Judge On Trial

Chapter Nine

1

A LEXANDRA WAS SITTING next to him with a contented look on her face. As if everything was fine, whereas the fact was that he had not yet summoned up the courage to infringe the cosiness she offered. He had merely refused to go to her attic, preferring instead to embark on a trip that was inappropriately long for the short time available.

She drew a small flat bottle of vodka out of her handbag and opened it. ‘I got this sudden fancy for it. Fancy a swig too?’

‘I’m driving, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I’ll have just a wee drop then. You’re sure you don’t mind? Sometimes Ruml doesn’t approve. He thinks it’ll be the ruin of me.’

‘Maybe he’s right.’

‘No, he’s the ruin of me. If I didn’t get drunk now and then, I wouldn’t survive living with him.’

They caught up with a column of Russian military vehicles. It was moving up the next hill and the rear lights flashed red above the road’s dark, wet surface.

‘He wanted to run out on me when we hadn’t been together more than six months,’ she said. ‘He found this girl, her father was a general. Ruml thought it might be a way of getting himself a cushier number. In Sweden or even Honolulu.’

The vehicles in front of them were crawling along and the road was all bends, so it had been impossible to overtake more than one tardy field kitchen, while the time kept ticking by. ‘But he didn’t leave you in the end.’

‘But he wanted to. He would have kicked me out with the kid. He offered me fifteen thousand, saying it would be worth both our whiles, the bastard! I told him I’d kill him: if he so much as mentioned it again I’d poison him, even if I had to swing for it. But they wouldn’t top me, that much I did know about our fucking laws. I’d be only too happy to go to gaol, knowing that I had rid the world of a shithead like him.’

‘Would you really have poisoned him?’

‘I already had the poison at home.’

‘What kind?’

‘It makes no difference.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘What do you want to know for? Need to get rid of someone too?’ Then she said: ‘We always had it at home. It was Dad’s. He’d got hold of it before war broke out.’

He was questioning her about poison that didn’t interest him. All their lives people asked questions about things that didn’t interest them. The things that really worried them normally remained unsaid.

The previous night he had had a dream: he arrived at a dance where everyone else belonged together in some way: only he was alone. He realised he was well over forty and he still hadn’t found a wife and therefore had no children. He couldn’t dance either. The band played, unknown couples danced all around him and the realisation started to grow in him that all hope had gone for him. And in the dream he had such a depressing sense of futility that he burst into tears. When he woke up he felt momentary relief. He wasn’t alone. He had a wife, children and even a mistress. But who did he have really?

In reality he was alone. It was a mistake to draw comfort from the fact she was still sitting at his side at that moment: his beautiful, wanton, tipsy mistress.

He could, of course, act as if everything was all right. Accept a way of living in which nothing was said about real worries, in which people only talked about conventional things and did what suited them. It was possible to live a life which had no bearing on one but was merely convenient, and even pretend that it was the most suitable lifestyle, because it occasionally offered a chance of passion, whereby it had something in common with real life — though in real life, passion alternated with grief and anxiety.

He pulled up in front of the cottage, got out and unlocked the door. She entered nonchalantly, as if the house belonged to her. She tossed her handbag on to a chair and went to switch on the radiant heater in the bedroom.

And what if it hadn’t been her in that lighted room that night?

But did it really matter? He was so distracted he had almost forgotten that she was someone else’s wife, the wife of his friend, in fact. It was as if he was unaware that she was concealing him as much as he was her, and that their affair had been marked from the outset by deception and betrayal.

He had no right to make any demands on her at all, and there was nothing he could expect of her but to give him precedence over another for a few moments of unforeseeable duration, and to hope that they could fill those moments with an activity that seemed to him so ecstatically blissful that everything else palled into insignificance. Perhaps it wasn’t so little he could expect of her, but it was not exactly what he would like to settle for, what he might accept without a sense of hopeless downfall.

She looked around. ‘Everything is the way it was last time. Haven’t you been here since?’

‘The idea hasn’t really appealed.’

‘You could have come on your own.’

‘What would I do here on my own?’

‘I didn’t mean all alone,’ she said with impatience. ‘I meant with some girl.’

‘If you were me would you come here with someone else?’

‘I don’t know what I’d do if I were you. Maybe I’d be with someone else if I had such a rotten mistress who’d sooner take her kids to the cinema than stay with me.’

‘Thank you for being frank.’

‘I don’t like being alone,’ she explained. ‘You left me in the lurch that evening and you will again.’ She pulled the bedding out of the chest and started to make the bed.

‘That’s not true,’ he objected.

‘You’re like the rest of them. You think I’m daft? Everyone promises me the earth, everyone makes out he loves me eternally and then, when the chips are down, he goes and does a bunk. I’m pissed off with it. I’m pissed off with sitting and weeping on my own.’ She sat down on the chest. ‘It’s cold here, so I’ve made the bed. I might as well get straight in. Would you bring me the bottle from my handbag?’

When he returned, she was standing undressing right next to the red-hot element. He noticed she had bruises on her arms and back.

‘What are you staring at? Oh, yes. We had another fight. You said you don’t beat your wife. So what’s your way of abusing her?’ She scratched her calf with her bare foot while letting down her hair. ‘No, I don’t want you to invent something. I couldn’t give a damn. I couldn’t care less about your wife.’

What did she care about? She made love to him because it happened to suit her, and he had happened to cross her path. She talked to him about love, wandering monks, the light in people, her dreadful husband and her childhood and he set great store by it. But all it needed was for him to say one evening that he didn’t have the time and she made love to someone else who happened to suit her. That was what she was good at: making love and talking; she had given everything a try and discovered what lovers liked and what aroused them. And it seemed to him that she had the ability to behave more freely than him, and that there was a chance that with her he might opt out of the staleness of his own life in favour of some nobler and more fulfilling destiny.

