Judge On Trial

Chapter Eight

1

MANDA WANTED HIM to help her choose a present for her grandmother’s birthday. They arranged to meet at lunch-time under the St Wenceslas statue. She couldn’t miss the statue. Otherwise she would be bound to fret about not getting off the tram at the right stop. She had inherited his tendency to worry.

It was an odd feeling to be waiting for his daughter. During the previous three weeks — wary and full of longing — he had grown used to waiting for Alexandra. Sometimes they had managed to drive to the Vyšehrad attic room during the lunch-hour and make love there. Most days, he had also waited for her after work. They would have dinner together and if she had the time, would go back once more to the small room where they could make love. Once they had actually managed to get off work early in the afternoon and driven out of town. On the way, they were able to see autumn settling in on the hillsides along the River Vltava: some slopes were yellow, some turning red and others were already flame-red, and he would never have noticed their colourfulness but for her. They had a meal in a country pub and then made love in the woods, which still exhaled a summer warmth. On the return journey she told him about the books she had been reading recently: he found her way of recounting them made even the most boring stories seem interesting, like the autumn trees they were passing.

He caught sight of his daughter in the tram as it passed, her nose pressed to the glass of the door. She saw him too, and waved.

Previously he had always carefully weighed up his conduct, accepting too much responsibility for actions for which he was not answerable. He had been used to perceiving the world around him in all its distressing and wounding details; now it was beginning to be lost in mists. He would spend his nights in one place and go to work in another; people moved about him and sometimes required his presence, or his views or his answers. They cried, remonstrated with him, implored him, relied on him, prevaricated, tried to pull the wool over his eyes or win him over, while all the time he lived between two encounters, between the last embrace and the next. For how much longer?

‘Give it here!’ he said, taking the red school bag from her hands. ‘You’ve not been home yet?’

‘But I wouldn’t have had time!’

‘Had your lunch?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘There were so many children in the dining room. I was afraid I’d be late.’

They crossed the street. She stopped in front of the window of a gift shop.

‘Have you already decided what you want to buy?’

‘No.’

‘And have you got your money?’

‘I’ll have a look.’ She took her bag from him and rummaged in it for a moment. Then she pulled out her pencil case. The pencils inside were all sharpened in exemplary fashion. From a side pocket she withdrew a folded fifty-crown note. ‘Do you think this will be enough?’

‘Bound to be. Grandma doesn’t expect you to give her anything expensive.’

She stood looking in the shop window obviously captivated by the painted jugs, costume dolls, Good Soldier Švejks and ashtrays of fool’s gold.

He had not spoken to Alexandra today yet. He had been stuck in a meeting from first thing till mid-morning. Then he had tried to call her, letting the number ring a long time but unable to overcome the instrument’s callous unconcern. Most likely she was still waiting for him to call her. If he didn’t get through to her, who would she go to lunch with, who would she make a date with for the evening?

He scolded himself for failing either to trust her more, or to pull himself together before he ended up fettering himself, which would be the path to destruction.

He guided his daughter into the cosmetics shop next door. They had a gift package of three over-priced soaps in a gold-coloured box on a bed of pink velvet. The box took her fancy. She also chose a skin cream for thirty crowns. ‘But it’s going to come to over fifty crowns altogether,’ he warned her.

She unearthed several coins from the pocket of her anorak. ‘Will this be enough?’

He counted all the coins. ‘Yes, but you won’t have a single crown left.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

He found it touching that she was willing to spend all her savings on a present for his mother.

They left the shop. Then he took her to a milk bar and ordered her a milk shake and two open sandwiches. He took a milk dessert for himself. He watched her as she drank, her little nose submerged in the glass. He felt tenderly towards her but was unsure how to express it. ‘Do you want my whipped cream?’

She scooped it up. ‘Don’t you eat it?’

‘No, I’ve never eaten whipped cream.’

‘Didn’t Grandma get cross with you?’

‘She didn’t know. It was during the war. Even the milk was rationed. Whipped cream was something we didn’t even dream of.’

‘Not even before the war?’

‘I can’t remember any further back.’

‘Grandma said you could buy everything before the war. Before the war, how old were you?’

‘The same age as Martin now.’

‘Do you think Martin won’t remember anything either when he grows up?’

‘I really couldn’t say. Have you got the presents?’

‘Wait a mo, I’ll have a look!’ She bent down to her bag. He looked at her blonde head and narrow shoulders. He ought to be her protector. His own childhood had not been especially happy but at least he had had someone he could trust and run to for protection. Who was she going to trust, when one day she discovered that her nearest and dearest had let her down and some Alice or other declared officially that the home she was used to was no longer her home. What was she going to do, how was she going to behave? Was she ever going to have the courage to become attached to anyone again?

He was overcome with regret at what had happened, which had been partly his fault. But in this life what could one retract or put right? To regret one’s own actions made sense if one was determined not to commit them ever again. Otherwise one’s regret was simply agonising, or more likely, consoling self-deception.

‘Look, Daddy,’ she said, just after they left the milk bar, ‘they’re showing Dumbo here. We could go and see it today, it’s Friday.’

He hesitated. What had his daughter been doing these past weeks? What had made her happy, what had made made her sad? He did not think he had noticed. ‘All right. Buy some tickets for five thirty.’ He gave her twenty crowns.

‘Are you sure you’ll make it? I know you’ve got lots of work.’

‘I’ll be there on time, don’t worry.’

‘We’ll wait for you outside the cinema.’

‘There’s no need to worry!’ he said, stroking her hair. He hurried away from her to go and call his mistress at last.

She answered before he’d even finished dialling.

‘What’s up? Why didn’t you call?’

‘I did call you.’

‘You called me?’

‘It was engaged.’

‘You can’t have strained yourself. I’ve not budged from this chair since this morning. I’m colouring a stork.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘You’re joking! There are five of us stuck here. One of them is daubing a little boy stork, one a mummy stork, one the background, one the little girl stork. I’m the daddy. Can’t you show up this afternoon, at least?’

‘I’ve got tickets for the cinema at five thirty.’

‘For both of us?’

‘Manda wants to go to Dumbo.’

‘I can’t stand cartoons. You’d have to be perverted to go and enjoy the fact that some poor girls wasted two years of their lives colouring in fucking baby elephants. I thought we might go somewhere together this evening.’

‘But I promised the child…’

‘Couldn’t your wife take her?’

‘Of course she could. It’s just that I’ve got the feeling…’

‘You’ve got the feeling you ought to stand me up?’

‘We could see each other after the film.’

‘What makes you think I’ll have the time then? Do you think I’m always available when the notion takes you?’

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘I’ve got other plans tomorrow. With other people.’

‘Well it can’t be helped. I hope you have a good time.’

‘As good a time as I’d have with you, that’s for certain.’

He hung up. He opened his desk drawer and then quickly closed it again. Sometimes he had the feeling that everything being played out around him, everything he participated in with such seriousness was no more than a farce, an absurd play that all the players were in by mistake. They smiled and bared their teeth (both apparently an expression of the same instinct) as directed by an author and a producer they had never met, and they had no idea how or by what route they might leave the stage with honour. Now, for a very short while he had had the impression of leaving the stage behind, of living, really living, but more than likely he had just ended up in another, less well-known, but equally absurd play, and yet again he was required to act as directed by someone else. Would he prove capable of resisting and leaving this one, or could he at least transform it into reality?

But what was the point of resisting at this moment, of fostering false hopes in the child, of sitting oblivious next to her in the cinema? The worst thing would be to start play-acting on the children’s and his own behalf.

A whole age ago, he had caught the fancy of a sad-eyed clown who could already see his own end and had selected him from a whole crowd of children, as if he had guessed that this was the one who would be able to transmit his message to others. But what precisely was the message he had entrusted him with? He had told him that it made no sense to play-act with the aim of deceiving oneself and others. That one should live in harmony with oneself and the world.

What was he to do? How was he to find harmony when he was incapable of knowing himself, had never learnt to heed his inner voice and it was so long since he had seen his own light, ever since he lost it in the way sleepers lose for ever the light of the star that they observed with such amazement in the night sky before they fell asleep?

The clown hadn’t told him, and now no one ever would.

The telephone rang. He quickly lifted the receiver but it was only his father wanting to meet him somewhere other than at home. He arranged it for the following afternoon when his father had assured him it was nothing of immediate urgency. He was rather pleased to have something to do now it seemed as if he would have time on his hands.

2

His father was supposed to meet him right alongside the place where the gigantic monument once stood. As usual, Adam arrived several minutes early, but his father was already sitting on a bench — with his back to the river, understandably, so as not to be distracted by the view of the city — writing something in his notebook — figures, no doubt. He had tossed his shabby coat over the back of the bench.

Adam sat down next to him. ‘Something happened, Dad?’

‘Your mum doesn’t know I’m seeing you,’ his father began conspiratorially.

‘Is something wrong with her?’

‘What would be wrong with her? I told her I was going to the library. But Hanuš rang yesterday. Did you hear about it?’

‘How could I have?’

‘He hasn’t called you?’

‘Not for a bit.’

‘Do you know he wants to come back next month? Adam, he must be off his head!’ Father spat in disgust on the filthy verge.

‘That surprises me.’

‘Your mum’s pleased, naturally. She takes it as a matter of course. Adam, I really hope you haven’t been advising him to do anything of the sort.’

‘No, I haven’t given him any advice at all.’

‘For goodness sake, try and explain to me what he thinks he’ll find here? They’ll kick him out of that institute of his the moment he steps through the door. He’ll end up stoking a boiler somewhere or shovelling coal, like those pals of yours.’

‘My pals don’t shovel coal.’

‘But there are others who do. And even if they don’t kick him out, what could he possibly hope to achieve here? Do you really think it’s possible to do any decent academic work in this bloody place? They’ll set some numskull over him and he won’t let him do a bloody thing. Or maybe you think I’m wrong.’

