to do it on a mad whim or out of perversity. Our father always used to say (and I expect he still does) that every major discovery finds some application. Another thing he said, and he is the most thorough and reliable person I could ever imagine, is that everyone makes a fateful error at least once in his life. And while I’m recalling his words of wisdom (though maybe he didn’t lavish them on you to the same extent — you were engaged in something which was scarcely worthy of attention in his eyes) he also used to say that there was no such thing as infallible technical equipment. I was thinking about him as I sat there hearing about translational asymmetrical systems. It just had to happen one of these days and in a split second it’d be the end of this comfortable hall, of posh hotels everywhere, here and in the antipodes. At last there’d be a levelling of the rich and poor, white and coloured, Hiltons and slums and that flawless levelling which would also be flawlessly entropic was something I’d have on my conscience too. So the lecture started to get on my nerves and I picked up my things and went out of the hotel. And in the very next street I found a magnificent pub with a games room. There were lots of gambling machines that would quickly rob you of all your money, without giving you any fun, but also a fantastic car circuit on which the miniature cars raced non-stop. You could bet on one of four cars: the red one paid out 1.5 pence for every penny staked, the blue returned double the stake, the green five times and the white one fifty times the stake. Seemingly everything was run by computer; even the pay-outs were automatic. You could stake from a penny to a shilling. I was utterly absorbed watching those little cars belting round their tracks, and there was no way of telling which would be first. Just at the very last moment one of them would always shoot ahead — most often the red one, as you can imagine — and overtake the rest just before the end. I calculated that the white one should win at least once every eighty races. I managed to sit and just watch fifty-five races and I was terrified I’d enter the game too late, but the white didn’t win once. Then, bro, I started to bet. I bet on fifty races: first a penny, then twopence, then fivepence and when it got to the hundred-and-fifth race, I bet a whole shilling and gave up. Brother of mine, that white car proceeded to win in the hundred-and-eighth, hundred-and-tenth and hundred-and-eleventh races. At that moment I thought it best to leave. My fingers still shake at the thought that I could have had seven pounds and a couple of shillings plus that incredible excitement. I don’t think I should tempt fate — maybe it’s a warning for me. Actually I was intending to say something else about Father. When he was my age he had great hopes, though they were just a big excuse, more likely. For him there existed a higher authority. He exempted his socialism from all laws. It was the only machine that was not supposed to fail because it had the capacity to repair itself. That gave Father the strength to go on zealously making his machines. The world is full of false hopes. But none of them appeal to me. The most I’m prepared to do is bet on a white car and get carried away for an hour with hopes of winning. Apart from that, as you know, I am interested in quite hopeless matters such as amorphous materials, particularly glass. I go on doing my sums the way Father did his, and there really are moments when I feel I’m moving through my own private universe. I am its master and no one may enter it. Then suddenly I sense an enormous pressure on my universe, a pressure so great that it is compressed into a single, solitary ray — which could slice the earth in half with no problem. And I get me such a fright that I say to myself: what’s it for, then? What I’m lacking, bro, is satisfaction and a goal. And I ask myself: what do I possess, what do I have left? Where is my home, where is my universe?’

Adam looked around him. Everything was in its place: shelves packed with books, the radio, the legs of his dark trousers projecting from the half-open wardrobe door. Was this his home?

Things had never interested him. They seemed to fill the emptiness but they didn’t really. He knew too well that they could be taken away from him at any moment. Things and people. And then what was left?

We never ever talked together about such things, you and I, little brother. We ate at the one table and played chess and tennis together, but we never talked about anything of that kind. There was never enough time, or maybe we had the feeling that it would only be empty talk anyway. It was I who was always doing the talking: about beauty and goodness, about the parallelism of the deity and humanity, about the knowability and non-knowability of the world, about liberty as loving obedience to eternal truths, about free will, about the one and only ethical doctrine for a virtuous and noble life, as well as about the moral imperative and the moral code. We would lie there in a hayloft or by a pond with a friend whom I have heard nothing of for twenty years or more; he disappeared into the world even more irretrievably than you, and with him went those categories and a way of thinking which struck me then as far too abstract. In real life, it seemed to me, other considerations prevailed. First they gaoled Father, then I had to go and take a judge’s post in the back of beyond, which meant handing down verdicts, attending meetings, fighting for peace, making speeches (agitation they called it in those days) and generally defending the interests of the Party. I had to be aware all the time who was the first, second and the last secretary, who had me under surveillance, who was reporting on me, who was vetting me; I had to consider very carefully whom I could talk to frankly, and who was best avoided, who was to be praised and who ignored, and think about how to get myself promoted to a better position in which it would be possible to do at least some of the things I wanted. Living like that, one forgets about abstract categories and high moral considerations; in fact moral considerations go out the window. Only from time to time, and mostly at night when one can’t get to sleep, there comes a feeling of regret or even dismay at how one has forgotten the old aspirations. One marries, of course, and has children. One maintains them and rears them, teaching them to speak the truth, not to steal, not to use bad language and to brush their teeth. One sends them to be taught to read and write, to play the piano and the guitar. One takes them for walks so that they get the chance of seeing a running deer, if only at a distance, or one of the last horses still grazing on a meadow. But in spite of it all, one knows that there is something else of importance that they ought to have, that one lacks a code to bring them up in, or to offer them, at least. But all the same, one loves them and does not want them to be no more than well-fed, well-dressed simpletons, happy because they have an electric train-set and a dolly that cries and drinks out of a bottle. One wants to share something profound with them, something they will retain for life, something they will be able to return to and cherish when things are hard, something that will foster their love and their capacity to relate to people.

Instead, dear bro, as happens in this life, my wife has found a lover and I a mistress. All the things I was sure of are falling apart; the things I regarded as shameful cloak me round like darkness at night. All I can ask is: what do I possess? What do I have left? Where is my home? Where is my universe?

He could hear familiar footsteps stumping up the stairs. The door slammed and the flat was immediately filled with shouting.

‘We telephoned several times,’ his mother-in-law announced, ‘but no one answered. We thought your phone was out of order.’

‘I expect there was no one home.’

‘Where’s Mummy?’ his daughter wanted to know.

‘She’s gone somewhere.’

‘Weren’t you together?’ his mother-in-law asked in surprise. She had sat down at the kitchen table. It would be proper at least to offer her a cup of coffee, but his mother-in-law always tended to irritate him and he wanted her to go as soon as possible.

‘Alena is so under the weather these days,’ she declared ‘Nothing bothering her, is there?’

‘We’ve all got something bothering us.’

‘It was just I thought she might be overdoing it. I know you’re a considerate chap, Adam, and help her as much as you can, but you’re always so hard at it yourself. You ought to persuade her to take a bit more care of herself.’

‘She takes care of herself, don’t worry.’

‘People are always in such a rush these days. They all want to get the most out of life and they end up wearing themselves out.’ At last she left.

The children were talking nineteen to the dozen, telling him all about television programmes whose inanity became increasingly apparent as they retold them. No doubt the mother-in-law had let them gawp at the television from morning to night, though he had asked her not to. But what right had he to be annoyed? He didn’t do anything to entertain them and had nothing better to offer.

He lay down in the lonely bedroom. There had been a time when he thought he knew. But what had he known? That it required assiduous and conscientious work if everyone was to be better off, that sacrifices had to be made for the general good! He had also known that he was not supposed to hanker after possessions, that it was his duty to watch out for enemies. He had known that he was not to believe in God but in science, or at least what purported to be science. He had known that out of the ruins of the temples and the ashes of the old world a new society would be born, a new humanity — a socialist world. Where selfishness, envy and meanness were once rife, friendship and comradely love would prevail.

That fanatical and infantile notion of friendship, a street in which an apathetic and hate-filled crowd was transformed into a throng of empathising and understanding companions, had captivated him so much that he believed he had answered the fundamental question, he believed he knew how to live.

Then, dear bro, I realised I’d been wrong. But what conclusion did I draw? I went on living the same old way, fulfilling my duties. I continued to behave in a non-adult way. A child also does the jobs it is given without asking why, and if it does ask, it expects an answer to its question, as well as praise for having asked a question that was clever. And so one goes on, fulfilling one’s obligations and kidding oneself that one is a decent and upright person and worthy of affection. One has a family and a job and one judges others. And through inertia one goes on waiting for someone to come and explain at last what one is living for. And then one has a mistress as well (and one tries to live for her) and success (and one lives for it), and board and lodging and a car. Meanwhile time moves on and one’s thirtieth and fortieth birthdays come and go; all of a sudden one doesn’t have a wife, one doesn’t have children either; then the mistress goes and all that’s left is the success, the board and lodging, and the car, or not even them. But by then one has forgotten one’s former doubts and life just goes on through inertia, so one doesn’t even notice that the time for waiting is long past; one has been an adult for long enough and it is time to answer for oneself. But what is one to answer when one has never found sufficient freedom or courage, and one has allowed the light that maybe once burned within one to go out?

I now ask myself, bro, what difference there is between me and the fellow I’m supposed to convict for having gassed his landlady? What if the only difference is that I am too cautious, methodical and self-disciplined to have gassed anyone? There is a fundamental difference, certainly: one of us is a law-abiding judge with a wife, a position, children, and a mistress, who acts prudently in his emptiness, while the other is a recidivist who has neither wife nor position and in his emptiness imprudently pushes his children and his mistress to the edge of the abyss.

No one can deny this indisputable difference between my irreproachable behaviour and the behaviour of that desperado, in terms of the penally indictable nature of our actions. But as regards the emptiness into which we try to tempt those nearest to us? In that emptiness, even the principled find their hands on gas taps that turn easily, and at that moment it matters little whether the gas escapes into a kitchen, a gas chamber or even into the motor of a rocket that will fire a ray and cut the earth in half.

As you can see, I’m a bit put out by it all — but I’m not desperate. I am better off than when I was satisfied at the way I fulfilled my obligations. At that time loving my wife was a duty like devotion to my work in court. But what can one create out of a sense of duty that is worthwhile? A home? Some relationship, or achievement, maybe? All you can do out of a sense of duty is to belong. To a home, or to a wife or to a mistress, say. Or to justice.

One should have the necessary freedom of spirit to define one’s place and one’s relationships; to be capable of leaving or staying if one wishes — however mad, inexplicable or ludicrous it might seem.

I don’t know whether I’ll prove equal to it. I’m over forty and I don’t know whether I’ll manage to find within myself what I have not found so far, or even looked for. I bet you think I should have a try, whether I succeed or not.

I feel as if I’m standing underneath a high tower looking at a narrow, darkening staircase that spirals upwards. There are those who promise me that from the top of the tower I will behold a land which I would never set eyes on otherwise, while others warn me that the depths beckon and many have already fallen. I, for my part, hope perhaps to meet her up there, and there, alone, on a wooden floor between earth and heaven to make love to her in total seclusion and solitude, in a silence broken only by the buzz of a stray fly — that would be freedom…

He woke before the alarm was due to go off. The neighbouring bed was empty. She’d not been in the whole night, then. It was remiss of her; what was he to tell the children?