Maybe she did behave more freely than he did — or she was less restrained, at least; but nobility was unlikely to be what she was seeking, and it wasn’t what he was seeking with her. And freedom without nobility of spirit did not uplift one.

But what right had he to judge her? Why was he trying to convince himself that he deserved or that he would be capable of caring for a nobler or freer creature?

‘Turn the light off first,’ she crouched under the covers, ‘and get a move on. What’s keeping you?’

So he joined her in bed.

‘Do you still love me at all, anyway?’ She encircled his mouth with hers and pressed up against him and he pressed up against her. But that wasn’t his purpose for being here. Why was he here, in fact? He had ccme to tell her… what exactly? I love you, I still love you, my false love, it’s stronger than my plans, stronger than my moderation, stay with me, stay with me for these few moments at least.

‘Darling,’ she opened her eyes as he got up, ‘you’re getting dressed? Are we going somewhere?’

‘I have to go for the water.’

He took a bucket from the kitchen and went outside. The air was pure and the moon shone from between the clouds. He could see several lights in the depths below him and on the hillside opposite the woods were darkening and becoming lost in the distance.

Why on earth am I here?

He could set off through those woods which went on and on, maybe right to the coast, a pack on his back, in the pack two blankets, bread, sausage, ersatz coffee. And he could even take his own potatoes and wouldn’t have to beg any from a farmer. And instead of a slide-rule — what would he take in place of a slide-rule? He couldn’t think of anything as indispensable. He had nothing of the kind; that was his disadvantage. But on the other hand, he could walk alone, escaping his guards and his fellow-prisoners; he could sit, lie, change direction when he felt like it; he could go forward, retrace his steps, light a fire, drink from springs, stay among the rocks; he would not have to leave his chosen place, or wait, or answer, or beg, or promise, or have mercy, or do harm, or listen to lies, or think up excuses, but could rid himself of fears, put up his tent and walk right to the coast. So many possibilities and he was stuck here.

He was here to make love. To lie at one side of the woman he desired, while on the other side lay her husband and someone else, a whole host lit up by the reflections of the setting sun. He was here so that in the meantime his wife could wander about at night with a mendicant student who carried gas bombs in his pocket and flung them under the beds of rabbis and false judges. Children stood waving on the porch, then the bomb exploded and struck the wrong ones as usual, the splinter struck from behind, not killing but burrowing into the flesh, so the child’s hand no longer waved but hung limply. That was a free life without nobility of spirit, one possible life option.

The bucket was full. He cupped his hands and scooped up some water to clear the lump in his throat. But it didn’t help; it was something else choking him, not something he could wash down.

‘Did you have to go far for the water, darling?’ she asked on his return.

‘No, the well is just behind the cottage.’

‘You were away a long time. Did you want to run away from me?’

He didn’t reply.

‘Are you tired of me already? I expect my conversation isn’t clever enough for you.’

‘That’s nothing to do with it.’

‘Why then?’

‘I don’t know who’s doing the running away.’

‘What do you mean?’ She sat up. ‘You know very well you were wanting to give me the slip!’

He could still put his arms round her, come and lie next to her on his side and couple with her. When they made love, when they were together, neither tried to run away from the other. ‘But after all, when you’re not with me you’re with someone else, aren’t you?’

‘Are you asking me?’ She covered her breasts with the cover, pulling it right up to her chin.

‘I’d like to know.’

‘Any other questions while you’re at it?’

‘I would have thought that that one was fairly important.’

‘Well I wouldn’t. I think it’s vile of you. Just you remember I do what I like. Whether I’m with you or not.’

‘You go with anyone you like?’

‘I’ve always gone with anyone I like, and it’s none of your bloody business.’ She reached for her underwear.

‘You mean to say it’s mutually immaterial how we live and who with?’

‘Would you kindly turn away?’

‘Would you kindly answer?’

‘How dare you shout at me? Who do you think you are?’

‘In that case, the best thing would be to call it all off.’

‘Call all what off? What crap are you talking? Since when did either of us have anything to call off?’

‘I understood we had.’

‘You understood something?’ She dressed quickly. ‘The only time you understand anything is when they send you a memorandum about something. You’re pigheaded and thoughtless. And boring. You think you’re being terribly passionate and amorous but you’re actually boring. You’ve always been boring and tedious ever since I first saw you. It was impossible to talk to you about anything. You don’t even go to the cinema. And if you do, it’s only to look at some fucking cartoon elephant.’

‘You needn’t have bothered if you found it so boring.’

‘I had to when Ruml invited you to our place. I don’t know what he saw in you. I asked him at the time and he spoke up for you. You seemed so decent and honourable to him. He didn’t realise you were only sucking up to him so you could screw his wife.’

‘But I wasn’t going out with you then!’

‘You got on my nerves then and you still do. You were insufferable. I only needed you because of him. By that time he couldn’t give a damn about me going out with fellows any more, but I was sure he’d have minded about you. He’ll go blind with rage when I tell him!’

‘Oh, shut up! You’re raving!’

‘Don’t worry, I know very well what I’m saying. You’re the one who doesn’t. And tomorrow you’ll be sorry. Tomorrow you’ll come creeping after me begging me to forget how vile you were.’

He realised that the tears were running down her face.

‘You’re just like the rest of them.’

Maybe he really would regret it tomorrow: when he’d stand under that window where the light would never again go on for him, when he’d unpack his two blankets: one to lie on, the other as an awning, with nothing to cover himself with or comfort him.

‘You’re all the same, the lot of you. It’s so bloody boring.’ She went up to the mirror, wiped her face with a handkerchief and then rummaged for a moment in her handbag. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? You wanted to sling your hook — so what are you waiting for?’

‘We always find confirmation of what we’re looking for,’ he said, as if there was any sense in explaining anything or defending himself.

She stared at him in surprise. ‘I don’t understand, but I bet you’re only looking for an excuse.’