‘I don’t know what the situation is like for mathematicians.’

‘The same as for everyone else. What can you achieve if they don’t give you access to information, if you’re not trusted and there’s no investment? Who appreciates conscientious work here? Have you already forgotten the reward I got?’

‘You did get that prize, Dad.’

‘What I got was two years and one month. And when they first took me in to see my charge officer, do you know what he told me?’

‘You told me, Dad.’

‘He said: “You won’t be beaten, don’t worry.” And I said to him: “Of course I won’t, after all I’m in a socialist…”’

‘Yes, you’ve told me before, Dad!’

‘He said to me: “You’d be surprised. You should have been here a few weeks ago.” Now tell me, what sort of idea is it, him coming home?’

‘I expect he’s got his reasons.’

‘What reasons, what sensible reasons could he possibly have? You don’t think it’s that woman, do you? We don’t know her, but she’s bound to be crazy — mad for home, like all women. Your mum’s the same: she’d sooner die than live abroad. But everything’s finished here now, can’t you see?’

‘In what sense, Dad?’

‘Science and technology are finished. And especially anything creative. They destroy anyone who might be capable of achieving anything. Because the place is run by numskulls and lazy slobs. And when everything’s on the rocks because of them, you know what they’ll do? The same as they did then. You know how long they held me in solitary?’

‘Yes, but things were different in those days.’

‘So you think things were different in those days. You tell me, then, if anything happened to the ones who sent me to prison that time, me and all the other innocent people. They’re still sitting where they were all those years ago. Like that Presiding Judge of yours.’

‘But Hanuš knows all this. It was you who told him, for heaven’s sake.’

‘So tell me what’s got into him, then.’

‘Maybe he wants to come home because this is where he was born. He knows the streets here. There are forests for him here. And he understands everything that people say to him. And we’re here too.’

‘What sort of nonsense is that? Are you telling me there are no streets over there and he can’t understand what people say?’

‘Why are you shouting at me, Dad? I didn’t put him up to it.’

‘People aren’t the same as birds or animals, for heaven’s sake. They’re not forced to go back to the place they were hatched, regardless of the fact they’ll be shot at.’

‘You might be wrong there, Dad.’

‘I might be wrong?’

‘Forgive me, but you were wrong when we came back here after the war.’

‘What I did wrong then was to put my trust in an untested project. But there’s one truth that has been tried and tested over millennia: everything that people have has to to be worked for. And now tell me this: who in this country still does an honest day’s work? Who is still allowed to do an honest day’s work here?’

‘You’re right in all you say, Dad, but maybe he sees things differently.’

‘In what way could he see it differently?’

‘You look at everything with a mathematical eye, but you can’t calculate everything in life.’

‘Oh, can’t you? More’s the pity. Most people don’t calculate at all. He doesn’t need a slide-rule to work out that there he has the freedom to read what he likes and go where he wants, while here he’ll be lucky if they don’t send him to shovel coal. And what if they send him to prison… Who’ll stand up for him? Who stood up for me then?’

‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘I don’t know how you meant it.’

‘For instance, I mean that people go on believing in God even though it has been proved to them — calculated — that everything began twenty thousand million years ago with a big bang, that the universe is expanding, and that human beings evolved from less developed creatures.’

‘What are you dragging God into it for?’

‘I was just trying to show that people are capable of believing and acting in ways that seem to defy reason.’

‘Adam, are you serious? You can’t really approve of Hanuš returning because of something so fanciful… so unreal, can you?’

‘It’s his decision.’

‘I wanted to ask you if you’d call him or write him a letter, but I can see that he wouldn’t get any sensible advice from you anyway.’

‘I can write to him if you like — but I expect you’d put it much better.’

‘God! You’ve come a long way, Adam!’

‘We both have, Dad! Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t be pleased to see Hanuš? To be able to see him whenever you like?’

His father reached for his coat. ‘My being pleased or not isn’t the point!’

What was the point then? He walked back to the Old Town Square with his father.

‘Don’t tell Mum about our chat.’

‘Don’t worry. And write to him!’

‘Write to him! If I write what I think in a letter, it’ll never reach him!’

Dusk was already falling. The floodlights illuminating the Town Hall and the astronomical clock suddenly came on. How long ago was it that he and Hanuš had walked here together? He couldn’t even remember.

Adam, is that you? Thank God.

What’s wrong with your voice? What’s happened? Where are you calling from?

From a phone box. I got into a bit of a scrap, Adam. They almost — I got thumped, and I could do with a change of trousers. They’re in the wardrobe in the passage. Just make sure Mum doesn’t see you. I’ll be all right in a second.

As he led him into an entranceway they left a trail of blood behind them on the paving stones.

They were still the same paving stones, but the rain had washed the blood away long ago, or passers-by had carried it off on the soles of their shoes.

He could have walked through to Příkopy and taken a tram home, but instead he set off through the lanes he had walked along every day for so many years: either alone or with friends of long ago. Here was the Bethlehem Chapel. He could go and have a look inside. The one and only code of decent and noble behaviour: the one laid down by Homer, Socrates… He couldn’t remember whether Hus had been included in the list. He certainly belonged there. Secretly I had wanted to belong in that company, which is not closed to anyone, surely. But what have I to show?

A group of foreigners was coming out of the chapel — the doors closed behind them and locked. He wouldn’t be taking a look round today.

He was aware nevertheless of a sense of relief at moving among places that linked him to the past, that were capable of speaking to him and thereby lessening somehow the burden which the present heaped upon him.

Is it really possible that this feeling is completely unknown to Father? Have streets only ever been connecting lines for him between a starting point and a destination?

For the first time in his life he had dared to tell him he might be wrong. It wasn’t that he had previously lacked the courage — he hadn’t been sure. He had been far too inclined to accept his father’s standpoint which made such a categorical distinction between the useful and the useless, between the beneficial and the futile, between the sensible and the senseless. It was odd that he had had to wait till he was in his forties to have the courage to leave his father’s world. Perhaps Hanuš felt something similar and wanted to return for that reason. To see his father and also to spite him.

Hanuš had grown up before him. Or at any rate he had not shared the childish willingness of immature students and political preachers to turn the world upside down, to improve it and make it conform as rapidly as possible to their own vision of perfection. Hanuš certainly hadn’t believed he was destined for something like that, let alone felt a vocation to judge others. He had chosen the most abstract occupation possible — one that nowhere obliged him to interfere in other people’s lives and impose his own attitudes. And if anyone started to force their ideas down his throat he would start to lash out.

The world we inhabit is becoming less and less adult. Most people have so little work to do, know so little of suffering and are answerable for so little, that they cannot recognise the essential moment when they move from an area in which they are led, into one in which they have to move according to their own free will, one in which they are required to take charge and protect, instead of demanding care and protection.

Criminals too are mostly immature even when they pretend to be acting entirely according to their own wills. Just as children regard themselves as the centre of the world, criminals accuse others of failing to provide what they long for.

The ones they accuse are terrified of them. They detest criminals, while at the same time having an interest in them which sometimes verges on fascination, and are susceptible to being moved by their life stories.

For his part, when he was required to judge real criminals, their life stories did not move him at all. People who wanted to judge the crimes of others had to avoid being moved by the cruel or tragic circumstances that led up to those crimes. They had to accept that tragic circumstances form part of most people’s lives, and only certain individuals succumb to them. That was the essence of their fateful choice, their transgression or their inability to cope with circumstances. And someone who was unable to resist the temptation to take another’s life disbarred himself from human society. That applied as much to those who committed crime as to those who fought it. During his life he had come across more murders committed by those claiming to fight crime than homicide committed by non-uniformed and unorganised criminals.

He was already hungry, but he enjoyed wandering the gloomy lanes. His head was clear and for the first time in a long time he felt a lightness of spirit that uplifted him. All his anxieties, worries and longing were gone from him — for that short while at any rate. He passed the courthouse where he worked. It was only a short step from here to that house, that cosy haven where he had spent so much time in recent days. An uneasy thought crossed his mind. He dispelled it immediately, but continued in the direction he was now used to taking.

He had concluded that the death penalty was unacceptable more in order to save himself from temptation and the innocent from arbitrary decisions than out of any compassion for criminals and the cruel circumstances of their unsuccessful lives. As for protecting the innocent, he shouldn’t fool himself. It was a well-known fact that the moment tyranny overruled the law, innocent people started to die at the executioner’s hands, even if, only the previous day, judges had weighed up a thousand times the circumstances of a proven murderer’s action. Tyranny was not balked by any tradition. Tyranny had no scruples; that was what made it tyranny. On the contrary, the moment it started to limit itself it ceased to be tyranny. The moment a hangman became a mere gaoler, an acceptable state of affairs was on its way back.

This was his first murder trial. There was something so reminiscent of his own life about the manner of the crime and the nature of its victims that he was pleased he did not have to work up sympathy to counterbalance his own bias. If this particular case was also to be his last one — and sadly, it seemed increasingly likely — then paradoxically it would consummate his childhood experience: his experience of mass gassings. Perhaps it would be such a total consummation that his experience would leave him, in the same way it had left his brother’s memory, and he would be able to heave a sigh of relief.

He stopped in front of the house in Vyšehrad. The door of the small shop next door was barred and most of the windows were shining in the darkness.

He tried the handle of the front door and found it unlocked. He hesitated a moment, but there was no reason why he should not enter, now he had come this far. He went down the few steps into the backyard. The small area was bare apart from four dustbins just behind the door; one of the bins lay on its side giving off a reek of decaying refuse. He skirted it and walked to the wall opposite where he turned and looked upwards, to the two — very familiar — small windows right in the roof. The first was in darkness, the second emitted a faint purple glow.

He left the yard again, closing the door quietly behind him. A drunk was staggering along the opposite pavement while from the neighbouring park came the scent of rotting leaves. Come to think of it, what is a to the power of zero? What sort of silly idea was it anyway? One — that’s one I still do remember. What’s a to the power of one? A, Dad. So what are you making such a fuss over then, Adam? What do you get if you raise a to the power of infinity, when a is greater than one?