Maybe he would not have to explain anything to the children from now on. The court would award custody of the children to his wife, and she would get the flat too.

He opened the window. Outside, a grey misty autumn day was breaking; a moth lay dead on the windowsill. He washed himself and went into the kitchen to get the children’s breakfast ready.

She was sitting on a chair with her head resting on the table, apparently asleep. The stink of gas hung in the air. Alarmed, he looked towards the gas stove, but the taps all seemed to be turned off.

‘Alena!’

Slowly she raised her head. Her usually pallid features were a greyish yellow and there were dark shadows under her eyes which were puffy and swollen. She seemed unable to unglue her eyelids. At last her eyes opened slightly and he could see that the whites were bloodshot. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t you come to bed?’

‘I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. You were there.’

‘I would have left if you’d told me it bothered you.’ He could still smell gas. He bent over the cooker and sniffed the burners.

‘I could-n’t,’ she repeated. ‘I couldn’t have told you to go if you were al-rea-dy there.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘I don’t know. I expect I had some tea. And some-thing else before that. But that’s ages ago. I called you but you weren’t home.’ She was still unable to open her eyes and spoke as if speaking to him from a dream. Her voice was hoarse.

‘Did you turn the gas on?’

‘It wasn’t me. He turned it on.’

Her words made no sense to him. She had clearly been drinking. He assumed she had been getting drunk somewhere and come home late for that reason.

‘I turned it off afterwards,’ she said.

She looked so wretched and helpless that he suddenly felt sorry for her. ‘You ought to go and lie down.’

‘I can’t! I’ve got to go — you know — to the library.’

She didn’t seem to him capable of any activity at all. ‘Give them a call to excuse yourself. Tell them you’re going to the doctor’s.’

‘But I’m not going to the doctor’s.’

He took the milk out of the refrigerator and poured some into a saucepan.

‘Where have you been these past two days, Adam?’

He put the pan on the stove. He hesitated a moment before striking a match. ‘But I told you where I was going, didn’t I? You oughtn’t to go to work. I’ll call them myself if you like.’

‘Were you there with her?’

He turned away. Yes, of course he was there with her. Why did she have to ask? After all she hadn’t been drinking on her own, either.

‘Why don’t you answer, Adam?’

But there was something wrong with her; something had happened that was troubling her. What point was there in hurting her even more? ‘No,’ he said.

‘You weren’t there with her?’

‘No!’

‘You were there on your own?’

‘Who was I supposed to be with?’ Shame overwhelmed him. He was lying brazenly like a false witness.

‘You’re not lying to me, are you, Adam?’

‘No!’ He took a loaf of staleish bread out of the bread-bin and cut some slices, trying to make them as thin as possible.

He buttered the bread and topped each slice with a round of salami and some tomato. ‘I have to go and wake the children,’ he said. ‘Or do you want to wake them yourself?’

She made no move, so he put the plate on the table. As he passed her he noticed that the odd smell of gas was coming from her. It was in her hair and her clothes. He bent over her. ‘Did you try to gas yourself?’

‘No, he did it,’ she said. ‘Adam! Oh, Adam!’ she sobbed.

He straightened up again. He knew he ought to comfort her in some way. Or to speak to her tenderly. And indeed for a moment he was gripped by an agonising sympathy and searched for the right word. He could also have hugged her or stroked her acrid hair.

But at the same time a paralysing feeling of disgust started to well up in him. Something about her disgusted him. He couldn’t tell whether it was the senselessness of what she had done or the other person with whom she had obviously done it. Or maybe just the vile stench of gas.

‘I have to go and wake the children,’ was all he said. ‘They’ll be late for school otherwise.’

2

He left the house with the children. He had made Alena leave the kitchen before they came in for their breakfast. She had gone to the bedroom promising to sleep it off. He had promised to excuse her at work. And to be home soon. He had not promised to ‘talk it all over’ although she had begged him to insistently. He accompanied the children to the end of the block. They ran off immediately after saying goodbye. His daughter was wearing a short brown coat and her hair flew about her head as she ran, while the little chap’s bag leaped up and down on his back.

At their age he hadn’t gone to school. That was not exactly true: he’d attended for the first two years. Then the authorities had banned him from going. Anyway he couldn’t recall having mixed with his peers back in those days or played with them. His childhood peers had been the ones who ended up in the gas chamber. That fact occluded anything that had happened earlier.

What if Alena was to try to gas herself again?

It was not a good idea to leave her on her own. He turned and hurried back home. Someone had just gone up in the lift but he was still capable of beating the lift up to the second floor. He reached there at the moment two men were getting out of the lift. They glanced quickly along the passage and then came over to him. After reading the name on the door they asked: ‘Are you Dr Kindl?’ They didn’t even have to show their passes. He knew all too well who they were.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘We have something we would like to ask you.’

‘Well?’ He was unable to contain his agitation. ‘Would you like to come inside?’

‘We would sooner you came along with us for a moment. After all, you’ve no hearing right now.’

He shrugged.

‘Were you just on your way home?’

‘I was coming back for something I’d forgotten.’

‘You may go and fetch it.’ One of the men stood in the doorway, preventing him from closing the door. They did not enter the flat, however.

Alena was lying half-clothed on the couch, covered with a green blanket, her face thrust into the pillow. She was asleep. He wrote her a note: If I’m slightly delayed, don’t worry. He couldn’t concentrate. He added: Never do anything like that again!

The grey Volga saloon was parked round the corner, which explained why he’d not noticed it on his way back. They sat him in the back between the two of them and didn’t utter a word the whole way. The car pulled up eventually in the narrow lane off Národní Avenue.

They passed the porter’s lodge and took the lift up to the second floor. Then they proceeded down a long corridor until, at last, they opened one of the many doors and entered. At a desk sat a man with a broad, puffy face. The man stood up. It was impossible to tell his age but he was certainly the elder of them. ‘I could caution you, but I don’t think it will be necessary in your case.’

‘I agree. But I would like to know for what reason I was summoned.’

‘You were invited here for an informative chat.’

‘Surely there was no need for it to have assumed such dramatic form.’

The man brushed his remark aside. ‘So you are a judge. Since when?’

‘I hardly think that is the subject of your enquiry.’

‘Were you in America, Dr Kindl?’

‘Why do you ask? You gave me the passport.’

‘You know very well we do not issue passports here. During your stay in America you didn’t work as a judge, did you?’

‘Certainly not. That was out of the question.’

‘Did you have a lot of friends in America?’

‘No.’

‘Do you correspond with them frequently?’

‘Any correspondence is solely about personal matters.’

‘In the course of your professional duties have you ever come across criminal activity that might qualify as incitement through the dissemination of subversive literature?’

‘Not as far as I recall. Certainly not in the recent period.’

‘What is your attitude to such criminal activity?’

‘The same as to any other criminal activity.’

‘Which is?’

‘You don’t intend to cross-examine me, surely.’

‘Have you been receiving such literature from abroad?’

‘No!’

‘You didn’t even try to get it sent to you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know Jim Fox?’

‘I’ve never heard the name before.’

‘Are you sure? Didn’t he visit you several weeks ago?’

At that moment, the penny dropped: Best wishes, bit of a headache on the way home. Sorry if I caused any bother… Yes, the bother had arrived. It was the American whom his wife had invited home the evening she had brought her lover to see him. And he had sent Petr’s list of books with him. They had most likely confiscated the list at the airport — and now it lay there in the file the fellow had in front of him; he could pull it out and show it to him at any moment. He felt the blood rushing to his head. He was not used to lying or prevaricating — he was more accustomed to proving that others were lying.

‘I have already told you I don’t know him.’ He was unsure whether his voice still sounded convincing. This was offensive. The treatment he was being subjected to filled him with growing anger and resentment.

‘Well, if you don’t know him, you don’t know him. I suppose you’ll acknowledge your own brother.’

‘Why shouldn’t I acknowledge my brother?’ He felt relieved at the change of subject.

‘You brother is abroad, isn’t he?’

‘He’s there legally.’

‘Your brother went abroad four years ago?’

‘If it’s really been four years, yes.’

‘Why precisely four years ago, do you think?’

‘Why not precisely four years ago? If someone’s going, they have to go some time.’

‘You’re well aware that something happened here then.’

‘I don’t see what connection there should be between my brother’s departure and events here.’

‘Your brother studied here?’

‘Of course. Where else?’

‘Don’t you think that, having studied here, it is his duty to work here, to give something to society in return? Where does your brother work exactly?’

‘We shan’t talk about that. I’m not obliged to answer any questions about my brother.’

‘I’m hardly asking you things that justify you coming the lawyer with me. Do you think he’ll return, your brother?’

‘Nor shall I answer questions about what a third person thinks or intends to do.’

‘All right, as you like. Have you been mixing with your friends much in the recent period? There’s no need to look so outraged, I’m hardly asking you anything that should offend you. For the moment I’m not even asking you about your friends’ wives.’

‘I have no comment to make.’

‘Do you know Matěj Kožnar?’

‘I do.’

‘What is the character of your relationship?’

‘It is an entirely legal relationship.’

‘Mr Kožnar used to be a broadcaster. Did you ever listen to any of his programmes?’

‘Possibly. I don’t recall.’

‘What did you think about his programmes?’

‘I can’t say. I’m not an expert on radio programmes.’

‘But you’re a lawyer. Wasn’t the content of those programmes intended to incite? Didn’t they defame our system?’

‘I’ve no idea which programmes you have in mind. If the content had been as you describe they could not have been broadcast as far as I understand.’

‘There was a period when they could be broadcast. And they were indeed broadcast. You are aware of what Mr Kožnar is doing these days?’

‘You mean his present occupation?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know anything definite.’

‘Didn’t Mr Kožnar ever mention to you what he did in his spare time?’

‘No, I don’t recall.’

‘Didn’t he happen to mention that he writes in his spare time?’

‘I don’t recall his ever mentioning it.’

‘You don’t happen to be writing any articles yourself?’

‘No!’

‘But you used to.’

‘Yes, of course I did.’

‘Under what name?’

‘Under my own, naturally.’

‘There’s no “naturally” about it. Many people like yourself also used to publish under other names.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway there is nothing illegal about using a pseudonym.’

‘It depends what appeared over it. And where! Don’t you think?’

‘I’ve no comment to make.’

‘Have you ever heard of Professor Fiktus?’

‘Yes!’

‘Do you know him well?’

‘I know him.’

‘Did you get to know him at university?’

‘Definitely not!’

‘But you were at university together!’

‘We weren’t. He’s younger. At least five years younger.’

‘Do you often visit Professor Fiktus?’

‘No.’

‘You only visit him when he organises readings?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘What was his last reading about?’

‘I’ve just told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Perhaps if I read you an excerpt, you’ll remember. “This new étatisme — I shall call it police étatisme because the police become its chief agent and support and in the end proclaim themselves to be the state and their interests to be the interests of the entire community — has created a new form of exploitation…”’

‘No, I don’t recall having heard it. I don’t have a good memory for quotations or definitions.’