‘I expect I’m just like everybody else. It’s a long time since I thought I was any better.’

‘Oh, buzz off. I can’t stand listening to you any more! I’ll get home from here somehow. Or are you afraid I’ll take something of yours with me?’

‘I’m hardly going to leave here without you.’

She sat down at the table. ‘Make me some tea, at least!’ The tears carved a channel through the fresh layer of powder.

Three matches snapped before he managed to light the gas.

To say to her: I love you. I’d like to stay with you. To be with you night and day. To hear the hissing of the drying reeds on the border between silence and the roaring of blood.

And then: to leave with you in search of a land where we’d know we were alive.

Where would we go?

No such land exists on earth. It’s not outside us, we have both lost it within us, you and I; we’d just wander fruitlessly from door to door.

He placed the mug of tea in front of her.

She pushed it away without drinking, then wiped her face and stood up. ‘It’s OK now. Let’s go if you think you can’t leave without me.’

2

The telephone rang. He snatched up the receiver in the vague hope of some good news, though he could not say what.

It was his wife. ‘Adam, it’s a long time since we’ve had lunch together!’

‘I can see no reason for us to lunch together.’

‘Haven’t you noticed what day it is today?’ she asked dejectedly.

He glanced at the calendar and then remembered that their wedding anniversary fell some time at the end of October. Their tenth. Or was it the eleventh already? They had no reason to celebrate it; she knew that as well as he did. That was if she was prepared to admit it. She was still trying to get him to talk everything over, so that they could agree on what to do. As if it were possible for people to agree that from a given date they would stop loving each other — or start to. But he would have to talk to her in the end.

He took her to the Brussels Expo restaurant. They found some space at a table with a view of the city. They sat opposite each other, and when he looked at her it struck him that he had not seen her in a long time. Her face — slightly pale with the smooth high forehead — seemed almost unfamiliar to him. Wrinkles were already forming under her eyes.

The waiter arrived with the hors d’oeuvres trolley.

‘Are you having something?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Do you mind if I do?’ She chose filled ham slices.

There must have been a time when he loved her. After all he had looked forward eagerly to their first dates, and even after their marriage he had looked forward to going home each evening and seeing her again.

Something had happened between that day ten years ago and today, something that had made them strangers to each other. In fact, during the first years he had pondered on it, running through the various actions, words, misunderstandings and quarrels which drove them apart. He had attempted to talk to her about them, but he recalled that usually she would go red and start to scream and hurl back her own grievances at him, or otherwise would pretend not to hear him and change the subject. And then he would conduct all his arguments with her, his indictments and pleas, entirely to himself. In the end he had stopped conducting them at all. There was no point in them, after all, if there was no one to sit in judgement.

But theirs had never been a passionate love. She moved along between the crash-barriers and had never dared to climb over them or duck them. She was certainly more high-minded than him. But high-mindedness without freedom became barren.

And what about him? He not only lacked high-mindedness, he had never learnt to act freely either. He could hardly demand from another what he lacked himself.

‘Do you often bring her to places like this?’

‘Why do you have to talk about it today of all days?’

‘I’ve been wanting to talk about her for a long time. You’re the one who hasn’t wanted to. You haven’t even told me her name.’

‘It’s hardly relevant, is it?’

‘What’s relevant is that you conceal it from me. That I’m not even worthy to be told her name.’

‘It’s not the person that’s important, but the fact that it happened at all.’

‘So why did it happen? Why did you have to find someone else?’

‘How did it come about that you loved someone else and so did I?’

‘I’ve broken off with him.’

‘I’m talking about the past.’

‘What past?’

‘You were going out with that student, weren’t you?’

‘But I’ve already explained that I regret it terribly. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘You can’t just dismiss it like that. There must have been some reason for everything that happened.’

‘You always have to look for reasons. Who’s guilty. Who’s the culprit.’

‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I said there was no sense in talking about it. You wanted to.’

‘There’s no sense in talking about what happened. I want to talk to you about now and the future.’

‘But they can’t be separated.’

‘I don’t want to separate anything… I want to talk to you about the future. Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s so difficult to talk to you. You’re always so evasive.’

‘All right then, we won’t talk about the past. What do you want to talk about then?’

‘About the two of us and the children. After all, the two of us have children, Adam, and their future…’

‘I’m not renouncing the children.’

‘But you’ve renounced me. You’ve been walking around me as if I were a stranger.’

‘Maybe you’ve seemed a stranger to me.’

‘After all we’ve been through together?’

‘I’ve come to realise that you’re not the person I thought you were.’

‘But that’s hardly my fault.’

‘And I’m not accusing you of anything.’

‘So why did you find yourself that… woman?’

‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about the past.’

‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask you that.’

‘I expect we didn’t love each other enough, you and I.’

‘I didn’t love you enough, Adam? Haven’t I given you everything I could?’ Her voice shook and she was unable to suppress her tears.

Yet more tears. All those years ago, when they lay together in that dirty dormitory with six bunks, and the stench of musty straw, water and fallen leaves wafted in from below, along with the singing of drunks and the quick breath of the night: did we love each other then?

He was overcome with nostalgia for the time when nothing had yet marred his image of her and life with her, when he lived in the happy illusion that he knew her mind and satisfied her unspoken wishes, the time when he did not hear her cry. He touched her hand to comfort her.

‘Adam, when I first met you… I’d never loved anyone before you. No one the way I loved you. But you were always like a stranger. You never wanted to confide in me. You wanted to keep yourself to yourself and keep your distance.’

‘I wanted nothing of the kind. But we never managed to become close to each other. We were probably mismatched.’

‘How can you say something so awful? You’ll never come close to anyone. You’ll never commit yourself to another. You’re too frightened.’

‘What am I supposed to be frightened of?’

‘Of disappointment.’