Infinity, Dad.

Good. So what will a to minus infinity be, then? You don’t know? I’ll help you then. How much is a raised to infinity if a is less than one? You don’t know that? You mean you don’t know something as simple as that? Hanuš, come here. This little child will know! Hanuš, pay attention! If you raise some number less than one to infinity — a half, for instance — what do you get?

You can’t get anything, Daddy.

Did you hear that, Adam? Zero! The same goes for all numbers less than one. And stop crying; that won’t help you!

He had a feeling that something hopeful had happened today, though, after all. Yes, of course: he might be be seeing his brother soon.

3

He arrived home; the children were still awake. Martin was in bed already, his daughter was finishing her homework, Alena was darning stockings. He had found his family in its proper place and for a moment could enjoy the illusion that things were going on just as they should.

His wife looked at him expectantly. Whenever he had returned in recent days she had given him the same expectant look. Where had he been? Who had he been with? With that other woman. When would he finally begin to talk it all over with her?

But he always eluded her gaze, and acted as if he didn’t even notice it. And when he did speak, it was only to say something unimportant. ‘I was with my father,’ he said, opening the refrigerator and taking out butter and cheese. ‘Hanuš wants to come home and Dad’s annoyed.’

‘It’s good news he wants to come back, isn’t it?’ she asked.

He shrugged. Throughout this period he had felt intense pity in her presence, though he could not explain it. He pitied her for not being equal to her own notions about life. He pitied her incompetence in getting embroiled with some immature, hysterical youngster. He regretted he was unable to love her as he had done before, partly because she had lost her ingenuous innocence, or rather he felt sorry for himself for having lost his image of her as an ingenuous innocent. ‘Good for whom, do you think?’

‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘My feelings are neither here nor there.’ He chewed his bread slowly. Pity and love had a lot in common. He would have gladly got up and stroked his wife’s hair and said something nice to her. Nothing, however, could be more humiliating than to receive expressions of pity in place of expressions of affection. If someone were to treat him that way he would be horrified and covered in shame.

He glanced through Manda’s Czech homework and then yielded to her plea for him to play a game of draughts with her. Amazingly, he actually concentrated on the game and this time did not surprise his daughter by losing.

Oddly enough, he felt a soothing sense of peace beginning to pervade him. It might be the first presage of death — but he had received that long ago. Maybe familiar home surroundings were soothing him. But he did not have a genuine sense that he had returned here. Rather he felt estranged from everyone and everything; it merely remained for him to take a final bow on all sides: live your lives in peace and wish me peace also: and to jingle his bells in farewell.

‘Where are you off to, Daddy? Are you going out somewhere?’

‘Just to my room.’

He had only just got to sleep when he was awakened by an insistent ringing.

‘Adam, Adam. Are you asleep already?’

‘What’s up?’

‘There’s someone at the door!’ Alena was standing in the doorway.

‘All right, I’m going.’

‘I’ll go if you like. What if it’s the… I could say you weren’t home.’

He quickly pulled on his shirt and trousers. They’d only come at this time of night if he had really committed some heinous crime. And they’d make a lot more noise about it. It suddenly crossed his mind that it might be her: ‘the other one’, Alexandra. Something had happened to her. It had all got to Oldřich’s ears and he had kicked her out. Or she had caught sight of him in the yard when he was looking up at the window, and had now rushed over here to explain everything.

But it was only his friend Petr with a large leather case.

He showed him into his room. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Do you think it’s safe to talk here?’

‘It makes no odds. Go ahead.’

‘There’s no need to worry; I wasn’t followed.’

‘I’m not worried. And I don’t even see why anyone should be following you.’

‘They’ve arrested Matěj. Haven’t you heard?’

He hadn’t. Yesterday he had gone to the cinema with his children, this afternoon he had been discussing his brother’s situation with his father and this evening he had wandered through the Old Town lanes and been to check on his mistress’s fidelity.

They had confiscated some books, letters and documents from Matěj’s flat. So far no indictment had been issued, which might be regarded as a good sign, but Petr was anticipating further searches. ‘Adam, I know it won’t be nice having the case around, but at least they won’t be coming to your place.’

‘So long as no one saw you coming here with it.’

‘No one did, Adam. I’ve been racking my brains for half the day trying to think where to take it. There’s my mother-in-law, but she’d go out of her mind with worry, besides which she’d blow the gaff somewhere. Apart from her, everyone I know is in the same boat as me.’

‘Except me.’

‘It’s awkward for someone in your position, I realise.’

‘My position has got nothing to do with it.’

‘It’s so bloody ludicrous. The day they finally come to write about it, it’ll seem so funny.’

‘No one will ever write about it, that’s for sure. People will have other things on their minds. Give me a rough idea of what’s in the case, anyhow.’

‘That’s what’s so damned silly about it, Adam. Nothing at all. Just old papers. Articles of mine that were published in magazines, a couple of books, and a few letters. Strictly personal. The case is unlocked and you can have a look through it if you agree to take it.’

‘I’m hardly going to look in your case.’

‘There’s nothing in there, Adam, I swear to you. It would just be a shame to lose them, that’s all. But see for yourself.’ He knelt down and opened the catches.

‘There’s no need! What about Matěj if they don’t release him?’

‘Surely they won’t be able to hold him. He hasn’t done anything. Apart from typing out a few of his own articles or a couple of poems by other people. It would be a disgrace — for them, Adam!’

‘The two are incompatible: power and a sense of disgrace. You spoke about it yourself.’

‘I know. But one likes to delude oneself that it won’t turn out like that in reality. I don’t know what we could do to help him. Get up a petition? We’d get some signatures, but only from people who are in the same boat as Matěj, and no one would give a damn. Adam, there’s not much left we can do. It’s more up to people like yourself.’

‘They’re not going to give me the job if they charge him.’

‘I don’t mean that. But you could have a word with the high-ups; they’ll listen if it comes from you.’

‘They’ve never been known to listen.’ He felt increasingly uneasy. People were starting to count on him again, to assign him a role. He didn’t mind them bringing him cases to hide, but he didn’t want people telling him how to behave, what action he should take, how and where to box clever and when to go in for cloak and dagger.

‘But you know from your own experience,’ Petr said, ‘they’re only prepared to talk to people whom they regard at least slightly as one of theirs.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘No offence intended, Adam. They’re the only kind who’ll be able to bring about a change for the better again one day.’

It was a marvellous idea, but he’d neglected to ask whether Adam still had any urge to change the world. He liked his friends but at the same time he wished at long last to belong to no one but himself and decide accordingly.

It was past midnight when Petr left. He went with him right down to the street door and then returned to the flat with the abandoned suitcase. Petr was wrong: there was no one who would still rate him as being ‘slightly one of theirs’, someone who might therefore stand a chance of being heard. One would have to make a much greater effort. It was a bit much to expect him to start going in for horse-trading when all he had to offer was his conscience and his honour.

If he made no effort, his career in court would come to a speedy conclusion and they would replace him, naturally, with someone who was prepared to make the effort. But what concern was it of his? ‘Why should he pretend to feel greater responsibility for the post he occupied than for himself? Alternatively: how could one be answerable for one’s post when one wasn’t answerable for oneself?

He could scarcely lift the suitcase. It weighed almost fifty kilos. He laid it on the settee and hesitated a moment before opening it. On top lay some books: Trotsky, Djilas, Orwell. A thick binder of Reportér magazine from the sixties and alongside it a box of letters without a lid. He could see that the topmost one was written in Matěj’s hand. Some of it was underlined and he couldn’t help noticing the words: ‘What does it matter, how many masters there are? There is only one slavery. Whoever refuses it is free, though the lords be legion.’ It was a quotation from old Seneca. Where had that old philosopher hidden his books and manuscripts? He hadn’t got away with it anyway and they’d forced him to commit suicide in the end, like Socrates. But apparently he’d died as he had taught: a free man.

How was he going to die? Maybe it would also be up to himself.

4

On Mondays, he usually had his office to himself. It suited him. There were only ten days left before the Kozlík trial and he wanted to be left in peace to weigh up the whole case.

If the truth were told, he would like to have had some conclusive proof that the man he was to try for murder had really committed it. Such proof was hard to come by, however. Usually nobody actually sees a murderer commit the deed, and one only had circumstantial evidence or expert testimony to go on.

He had received enough circumstantial evidence. However, Kozlík had provided not a single fact in support of his revised statement.

I started to get one of my headaches and went to my bedroom and sat there for a long time in the dark. On account of I was thirsty I went to the kitchen for the purpose of having a drink. Mrs Obensdorfovd was already back in her bedroom on the other side of the kitchen where she always left the door ajar for fear of someone stealing something from the kitchen. But I could hear she was asleep. That is when the idea came to my head that if I turned on the gas and went away people would think she had done it herself because it wouldn’t have been the first time and at her age she didn’t always know what she was doing…

Why did he confess anyway?

Normally it was difficult to force people with his sort of life experience and thickheadedness to make any sort of statement, let alone make a false confession and sign it.

From what he knew of Kozlík, he would have expected him to deny it even if they beat him up. They could not have extracted a confession out of him even with lengthy pressure. He had been scarcely two days on remand and there he was making a full confession. What had induced him to do it? Mental derangement? What could have deranged him to that extent? Maybe only the fact that when he had got over the fit of rage which powered his action, he suddenly realised what he had done. Or had something happened to him that night? Something he had not mentioned in his statement?

It would be as well to make the effort to consider the second statement, briefly at least, as if it were truthful. Kozlík came home from work during the afternoon. He knocked down the shelf and was told off by his landlady, from whom he subsequently took the savings book. He had been too agitated to notice whether there was anyone else in the flat. Shortly afterwards he had left to go and meet his fiancée, taking the savings book with him.