‘You have a bad memory?’

‘A bad memory for quotations!’

‘Doesn’t that create problems for you in your professional life?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed.’

‘What’s your reaction to that excerpt?’

‘It’s an excerpt.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘An excerpt is part of a continuous text and therefore cannot be assessed out of context.’

‘Is that someone’s definition?’

‘No. I was just trying to explain to you what an excerpt was.’

‘And didn’t that excerpt sound to you as if it was part of a subversive text?’

‘I have already said what I have to say about it.’

‘Who came to the readings?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by readings.’

‘Weren’t you at Fiktus’s when he was reading from his book?’

‘I’ve already told you I don’t remember.’

‘You told me you couldn’t remember the excerpt. You’re not trying to tell me that you can’t remember whether your host read something or not?’

‘Maybe he did. I don’t see its importance. I left early, that evening.’

‘Why did you leave early?’

‘For personal reasons.’

‘You didn’t happen to leave because you were incensed by the text being read?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Do you recall who was there that evening?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘No one at all?’

‘No!’

‘Out of a room full of people you are unable to remember a single person? But it’s not even a month ago! If some witness were to declare something like that in court, wouldn’t you think he was prevaricating?’

‘That would depend on the witness’s reliability.’

‘Was your friend Ruml present?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Do you still regard him as your friend?’

‘That is hardly the subject of your enquiry, surely?’

‘Maybe you object to the fact he has kept his job. Just recently you seem to have preferred the company of people who had to leave their jobs.’

‘That’s certainly not the way I’d put it.’

‘How would you put it, then?’

‘I’d sooner say my friends were forced to leave their jobs.’

‘Then it looks as if you chose your friends badly, if that’s what happened to them.’

‘On the contrary, they were decent people; that’s why it happened to them.’

‘Does that mean you don’t regard yourself as decent?’

‘I sometimes have my doubts.’

‘Isn’t it time to end the fun and games, Dr Kindl? The Party certainly wasn’t playing games either when it decided that those people had to go. By and large they were qualified individuals and society had invested quite a lot of money in training them. We are fully aware that many of them were capable. If society decided that it was prepared to risk the loss which the departure of those people would incur for the economy, then it certainly knew why. And you know it too. Those people had to go because they were enemies. It’s better to lose a number of experts rather than allow enemies to sabotage our society and our work, harm our young folk and poison people’s minds over the air-waves or through the pages of the newspapers. On that issue, our society will be uncompromising. And you can tell that to your friends from me. If they think to themselves that all this is just a joke, just a passing phase, and are counting on another “thaw”, as they call it, so that they can get their jobs back again, then they’re mistaken. They are out in the cold. The people have written them off. And as far as you’re concerned, it’s high time you realised once and for all that you are a judge in our state. And you’re well aware who rules our state. The people entrusted you with a responsible function and expects you to carry out your duties properly. You ought to realise the sort of people you are mixing with, what they’re trying to drag you into, and what they want from you. You of all people should be able to understand that. With a background like yours! You should be able to grasp what’s at stake in the world today. And draw the consequences while there is still time. I’d have thought you’d got problems enough at home. You don’t need to go making yourself more. Enough said?’

He had not expected such a lengthy statement and it stupefied, sickened and alarmed him so much that he stood up and said: ‘All I have to say is that my friends and I do nothing that contravenes our laws.’

He was so disconcerted that he shook the proffered hand and even said ‘See you’ on the way out. He immediately realised the fateful meaning of his slip of the tongue, but it was too late to withdraw the words.

3

Having called the courthouse to say he would be delayed a little longer, he managed to get hold of a taxi and returned home.

Alena was still lying down, her head sunk deep in the pillow. Her rather prominent chin seemed to him fixed and rigid and her nose had become pointed like the ones on the corpses he had seen drawn along on carts in his childhood. Then she moved, slowly pushing the pillow aside. ‘You’re back already?’

‘I just looked in to see how you were.’

‘That’s… that’s nice of you.’ She uttered the words slowly and deliberately as if searching for each word separately. She looked so wretched that he felt sorry for her. How could she have done it? Whatever possessed her to want to end her life all of a sudden? Was it he who had driven her to it? Had he dragged her into his own emptiness, in which she turned on the gas out of despair, or had she fallen victim to her own emptiness? ‘Can I get you something? You ought to drink milk.’

‘Do you think so?’

At the same time, he was repelled by her dull, lethargic resignation. He brought her a cup of milk. She sat up and sipped it like a child.

‘Will you tell me how it all happened?’

‘I called you and you weren’t in.’ Her lower lip quivered.

‘Did he persuade you?’

‘All he said was…’ She stopped. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘He wanted to kill you.’

‘But you weren’t at home!’

‘Are you trying to tell me that I was partly to blame?’

‘Don’t shout at me!’

‘I wasn’t home, just like you weren’t home.’

‘It hurts me here when you shout,’ she said, indicating her forehead.

‘Can you tell me whose idea it was?’

She said nothing.

‘Who turned the gas on?’

‘Stop interrogating me. That’s the one thing I ask. At least leave me alone now!’

‘Did he do it?’

‘He still loves me… Unlike you…’

‘That’s why he wanted to kill you. You are aware, are you, that he wanted to kill you?’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean “No”?’

‘I don’t want you to talk about it now. Please leave me alone.’

‘As you like. Shouldn’t I take you to the doctor’s?’

‘No. I’ll get over it.’

‘And what if… You won’t do anything like that again?’

‘No… After all, I’ve got…’ She burst into tears.

‘Do you promise?’

‘Leave me alone, please!’

‘Stay in bed. I’ll be back soon.’

‘Will you really?’

‘I’ll do my best. And I’ll phone you.’

‘Adam, I didn’t want to. I’m sorry. It was the last thing I wanted.’

‘I know. Now stop thinking about it and rest.’

‘But what’s going to happen now?’

‘Try not to think about anything.’

‘How do you expect me not to think about it?’ Tears streamed down her cheeks.

He felt regret at everything that had happened and at the way things now were. He bent over and hugged her. She clung to him desperately.

‘You must never do anything like that again.’

‘I know, Adam. I love you all so much.’

Her eyes were fixed on him. Her tear-filled eyes strove to catch him, call him back, hold on to him and tie him down.

As he was going out of the door he just caught her whispered words: ‘Do you love me too?’ He pretended not to hear and left hastily.

He entered his office just as his colleague was putting a demijohn of wine into the cupboard. ‘Look what they brought me. Out of sheer gratitude for divorcing them. Fancy a glass?’

‘I’ll have a drop. I’m not here with the car today!’ He felt the need to justify his assent. He drank the glass off almost in one go. Somehow he ought to let his friends know he had been asked about them. But he was reluctant to call them. He didn’t trust the telephone.

And he ought to do something about that student too. Fancy her getting involved with a deviant poisoner like him. He could have him prosecuted, but it would be more useful to get him to a psychiatrist; before he ended up doing something like that other youngster, the one whose case was coming up. They had something in common, he realised. The same bemused expression and a feigned confidence when speaking. What kind of emptiness did they inhabit? What icy winds blew through it? It was not in his power to save them from it. All he could do was try them. But what was the point of such a trial, what was the point of a judge who had nothing but the letter of the law to offer if anyone were to ask him what he should fill that icy void with?

‘I’ve meant to ask you several times,’ his colleague said suddenly, ‘how well you know Oldřich.’

As if there was any way of answering a question like that. ‘May I have another glass?’

‘Of course you can. It’s a novelty to see you drink.’ She gazed at him expectantly.

‘We used to share an office at one time; but I don’t know what I could tell you that might interest you.’

‘Of course. I do know what you mean. Sorry for asking such a tactless question.’ She actually blushed.

‘He was always nice to me and whenever I needed help, he helped me,’ he added, forcing himself to come up with a reference of some kind.

‘He always speaks well of you too.’

‘Really?’ He took another drink, but was unable to get drunk fast enough to get out of this embarrassing conversation.

‘He would like me to explain some things to you.’

‘He wants you to explain something to me?’

‘He has the feeling you don’t realise the situation you’re in.’

‘I’m sure he’s mistaken.’

‘No, I happen to think so too. You came up at a meeting recently. I oughtn’t to tell you, you know the form, but it would be better for you to know. They have lots of reservations about you. They gave you the Kozlík case deliberately. They know you’ll go out of your way to save him from the rope. But you’ll make sure he swings, won’t you?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m advising you to. Because otherwise you’re for the chop.’

‘Why is someone so keen he should swing?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘After all, he did kill a child. People were incensed.’

‘That’s no reason. No one worries too much about what incenses people.’

‘They have to make some concessions. And even if there was pressure from somewhere else they’ll always use people’s reactions as an excuse.’

‘I’ve never sentenced anyone to hang. They’ll kick me out soon, one way or the other. At least I won’t have that on my conscience.’

‘He’s a killer. Surely you’re not going to sacrifice everything that matters to you just to save a villain who can’t be saved anyway?’

‘What are all those things that are supposed to matter to me?’

‘Ask yourself!’

‘I don’t know what should matter to me enough for me to allow another man to be killed for it.’

‘Oldřich thinks the way I do. He says there’s no point in playing the hero. These days, people prefer those who act with prudence and moderation.’

‘Like Oldřich?’

‘Do you think it’s so bad what he does? What good will it do you? You’ll lose your job and you won’t save the fellow anyway. The prosecution will appeal and make sure he swings. You don’t really expect anyone to be interested in the life of a murderer?’

‘It’s against my principles.’

‘You’re stubborn, Adam. You remind me of an old fellow back home. He made up his mind he wouldn’t let them cut down an old lime tree that was standing in the middle of a field. It wasn’t even his. The field had never belonged to him either. He did it for the principle. He sent letters and protests to all and sundry. Every time I came home he would come and show me all the bumf, because I was studying law.’

‘And did he save the tree?’

‘When the forestry fellows arrived and were cutting it down he went for them and got so steamed up he had a heart attack.’

‘I won’t get steamed up,’ he promised. It crossed his mind to check the drawers of his desk in case he had something in them they might use against him. But it would be better to wait until he was alone in the office.

4

He had managed to phone Alexandra just as she was leaving work and he waited for her by the Powder Tower.

‘I thought you’d forgotten about me.’ She looked extremely sophisticated in her long suede coat. Her face, compared with his wife’s, was full of vitality. ‘A pity you didn’t call me this lunch-time. I had some free time.’

‘I was at an interrogation.’

‘Couldn’t you have postponed it?’

‘Hardly. They came for me.’

‘They were interrogating you? I thought they weren’t allowed to bother people like you.’

‘They’ve bothered bigger fish than me.’

‘Hmm. And then they hanged them, didn’t they?’ She stopped in front of a window display of shoes and stared at them. ‘So they interrogated you. Were they up to your standard?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘That must have got up their noses. Did they beat you up?’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Ruml told me that was routine. Nobody’s going to confess unless they’re beaten, are they?’