‘I had every reason to be, as you see.’

‘I wouldn’t have done it if you’d been devoted to me.’

‘You’re just saying that. You’re just finding excuses for yourself.’

‘It’s impossible to live with someone who’s such a stranger.’

‘Did you feel I didn’t take enough care of you?’

‘No, but you never stopped being a stranger.’

‘What was I supposed to do? What did you expect me to do?’

‘To commit yourself to me sometimes. To be with me totally and let me know you were happy with me. But you would have sooner reduced everything to a written statement or figures. You take after your father. You have to draw a line under everything and add it all up. What can’t be added up doesn’t interest you.’

‘I wish you’d tell me what I could have added up in your case. I’d dearly like to know what form your love took.’

‘Exactly what I told you. I wanted to give myself to you. I wanted you to give yourself to me. To feel me close to you. To open up to me.’

‘And what did you do to help me open up to you?’

‘I was constantly waiting for it. The whole time. I know you’ve been kind sometimes. But you never did anything because you just couldn’t help it. From an inner compulsion.’

‘And did you ever do anything of the sort?’

‘How could I when you were such a stranger?’

‘You see, I told you it was pointless. All we do is argue. We’ll sort nothing out by talking.’

‘So how did you think it would be? That you would go on seeing her and I would say nothing?’

‘But I’m not seeing her any more.’

‘But you were.’

‘Why do you criticise me? You were going out with that student too.’

‘Stop calling him a student all the time.’

‘It’s irrelevant what I call him. But I don’t criticise you over him.’

‘There you are. That’s you all over. You’re acting like a stranger. You started to laugh when you first heard about it.’

‘I was laughing at myself.’

‘But you did laugh! How could you laugh at such a moment?’

‘What makes you speak about that moment as if it was so important?’

‘Adam, I’ve been pondering on you for all of the past ten years. Sometimes when I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer — your remoteness from me and from us — I’ve told myself that you probably can’t help it. That they damaged you during the war and stole something from you that you can never get back.’

‘What do you think they stole from me?’

‘Everything, apart from your reason. You’re sometimes tender — because you know you ought to be — but not because there is any tenderness in you.’

‘I expect I’m not what you need. I told you we were badly matched.’

‘How can you say something so awful?’

‘It would be more awful if we failed to discover it.’

‘No, the only awful things are those you can’t do anything about.’

‘At least we can accept them.’

‘But we have to do something. Something so we change.’

‘What do you want to change?’

‘What you said. That we don’t suit each other. But we do belong together, though. We have children together.’

‘Do you think there’s anything we can do?’

‘Yes. Love each other again, Adam. I love you. I feel that you’re mine. That you’re the only person I have in the world. And if I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry.’

‘I’m also sorry if I’ve hurt you. But one can’t force oneself to love someone.’

‘Are you saying you don’t love me at all any more?’

No, he wouldn’t say that, but something had happened and they could not just decide that it hadn’t. Perhaps he had not used the right expression when he said they were ill-matched. They had just failed to connect, to listen to each other, have understanding for each other.

But what had they been capable of understanding at all? What had he ever managed to understand? What had he managed to truly feel and experience? So what good would it do to promise her now that he would remain at her side, to remain with her the way he was?

‘Ten years ago, we made that trip to Slovakia and slept in that dismal hostel-type place. Do you remember?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did you think at that time that we weren’t a good match?’

But that wasn’t the point, the problem was elsewhere — if only she were to ask. For a moment he hoped she would: where are you now and where do you want to go from here? Have you still any capacity at all to live and act as a free individual? And if you have, will you still want to come back to me?

‘Are you not going to say anything?’ And then, as if all her determination had gone, and all her strength, she froze and the tears just streamed from her eyes, soaking the tablecloth.

He felt torn with remorse. He was now walking alone with just a pack containing his two blankets, a loaf of bread and a sooty mess-tin — where was he bound? Perhaps we’ll encounter each other again in some distant place that you’ll set off for too with your own knapsack. We’ll catch sight of each other between the sand dunes in the coastal forest and run to each other, or on the contrary — we won’t know until then — we’ll pass each other by considerately.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘They were happy times for me.’

3

Dear younger brother, perhaps you’re still waiting for me to come up with some advice for you after all, and instead you’ve not heard a thing. As I’ve already explained, I can’t give you any advice or decide for you, the best I can do is to tell you something about myself. What am I actually doing at this moment? I am in the park on my way from the courthouse to the hospital. It’s five in the afternoon and it’s getting dark. It’s a real English day: damp and dreary. There’s no one sitting on the benches. I dealt with three cases today, the last one a twenty-year-old nurse caught stealing drugs. Opiates, of course. I think she was pretty, but she cried the whole time so her face was all puffy. People try to steal bliss and end up weeping. Just recently I’ve had people weeping all round me. I’m used to it in court, but not elsewhere. I always wanted the people round me to be happy. I did my best to make them happy, or at least I persuaded myself I was doing my best. People persuade themselves of all sorts of things and in the rush of everyday life they don’t realise they’re merely nursing illusions.