Shortly after, Mrs Obensdorfová junior arrived with her daughter. She didn’t notice the shelf had been knocked down in the front hall and her mother-in-law didn’t mention it to her either. It was conceivable; she had obviously been in a hurry and they had certainly exchanged only a few words.

Kozlík went to see an Italian comedy and then walked his fiancée home. About that time, someone had turned on the gas in the flat. Because Kozlík was still with Libuše Körnerová — though not even she had confirmed that, of course, and now she would be unlikely to confirm or deny it — it would have to have been someone as yet untraced and unsuspected. That person was then seen by the neighbour through her spy-hole. Either she had really seen the person and took it to be Kozlík, which one might concede, since she had assumed in advance it was him, or the person did not exist at all and she had concocted the story for some unknown reason. In that case it would have had to be Kozlík’s landlady herself who turned on the gas. But all the experts’ reports and other testimonies did not tally with such a hypothesis.

Whoever it was who had turned on the gas, Kozlík could have had no idea what had happened in the flat. Why had he not returned home, then? Libuše Körnerová had stated that she was in a hurry. Not even he maintained he had spent the night with his fiancée. The cinema performance ended around ten, so Kozlík must have been back at the tram stop by eleven o’clock at the latest. If he had wanted to return home he had had the chance to do so. Clearly he had not intended to go home. It was also possible that his landlady had thrown him out for breaking the shelf. But if she had thrown him out, she wouldn’t have given him her savings book.

He could have stolen the savings book, of course, then left the flat and spent the night at the home of someone he did not wish to name.

But it was unlikely that he would have missed the chance to prove his presence at someone else’s that night. After all, Protectorate laws no longer applied. It would not endanger the person who had sheltered him, so long as he or she knew nothing about his criminal action. Particularly if he had not committed any crime, or at most was in possession of a stolen savings book with a paltry amount in it.

The individual elements of Kozlík’s second statement might have held water, but as a whole it did not present a credible picture. There was no sense in dealing with his second statement. He had withdrawn his confession for understandable reasons. He had nothing to lose; the only chance he had was to start denying his action.

But even if he had committed the murder, he must have spent the night somewhere. He was clearly covering up for someone. And he had already been covering up for them when he made that first lengthy confession.

Could he have gone back to his common-law wife and wanted to spare her needless investigation? It was not his impression that Kozlík displayed a particularly considerate attitude towards women. Besides, he had named her. There was no reason for him to state that he had only gone to her place the next morning instead of saying that they had not parted at all the previous evening.

When I almost went blind which I didn’t report as a protest against my treatment a fellow-prisoner in my cell whose name I don’t recall started to teach me philosophy and English and he explained to me that real strength is doing good…

Only now was he struck by the inconsistency of those details. Kozlík had obviously been referring to the clergyman who had been to see Alena and shown her Kozlík’s naive and vainglorious letters. His name’s Pravda. Even I remember that.

Kozlík had clearly lied in his first statement when he had said he could not remember the name of the person to whom he had sent almost filial letters. He had lied in the middle of a statement in which he was almost amazingly frank. It was possible, for instance, that he had not named him because he was the person who had given him shelter that night. The thought so fascinated Adam that he had to tell himself off for starting to play the investigator, something he detested in himself.

Even if Kozlík had spent the night there, there was no reason for him not to name him. Unless he had confessed to him what he had just done. He might have been afraid that Pravda had failed to report what he had told him and thereby been guilty of a criminal offence. However, that would be to assume that he had come to him and stated: ‘I’ve just turned the gas on in my landlady’s kitchen and here I am. What do you think about it?’

It was hardly likely that a third person, let alone a former clergyman, would listen to such a statement and do nothing. After all, the landlady might still have been alive. If Kozlík had come to see him that night and confided in him, his friend would have made him go straight back there. And most likely would have accompanied him. They would have taken a taxi and driven straight to that apartment house in Žižkov. But what if they had seen the police car or ambulance already parked outside and realised there was nothing they could do to put things right?

What advice would Pravda have given Kozlík? Would he have lent him some money and sent him away to try to find a hiding place? Or, and this was likelier, said: Clear off, I don’t want to hear any more about you! Or: Go and report what you have done and make a full admission, that’s the only hope you have left. In the eyes of your fellow-people and of God. Or he could have just turned away from him and abandoned him without saying a word, and, in the knowledge that he had been spurned by the only person he still clung to, the murderer could then have observed from a distance as they carried the lifeless bodies out to the ambulance. He could almost picture him suddenly running off and then wandering aimlessly through the streets until the next morning when he made his way to the place where they would inevitably find him, until he reached the place where there was no longer any point in trying to defend himself or to lie, not even to avoid punishment.

The telephone rang. His boss wanted to see him.

‘Kozlík buggering you about?’ he enquired as Adam came in.

‘No, not particularly. Why?’ He had no desire to discuss the case with him.

‘But he withdrew his statement, didn’t he?’

He shrugged. ‘He didn’t introduce any new facts.’

‘As far as I know,’ his boss said, ‘the prosecution will be pushing for the rope.’

‘And they expect me to play along?’

‘What did you expect? After all the bastard did away with a child.’

‘It’s possible he really didn’t know about the kid.’

The Presiding Judge stared at him without any sign of emotion. ‘I don’t get you, Adam. You act as if you didn’t understand anything. Do you think I enjoy hearing nothing but complaints about you?’

‘Are there any complaints about my work?’

‘I’m not talking about your work.’ He went over to the window and gazed fixedly at the wall of the building opposite. He clearly preferred not to look Adam in the eye. ‘We’ve all of us had to weigh up our recent attitudes and draw the conclusions. You’re the only one who goes around as if it didn’t concern you: when the plain fact is that it concerns you most of all. But you’re running out of time, Adam, there’s no way you can sit on the fence.’

‘The only place I try to sit is on my own chair.’

‘These chairs,’ his boss said pointing at one, ‘aren’t yours. They belong to the state.’

‘What is the state? I don’t know the colour of its eyes and guessing what it thinks is completely beyond me.’

‘I’ve a fairly good idea what you think about me, but that’s your business. I reckon you’ve got nothing to complain about as far as I’m concerned. I’ve kept you on here. I want to have people here who know what they’re doing. You must realise you’d have been out on your ear long ago, otherwise. With a background like yours. And with the company you keep! Hanging around flats where they read out illegal texts!’

He was extremely well briefed. It wasn’t hard to guess by whom. ‘There were no illegal texts,’ he corrected him pointlessly.

‘I put you on the Kozlík case so you’d have a chance to show willing a bit. I could have given you something that would be far less acceptable to you. You must be able to see that. You’ve got a transcript of his new statement?’

‘Naturally.’

‘I’d like to have a squint at it.’

‘As you wish. I’ll bring you the file.’

‘And think about what you’re doing, Adam! I’d hate to lose you. It’s up to you entirely.’

That was a patent threat.

Anyone who, by force, by the threat of force, or by the threat of any other serious injury, obliges another to do, neglect to do, or to suffer anything will be liable to imprisonment for up to three years. Paragraph two hundred and thirty-five, sub-paragraph one, of the Penal Code.

5

The chapel was situated in an ordinary apartment house, the only embellishment being the front door in the shape of a neogothic arch. She watched from a short way off as some old ladies emerged from neighbouring streets, as well as some families in Sunday best with well-behaved children. People shook hands and exchanged smiles. They all knew each other. Only she knew no one.

She had been invited there by the clergyman with the revivalist name. The last time she had visited him in his warehouse, he had talked to her at great length. He had also lent her a book about the Christian family and finally invited her to attend one of their assemblies for worship. She had asked if it mattered that she wasn’t a Protestant. He replied that people were not born members of a church, they only became members in time, and it made no difference whether she believed or not. No one could declare with certainty that they believed, in the same way that they could not be sure that their soul was forever cut off from grace.

The stream of chapelgoers started to tail off and she could hear from inside the sound of an organ. Someone else preceded her in and through the gap in the door she could make out a hall full of pews. The minister was already at the pulpit.

The door closed slowly and she had time to slip through. She sat in the last pew but one, which was empty. Happily, the rest of the congregation paid no attention to her and went on leafing through their hymn-books before starting to sing straight away. She tried to follow the words of the hymn but the meaning eluded her. However, the tune seemed to have an ancient reverence and she was moved by the unaffected harmony.

If only the miracle could happen and her faith be restored. Perhaps then she would have the strength to endure what lay in store for her.

She shut her eyes and did her best to ward off the horror. Maybe not, she said to herself. Maybe not!

The hymn ended and everyone stood up. The minister in his long black robe read from the Bible.

The Scripture reading was about the pharisee and the tax-collector entering the temple. Whereas the pharisee boasted of his virtue, the tax-collector stood at the back, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven. He only repeated: God have mercy on me, a sinner.

She had the impression that the minister was speaking about her. She did not know precisely the meaning of the word pharisee but the tax-collector was herself sitting on her own at the back, and for that they promised her redemption.

The minister finished reading and everyone sat down again.

After the next hymn, the minister went up to the pulpit at the side of the chapel. After reading a further passage from the Bible about the blind man whose sight was restored merely by the word of Jesus he started his sermon. We live in a world in which many people are stricken with blindness. They look at things but fail to see their neighbour. Likewise they are submerged from morning till night in a welter of words, but they fail to hear the real Word.

What would Adam say if he knew she was sitting in church? Nothing, most likely. Or he might try to persuade her she was wasting her time, since there was no God. She needed him next to her now. And most of all she needed him to be waiting for her outside their house afterwards. No, she didn’t need it really. She was glad that no one was here with her: neither of them.

The other one would be only too happy to be sitting here with her. He would come after her wherever she was, if she let him, if she ever wanted to meet him again. He was always phoning her. Most of the time she did not even reply but would hold the receiver for a few moments, letting his passionate declarations of love and promises never to stop loving her pour out of it, and then hang up.