‘They confess, don’t worry.’

‘And did you?’

‘I had nothing to confess to. It was more of a caution about my friends.’

‘About Ruml?’

‘Why him, do you think?’

‘He can get really wild. When he figures out you started something with me, he might even kill you.’

‘I think their cautions are based on rather different considerations.’

‘Aha. It never struck me they have their own considerations.’ She had stopped again, this time in front of a display of clothes. She found them at least as interesting as his fate.

He watched her with impatience. He ought to take the tram home. If not for Alena’s sake, at least because of the children. But he wanted to tell her what had happened to him, and how there had even been an oblique reference to her.

That was just an excuse. In reality he wanted to see her because she seemed to him the only glint of light in an otherwise dismal day, if not in an otherwise dismal life.

‘What shall we do?’ she asked when she’d torn herself away from the window display. ‘If you feel like it, I’ve got the key to that little flat we were in the first time.’

‘I’m not sure. I ought to get back as soon as possible today.’

‘Get back where?’

‘Home.’

‘Ah, well, it can’t be helped if you have to rush off to cook the supper.’

‘Alena’s not well.’

‘I don’t ever recall Ruml coming home just because I wasn’t feeling well. He would happily leave me to die if he happened to be playing bridge that evening.’

He tried at least to phone home from a call box, but the line was engaged. She was either chatting with her mother or fixing another date with her poisoner. Another possibility was that she was phoning the doctor. Even more likely, the public phone was out of order. He looked through the glass at Alexandra walking up and down a little way off. Anyone could pick her up and she would go off whenever she felt like it. Meanwhile he was striving in vain to discharge his duties and get through to the house of the dead. He hung up. The apparatus jangled loudly and he rushed out of the box.

They had scarcely closed the street door behind them than she pulled him to her in the dark front hall of the house. He put his arms round her and she kissed him. ‘If you’d have gone home to cook the supper I’d have never wanted to see you again.’

As they climbed the stairs, he could detect among the smells of boiled cabbage and musty potatoes, the sweet stench of coalgas. It got stronger and stronger until it became unbearable.

She unlocked the flat, dropped her handbag on the floor, threw her coat across the half-open cupboard door and kicked her shoes into a corner of the lobby. ‘Come on, quickly. You’ve got to leave soon, haven’t you?’ She’d managed to slip out of her clothes even before they entered the room. ‘What are you waiting for? You want me to freeze?’

And he cast everything off him; the day turned to stone and peeled away from his life, came away from his body, and his body ascended unencumbered into the heights where no voices could be heard, where the air was pure and odourless, where neither poisoners nor bloodhounds roamed. Nor was his wife flying to meet him with her head wrapped in a pillow and her hair impregnated with gas.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Something on your mind?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

Her naked belly was as smooth and pale as a conch shell. A quivering shellfish amidst moist seaweed. He touched it with his lips and noticed how it opened. The gentle hiss of drying stalks on the border between silence and returning sounds. Breathing and the roar of blood.

I’m here. I thought I had a duty to be elsewhere. I ought to be elsewhere, but I’m here with her and don’t know how I got here. Did I come alone, was I brought, was I carried here by the stretcher-bearers of long ago? What day is it? Spring, summer, autumn, winter? What year? Is the war over?

Here I lie. Breathing and the roar of blood. Somewhere nearby a stretcher, snow, I can still feel how my feet are frozen, my little brother raises his head to look at me. Are you here with me? The hiss of stalks, a forest of yucca trees, a thicket of sumacs, the scent of sage, a warm rock table, nothing breaks the silence of the desert, no one calls, no one wants me to listen to them, the birds of prey have not taken off to hunt yet; I’m here and it must have some meaning, it must conceal some intention in other words. I’m not here because I picked up the phone, because we happened to meet; not because today or three months ago she had the keys and the time; not because there are countless men lying with their heads on damp, brownish thickets that quiver as they breathe. I’m here because it’s someone’s wish that I should be — but who was it that I obeyed? Could it be that I finally listened to myself and therefore cannot be anywhere else but here, naked, just beneath the roof, concealed so far from all eyes, with just a few steps to go to reach the summit. Will I then be free and totally unfettered?

There was the click of a cigarette lighter. He flinched, anticipating an explosion, but the air merely started to fill with smoke.

Individual objects started to emerge from the gloom. White roses in a vase on the windowsill seemed to emit their own light. (Who had ever brought roses here?) The cupboard doors were covered in brightly coloured posters. One of them showed an open-mouthed singer facing a flock of sheep. He couldn’t recall having seen the posters before, but they had most likely been hanging there for a long time and he had been too much on edge to take them in. Just above his head there hung a painting. A tall fellow in a grey double-breasted jacket was walking along a deserted street at night. His pale puffy face had no eyes. Where had he seen that picture before?

‘It’s him,’ she said, seeing the object of his gaze. ‘I painted him when I first met him.’

The death’s head smiled at him with its white toothless mouth and suddenly he saw in it the face of that student, that unrelenting poisoner who had entered his life, or rather the life of his wife. The dead face now goggled at him. What had she seen in him to have pursued him? How had he bewitched her? She wouldn’t have been the first. We could assign any colour to empty eyes, plant our own ideas in an empty head, our own dreams, even. He felt sorry for her, for the way she must have wandered home alone late at night, a lost sheep wagging her fluffy, sweetly pungent, tail. Maybe she really had been looking for him, while he was out of earshot, hidden in the very lap he now caressed.

He should leave! It was not right for him to be absent from home tonight, even if one day this would be his home and not the place that was currently his home. But that wasn’t important now. What was important was that his wife was in distress. Possibly he wasn’t to blame for her situation, but the right thing to do was to be at her side and stop looking for excuses. Anyway it was impossible to make excuses for himself as he had long learned how to see through alibis, even ones that sounded supremely plausible and honourable.

He sat up and reached for his shirt.

‘Are you cold? Shall I get out a blanket?’

And yet he made love to her and she to him so totally that the entire previous day, his entire previous life, fell away from him like a crumbling rock from a cliff-face, and here he was about to get rid of her like shaking a stone out of his shoe. ‘No, stay where you are!’ He still held the shirt in his hands.

‘Do you want to leave already? What is wrong with your wife, as a matter of fact?’

He hesitated.

‘Or was it just an excuse so you wouldn’t get home late?’

‘She tried to gas herself.’

‘Aha. And you turned off the gas.’

‘No, I wasn’t there at the time.’

‘Who turned it off, then?’

He shrugged.

‘Wasn’t it at your place, then? You mean your wife goes to strangers’ houses to gas herself?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a stranger.’

‘She tried to gas herself on account of her lover?’

He said nothing.

‘So why are you so upset? They put on a show for you and you get upset.’

‘I don’t think it was a show.’

‘No? So what was it, if she came home safe?’

He would have liked to tell her she was wrong, but his nerve failed.

‘There’s no sense your worrying. She won’t do it a second time. She’ll wait and see what effect she had on you.’

‘That’s not the point. The children are there and she might be ill.’

‘Buzz off then! I’m not stopping you!’

‘I’m glad I’m with you.’

‘Are you really?’

In a moment he would leave. Then he would find himself in a cage far narrower than this attic room and he would be surrounded by a fine cloud of gas that would gradually stupefy him. In the end he would feel that peculiar, almost drunken, satisfaction at being where he ought to be, at having done his duty at least. But for the time being he was still here, with her, the heights were still open above him, ready to accept him into their pure silence.

‘Yes, I really am.’

‘Why don’t you come closer, then?’

She stubbed out her cigarette and he folded her in his arms.

For a split second it was as if he could see his wife’s jutting chin, the nose projecting sharply from her pallid face. As if from out of the depths somewhere he could hear the sound of lamentation and an icy hand ran down his back. Then he felt the hot touch of the other’s fingers, her long fingers wound round him like membranes, transforming him into a single, dazzling cocoon, in whose soft, dark interior he evidently still rested, though ceasing to be aware of it.

She switched on the lamp above the settee and the room was bathed in dim, purple-coloured light. ‘Darling, if you’d be so kind: there’s a blanket in the cupboard.’

The cupboard contained a jumble of folders with drawing paper and canvases. On one of the shelves, amidst brushes and tubes of paint, he saw a crumpled blanket. He took it out gingerly — it seemed to him to give off a faint odour of turpentine. ‘Those are your paintings?’

‘They’re things I did at school.’

He pulled out a painting at random. Above a forest that appeared orangey-brown in the purple light there shone two scarlet suns and between them flew a twin-tailed comet.

‘Put it back,’ she told him. ‘They’re pathetic daubs.’

‘Why?’

‘I should have chucked them out ages ago — but I would have to come here on my own, and that’s something I don’t fancy.’

He bent over her and covered her carefully.

‘You’re not coming back to me?’

He knelt on the floor by the settee and laid his head on her breast. ‘Did you want to see more suns once?’

‘Why not? You have to live in hopes that something will happen. In heaven, at least, if not here on earth.’

‘Would that help you?’

‘It would be great.’ Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling at the same time, though not at him, most likely. ‘I always wanted to see a comet; one that would suddenly turn night into day. Or see two stars collide. Or see an enormous stone fall from the sky. And I wanted to see a unicorn or something of the sort — it’s all silly nonsense, eh?’

‘Miracles, more like. Or divine manifestations.’

‘I don’t care what you call them. I was waiting.’

‘Aren’t you any more?’

‘I’m too tired these days. Like at this moment. I can’t even open my eyes. Even though I’d like to see you.’

‘Sleep. You’ve a chance to sleep.’

‘I don’t want to sleep. It would be a pity to sleep now I’ve got you here. Now I’m feeling great.’

‘You feel great now?’

‘Yes. I have the feeling I know why I’m alive.’

‘Why are you alive?’

‘So I can be. So I can be now.’ She opened her eyes and stared at him fixedly. ‘Maybe I needed to meet you; you didn’t even have to be a rabbi. To meet you was enough. I’ve just read a book by some Latin American, and in it they’re all trying to find out what they’re living for and they waffle on about it for nights on end and are mad about some writer that none of them has ever met. Then one of them happens to see some unknown old man knocked down by a car and he realises that the old man is all alone so he and a friend go to visit him in hospital, and there they discover that the old man happens to be none other than the writer they are mad about. They chat to him and they’re happy because something they had never believed would ever happen, had happened. And even though he told them nothing and even though meeting him must have lost all its significance by the next day, they were happy anyway.’

‘Do you think one lives in order to meet someone?’

‘I was only telling you something I’d read.’

‘And then to stay with them?’

‘Why to stay with them? Didn’t I say that the next day it might not mean a thing any more.’ She sat up. ‘I told you. I’m all right now. I’ll get up and pamper you a bit.’

‘The way I see it, it was I who met you.’

‘I don’t understand. Could you pass me my clothes?’