Now I’m out of the park and could take a tram to where I used to tell myself I had a nice home. But instead I’ll walk down to the Botanical Gardens, where, you might recall, there’s another stop. I am just looking at a house where, for the past weeks, I have been meeting with the wife of a man who seems to have persuaded himself that I am his friend. I think I loved her. I daren’t say it for sure — but I did feel real pangs when, one evening recently, I glimpsed a light high up under the roof, a light that was not shining on my account. Maybe it’s shining again; I’d have to go through to the courtyard to find out, but there is no reason why I should. I don’t enjoy seeking out evidence these days or sitting in judgement on others. I don’t think I ever did enjoy it very much; I used to judge others mostly to avoid judging myself. Nothing boosts one’s confidence more than judging someone else. You start to persuade yourself that their weaknesses and faults are beneath you. Admittedly reality never fails to put you right on that score, but most of the time it’s easy enough to ignore its evidence. And when the worst comes to the worst you can always run away from it. Escaping doesn’t solve anything though and always leaves cruel traces. That’s something I do know and I expect it’s the reason why I am here in a place that so many people run away from. Don’t think I’m condemning anyone; I’ve run away enough times in my life. Every time some verdict was hanging over me. Instead of starting to think about myself, I have always started to think about a reprieve and a possible escape. It was during the war that I first learnt to hope for liberation and believe in a lucky escape. And I escaped from The Hole to evade my responsibility as a judge and get away from Magdalena, if you still remember her. I escaped to America when I got into deep water. I found a wife, but I used to find escape at work rather than face up to the possibility we were estranged from one another. When I discovered that my work, like my marriage, was going nowhere, I escaped to another woman — actually persuading myself that I was at last challenging my fate. Of all forms of escape, love itself conceals escape best of all. But what sort of existence is escapism? You start to act like a criminal: constantly looking over your shoulder and feeling pleased that no one has cottoned on to you yet. You regard your escape as freedom and don’t realise you’re a fugitive. You’ll never challenge anything again: you weigh up the circumstances instead of yourself. You look to others for help and protection, instead of looking to yourself. In fact, even when you offer help and protection to someone else, you don’t know whether you’ll be really capable of it, because you yourself are on the run and your help could easily be transformed into its opposite. So you increasingly keep your thoughts to yourself and just nod. Before sitting down anywhere you take a good look round for an escape route should the need arise, and only then do you start to listen, but in a different way than if you weren’t on the run. You listen circumspectly, eager not to miss any possible warning or hint; you try to ingratiate yourself with those who have given you refuge. You’re not living your own life any more, you’re living by the grace of others: those whose silence covers up for you, those who turn a blind eye or couldn’t care less; by the grace of your fate.

And what if you have already fathered children? They look up to you and regard you as a source of strength, wisdom and life, while in fact you are living by grace, and all you have to offer them is your weakness, your confusion, your caution and your anxiety.

Now I’ve walked down as far as the Botanical Gardens. They say they’re to be transferred somewhere else. For the time being, they announce on their gate an exhibition of exotic birds. Now I recall that just after the war you begged our parents to buy a pet. A kitten or at least a canary. But in the end Father bought a projector, a screen and two films: one was a cartoon about a fox and the other was a natural history film about the Danubian salmon. He must have thought that films were more permanent than live animals and didn’t require so much attention. But they were confiscated along with the projector when the police searched the flat — Father was wrong about that too.

It sometimes strikes me how often he was mistaken, for all that he was strong-willed, precise and down-to-earth and in spite of all he had experienced and endured. After all, he had lain on a blanket in that coastal forest, conscious that he was holding on to life with the last of his strength and already thinking about how we would get by in life without him. But even at that moment he was unable to abandon, even for one second, his fond illusion that the world would be a completely different place once his party came to power. Or was it in fact that moment which confirmed him in that illusion and banished the good sense he showed elsewhere and at other times? Is there any moment in our lives when we are permitted at least to glimpse the outline of the real world? I have a feeling that no person or thing will give you such a moment, you have to fight for it yourself, you have to resist everything that would tempt you into a fool’s paradise and hide from you the truth about your situation. You have to set out on your own for that coastal forest, and stay there not because you’ve been brought there by armed guards, not in hope of being liberated and led out of it, but stay there in the knowledge that if you fail to liberate yourself you’ll come to a miserable end: as a convicted person who has sentenced himself — together with his nearest and dearest — to perpetual exile.

I’d hate to confuse you with that word, but now it has come to my mind, it occurs to me that there are two kinds of exile. One kind is when you are banished from your home and have no chance of returning. The other is when you abandon yourself and are unable to return. Perhaps the only piece of advice I can give you is: don’t confuse the two!

Perhaps you’d still like to know how I’ve decided? Whether I’ll leave my family because I’ve fallen in love with another woman and don’t want to hide the truth, or I’ll leave my mistress and stay with my children and wife because my infatuation will pass anyway, and it wasn’t even real love, just one of many possible forms of escape?

First I thought I had to decide between just two options. Like a cybernetic mouse in a maze, like a computer that knows only two answers: yes or no. Then, when I glimpsed the light in that house near here, I realised that I had been intending to choose between two escape routes, two kinds of deception and self-deception, contrasting two possibilities of exile, seeking whom to join, whom to follow, where to have my home: in other words, a bed, at the side of a woman, somewhere for a desk, and breakfast in the morning, instead of looking for a place where I’d no longer be a fugitive; I would be there solely because I wanted to be — even if it meant being homeless.

Now you want to know where that place is, not for me, but for yourself. You already have an inkling what my reply is going to be. The moment is coming when you must not abandon yourself. If you do, you could pronounce a sentence on yourself that no one will overturn, and which qualifies for no amnesty, since the decision will have been yours alone.

Here’s my tram coming. But just so you don’t run away with the idea, dear bro, that I’m somehow talking to you from heights I might be expected to have reached as an elder brother, I will admit to you that all this time I have been gazing at that fateful house on whose top floor I spent several weeks as a happy guest. What if the other one, my other woman, had suddenly come out into the street and was on her own? I would have run after her and by the time I reached the staircase — that is if she would have invited me up — I would have forgotten all my solemn resolutions.

She didn’t appear, of course, and as a result I am perhaps wisely setting off to find a place where I will no longer be an exile.

4

He was making love to Alexandra in his own flat. It was night-time and a purplish light was shining in through the sharply pointed window. He was lying on the bed, she was kneeling in front of the bed grasping his thighs and kissing him between them. Just as his body began to quiver in ecstasy the doorbell rang.

She stood up, put his shirt on over her naked body and walked to the door. He also tried to get up, but was unable to find the strength to raise his enfeebled body. Not even to reach out for his trousers and put them on.