He had been ill. This she had overheard before taking the receiver from her ear. He had a fever and was all alone at home, scarcely able to get up and make himself tea. His voice was muffled and weak. Perhaps he really was ill. Whatever he had done to her, she could hardly refuse to come at such a moment.

She had bought him milk, butter, rolls and a piece of smoked fish. He had come to the door, his head wrapped in a wet towel, his eyes deep-sunken and feverish. She had led him back to his bed and gone to prepare him something to eat. Then she brought him the food on a dark red tray they had eaten off together a few weeks before. But to her surprise she felt nothing: neither love for him nor regret, nor pity. And it did not even occur to her at that moment that she ought to let him know where she had been at the beginning of the week. He would be bound to think it concerned him in some way. But it concerned her alone, and if anyone else, then only the creature which it now seemed sure had been conceived in her body.

She stood up for the prayers: ‘We thank You, Lord, that You have once more allowed us to meet and hear Your word which is a light in our darkness, announcing Your promise…’

She realised with a start that the time was getting on. In a moment the service would be over and she still had a good walk ahead of her. Oh God, I ought to have prayed, paid heed to the sermon, asked for mercy instead of turning over the same old thoughts all the time.

People stood around in small groups on the pavement outside. She took another look round but her friend wasn’t there.

She walked to the next corner. There was no one about and the sun lit up the walls of the houses. She took the visiting card and the street plan from her handbag.

The only gynaecologist she knew was the one she had attended at the clinic. She had been to see him there but had not dared say anything in front of the nurse. She had merely asked him in a whisper whether he might see her privately.

He had displayed not the slightest surprise. Taking a visiting card from his desk drawer, he asked her if Sunday afternoon suited her.

At last she found the street on the plan. She had never been able to estimate distances on maps, but it struck her that she should be able to get there on foot easily enough. She therefore set off through the deserted streets, the smell of Sunday lunch wafting from windows as she passed. The smell of food, which on other occasions she wouldn’t have even noticed, made her feel queasy and almost nauseous. She realised all too well the cause and went sweaty all over.

The doctor lived in an old apartment house that reminded her of the one where she was born, even down to the park on the opposite side of the street.

He answered the door himself. He was dressed in a boilersuit. He had always struck her as looking more like a butcher or a delivery man, and now, without his white coat, she didn’t recognise him straight away.

He shook her hand and led her to a small cubicle: it was wallpapered and covered from floor to ceiling with pictures. He sat her in a white armchair while he himself squatted on a small stool: ‘So we’ve been a bit careless, have we, Mrs Kindlová?’

She nodded.

‘When was your last period?’

‘Six weeks ago yesterday, Doctor.’

‘There was no need to think the worst then, was there? Are your periods ever late?’

‘No. Two or three days at most.’

‘You haven’t got yourself upset or anything in the recent period, have you?’

‘As a matter of fact I have, Doctor,’ she said with sudden hope. Then she added: ‘And I also suffered mild coal-gas poisoning.’

‘So what are you making such a fuss for, my dear! Six weeks doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘I’m starting to have attacks of nausea, Doctor,’ she protested.

‘You all start having those. I’ll give you an injection and you’ll be right as rain.’

‘Do you think so, Doctor?’

‘If it’s due to stress,’ he said. ‘Or from inhaling coal-gas.’

Her hopes quickly dissipated. ‘And what if the injection doesn’t work?’

‘We’ll give it a bit more time, my dear. You could have given it a bit more time yourself. Nobody could tell you anything after just six weeks. Except a fortune-teller, maybe.’

‘I was afraid of coming too late.’

‘Have you told your husband about it?’

‘I’ve not told anything to anyone, Doctor.’

‘Give it another fortnight, my dear,’ he told her. ‘You still have plenty of time to apply to the board.’

‘Doctor, I can’t apply to the board.’

‘You can’t?’

‘No.’ Then she corrected herself. ‘I wouldn’t be able to go through with it!’

‘How many children do you have, Mrs Kindlová?’

‘Two,’ she whispered.

‘Well then. So long as this latest wasn’t from within the marriage, the board won’t turn you down.’

‘But I don’t want to!’ She shook her head violently. ‘I don’t want to go before the board.’

‘The father needn’t even come in person,’ he said, ‘if that’s what’s worrying you. It’s enough if he lends you his identity card.’

She went on shaking her head. She was unable to utter a single word. What if he refused her?

‘It’ll cost a lot more to have it done privately. A lot more.’

‘I know. I’m allowing for that.’

‘It seems a shame to throw away three thousand crowns when you could see the board.’

‘I thought you might be able to, Doctor. If the need arose. I don’t know anyone else and I can’t go before the board.’

He stood up. He reached into a little white cupboard and took out a small polythene bag with a syringe and an ampoule. Even as the injection went into her buttock she knew it was pointless: she was pregnant, it had already taken root in her and was clinging to her: a new life.

‘How much do I owe you, Doctor?’ he asked.

‘Don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in a fortnight’s time.’

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

Once, when I was just starting to go to school, my mother sat me on her lap and wanted to know what I thought about the idea of our leaving the house where we lived and going to live a long way away. How far away? Over the sea; but it was such a little sea that they only called it a channel. (And as the word in Czech is the same as for a drain, for years afterwards I imagined us having to jump over a narrow gully covered with lots of iron grilles.) Mother also showed me a picture of brick houses and strange, half-raised bridges over a river. A job was already waiting for Father in the city of Liverpool and in the front hall an enormous sea-chest with shiny locks stood yawning open (it still stands covered with an old tablecloth in a corner of the flat in the Old Town Square). I couldn’t grasp why we would have to move. Father therefore tried to explain to me that our country was going to be invaded by an enemy who could come and kill us. And wouldn’t he get us in that country over the drain? No, that country was on an island and no enemy had ever conquered it.

But Mother and Father both hesitated about leaving. They both had their parents here and Mother was too attached to her native city; so in the end we didn’t leave.

That country over the channel was subsequently linked in my mind with talk of a happy end to the war and the return of the good times. I would hear people talking about what ‘London’ had reported, as everyone waited day in day out, month in month out, for the invasion.

Years later, when I had to suggest a country where I might like to go for further study, I wrote: Britain. They never sent me anywhere, of course; I was merely allowed to repeat my suggestion the following year.

When my third year at the institute came, they informed me that I could go to Britain for four weeks. It seemed incredible that they really meant I would be allowed to get on a train and cross the frontier unhindered, for the first time in my life (I was thirty-three by then). I would be taking a ship to sail across that channel before stepping out at last on the shore where I had been supposed to land a quarter of a century earlier.

Several days before my departure I received a telephone call: I didn’t catch the name, but there was something familiar about the measured manner of the other’s voice. He said he had caught sight of me from the tram as I was walking along Národní Avenue, and it occurred to him we might meet for a chat. I struggled fruitlessly to remember to which of my acquaintances the voice belonged. I therefore told him I was just leaving on a foreign trip and suggested we meet on my return. To my surprise, he told me he knew about my trip and would like to see me before I left. He wouldn’t keep me long; he knew what such journeys were like. At last I realised who I was talking to. It was Plach.

He was sitting behind a battered café table and his face lit up as he caught sight of me. I scarcely recognised him. His pugilist’s face had filled out and his distinct features had become flabby. His hair had turned grey and he had become an off-the-peg dandy; my former fellow-student even smelt like a suburban barber’s shop. He told me he read my articles. They were interesting even if I did go a bit far sometimes. He asked after my family, actually referring to my mother’s condition and my father’s imprisonment of long ago. He was glad it hadn’t been anything serious. He also had news of our other fellow-students. Eva was working in a house of culture in some distant part of Moravia. She had married and was now divorced. Nimmrichter had been working as a lawyer for an export company but had just been promoted to a higher post. But about himself he said nothing, and when I asked him, he ignored my question, which aroused my suspicion. Then he said he had heard about my planned journey.

Who had told him?

He’d forgotten. Someone just happened to mention I would be travelling. He had a favour to ask of me. He needed to get a letter delivered and would rather not send it by post. He would give me the address. It was in London, not far from the place I would be staying. I was staying at Patrick McKellar’s, wasn’t I?

My amazement that he knew where I’d be living pleased him. But he proffered no explanation, and only said that I would most likely receive an immediate reply, which I would bring straight back to him. I had nothing to fear; there would be nothing dangerous in the letters, nobody would make any sense of them apart from the people they were intended for.

So why didn’t he send them by post?

He would sooner send them this way; but there was nothing to fear. Nobody suspected people like me; at most they’d ask about alcohol or drugs. Letters didn’t interest them; it was a free country, after all. He made an attempt at laughter and I was clearly intended to join him. He added that it might be arranged for me to travel more often if I was interested.

I tried to persuade him of my unsuitability for such errands.

He told me to give it careful consideration and gave me his telephone number so that I could call him. Finally, he told me not to mention our conversation to anyone. He knew I would understand. He smiled again, we paid the bill and left the café. I shook his hand and as he moved away from me, I started to boil with indignation.

I was annoyed with myself for not having said no straight away and for actually shaking his hand and treating him as a friend. I decided that I would call him first thing the next morning and tell him that I wanted nothing to do with him and I would sooner not go anywhere.

I realised with regret that I would have to forgo my trip. Admittedly I didn’t know what position my former classmate held, but I expected that his influence was great enough to prevent my journey.

But I didn’t call him, either the next day or any of the subsequent days — and he didn’t call either.

I waited for them to inform me that my journey had been cancelled (what reason would they give?).

Even when the train was already entering the border station at Cheb and the frontier guards were nearing my compartment, accompanied by two dogs straining impatiently at their leads, I was still almost certain that they were heading for me, that they had been detailed to drag me out of the carriage and send me home.