He gathered up her things and also dressed himself. In a relationship, the one who was on the taking end usually talked about him meeting the one he was doing the taking from. Sometimes it was difficult to tell. But it seemed to him that it was he who had been doing the taking so far. With her he had entered an empty space, a landscape where more than one sun shone, so that even he had started to thaw. And what had he given her? What could one do for another, if one loved them? Not burden them with one’s own problems, be with them when night was falling. Or listen to them, at least?

‘I’ll fix you something to eat,’ she suggested. ‘You must be hungry.’

‘No, don’t. It’s time we went.’

‘You want to go already? You won’t even stop for a drink?’

He put his arms round her. His whole life he had done things because someone else wanted him to and in order to oblige them. No good had come of it.

‘Suit yourself. As I said, I’m not stopping you.’

‘Are you staying here?’

‘There’s no need to bother about me.’

‘I love you.’

‘That’s why you’re rushing off!’

‘It’s for the best.’

‘You’re barmy. They put on a song and dance for you and because of that you leave me in the lurch.’

He tried to kiss her but she turned her head aside.

Downstairs, he mistook the door and rushed out into the backyard instead of the street. He let himself look upwards and made out that strange purplish glow in one of the two attic windows. It couldn’t be enough to live merely on the off-chance of meeting someone. What you needed rather was for someone to want to meet you. Or to live your life in such a way that you would enjoy meeting yourself. Like when a window reflected the rays of the setting sun. Or rising sun? It was odd how he automatically thought of a sun that was about to go down. He spent a few moments looking up at the lighted window and suddenly he wasn’t sure whether he shouldn’t have stayed after all.

5

There was still half an hour before her finishing time. She had found it difficult to concentrate on her work in recent days. She would read but the link between her eyes and her brain was broken. And from time to time the hiss of escaping gas would fill her ears. She felt wretched and everything made her cry. Before changing his shoes, Martin had managed to leave piles of mud all over the front hall, Manda was refusing to eat vegetables, and she herself had managed to break the handle off one of the cups she had received as an heirloom. Tears would stream from her eyes without her sobbing. And that morning, from the moment she opened her eyes and saw outside the first, rather premature snowflakes, the tears had started to flow.

She did not cry in front of Adam. Whenever he arrived home, she seemed to go tense all over, either from expectation or anxiety, though she was unable to distinguish between her emotions. Maybe he would say something at last and undo the spell he had cast on her with his infidelity and betrayal, or at least tell her the name of the other woman and reduce somewhat her demonic immunity, her vampiric powers. But he had done nothing of the sort and instead moved about the flat like a shadow detached from an absent body; he would enter the kitchen when she wasn’t there, evidently to eat something, but without leaving any of the usual traces behind him. The cup would be washed and the crumbs swept up.

He would sleep in his own room on the small couch, although it was narrow and uncomfortable. He would get up before her in the morning and prepare the children’s breakfast. He would chat to the children, particularly Manda. He had always been more attached to his daughter than to his son, and more than to her.

He had also returned her the letters which that bizarre clergyman had sent him a while ago. Maybe he realised that he ought to make some comment; he suddenly started to talk to her about the case which he was due to hear in a few days. He explained that they were putting pressure on him to pass the death sentence, but that he would never do so, even if it cost him his job.

That was him all over. He wanted to save a murderer he didn’t know, while he would calmly let her die, or drive her to her death, because he didn’t have to take a decision, because he didn’t have to formulate his sentence on her or deliver it in triplicate. Why hadn’t he phoned her even once today?

Anguish welled up in her. She was so lonely.

Even Honza hadn’t called her today.

Yesterday, when she came back to work again, he had come running after her: thin, tall, gaunt and rather pale. She did not take in anything of what he tried to tell her, but merely told him repeatedly to go away. Then he tried telephoning her; how many times she couldn’t say because she didn’t pick up the phone, and when she did, she had immediately put it down on recognising his voice.

She took the envelope with the letters out of her bag. She could go and see that minister; that way, at least she wouldn’t have to go home directly.

She dialled the number and while she waited for the connection she read the first page of the criminal’s letter.

Then a familiar voice answered: soft and kindly. He immediately recognised her and thanked her for being ready to take the trouble to visit him.

In the first letter, Karel Kozlík had written:

Dear Friend,

I haven’t been in touch for a long time. The thing is I’ve been very busy, but even so I read Dr Schweitzer’s book straight off non-stop over two evenings. I also set myself lofty goals after my last release from prison namely to continue educating myself and be useful to the people I meet. In fact it was just last week that I asked for a recommendation from the hospital here so that I could register for night school. They were very surprised and wanted to know what I needed to study for, wasn’t I happy with my job in the boilerhouse, and if I was losing my taste for work they wouldn’t hang on to me, but I wasn’t to think I could waste their time with provocative activities. I had another go at trying to explain, but I could see they weren’t listening. It’s always been like that, I never in my whole life found anyone ready to listen to me apart from you. When I finished the book I imagined to myself I was living in another country, such as England. They allowed me to study for a regular profession. I’d like to be a priest like you or a doctor like he was. Also I imagined going away to some backward country. I think I would manage to cope with all those hardships seeing that I managed to put up with months on end in the slammer. You know that when I tried I was able to fulfil the prison norm and then spend several hours learning English and listening to your commentaries on philosophy and theology. How ennobling it was to put one’s efforts into something that would be meaningful and give a sense of usefulness. I imagined the sick people coming to my hut, showing me their ulcers and festering wounds and me helping them. If something like that could happen I would be happy. I wouldn’t even ask for reward, it would be enough to know I was rendering a service to others.

The tears were running down her cheeks again. It touched her that a person who was being held in gaol for murdering someone could yearn to be good, and that his yearning was clearly stronger than that of many other people, stronger, perhaps, than of the people who would judge him. At any rate she could not imagine Adam ever wanting to go off to the jungle and cure people there. What did Adam yearn for?

For her, most likely, at this moment! To go away somewhere with his tart. Adam never yearned for anything really noble or romantic. The need to serve others was alien to him. Abstract ideals were the most he could work up enthusiasm for.

The gatekeeper let her in when she explained whom she was going to see, and did not even ask to see her identity. The site only consisted of a few wooden huts surrounded by a dilapidated fence. A railway embankment towered above the last of the huts. The last building was the one to which the door-keeper had directed her. She went up to the door and knocked: no one seemed to have heard. So she carefully opened the door a fraction and peeped inside. She saw nothing, however, apart from rows of shelves filled from floor to ceiling with tins of every colour.

At last, her acquaintance appeared in a black cotton overall. ‘You’re very welcome, Dr Kindlová!’

‘I’ve brought you the letters.’

He took the envelope from her.

‘My husband has read them. Or rather, I think he’s read them,’ she corrected herself. ‘He made no comment on them. But he doesn’t comment on anything in my presence.’

She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t know how to start. She felt the tears coming to her eyes. It was out of the question for her to cry here.

He offered her the only chair in the place, while he sat down on an upturned box. ‘I think about it every day,’ he said. ‘I’d really like to identify that split second when evil triumphed in his soul. I pray that that victory should not be final. And for mercy on him. And, of course, for mercy on those he killed.’

As if mercy could exist for those who were already dead. ‘Do you believe in prayer?’ she asked.

‘How could I not?’ he exclaimed in surprise. ‘Prayer is the only opportunity we have to talk to our Lord. If I lost that opportunity, I’d fall dumb, or, as Scripture puts it, I’d fall prey to unclean spirits.’

The light dwindled in the room. The lighted windows of railway carriages passed by on the embankment behind the hut. If one believed in the power of prayer, one had to believe that God was listening. It meant assuming not only that there was a God, but also that He was capable of hearing and distinguishing between human tongues. ‘There was a time when I used to pray too,’ she said. ‘But not any more. Not for a long time.’

‘Do you feel that you have lost your belief?’

‘I don’t know if I ever believed. I didn’t feel there was anyone I could speak to.’

‘It must have been hard for you.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Whether prayer is heard or not is not the essential thing. The important thing is my right, my freedom to pray, to turn to God. There are moments when it is the only right and the only freedom we have — without them our soul would hardly endure.’ Then he said that people estranged themselves unnecessarily from the message of Scripture by wanting to take those words, which announced something so inexpressible and indefinable as the existence of God, as if they were words in a text-book. They treated them as if they were a scientific statement. After all, a discourse on physics and a poem could not be read the same way. People nowadays read Scripture as if they were reading a report of some historical congress and were scandalised to find references to the immaculate conception, miraculous cures of the blind, the lame and the leprous, and to read about the fires of hell, the resurrection of the dead, Satan and angels. It never crossed their minds that virginity symbolised purity, that the blind and leprous were images for the spiritually blind and the small-minded. It was certain that much of what had been accepted for centuries as a literal message was no more than an image intended to express the insights of the prophets. It was obvious that none of them was capable of defining eternity or redemption, Heaven, Hell or even God. After all, the controversy about the meaning of those insights had been going on amongst God’s people from the very beginning of their history. Even today there were few people capable of understanding the true meaning of poetry, the truth of a painting or the message of a piece of music. Very often, with the best of intentions, people turned the message on its head and gave it their own interpretation and squeezed it into the framework of their own souls. People were like that now and people had been like it centuries ago, and it was undoubtedly through their uncomprehending mouths that the Good News about the Redeemer was communicated to others.

‘Not long after I was convicted, Dr Kindlová, I shared a cell for some time with a well-known poet. He enjoyed telling me that human history was an eternal clash between poets and policemen and that clash had never been resolved. And was unlikely to be.’

He gazed at her anxiously and it seemed to her that he knew everything about her, or at least that she was in distress and was in need of comfort. That was why he had invited her to stay a while, why he had talked about prayer, why he had tried to restore her hope and belief in God. He was someone who was receptive to others and she could therefore confide in him.

She was determined to talk about Adam dispassionately, or even to speak in his favour, because she didn’t like the idea of complaining about someone with whom she lived. She spoke about his childhood as she knew it from his telling, explaining how that experience had cruelly marked him, taking away his trust in people and his belief in friendship and even in goodness. All he retained was a fanatical belief in some unreal, just world that would one day be created by means of reason. She told him that he was capable of being kind and loyal to his convictions and his work. He usually managed to control himself, but on the other hand he had never allowed her to enjoy the feeling of real intimacy and mutual devotion. This was possibly something that troubled him also, and why he had now found another woman. She said all this with her eyes fixed on the black, greasy floor.

‘And will you tell me something about yourself?’ he asked, when she started to falter over the other woman, that female stranger.