He heard from somewhere nearby the sound of men’s voices, and among them he could recognise Oldřich’s.

She glanced in at the door, the shirt scarcely reached her waist. ‘Ruml is here with some friends of yours.’

He sat up. He pulled Alena’s pyjama top out from under the pillow and quickly slipped it on. But it was so tight it pushed his arms forward. He looked like a dachshund begging for a titbit.

All the intruders were wearing dark formal suits with old-fashioned bowler hats on their heads.

Oldřich was carrying some file or other. Immediately behind him came his brother Hanuš (he might have known he’d get invited). The last to come in was a fellow with the face of an ageing boxer. He was carrying a stick: a conductor’s baton or a truncheon. He recognised that one straight away.

They all sat down round the table and covered it with sheets of paper. Alexandra — still half-naked — brought them glasses on a tray. He tried to indicate to her that she should get dressed, but he suddenly realised his own nakedness and tried to cover it with a corner of the bedsheet.

‘So where do you have the suitcase?’ Plach asked.

‘What suitcase?’

‘That takes the biscuit!’ Plach exclaimed, turning to the others. ‘He just goes on denying it. We’ll have to fetch his wife!’

‘My wife?’ He tried to laugh. After all, he didn’t have a wife any more — not even a mistress. He now looked round for her in vain. He really was left with just the suitcase, and it didn’t even belong to him.

It wasn’t yet five o’clock and everyone else was still asleep. He got up quietly, got dressed, and went into the kitchen where he drank some cold tea and spread himself some bread.

Once he had the suitcase in the car he felt relieved. It was most likely an unwarranted precaution, but it would be more unwarranted to leave it in the flat.

The dream was still fresh in his mind and also filled him with nostalgia. What would happen if he drove to the corner of the street where she lived and waited for her to come out on her way to work? Maybe she would get in with him. Where would they drive to?

He parked on the Old Town Square. The street lamps were still on, but the sky above the Powder Tower was already growing light. People were thronging along the street in the direction of the tram.

He pulled the suitcase out and entered the house. It was still early. He should have telephoned first. His mother would be bound to have a fright if she was already up. He dragged the case right up to the flat door and let himself in as quietly as he could.

His mother was peeping out of her bedroom before he’d even taken his shoes off. ‘Has something happened, Adam?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

‘What’s that suitcase you’ve got with you?’

‘Just a suitcase.’

‘Where are you going with it at this time of the morning?’

‘I’ve got some papers in it.’

‘You’re taking them to court?’

‘No. I thought I might leave them here.’

‘Why should you leave a case here? Haven’t you enough space at home?’

At last his father appeared. ‘Come in, for goodness sake!’

‘He’s arrived with thai: thing,’ his mother called out, ‘and he wants to lumber us with it.’ She came over to the suitcase and took hold of the handle as if intending to try its weight. ‘God knows what he’s got in it.’

‘Books,’ he replied. ‘Just books.’

‘Nice books they must be.’ His mother lowered her voice. ‘Very dubious ones, if you’re offering them. I can’t recall the last time you brought us a book. A decent book, I mean.’

‘Shove it in the lumber-room,’ his father decided, ‘there’s room for it there.’

‘I don’t want it in the lumber-room!’ His mother ran her finger fastidiously along its worn edge. ‘God knows where the thing has been.’

‘All right, I’ll take it away again.’

His mother stopped him in the doorway. ‘Have you had any breakfast?’

‘Never mind.’

‘You’ve been very odd just lately. You’ve not shown yourself at all.’

‘I think it’s just as well if I don’t show myself. You never know, I might be after something else. Or I might dirty your lumber-room.’ He opened the door and pushed the suitcase out.

His father caught up with him on the stairs. ‘What’s come over you?’ He looked round in case anyone was listening. ‘You know what Mum is like. Why didn’t you ring me first?’ He slipped the cellar key into his hand and quickly went back upstairs.

In the cellar he dirtied his hands and most probably his face too. If only he had been hiding a time-bomb, a case of gold bars or at least some leaflets calling for rebellion. But the contents were so innocuous and the action he’d been driven to so pathetic that he felt humiliated.

In a proper battle, one worthy of the name, one in which well-matched forces and determination were pitched against each other, a life-or-death conflict, one could be destroyed, but could also achieve greatness. In the case of a squabble, a dispute devoid of all dignity when it was unclear what the dimensions and significance of the quarrel were and who were the protagonists, the only great thing was the pettiness.

At least there was still his own dispute, his own cause, and hopefully it was free of pettiness, though at this particular moment he was not so sure whether he wasn’t effectively just dragging another suitcase full of musty books and old letters.

He arrived at his office even earlier than he was expected to. He had a wash and then dialled the number of Matěj’s flat. Matěj’s voice took him by surprise.

‘You’re out already?’

‘To hear you, you’d think I’d raped a schoolgirl in the park.’

‘Was it very nasty?’

‘What if you were to drop by instead?’

‘All right, I’ll come this evening.’

‘How about your murderer? When’s the trial?’

It surprised him that Matěj should remember the case at this particular moment. ‘Next week.’

‘A pity. I shall be out at the caravan. Would you believe it, I’m just beginning to see the connection. It came to me when I was in that hole. If they don’t hang murderers, it’s unlikely they’ll hang those who type out poems or even write their own.’

He was sure the connection was not quite so immediate, but he said: ‘Thanks for the encouragement.’ He realised that the files on the case were still in the boss’s office, so he asked for a meeting.

‘I was just about to call you, Adam.’ His face looked even puffier than usual. There were dark shadows under his eyes. ‘Have you notified the witnesses?’

‘I was going to send out the letters today.’

‘Wait a bit. I’ve been thinking about it — I can understand your misgivings. Doesn’t it strike you there are a lot of things that still need clarifying?’