They came aboard. A uniformed guard at each door: no one to enter, no one to leave. A soldier in green overalls shone a torch under the seats arid other soldiers shone their lamps under the wheels of the carriage. I handed over my passport. Although I had thought about nothing else but this moment throughout the entire journey so far, I had not yet rehearsed the words I would say in protest against their harassment. They then handed back my passport and even thanked me; moments later they left the carriage. The train slowly moved off and still I couldn’t believe they had let me through. I gazed at the dead, ochre landscape which was bereft of all life apart from a few semi-derelict buildings, until at last I saw it, for the first time in my life: the barbed wire! The barbed wire of my camp, stretching on high posts endlessly in both directions, and below it the machine-gun towers. The train again braked, hooted and came to a halt. I went rigid: they had me after all; the order to stop me had just been delayed for a few moments, or possibly they were only playing with me. And I waited paralysed like a cornered mouse, like a condemned man on the steps to the scaffold, like a patient on the operating table.

When the train got under way again and finally crossed that imaginary — but oh so graphically demarcated — line, and with a hoot that sounded triumphant and joyful to my ears, stormed into the clean and colourful-looking station on the other side of the border, it brought back to me the very feeling I had known twenty years earlier. I was free! I leaned out of the window. A young fellow in a white overall was selling Coca-Cola, bananas, oranges and chocolate, there was a banging of carriage doors and from below the window came the sound of German: the language which, twenty years before, had been associated with the unfreedom whose grip I had escaped; the paradoxical transformation gave me an uneasy feeling.

2

My host lived in a residential area not far from Finchley Road tube station. I was given a room with walls covered in sabres, épées and etchings, and a comfortable soft bed, and the view was a skyline of London roofs. On the bookshelf, my host had prepared a selection of books for me, which I would have read had my restlessness not urged me to make more effective use of my time. So I hurried around the galleries and museums, attended one of the Quarter Sessions where some far senior colleagues of mine were trying a case of street assault, squeezed among the tourists at Speakers’ Corner and watched the changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace. I took a trip to Eton to see an old English school and I even managed to get into the gallery of the House of Lords and listen to learned oratory on issues whose meaning eluded me.

In all these things, which remarkably, surprisingly and for no apparent reason, had survived for centuries, I found something admirable, something of grandeur even. At the same time, I realised just how wretched were the conditions from which I had come. I came to realise the pitiful nature of a world in which people were forever exchanging one set of rulers for another, and with them their beliefs and their history, one in which past events were forever being amended and embellished, thus depriving people of the chance to develop a sense of humility or pride; a world which, for centuries, those who wished to preserve their beliefs had fled, leaving behind those who found it easy to conform; a world where laws often ceased to apply even before they could be used, where the achievements of past generations were usually reviled and praise was reserved solely for current events; a world where fresh beginnings were made time and again in the name of something better and lasting, while in fact nothing had lasted longer than a single part of a single generation’s lifetime; a world where everything that was pure, dignified, noble or exalted aroused suspicion. How could one live in such a world? To what could one appeal, to what values, to what language, to what law, to what judge? And all I had done so far had been to contribute to that unhappy state. Without having learnt anything of the world I was born into, without understanding how it was administered and run, I had striven to change it.

One evening, my host invited over some of his friends who wanted to meet me and learn something about my country.

Of the many guests, two fascinated me in particular. One was a journalist who kept steering the conversation back to the show trials and always had a handy quotation from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or Mao, not to mention other prophets of revolution that I’d never heard of. The other was a hermit-like bachelor of law from Massachusetts named Allan Nagel. Allan was very interested in my wartime experiences, the concentration camps and my views on capital punishment.

I recall that the conversation initially turned on the recently concluded trial of a worker alleged to have murdered a woman, who had been found guilty by the jury although there had been no direct proof. At this point the others started a lengthy debate about the jury system. I was almost entirely unfamiliar with the matters under discussion. My concerns were of a different order, or even from another time. I started to feel embarrassed at my own ignorance. I went over to the window to escape their attention. A bowl of pistachio nuts stood on the window sill (it was the first time I’d ever tasted them), while outside cars passed by in a long confused line, and above them the lights of the neon advertisements constantly changed colour.

If juries were unjust, I heard the American say, that was just one more reason why their decisions should not justify the carrying out of the supreme penalty.

The journalist (the next day he brought me several copies of the journal he edited but I did not have time to read them and I was scared to take them back home as the very headlines were rather too forthright in their advocacy of world revolution and their condemnation of imperialism of all kinds) declared that so-called judicial verdicts had already taken the lives of countless of his comrades and he would therefore have every reason to favour abolition of the death penalty. However, in his view the controversy should not be side-tracked into the question of punishment. Instead we should be considering whether the unreliability or even mercenary character of the judiciary was not a reflection of the social system as a whole. And society’s imperfections could not be eliminated through moderation, only through revolutionary change. But could we deny the revolution the right to terror? Its enemies would stifle it before it had a chance to start putting things right.

At last the conversation had touched on an issue more familiar to me. When it came to the basis of revolutionary justice I knew a thing or two. Amazingly enough, though, I didn’t start to argue with the journalist (I think I was rather deterred by his demagogic eloquence, for which I was no match in a foreign language) and I asked the American if, in his view, the death penalty should not even apply to child killers, mass murderers or war criminals.

Why should anyone suffer punishment by death? he asked. After all, by executing the murderer we did not bring the victim back to life. And I was certainly aware that even the cruellest punishments did not deter future criminals. If that held true for common criminals, it was even more true for those we termed war criminals. After all, they committed their crimes in the name of a regime in whose victory they believed. That regime offered them not only impunity but also honour for their actions, which was dignified as service to the homeland or the ideal.

He had clearly given careful thought to the question and probably read rather more of the literature on it than I had. I, on the other hand, had seen old women and old men in threadbare coats, people with one foot in the grave, who had been dragged from remote villages and transported for days on end in trucks intended for potatoes or even cattle; they were being carried off to their deaths.

When, somewhere in the civilised world, a perverted murderer killed a child, it aroused widespread outrage and indignation — the crime was talked about for weeks on end. But what about when a murderer took hold of the entire machinery of a modern state, including the army and the police, and then used it to start such a campaign of killing that the number of victims surpassed the worst we were still able to imagine? Surely in such a case the crimes exceeded not only our powers of imagination, but also all usual considerations — all customary thinking about crime and punishment.

The American listened to me attentively. Then he said that he could understand my personal concern and my indignation, but that he unfortunately took a different view. Either we perceived all human actions in terms of circumstances and mutual relations and came to the conclusion that every human life was inviolable and every infringement of its inviolability a crime, or we would remain stuck in the vicious circle of murders and their retribution.

I said that I too understood his way of thinking (though I didn’t), but that I thought he would nevertheless speak differently if he had been through what I had.

In reply, he said that it was something he didn’t like talking about, but seeing that I’d mentioned it, he too had come from Europe. Both his parents and his younger sister had stayed in Vienna during the war, he alone having been sent to Sweden, and managed to survive. His next of kin had all perished in the way I had indicated earlier, though where and when he had been unable to discover, in spite of his efforts.

His words mortified me and I stuttered some kind of apology. The others steered the conversation elsewhere and I did not say another word the whole evening.

That night, when everyone had gone home and I was alone in my small bedroom, I realised that I had disgraced myself not just by having tried to manipulate my listeners’ feelings but also because of the attitude I had espoused.

3

The next morning I set off to spend a few days in Scotland. My host furnished me with a whole list of addresses but I had decided to spend at least a day on my own. In Inverness, after booking into my lodgings, I boarded a pleasure boat at the quay with the prospect of a four-hour cruise on the trail of the famous monster.

It was a clear, fresh day in late summer. About two dozen passengers were crowded on the deck. I went and sat in a brightly coloured deckchair in the bows. A sailor rang a brass bell in the stern and we were under way.

The loch resembled an enormous river. The sheer, unwooded mountainside gave the impression of rising to heights one would normally think of as cloud level.

Then a girl came and sat in the deckchair next to mine. I was expecting her to be joined by someone else, but no one came. She wore a nautical T-shirt and sat with her hands in her lap, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Maybe the sunglasses or the colour of her hair reminded me of my wife.

I thought she was asleep and observed her almost blatantly. She initiated the conversation by asking if I had any matches (I never carried any), and then we chatted, or rather she talked while I lay looking at the banks and awaiting the appearance of new landscapes and new formations of hills and rocks from around each bend in the loch.

She was American and had come here to visit relatives. She had done a lot of travelling, having spent several years in the Middle East and India with her father. She had lived in Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan and regaled me with all sorts of bizarre adventures, tales and sketches from her time in those countries, which all sounded so exotic to me.

I don’t know what made her so communicative. Maybe it was the peace and calm of the cruise or the effect of the landscape which was so different from the ones in the countries of her adventures. Or maybe she was as lonely as I was. In the end I started to lose the thread of her narration, my mind turning increasingly to the thought that the journey would end in a few hours and we would both disembark. It would be up to me to invite her: to dinner, a glass of wine or beer, a walk, anywhere — and I was already touching those arms, leading her up to my little room in the boarding house, where we were already writhing in one another’s arms.

When the boat reached the point at which it turned round and started on the return trip, my companion fell silent for a moment. Maybe she now expected me to entertain her for a change. But I didn’t know any exotic stories. What could I tell her about? About a man who thought he was going to bring people salvation and then discovered he had been mistaken? About the revolutionary who discovered the self-deception of revolution? About the lawyer who came to the conclusion that justice didn’t exist? About the son who wanted to imitate his father but discovered he lacked his father’s strength?

Some people in the stern — they must have got drunk during the trip — were singing Italian songs, the water gurgled softly as it flowed past the sides of the boat and my neighbour started yet another story. When she and her father were returning in their jeep along a valley in the Koh-I-Baba Mountains, they caught sight of a rock eagle drinking from a tarn in the middle of a deserted stony plain. She had often seen those magnificent birds of prey in flight but never on the ground. Her father said that when eagles drank they lost their sense of balance which prevented them taking off immediately and he started to drive the jeep towards the bird. And the enormous bird really did not fly away but instead retreated towards some rocks. They cornered him in a narrow hollow where her father rushed and overpowered him, tying his wings and legs together and tossing him in the back of the open jeep before driving off again.