So she started to relate her childhood, even more incoherently. How her parents had sent her to stay in the country when she was six, how she had actually been happy there and also learnt to pray, but how she had suffered from anxiety about her nearest and dearest and used to have dreams about her mother being killed. She spoke about her family, which was always a haven of love and understanding and where they were always ready to help each other. Thanks to that, she had come to know the meaning of a good home and all her life she had wanted her own children to have a home like that. She also mentioned her friend Tonka, for whom she had never been able to find a substitute, and Menachem, who had offered her a wider family in a foreign land. And again she returned to Adam, for whom home had been at most a place where he could get on with his work in peace and where he slept. Then at last she started to tell him about the third person involved, how they had become acquainted and how all she had wanted was to help him, because she realised he was abandoned and disillusioned, but everything had turned out differently from what she expected and she had therefore decided that the relationship must be ended. She had only wanted to belong to her family even though her family did not fully satisfy her, and she had done it even though he had knelt down in front of her, clasping her round the legs and begging her to stay. Now she had no strength left and was unable to control herself. She sobbed out loud.

He waited patiently for her to calm down. He even smiled at her and she attempted a smile too. A pathetic attempt, no doubt.

‘Now you want to know what to do next?’

She nodded.

‘Do you want to save your family?’

She nodded again. ‘Only I don’t know whether I’ll be able to forget what he did to me. How he abandoned me when I needed him most.’

‘Maybe you also abandoned him when he needed you most.’

‘But I never abandoned him!’

He threw her a look of amazement. ‘But you’ve just been telling me about it.’

‘That was something else. I didn’t want to hurt him! I didn’t want to abandon him.’

‘Our actions always appear differently to ourselves than they do to other people.’

‘No, I didn’t want to hurt him,’ she repeated. ‘After all, it wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with him.’ She hoped he would see what she meant. She took a handkerchief out of her handbag and hid her face in it.

‘Most of the time, we all act with the best of intentions,’ he said. ‘Which of us has sufficient humility to look upon himself or herself as no more than a sinner among sinners?’

‘Do you think I have enough humility?’ she asked into the handkerchief.

He leaned over and stroked her hair.

No, of course she didn’t have enough humility. But he didn’t condemn her for it; he had understanding. She was aware of the consoling touch of his fingers. At last, after so many days, she felt a sense of relief.

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

The train was late as usual. My parents had evidently been waiting at the station the whole time. I caught sight of them the moment I got off the train. Mother was waving at me and Father was running alongside the train towards me. I was lugging two enormous cases, the language of The Hole still surrounded me in the form of other travellers, although it was being diluted so rapidly as to seem foreign once more. I could see the familiar figures rushing away up the platform, leaving behind them the faint familiar stench of those far-off inns and courthouse corridors: sweat, dirt and alcohol. I realised it was for the last time and felt a blissful sense of relief.

Father would not allow me to call a porter and toiled along with one of my cases. He had not changed, whereas Mother had aged. She scurried along at my side talking away: I would have my bedroom back again, all to myself in fact, as Hanuš was doing his military service. Poor Hanuš was in despair over the time he was wasting on it and was constantly hoping I might be able to do something to get him out. Father broke in to ask whether I knew he had been nominated for a state prize. I told him that he himself had written to me about it. I suddenly realised that it wasn’t the reply he had been hoping for and quickly added that it was a magnificent tribute to his life’s work.

Standing in front of the station was Father’s quarter-century-old Tatra (newly resprayed dark blue, so that I almost failed to recognise it). Father attached the cases to the roof, the engine — which was only slightly younger than me — roared into life and I was on my way home.

My room was tidy, with the books dusted and not a speck of dust on the rug. I could hear my mother in the kitchen clattering the crockery. It was ten in the morning and I was bracing myself for a village loudspeaker to burst into life. Then came the unnerving realisation that I wasn’t in court. What was the matter with me; surely I couldn’t be ill?

And then it sunk in: never again that courthouse, never again that corridor full of people, that square beneath its cloud of hot dust; never again, either, Tibor Hruškovič, Hungarian goulash, my seedy inn room or the sound of horse carts and beery singing as I tried to get to sleep. Everything was drifting away and disappearing, as if I were waking from a dream, and I suddenly realised with dismay that she too was part of that dream. But unlike the others, Magdalena could follow me; at any moment she could be ringing the doorbell, crossing the threshold and entering the room she had never seen. Was it something I wanted — or feared?

Mother called me to the lunch table. She was smiling, happy that I had returned to the family circle.

Potato dumplings, roast pork and stewed kohlrabi. Even before the train arrived I knew what to expect for lunch. And the wine glasses, from which no one in our household drank wine, were filled with an egg-yolk dessert topped with strawberry mousse. What about my young lady, Mother asked, wouldn’t she be following me? I didn’t want to talk about it? That was all right, I was old enough, just so long as I didn’t hurt the girl. Anyway, as my mother, she was sorry I hadn’t once brought my young lady to see her.

And towards evening, the doorbell really did ring. Where would I put her up? What would Mother say to her, what would she say to Mother? Where would we live?

But it was only Uncle Gustav with Aunt Simona. They had come to see me. Aunt Simona had recently undergone an operation and she gazed at me with tears in her eyes and remembered those beautiful post-war days when I was still a little boy. Uncle Karel also arrived — in an official limousine. (He now occupied an important post of some kind and was also a member of the assembly, though I didn’t know for which constituency.) He greeted me and told me he was pleased to see me home again. (It had probably been thanks to him that I was able to return, thanks to him I had successfully applied for the job; it sufficed that he was, that he existed and could be listed in my application forms.)

We drank tea and ate apple strudel. Uncle Karel lit his pipe, the smoke from which irritated me. Father got into an argument with his brother, declaring that nothing in our country was as they claimed it to be, that leading posts had been taken over by incompetent careerists who would soon stifle all technical development, and his brother shouted at him that he was embittered and alienated from the people, and rapidly turning into a reactionary. Uncle Karel would smile indulgently when they addressed him. He said that Father was exaggerating slightly, but one could not deny that there was a lot of truth in what he said. The Party could never again afford to ignore the voices of conscientious specialists.

In spirit I was still back in The Hole beneath the gaze of drunkards and the windows of gypsy dens, hearing the clash of brawlers’ knives and the sound of nocturnal vehicles distributing bags of stolen cement and bricks; all that seemed more real to me than this room and their arguments. I wanted to say that everything looked quite different from what they imagined, but maybe precisely because their argument seemed so remote to me, I said nothing.

I thought about Magdalena. She had stood facing me while my cases lay in the dust at the edge of the footpath. She had not been looking into my eyes but gazing beyond me somewhere. Yes, the bus was there ready to leave. I asked her if she was intending to join me. She answered that we had already discussed it, and anyway it was time I went to load my cases; I didn’t want to miss my bus, did I.

I had repeated my question. She told me in reply that I knew very well she wasn’t. Whatever would she do in Prague?

I said that we would be together.

What would the two of us do together, you loony?

I had wanted to say that I loved her, after all; but the bus driver was already looking in my direction enquiringly and she urged me to go or I’d miss the train. I picked up my cases, and at the last minute she told me that I would forget her, that I would forget everything here. I was someone who quickly forgot, since I was always looking forward and never backwards. And the bus had moved off. I had scrambled through to the back window and could see her standing at the bus stop like a statue or like an abandoned child. I had waved but I was no longer visible as the bus steered out of the square.

Father turned to me, requesting me to corroborate that corruption was rife in the republic and I replied reluctantly.

I suddenly felt at a loss. Why was I sitting here? I was almost thirty and no longer belonged here. But where did I belong? Where was my home?

That night I could not get to sleep, aware all the time of the sound of the astronomical clock in the Old Town Square and the bell rung by Death for us, the living. I was afraid that the moment I fell asleep I would be transported back to my recent existence. And indeed that night I did depart in style from the godforsaken Hole. The band paraded up and down the square and the captain of the guard of honour reported to me. I was seated in a coach with tall gilded wheels, nodding genially to the crowd. At that moment I heard a screech. Magdalena was rushing towards me from the door of some house, shouting for me to stop. I called out to the coachman, but he wasn’t on the box. The horses were galloping and I didn’t have the strength to stop them. When I turned to look I could see my lover running behind us, casting off her clothes to help her run more easily. And then I noticed that her body was covered in fur and there was a long red tongue protruding from her mouth. The horses were galloping at full pelt and I wasn’t braking any more but laying on the whip for them to go faster. But it was useless. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck and sharp fangs dug into my throat. I could feel the blood running down my neck and realised that I would never reach my destination.

The next day I started my new job. I was assigned a desk in an office whose occupant was announced on the doorplate as Dr Oldřich Ruml.

Accustomed to the strict routine in The Hole, I arrived at work at the same time as the secretaries. I unpacked my things and set them out on the desk top and then started to study the titles of the books on the bookshelf while listening attentively to the noises from the corridor (compared with my old corridor, the silence here was uncanny and even depressing), and then the phone rang. I lifted the receiver with suspense-filled expectation, even though the call couldn’t possibly be for me. A woman’s voice asked the whereabouts of Dr Ruml. (I was astonished to be addressed as ‘sir’, a form of address never used in The Hole.) The phone rang several more times. Men’s and women’s voices asking for a man I had never met in my life, asking for more precise details of where he might be and when I was expecting him to arrive. Towards noon he finally appeared, a well-built fellow with a thick mop of short blond hair. He flung a parcel of journals on to the desk, thereby indicating he belonged there. He wore an immaculately cut suit (including a waistcoat, which I considered snobbishly old-fashioned), and his tie was transfixed by a tie-pin in the shape of a snake. He declared that they had already told him about me and was sure we would get on like Castor and Pollux. He listened to my account of telephone calls and personal callers and explained to me that I would have to learn to spend as little time as possible in those premises or I’d never get anything done. Then he asked me several discreet questions in an effort to ascertain to which clique or power group I belonged, to whom I owed my appointment, who my powerful protector was, and what my immediate ambitions were. He must have concluded I really was entirely uninformed in such matters (or artfully pretending to be) and declared that he would have to clue me up without delay or I’d be bound to commit irreparable gaffes.

His speciality was economic law, but he was far more interested in politics, or what went under that name here and which in reality consisted entirely of intrigues and scarcely visible movements and shifts within the ruling circles. He classified his colleagues into influential, promising and insignificant. With people in the first two categories his aim was to maintain good relations and he therefore spent his time attending a plethora of meetings, consultations, social evenings and seminars, where his interest was never the subject under discussion but who was taking part.

I never fully understood what place in his hierarchy I could have occupied, nor how I came to be promoted to be his virtual protégé. Could he have overestimated the importance of my family connections and mistakenly placed me among the influential? Or was it that he needed someone who could help him sort out his ideas and in front of whom he could rehearse his power games? Or maybe he simply took a liking to me, and out of a need to have someone like-minded and also useless around (he had lots of acquaintances but no real friends) decided that I would do?

He used to invite me to his parties — which he called garden-parties (and indeed they did take place in the garden when the weather was fine) — even though I was in no position to pay him back in kind.

He had just got married. His wife didn’t attract me. She seemed to me like a child who had grown up too soon and was trying to conceal the immaturity of her features under layers of face powder. I never knew what I could, or should, talk to her about. On one occasion, I arrived at a party some time before the other guests and we were compelled to spend several minutes together. She was probably making a conscientious attempt at conversation. She asked me whether I was interested in pictures and brought me a book about abstract painting, and then proceeded to tell me something about Chagall and Miró. I told her truthfully that I had little interest in art. At that moment I noticed something incongruously unshapely about her slender, girlish figure and asked her whether she was expecting a baby. In three months’ time, she said, and expressed surprise at my ignorance; Oldřich had told her I knew. Then the other guests started arriving, interrupting a conversation which was not to resume until many years later.