Adam stared at him in amazement. He didn’t know what else he could clarify in this case, and had not even given it any thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a case returned for further investigation.

‘For one thing,’ his boss went on, ‘I’d like to know what he was really doing that night. Or whether he really had any idea about the little girl’s presence.’

Could he really have misjudged him? He would like the fellow to hang, but he’d also like to be sure about his guilt? No, it was wrong to delude himself. Most likely he had just received new instructions. But even that was a good sign. ‘Do you think we ought to return it?’

‘If you provide good grounds.’

‘The prosecutor’s office will file a complaint.’

‘Leave that up to me. You wanted to take some leave: if it’s not too late, take it now.’ There was a note of cunning in the voice. But then it always sounded shifty — to Adam’s ears at least.

‘All right, I’ll put in for it.’

As he walked back through the long corridor he became aware of a painful feeling of strain in his back. As if he were still carrying that suitcase.

5

She asked for permission to finish work at mid-day on Friday.

Her mother promised to pick the children up straight from school. Adam was taking some leave and told her he was going off somewhere. He said he would be going alone; he needed some rest. She needed some rest too, but no one ever asked her what she needed.

She was not sure whether she wanted him to go or not. But she would probably be too afraid to stay alone in the flat. She had heard of women who had bled to death after such an operation.

She felt dizzy from weakness. Even though she already had her coat on she sat down again. It was still possible for her not to go. She feared the pain but most of all it appalled her that she was letting them tear that life out of her, that she was consenting to the murder of a human being which had already been conceived.

When she had first decided to get rid of the child, she had done so mostly on account of Adam. She had still believed in a speedy reconciliation and thought that the fruit of her infidelity would hardly help matters.

Since then, it had become increasingly apparent to her that Adam was going to leave her anyway, that they would separate and she would have destroyed a life for nothing. But she felt so exhausted from everything that had happened to her that she could not find within herself the strength to give life to another child, or to love and rear it.

But wouldn’t her despair become even deeper now? Over the past weeks she had found someone who possibly understood her and he had helped her discover a fellowship which came near to the ideal she had long held of a good human community, all of whose members were close to each other and strove for even closer mutual understanding. Perhaps the fellowship really did enjoy the grace of some higher, celestial power, and she earnestly prayed that they would accept her and help her to share in that grace one day. What if her coming act were to cut her off from them?

The previous Sunday, the minister had preached on the text: Suffer little children to come unto Me, and spoken about the world of children which was pure and how Jesus had been the first to understand this. At that moment she had decided to keep the child, even though the other one was the father, and she had actually felt gratitude for being a woman and having the possibility of becoming a mother. But afterwards, when she had left the chapel, it occurred to her that every child must one day grow up and leave its own world for one in which people deceive, cheat and betray, where they live in bondage and only strive in vain to find at least something, however small, of the world that remained in their memory.

The next week, she had withdrawn all her savings. The money had been put aside for Christmas presents (but what was the point of presents in a home where love and togetherness had been lost?). But she had not had enough and she had been obliged to sell two of her jumpers at work, as well as her prettiest dress, one she still had from America.

She got up again, picked up her bag and left the office. From the window opposite there peered the gaunt, ginger face of her ex-lover: still the father of the child which was not yet born, but which she had also not yet killed. He came out to meet her:

‘Alena!’

‘You know very well I’ve asked you not to wait for me.’

‘But I have to tell you something.’

‘You are always having to tell me something. There’s no point. I explained it to you, after all.’

‘It’s something else this time. Something completely different. Alena!’

‘But I’m in a hurry. You can see for yourself I’m on my way out.’

‘I’ll walk with you then, Alena.’

‘No, there’s no point. I don’t want you to walk with me.’

‘Just to the tram. Alena, the thing is I’ve got a girlfriend!’

‘You’ve found a girlfriend?’

‘Yes, Alena. I was desperate. I didn’t know what to do. Being on my own, I couldn’t help thinking about you all the time.’

‘And then you met her?’

‘It was at a concert, Alena. She’s a music-lover like you. She’s got hair like yours too. Sometimes when I see her from a distance I have the feeling that it’s you. I’ll show you her photo if you like.’

‘You carry it around with you?’

‘I got it today. So what do you think, Alena?’

‘I don’t know, she strikes me… she’s quite young, isn’t she?’

‘It’s an old photo. She’s eighteen already, and she’s so like you, Alena. Just as kind and gentle. She knows how to make other people happy. Would you like to meet her?’

‘I shouldn’t think she’d be too pleased.’

‘Oh, but she would, Alena. I’m always telling her about you. I told her you’re the most wonderful woman I’ve ever known. I told her I loved you. And she wants to meet you. Alena, are you cross with me?’

‘There’s no earthly reason why I should be cross with you.’

‘You look at me as if you hated me. Alena, I thought you would be pleased. I really thought you would. You always told me you’d be happy if I found myself a girl.’

‘I am pleased you’ve found a girl. But I have other things on my mind.’

‘If only, Alena, if only… if only you could still love me…’

‘I don’t want to hear anything of that sort!’

‘Anyway if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be capable of loving her. You taught me to, Alena. Are you angry with me? Do you think we could now be friends?’

‘Maybe. At this moment I have so many things on my mind that I’m not able to think about what will happen next.’

‘Have you got trouble with your husband? Isn’t there anything I could do to help?’

‘There’s no way you could help.’

‘I really am sorry, Alena, I really would like to help you if someone was making you suffer.’

‘All right, Honza. But here’s my tram coming. Thank you for seeing me to the tram stop. I hope you’ll be happy.’

‘Thanks, Alena. I hope you’ll be very happy too. You’re bound to be…’

The doctor let her in himself. ‘You haven’t had second thoughts, my dear?’

‘No, Doctor!’