She could hear the eagle giving out dreadful squawks — of despair, most likely. From time to time she glanced at the back seat and could see him watching her with his yellowish eye. She felt almost an animal’s disquiet at that gaze, combined with a sense of awe at his majestic size. Then she noticed that the eagle was beginning to free himself, that he had loosened the bonds by constantly moving his wings. She knew she ought to tell her father who was concentrating on the road ahead, but she also felt compassion for the captive in his desperate efforts to win back his freedom and could not bring herself to betray him. She watched as he slipped his wings out of the noose and started to spread them. He did not dare flap them, however, but just kept stretching them wider. She could see the feathers at the wingtips vibrate slightly and shake so as to catch the wind, until the bird suddenly rose into the sky, his legs still tied together. And he rose higher and higher without a single movement of his wings, while they left him further and further behind. She observed the eagle as he ascended silently to freedom without the slightest movement, and she realised that freedom was the creature’s element and together they formed a unity. For a moment she felt she too was a bird and flying upwards also.

I detected emotion in her voice. That was the end of our conversation.

I watched the distant banks and wondered whether I would be capable of recounting my own story, and if I managed it, whether I would find within it a single moment when I shook off my bonds and flew upwards.

4

I travelled abroad once more that year. It was my wife who decided that she would at least set eyes on the country where she had once decided to live, and also on Menachem with whom she had decided to share her life.

On this occasion, she managed to overcome the authorities’ resistance and we were given permission to travel.

Menachem no longer lived at the foot of the Hills of Galilee, but in a recently established kibbutz on the edge — or rather beyond the edge — of the desert. He drove to Tel Aviv to pick us up in a little Citroën whose dark bodywork became unbearably hot in the course of the journey.

As we drove southwards, all trace of green quickly disappeared from the landscape, leaving sand and the occasional pitiful clump of yellowish grass. At the end of a two-hour drive we arrived at an artificial oasis: several agricultural sheds, dusty palms and eucalyptus trees growing from the bare, dead land, and a group of small, dazzling white houses actually surrounded by green lawns.

They lodged us in the furthest of the houses. It must have served frequently as guest accommodation. It was a fine house like most of them there: a spacious living room, a small bedroom and an alcove with small refrigerator and a small table with a cooking-ring (main meals were prepared in the communal kitchen and eaten in the communal dining-room). On the verandah, deckchairs were set out. The windows were covered with venetian blinds, but in spite of them the heat was so great inside that I was covered in sweat almost as soon as I crossed the threshold.

I raised the venetian blind and opened the window. Immediately beneath it, water gushed out in a geyser from an invisible opening, keeping alive a few square metres of lawn. Where the lawn ended, the Negev Desert began. Bare rocks towered out of the landscape like the ruins of a gigantic city. To me it seemed unearthly and inspirational. When I lowered the blinds once more, I noticed that the window ledge was covered in a layer of fine yellowish dust. I tried to wipe it off but it just blew about and caused me to sneeze.

I would have liked a nap but my wife said she wanted to see round the kibbutz. We walked along a stone path that was so hot I could feel the heat through the soles of my shoes.

If it had ever been that hot back home, Alena would have caught sunstroke the first afternoon, but here she seemed transformed. Tirelessly she rushed from one place to another. From Nazareth to Lake Tiberias, up to Galilee and back to Mount Carmel, from there to Haifa and back to a kibbutz near Lydda. She lost weight. Her normally pale skin started to tan. Whenever she removed her optical sunglasses I could see her eyes were red. I didn’t know whether it was from the glaring sunlight or from exhaustion.

Menachem was waiting for us in front of the communal building. He invited us into the communal dining-room and asked if we would like to tour the kibbutz after our meal or go for a drive in the desert. About an hour’s drive from there was one of the first desert settlements; it had been established by its members even before roads had been built or pipes laid down to bring them water. They were true pioneers. They not only suffered from thirst, they also had to fight with the nomads; in recent years, after retiring from office, a former prime minister had joined them there and helped them graze their flocks. Menachem added that he also had several good friends there who would certainly like to meet us.

I had seen enough pioneer settlements during the previous days and heard too many stories — full of pathos and heroism — which did not concern me. It also occurred to me that my wife would no doubt like to travel with Menachem alone. After all, he was her acquaintance, her former boyfriend.

She was kind and attentive towards me. She went with me to our temporary accommodation, and insisted that I lie down and eat an orange. Then, although I had no headache, she laid a wet towel on my forehead and left.

I woke in the middle of the night and found to my sudden surprise that I was alone. From outside there came a strange hissing noise and it took me a few moments to realise that it was the sound of gushing water. I looked at my watch: it was two in the morning. It seemed odd to me that Alena hadn’t yet returned from her excursion to a place that was supposed to be only an hour’s journey away. I got up. The tiled floor was warm to my feet. I browsed among the books for a while. I started to feel increasingly uneasy. I had never been superstitious, but it suddenly struck me that her unusually considerate treatment of me had been a premonition of disaster. In a country where bombs were exploding all the time and where a solitary vengeance-seeker could turn up at any roadside, I shouldn’t have allowed her to go off without me. For a moment I was tormented by the image of her lying by an overturned car on a deserted road, her face, which still seemed childlike to me, bearing an expression of amazement. She had never accepted the idea that somewhere in the world she might come across a force that would challenge her, and so she was incapable of believing in personal danger. I was touched by her optimistic faith in life’s basic goodness, I loved her for her optimism and maybe I encouraged it by shielding her when I could from life’s worst troubles.

Time dragged by. I could hear the distant drone of motors and from the darkness came the raucous shriek of some animal I could not identify.

With an effort of will I sat down at the desk and took out a notepad. Before leaving home I had decided to write an article about the death penalty. I had prepared myself thoroughly, studying the views of advocates and opponents. Naturally, I didn’t have my notes with me, but that might be an advantage: I wouldn’t be influenced or distracted by others’ words. It was bizarre of me, of course, to start it here and at this time of night. Or perhaps it was the perfect time and place to start it, sitting here in the shadow of violent death.

It was impossible to concentrate. I rushed out of the house and dashed to the main road which, just beyond the kibbutz boundary, started to climb towards the mountains. There was no point in going further. I sat down on a low rock at the roadside. There was not a light to be seen. Was it possible that fate had brought me here, to the land of my forebears, in order to catch me and demonstrate its wilfulness — not upon me but upon the person who had become my closest companion in this life?

The sand on either side of the road glistened palely in the moonlight. It was as if the almost forgotten misery of the human condition had suddenly been revealed before my eyes: skulls rolled around in the sand, so many of them that if they came back to life and exhaled, their breath would be a shriek filling the entire valley. My beloved friends from the fortress town, you will appear no more; your feet will no longer walk the sand of the desert, your breath will not reach me on this earth. My precious, darling wife: you, at least, breathe on me! May Azael — the Destroying Angel — pass you by, may your innocent face move him to pity.

I waited there, offering myself as a ransom, but no one appeared to take me; no headlights appeared either. It struck me that they might have returned by another route, by some invisible path, and I ran back to our temporary abode.

She did not appear until dawn.

I heard her footsteps and someone else’s. They stopped beneath the window. I was so happy and excited that I dared not move, lest I scare her and change her into a phantasm. Then an indistinct whispering reached my ears and the door opened ever so quietly.

I hugged her. She smelt of wine. I wanted to kiss her but she covered her mouth. Why wasn’t I sleeping! What had I been doing?

I couldn’t sleep, so I started to write an article.

An article? What about?

About a legal problem of mine. And how about her?

Nothing. Why didn’t I go to bed? Why was I staring at her? Whatever prompted me to start an article at this time?

I was waiting for her, of course. I had to pass the time somehow. Had she enjoyed herself out there? Had she learnt anything interesting?

She was tired, she would tell me everything the next day. She came no closer to me and did not kiss me as she usually did when coming in. She pushed aside the curtain and disappeared into the bathroom. I went over to the window and gazed out at the dead landscape as the light started to return.

The sound of gurgling water came from the bathroom and then silence. I waited for my wife to come to me; I desired her, yearned for the touch of her body, her small hands; I awaited her with a strange anxiety, as if she were still far away in an unknown place. Then I called out to her, but she did not reply. So I pulled back the curtain myself.

There she sat on the tiled floor, her back propped against the white wall, her legs tucked up almost to her chin and her hands joined on her breast, as if in prayer. She was asleep.

5

The article turned out to be important for me personally, even though I certainly said nothing particularly radical in it, but merely rehearsed the basic attitudes to the death penalty, an issue which had long ceased to be considered controversial here. In it (though I doubt that it would have been evident to anyone else), I challenged the belief which I myself had held until recently, that the value of life could be measured like all other values, in terms of ends (to what degree it served the Revolutionary Idea and its immediate interests — or what purported to be its interests); in other words, an enemy’s life was worth less than the life of a friend and comrade. It was a belief that asserted one of the cruellest of inequalities, an unequal right to life.

I wrote the article with enthusiasm, and I really do feel I managed to present the maximum evidence for the proposition that the death penalty was a relic of times when the main aim of capital punishment was to exact retribution, appease an outraged public, or protect innocent people from criminals. At that time, I wrote, people still lacked explanations for the origin of crime and knew nothing of social diseases, let alone mental disorders. But how could we justify such punishment in our own days?

I sent the article to a cultural weekly where it would attract a much wider readership than in a specialised journal.

In time I was invited to the editorial offices and the editor went through my text with me, deleting from it the passages that seemed to me the most significant or at least the most personal, and promised that he would include the article in a future issue. I could therefore look forward to finding it there, unless something predictable happened to stop it, of course.