2

The more I studied, the more I realised the inadequacy of my previous education. I did not have the faintest notion about real sociology or real political science, had never penetrated any of the foreign legal systems and possessed a knowledge of jurisprudence so biased as to be non-existent. Half a century of modern thinking had remained concealed from me. Philosophers and lawyers whose names were familiar to grammar-school children elsewhere in the world were utterly unknown to me. I had not even mastered a single foreign language. As I began to realise the extent of my ignorance I started to panic. Would I ever manage to make up for all those wasted years?

Sometimes I got carried away, mostly to the detriment of my work. I started to study sociology and logic. I discovered that I lacked the fundamentals of maths and statistics and bought myself several text-books which I started on, but abandoned as soon as they demanded more time and concentration than I could afford to give them, having decided in the meantime to improve my English. There was a growing pile of unread journals, scholarly reports and new books on my desk. And I had seen nothing of modern art and not been to an exhibition of any kind for years. I bought myself a transistor radio and had it on while I was studying (if only Magdalena could have seen me) and used it to deafen my restive spirit. Sometimes I was overcome with a sense of the futility of all my efforts. Knowledge was meaningless of itself: I needed to link it to some goal, to some living person. I wrote to Magdalena telling her I was missing her, but received no reply.

My brother gave me a tennis racquet for my birthday. The accompanying comment was that he could not stand to watch me getting fat and turning into a misery. We used to go twice a week, weather permitting, always early in the morning, to bumpy tennis courts situated terrace fashion under the windows of the institute where he worked. It could be that I showed a certain aptitude for the game since we were soon well-matched opponents. Occasionally, he would bring some of his mathematician colleagues with him and, even more often, female colleagues and friends — who were not required to understand mathematics or even play tennis — and we would form mixed doubles. After our match we would drink cheap lemonade, though my brother’s female colleagues were happy to accept an invitation to something better and rather stronger. But I was always in a rush to get back to my institute and anyway they didn’t appeal to me — I lacked Hanuš’s free-and-easy way of enjoying himself, not to mention his apparent gifts for making love.

At the beginning of spring, our institute played host to a visitor from London University with the Scots name of Patrick MacKellar. He was my age and specialised in juvenile delinquency, a subject I was assigned to at the time. They therefore decided that I should act as a guide for our visitor. I was quite unsuited to such a role. What I knew of Prague was two or three wine bars and a couple of churches, apart of course from a comprehensive grasp of the Old Town street plan. At a pinch I could have put together a programme for two or three evenings, but my charge was due to spend a whole month in Prague. In order to fill the time, I invited him on a trip to the town where I had spent the other part of my childhood. On a sunny Sunday morning we boarded a bus and set off in the direction of Litoměřice.

Oddly enough, I did not feel I knew the landscape, and even the fortress town itself seemed unfamiliar. (I had not been there since the day my cousin came for us in the gas-powered lorry.) I walked through the straight lanes with my guest and pointlessly drew his attention to the long out-of-date names on the barracks and tried unsuccessfully to find something that recalled the atmosphere of those years. We set off along the road in the direction of the Small Fortress where we joined a group of tourists. They were Jews in dark clothes and black hats. In schoolgirl English — though faultless, as far as I could tell — their guide endeavoured to acquaint them with events that she herself must have been too young to remember. We accompanied them up to the museum as well. And here you can see pictures from the neighbouring ghetto (yes, that was it, at last I recognised what I had been in) where most of the people died. One hundred to one hundred and fifty victims every day. Each person had a maximum floor space of one and a half square metres and the people had to work ninety hours a week, and that included children from fourteen years of age.

I stood next to her. I guessed that she was not a professional guide because she was clearly moved by what she was telling them. Fifteen thousand children in total passed through here, some of them babies. They all died in the gas chambers. She took off her glasses for a moment. She had blue eyes set far apart. She wiped her glasses and then wiped her eyes. There were loud expressions of horror from among the tourists and I turned to her — though I don’t know what made me do it, as it was tactless towards her (but it did concern me, after all, having been important for my existence) — and said that some of the children had survived.

She gave me a severe look. How did I know? I told her that there were very few of us who survived, though I appreciated that for other people or for history, the numbers were not significant. She asked me whether it was true that I had been there and then told me that her group were members of a Hasidic community from America and were deeply interested in the fate of European Jews. Would I be willing to tell them something about what it was like to be there? I told her I would be pleased to but that I had almost forgotten everything. Would I at least be prepared to answer any questions which they might have? I replied that I would rather not. She was sorry if she had offended me in any way and asked me to forgive her if she had. I assured her that this was not the case and said that it was I, rather, who owed her an apology for butting into her talk. There was nothing more to be said. I nodded to my charge and we both left the museum. We bought ourselves postcards and then, at a kiosk which made the place look even more like a mere tourist attraction, we treated ourselves to lemonade and sat down on a bench by the entrance to the fortress. My visitor wrote one postcard after another, using his knee to lean on (to all the world as if sitting beneath the Great Pyramid), while tourists walked past us. Then I caught sight of her again. She was leading her charges to the waiting coach. The coach was a roomy one and they were scarcely twenty in number. I jumped up from the bench and went to ask her if she had room for two more passengers.

She remained standing in the doorway until we climbed aboard, then directed us to one of the double seats over the rear wheels, told the driver to start and came and sat down opposite me: my future wife.

3

She was in the final year of a librarianship course while also studying at the language school, which was how she was able to earn herself some extra cash interpreting. (Her parents were civil servants and she also had a brother; ever since she started university, she had managed to earn enough to buy her own clothes.)

At the age of nineteen, she had interpreted at a student congress where she came to know the Israeli delegate, Menachem. He was an engineer from a kibbutz and was thirteen years her senior. Compared to the youths she had gone out with previously, this was a mature man. He had been wounded twice, first by the English, then by the Arabs. He lived on the edge of the Negev Desert which he was helping to irrigate. After ten days’ acquaintance he proposed marriage to her and a life together on a kibbutz. She took off her glasses and cleaned the lenses while she was telling us this. She did not once look at me. Maybe she was shy, or was afraid that the glasses spoiled her looks, but at this moment she turned her face away from me so that I wouldn’t see her crying. He would certainly have kept his promise. He had already started to see to the formalities in his own country and written to her to say that everyone in the kibbutz was looking forward to her arrival; and it did not matter at all that she wasn’t a Jewess. (That comment had hurt her feelings as she was half-Jewish, but they apparently did not recognise it there, as it was on her father’s side.)

She had also applied for permission to marry a foreigner but the application dragged on and on. She wrote to him complaining about it. He wrote back to say she would have to be patient. He would be too. He would go on waiting until she arrived. She promised to be patient and never to stop loving him; only death could end their love.

In his letters he would tell her about the kibbutz-members as if they were relations. Sometimes he would include photos of them and before long she knew them and could imagine the various little houses, the hall where they all ate together and held celebrations, and the paths that led to the stables or the orange groves. Her passport application was turned down, as well as her appeal. In desperation, she wrote to him to say she would try to enter one of the neighbouring countries and get to him from there. That letter was probably opened by the authorities and she had never been allowed anywhere abroad since.

He continued to vow love and devotion. She now made a conscious effort to win the confidence of the authorities. She joined a youth ensemble in the hope that she would eventually travel abroad with them. She wrote and told him her plan. When her ensemble made a trip to Hungary she alone was banned from going, even though she sang solo in two of their songs.

And then — it had happened only a few weeks before I met her — she received the announcement of his wedding, together with a long rambling letter in which he explained that he had not been able to endure waiting any longer. (How could he possibly not endure? What sort of love was it that was unable to withstand separation!) And most horrifying of all, it appeared that he had lured away the wife of one of his friends in the kibbutz. Surely no decent man could do something of that sort? Could she have been totally deceived in him?

I was touched not so much by the story itself as by her show of feeling. Had I been wiser, I would have realised that it concealed the danger of romantic notions, and a tendency towards categorical demands and judgements. But at that moment I found her childlike earnestness touching.

From the very first she aroused my sympathy. Her cheap spectacles with their thick old-fashioned frames, her tiny hands, almost like a child’s, with stubby fingers, her disproportionately high forehead, and her complexion so pale that the bluish pattern of the veins clearly showed through, not to mention her habit of laughing too loudly in order to conceal her shyness or emotion.

I tried to foster the impression in her that I was educated, successful and amusing. Subconsciously I started to imitate my colleague Oldřich. I became loquacious, tossing around aphorisms, boasting of my knowledge and the people I knew, complaining about all the duties I had. But then it dawned on me there was no sense in blowing my own trumpet this way, as she had a different scale of values. She was not interested in whom I knew or even what I knew. What she wanted was for the person she loved to be kind, sensitive, sincere and attentive, and to love his own family the way she loved hers.

She talked about her family from the very first day we met and wanted me to meet them. Even before we went to the pictures together or were on first-name terms, I found myself standing in their dark front hall, full of enormous cupboards, hangers, buckets, ropes, paddles and bicycles. My ears were assailed by an assortment of noises that seemed to come from every corner of the flat. My wife-to-be had chosen for my visit a moment when all the family would be there together. ‘The family’ meant Mother, Father, Grandad, brother Robert, his wife Sylva and their daughter Lucie, Auntie Mařka, and Sandor the tom-cat. The place was pervaded by a pungent smell of boiled sauerkraut, soapy water and tobacco smoke; the child was crying; somewhere in the bowels of the flat a piano was being played; and from the kitchen came the hiss of a pressure-cooker and the blare of a radio. I suppressed a desire to turn and run. I looked upwards and noticed that hanging from the smoke-blackened ceiling among the fine threads of dusty cobwebs was a banner which proclaimed: WELCOME TO ALL WHO COME IN FRIENDSHIP.

And then out of the kitchen came Mother: monumentally buxom, her thick hair, which was still dark, combed into a bun. She smiled at me and extended to me a large, almost masculine, hand (so unlike her daughter’s), while summoning the family to her in a deep voice, and I realised that in this family, matriarchy survived untouched by time.