Something predictable did happen — the censor vetoed it. I received a message from the editorial board asking whether I would like to attend the discussion at the relevant department of the Party’s Central Committee.

There were three of them waiting for us in a large office (there were just the two of us).

They all introduced themselves though I failed to catch their names, and we sat down at a table on which there lay several photostats of my article. Most of the text had been struck through with different coloured pencils by someone with a warped predilection for ornament, and in addition, large question and exclamation marks had been drawn in the margins.

A secretary brought us coffee and the three of them talked together in low voices, while my companion clipped the end of his cigar and I sat there totally unaware of what we were waiting for. And then a door at the back opened and in came a little fellow with a small head on top of broad shoulders. There was something familiar about his chubby features. He nodded to the editor and even smiled at me, saying in a high, almost womanlike voice that we were acquainted, weren’t we? I nodded, but I still couldn’t place him or put a name to him. I therefore asked him how he was. He replied that they had just given him this job. And how about me, had I got married? I told him I had and he grinned, displaying ugly yellow teeth, and commented that they had been great times all the same. Did I still remember Eva? — after all I had been sweet on her in those days. She had married and divorced and not long ago had married an Abyssinian or some other Arab and gone off to Turkey with him.

It was this display of geographical knowledge which at last enabled me to put a name to the face: Nimmrichter. And at once my mind went back to that garret in Košiře and that party of long ago with Nam the Korean, and the story of the priest and the underground cell, the priest he had called a ‘fat mouse’. And I was so overwhelmed with disgust that I turned away from him and sat down at the table without a word. My former classmate had no alternative but to open the meeting. For a while I tried to follow what he was saying, but then I realised it was the same old sentence all over again, the one he used to weave without end. Only the diction had changed: no doubt he had picked up the intonations he had heard at countless meetings. Thus those who pretended to be listening to him — everyone, in other words — were fooled into thinking that he was actually talking, speaking in sentences and moving from one idea to the next.

When he finished speaking, having opened our discussion in worthy fashion, he nodded to one of his men, who, rapidly and without interest (as if he had said the words so often that he didn’t notice them any more), declared that the question of the death penalty was a serious problem and our society regarded it as an exceptional and temporary measure. That was also how it was formulated in the legislation. No doubt the time would come when we would consider the abolition of all punishments, and hence the supreme penalty also, but for the time being such a consideration would be premature, and I was bound to realise that we had no institutions in which to place the most serious criminals and assure their resocialisation. What would be the point of bothering the public with a question that was insoluble at the present time?

Only later did I realise that this man, who for the rest of the discussion guarded a passive silence, had been trying to help me. He was trying to shift the whole argument to a level at which questions were admittedly separated into useful and non-productive, timely and non-timely, appropriate and inappropriate and so on, but at which no one would get worked up about my having expressed subversive ideas.

It was then the turn of his colleague. He declared that our legislation had become a matter for the working people. I would be surprised how often, in cases where professional judges hesitated about a verdict or even fell into error, ordinary people with their sense of justice had a proper perception of the seriousness of an offence. How many times, in cases in which we, lawyers, narrow-mindedly insisted on the letter of the law, the people were capable of being broad-minded, but how, on the other hand… I was amazed to find, even though he was talking directly to me, his words started to become incoherent.

Suddenly he paused, staring at me, and I realised that his last sentence had been a question.

Receiving no answer from me, he gave the reply himself, declaring triumphantly that a law like that would not be understood by people, let alone approved.

Then the last of them took the floor. He was an older fellow wearing shoemender’s spectacles. He reminded me of the father of my long-exiled schoolmate and I subconsciously expected him to say something wise.

He said he had read the article with interest, for the very reason that he himself had once occupied the condemned cell. He fell silent and lowered his head, so that his glasses slipped to the end of his nose and he gazed at me through the cut-off lenses with a look that seemed to me benevolently stern, and added that in those days they used to execute the best sons of the working class. Since then, everything had changed, which certainly none of us here doubted. These days, only criminal elements and real enemies of our system landed in court. It was true, he said for my benefit, that there had always been individuals among the workers who ended up taking the path of crime, but in those days conditions were such that many of them quite simply had no other choice. Class society was cruel and grounded on violence, selfishness and property, not like our new society which we had built on comradely relations and mutual help and trust.

Could we be surprised that where the basic law was dog eat dog some people, out of despair, hopelessness or poverty, decided to take that law at its word and behave like dogs? When the law of the jungle applied, it was hard to decide who was the culprit and who the victim. In such conditions, the most progressive forces in society indicted class justice as a whole and called for its total transformation. And in the awareness that that goal was unattainable for the time being, they demanded at least the abolition of the severest penalty! But what had their problems in common with ours?

He went on to add that the author, as he could see, was still a young comrade, and maybe for that reason had not yet properly learnt the distinction between true humanism, whose concern was the welfare of all conscientious working-people, and pseudo-humanism which made a great song and dance about a few dozen outcasts and murderers. He was sure the author meant no harm, although his article expressed nothing but confusion. He was only astonished that this had not occurred to the experienced comrades on the editorial board.

He gave us both a reproachful look and took off his glasses to clean them.

The editor at my side asked to speak. It had not been the intention of either the author or the editor, he said, to initiate a debate about a problem which was undoubtedly marginal and abstruse. All they had wanted was to recall it. Most probably they had underestimated the negative effect which the article might have on public opinion. None the less he took the liberty of pointing out that Comrade Marx himself had warned us not to overestimate people’s sense of justice, for people were also influenced by the survivals of dead and dying historical periods. Somewhere in the collected works — the editor couldn’t recall exactly which volume, but thought it was the fifth — Marx had specifically stated that the people’s views on justice lagged behind the evolution of economic and legal ideas, and in 1853, Marx himself had written an article about the death penalty, stressing that such punishment was unjustifiable in civilised society, and he, the editor, drew attention to the fact that Marx had used the word ‘civilised’, not ‘class’ society. That was precisely what had led the editors to accept the article currently under discussion. And he, while recognising that most of the criticisms voiced here were justified, continued to think that the article might still appear, if its author were to revise certain points in it; were he to stress, for instance, that the death penalty could not be abolished in our country for the time being, while stating, as we had been reminded here, that it was an exceptional punishment which would be totally done away with at some time in the future.

When I looked back at his speech afterwards, I realised that it was not merely opportunistic (as I thought at the time). He had been seeking a way of publishing most of what I had written, because he knew he would never manage to publish the lot.

But I, at that moment, was aware of only one thing: that I was being asked to sign an article conceding that the death penalty had to remain for the time being, instead of an article demanding the abolition of capital punishment — and I declared that that was something I had no intention of doing. And that could have been the end of it. They would have shelved the article. It would have become just one of many unpublished texts and I could have gone back, without any trouble, to my job at the institute.

Ever since, I have often wondered why I didn’t leave it at that statement. After all, I had taken part in enough meetings of the kind before. I was well aware of the style of thinking or non-thinking on display — it would disgust me, but I had always managed to control myself. That fact that I didn’t manage to that time was the fault of the man chairing the meeting: my onetime fellow-student — original occupation, prison guard. He had difficulty putting together an intelligible sentence. He was unable to distinguish Europe from Asia and the Middle Ages from our own century, but in spite of that, he had been permitted to study, and now — since being qualified — he had the power to decide what ideas were permitted and required in his field. And it applied not just to me but to the entire nation.

I did not stop at the point where I might have come out unscathed, but instead went on to declare that in a country where only a few years ago so many innocent people had been hanged, including some of the nation’s best men and women, we should abolish the death penalty forthwith. For a moment my statement left them thunderstruck and I quickly added that I could see no reason why there should not be the freedom to consider and write about any problem at all.

The grey-haired man stopped me short and asked me if I meant to say that there should be freedom for all views, including racism, fascism and nazism.

I said that I meant nothing of the sort, as he knew full well. I hoped that he had found no racist or fascist views in my article. He replied that it depended on how one looked at it. I asked him (my indignation was rapidly growing) what that was supposed to mean. He declared that in essence I was demanding that fascists and war criminals should go unpunished!

I started to shout at him not to twist my words!

One of the two younger men made a further attempt at compromise. He could tell from the way I was defending myself that I accepted that certain views could not be published. That meant that someone had to assess them first.

I shouted that I did not maintain anything of the sort.

What did I maintain then?

I maintained that censorship was only needed by governments which went in fear of truth and their own people. It was only needed by governments that had never been elected. And I added that wherever freedom of speech was suppressed, there was a risk that unqualified people would start to take the decisions and that power would fall into the hands of those of dubious character.

Now my ex-classmate joined in for the first time to ask me if I was trying to say that the Party, which in our country chose comrades for leading posts, gave priority to people with dubious characters.

I told him I had been talking in general terms, solely against the suppression of opinion and restrictions on freedom of speech.

So was I trying to say, Nimmrichter continued, that the Party did not have the right to suppress hostile opinions?

I replied that to start with, they were not the Party.

He insisted that I answer his question: Did the Party have such a right, or not?

At that moment, the image returned to me of a priest in an underground cell being marched around those four walls from morning to night and being forced to do press-ups and squats. I had foolishly let myself get carried away. I declared with sudden caution that a sensible party suppresses neither the views of its enemies nor of its own members.

He repeated his question once more: his untypically precise sentence. But I merely shrugged and sat down, suddenly incapable of pursuing that doomed argument or even taking in anything of what would happen next.

Nothing else did happen. Nimmrichter rose and wound up the proceedings by declaring — with amazing coherence — that in view of what I had just said, it was clear to him that someone else would have to settle the issue. The others rose also. Nobody said any more to me and we separated without any of the usual courtesies.

In the corridor, when we were at last alone, the editor leaned towards me and said quietly that I had certainly given them a good lashing, but I’d probably got myself into hot water in the process.