Then we all sat around an enormous table and ate goose with cabbage and dumplings (the goose was in my honour, in honour of a potential new member of the family and I was immediately horror-stricken at the very thought of it), drank beer, ate a dessert and sipped coffee from mocha cups. My future sister-in-law Sylva carried the infant back and forth and my brother-in-law-to-be started arguing with the grandfather about some motor-car problems. My wife-to-be then slipped as she was carrying away the dirty dishes and the awful sound of breaking china drowned the surrounding din. Brought up in the rather fastidious surroundings of our household, I sat with bated breath wondering what would happen next, but nothing did; my wife-to-be and her sister-in-law merely brought a dustpan and brush and swept up the pieces while her mother, now that the lunch was finally behind us, sat me down in an armchair and asked me if I liked music, telling me straight away that they all loved music. Music brought some measure of tranquillity to people’s lives in the hectic modern world and helped one discover that necessary inner peace and serenity. The most important things in people’s lives, she stressed, were harmony and mutual understanding. Then she asked me what my work actually consisted of, but I had hardly managed to utter a few sentences when she interrupted me and sent the remaining female family members off to wash the rest of the unbroken dishes. Then she told me that what she really wanted to know was if my employment did not take up too much time. In the current rat-race for money and success people no longer had any free time left for themselves, let alone their families. She could not accept such an attitude.

She also wanted to know whether my profession was not rather risky. I could not understand what she meant by the question. Only later did it dawn on me that she had been afraid that if there were a change in the status quo (not that she found the present status quo particularly unbearable, but because she had lived through too many sudden, abrupt changes in her lifetime) my existence might be in jeopardy and they might send me to prison, or even the gallows.

I also had to explain to her how things had been for me during the war, and all about my mother’s illness. She decided that she would send my mother some herbal teas which were excellent for the heart, the nerves and the digestion. And at once she stood up — monumental in her wide dark skirt — and strode into the front hall, where she opened one of the many cupboards. After turning out a pile of rags, a whole bundle of old-fashioned straw hats and several boxes — I could not see their contents but they gave out a tinkle like glass — followed by a cellophane bag of pheasant’s feathers, she at last found what she was looking for: an old Van Houten’s cocoa tin. In a single breath she blew a cloud of dust off it and after removing the lid — in the process, releasing several moths which flew noiselessly up to the ceiling — placed before me in yellowing bags (the work of her late mother-in-law who had collected the herbs herself) the miraculous teas.

It struck me that although this household differed utterly from my own ordered and restrained home, where everyone worked, where most of the time they were all ensconced in their hideouts, and where one spoke quietly and only about essentials, this too was a home, or rather that collection of people, that place of constant bustle, shouts, crying, laughter and non-committal words, was a home.

4

The spring of that year was cold and rainy — Alena and I would go for walks together, taking a train or a bus a little way out of the city. Then we would wade through wet meadows and tramp along muddy footpaths. Leaning against the mighty trunk of some rare fir tree in the Průhonice Game Park, we kissed and cuddled while flakes of late snow blew all around us.

Often we would be caught out in the dark and I would suggest to Alena that I might be able to find somewhere for us to stay the night, but she always refused. It would not be proper. And what would Mother say? We would therefore make a dash for the last train, huddling together under the eaves of the station building while enormous drips fell alongside us from the holes in the guttering above.

She also refused to come and see me at our flat except for visits when the whole family was present.

But we would have to remain together one day. Just the two of us! Why was I so impatient? One day we would go off on a journey and stay somewhere together. And when would it be? I probably didn’t love her enough if I was so impatient.

Then Oldřich offered to lend me his flat. All right, she would go there with me if that was what I wanted. Was I certain there would be no one in the flat? I assured her there wouldn’t, that Oldřich and his wife were the only people living in the flat and they were out at work, and their little girl went to nursery. What if one of them were to be taken ill and return unexpectedly? I told her it was unlikely.

So we found ourselves in a small room which supposedly served as a joint bedroom, but clearly belonged to Alexandra. The furniture in it was white; a chair with red and purple seat covers, a wardrobe and a dressing table cluttered with trinkets. A skirt lay strewn over an arm of the armchair and a pair of women’s slippers peeped out from under the bed. An artificial scent of jasmine hung in the air.

And that was where we first made love. In the silence of a strange room; just the sound of rain outside and at one moment the loud chime of a clock from the room next door, which made us jump.

She wanted me to tell her over and over again that I loved her, and so I did. In reply, she whispered that she loved me too. She also wanted me to tell her I wouldn’t leave her, so I promised her I would never leave her. She whispered that she wouldn’t leave me either. And she wanted to hear that I would never love another woman, and I repeated that I would never again love anyone but her.

Then we carefully removed all traces of our presence but she ended up leaving her glasses there and we had to go back for them. We looked high and low. As she was kneeling looking under the couch I knelt at her side, her large breasts almost touching me. Then we made love again on a strange rug that gave off a scent of jasmine.

In the end she found the glasses hidden, quite improbably, underneath a skirt that neither of us had touched before.

It was her mother, of course, who came to the conclusion, one day in midsummer when I had persuaded Alena to spend the night with me, that it was improper for us to live together like that in unconsecrated union. Her subsequent pressure on me to commit myself cut short that most beautiful period of our courting.

We decided that the wedding day would be at the end of October. We were rewarded with her mother’s kisses and blessing, as well as her consent for us to go off together on a prenuptial journey that summer.

Towns beyond the frontiers of our country still remained as closed to us as deserts and sea coasts: the all-powerful authorities had not yet taken into account the change which my wife-to-be had wrought by her choice of partner. Alena wanted me to show her The Hole, to sleep in the dismal inn where I had spent two years of my life. But I feared we might bump into Magdalena there, and besides I had no wish to meet any of my erstwhile colleagues.

In the end we set off for somewhere in that part of the country at least. We rambled all over a plain through which — enclosed by almost absurdly high embankments — a murky summer stream flowed quietly and sluggishly.

We put up in an old farm that had once belonged to the local count, situated not far from the river. The farm, which was in fact more of a manor house, had been transformed into a school, and the principal gave us permission to sleep in a room belonging to ornithologists from the Academy of Sciences. It contained five beds, a refrigerator and a sideboard with stuffed bustards, teals and wild geese. We would make love there every morning while the children, separated from us only by a thin partition and a door whose hasp could have been opened from the other side by a single push, practised pioneer songs. Three days later, we set off again through that semi-steppe, hiking upstream along the river bank, observing flocks of ducks and storks who were just gathering ready to migrate.

We ate fragrant white bread with pork fat and onions and she would tell me about her mother, her brother or her friends, sometimes stopping to ask if she was boring me. Certainly not, I would reply, I wanted to hear as much as possible about her. I knew that my reply would please her and anyway I was glad she was chatty, as I was afraid of the silence that could settle between the two of us, realising that my world and my interests were so alien to her. Then somewhere by the side of a dike we took off our rucksacks and I laid out a blanket in the shade of a hazel bush whose branches sighed in the wind. She knelt on the ground and gathered brown hazel-nuts among the fallen leaves. I coaxed her to come and lie down by me and we cuddled there. But not here, for heaven’s sake — what if someone came?

In Snina we spent the night in a tiny room containing six wooden bunks. The bed linen could not have been changed more than once a week and the walls were covered in dirty rhymes. Drunkards urinated right under the window, gypsies played and sang outside under the vast night sky while we lay and talked about how we would organise our life, how many children we would have (it had never occurred to me that I might need to have children) and when the night was so far gone that even the drunkards were too tired and the gypsies had wandered off to their miserable hovels on the edge of town, we snuggled up together and she asked me to say something nice to her. I tried to find words that would sound tender enough, all the while longing for her body. Which was so close, so near to me that it seemed absurd to waste time talking.

5

Two years later, we managed to obtain a flat with the help of Oldřich whose contacts inevitably included a housing cooperative chairman.

Subconsciously, I expected our new home to resemble in some way the home I had been accustomed to. My mother had always gone to the verge of extremes in her care of me and was always there ready to listen to me and share the events of my life and my attitudes to the world. My wife cared as little about what I ate as what I thought. She seemed to me like a child: still totally absorbed in herself, her own world and her own needs. She was incapable of concerning herself with anyone else’s world and needs.

At first I put it down to reluctance and tried being obstreperous. I deliberately kept myself to myself and refrained from talking to her about things I considered important or interesting. But then I realised that she didn’t notice my taciturnity in the same way that she didn’t notice when I wiped off the layer of dust that had settled on the furniture. All she required was for me to be there, to be near her and ever ready to listen to her.

It is also possible that I failed to find a way through to her; that the things I talked about seemed too remote to her. What she wanted from me was tenderness; what I offered was news of the world. But I was unaware of the disparity, being too taken up with outside events. I needed to be involved in them, to think about how to reform society, to reflect on new laws. I spent more and more time with friends who felt the same need. We had all spent a large part of our lives in intellectual deprivation, during a period when tyranny and violence reigned; now, it seemed, we were going to have the chance to remedy matters at least in part.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were fascinated by reason, having been brought up to regard the Church as the supreme authority. Revolutionaries, brought up in an irredeemably class-divided society, were fired with a vision of egalitarianism. We, in similar fashion, were attracted by a vision of freedom, or freedom of thought, at least.

We used to go on arguing late into the night. I longed to be allowed to speak, to share my conclusions with the others. I can’t tell whether that need was innate in me. When confronted by idiotic rulers and stupid laws, almost everyone feels enlightened and discovers within himself the capacity for useful counsel. Maybe if I had lived under a different regime or in another country I would have channelled my disquiet in simpler and more sensible directions. Perhaps I would have calculated motor winding like my father, or become a wandering monk or rabbi, or have presided in a dignified way in a law court, wearing a wig and judging in accordance with my conscience, aware that each of my judgements was also helping to construct the complex edifice of the Law.

I started to write articles, at least. Most of them had only a tenuous connection with my speciality — I wrote about Montesquieu in order to quote his views on the independence of the judiciary, I wrote about juvenile vandals in order to demonstrate the link between their cynicism and the cynicism of society as a whole — I certainly said nothing that was not common knowledge to anyone concerned with those matters: in the murky depths from which I was only gradually emerging there was little scope for real wisdom to develop.

I was so preoccupied with my activity that when my wife announced she was expecting a baby, I felt apprehension rather than joy or gratitude.

I scarcely recall the period of her pregnancy. She would complain about being tired all the time and negotiated shorter working hours at the library. She also wanted me to go with her to choose clothes for the yet-unborn baby. Minute smocks and bootees would arouse in her an enthusiasm that I found irritating as it made no sense to me and struck me as artificial. And at night she would put my hand on her swelling belly for me to feel how our child already lived. She must have longed for me to feel the same way that she did about it, for me to look forward to it like she did, but it was beyond me.

She felt the first contractions in the small hours of the first day of February. I telephoned my father and he came for us in the same old car.

It was still wintry and there had been a fresh fall of snow during the night so the car proceeded very slowly through the deserted streets. We finally got out in front of a dismal barrack-like building of unrendered brick and slowly trudged through the snow. I supported her with one hand while carrying a bag with her things and clothes for the baby in the other. Several early rooks were hopping about in front of the closed gates. Then the gates slowly opened as they had done on that far-off night; only the armed guard was missing, and there was I following the stretcher. At that moment I realised I had to leave her there, alone in her pain. I hugged her and told her I would be with her in spirit, and she told me not to worry about anything.

Someone took the bag from me, and her as well. She turned once more and waved, and it struck me that that moment would most probably bind me to her ever after.