They stood facing each other for a moment, and then he told her to come with him in that case, and she followed him to his cubicle. While he was drawing the curtains, she placed an envelope with the money on the table.

‘You could have left that till afterwards,’ he said. But he retained the money and went to wash his hands.

‘Should I undress?’

‘Yes, that will be necessary, my dear. I’m afraid I can’t give you an anaesthetic like in hospital. I hope you’re not going to yell too much.’

‘No, I won’t, Doctor.’

The white armchair had been spread open like a couch and covered in a white sheet. A towel had also been placed on the sheet.

‘Did you come alone?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Doctor.’

‘And nobody will be coming to meet you afterwards, either?’

‘No, Doctor. Do you think I won’t make it home on my own?’

‘I’m sure you will. Or I’ll call you a taxi.’

Then she lay naked on the couch. The doctor brought from somewhere a basin with sterilised instruments and a small portable tape-recorder. He switched on a tape, filling the room with soulless music. ‘That’s on account of the neighbours,’ he commented. ‘It’s an old house but there are new tenants.’

She could hardly hear him through the barrage of noise.

She closed her eyes. The music assailed her from all sides, and then she heard the clink of something metallic. ‘Now you’ll have to be a bit brave,’ he told her, ‘and grit your teeth. And not cry out. You know what people are like, don’t you?’

Yes, I do. And he actually had to come to me and tell me how he’d fallen in love. He would have killed me, poisoned me like a mouse, and then he comes a few days later and tells me how happy he is. The bastard.

At that moment a pain went through her, a far worse pain than she had imagined. As if they were burning her insides with a red-hot poker. It occurred to her that he had forgotten to cool his instruments; he hadn’t noticed they were still red hot, and she cried out, maybe to let him know the instruments were red hot, or just to let him know it hurt, just for relief. And she went on screaming louder apd louder as he went on cutting, slicing away her body, and all the while her own blood gushed hot down her thighs.

She opened her eyes slightly and glimpsed a sweat-soaked brow and strong bare hands that were spattered with blood. Then suddenly her breath gave out, everything went stiff, even the face in front of her froze and the hands went rigid and she realised she was dying.

Oh Lord have pity on me, receive my soul and that soul, if it already had a soul, forgive me my trespasses, all my trespasses, I know I was proud.

It was not the best moment for prayer, and God, if He existed, and even if He existed and was merciful, would surely turn away from her in disgust.

She could feel her forehead going clammy. She was not breathing.

‘All right then, my dear,’ the doctor broke in, ‘it’s all over. I think we’ve made a good job of it.’

She tried to move her head, at least, but was unable to.

‘There’s no rush,’ he admonished her. ‘It might need a bit of Eucoran.’ He turned off the tape-recorder and washed his hands once more. Then he came back to her. ‘We’ve got our colour back again, I see,’ he announced. ‘The main thing is it’s behind us now.’

She moved her lips. ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

‘It’s hot in here,’ the doctor said. ‘It could do with some ventilation.’

At last she sat up and he handed her a package of cotton-wool, saying in his off-putting, non-committal, matter-of-fact way: ‘The bleeding will continue normally, but apart from that everything as for a confinement. Refrain from intercourse, naturally.’ He placed next to her two small packets of tablets and ordered her to take one very six hours.

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

‘How do you feel, my dear?’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

‘Do you think you’ll manage to walk?’

‘Yes. Thank you, Doctor.’

‘Or should I call you a taxi?’

‘No, there’s no need, Doctor, thank you.’

‘I don’t like calling them from the flat, but there is a public phone box at the corner of the street. Do you have a coin for the phone?’

‘Yes, Doctor.’

‘Take this tablet before you go.’ He handed her a pill and a glass of water. ‘Swallow it straight away. No bath when you get home, just a shower. At least two days’ rest. Stay in bed tomorrow. No cleaning or cooking.’

‘No, Doctor.’

‘Come and see me at the surgery next week. If you have any pains or a temperature come and see me straight away.’

‘Yes, thank you, Doctor. Thank you very much.’

Outside she was surprised to find total darkness. A moist spring-like breeze was blowing; dried leaves rustled as they blew about in the small park on the other side of the street. The clouds scudded across the sky and between them the moist and almost complete disc of the moon appeared and disappeared again.

Her legs were so weak that she was obliged to hold on to the wall for support. An elderly woman with a dog was approaching her from the opposite direction. As they passed, the woman said to the dog: ‘The shameless creatures you see nowadays. Almost too drunk to walk.’

She freed herself from the wall and crossed the street. The ground beneath her feet shook so much she could scarcely keep her balance. There was a bench just at the edge of the park, so she could sit down for a moment. She rested her head on the back of the seat and stared straight upwards. Immediately above her head a mighty, five-fingered branch stretched out, with several large dry leaves rustling at the end of it. The moon lit up the branch with a greyish light. For a moment she had the impression that the branch had come to life and was reaching out for her with its gouty claws. Then she noticed that the edge of the cloud then approaching the moon had become iridescent and swelled into a kind of crater from whose depths a glow emerged.

It was a golden, almost unreal light, which amazingly went on becoming brighter until its flames started to lap over the edge of the crater and out of the flames she could see a misty vapour rise up full of coloured reflections, peel away from the flames and descend towards her.

Only as the mists came nearer did she realise that they were endowed with an inner capacity of shape, and at the same time she felt a sudden, almost dizzy blissfulness and she knew that something celestial and undefiled was approaching. Then it came to rest in the space between herself and the branch and gazed at her.

‘Are you an angel?’ she asked.

‘I am myself.’ And she understood the reply though it was not spoken.

‘Have you come from Him?’

‘I come from Him who sent me.’

‘He heard me, though I did that awful thing?’

‘Did you feel remorse?’

‘I wanted to die!’

‘Whoever feels sorry for another shall not die. He is merciful to all whose hearts have not been hardened by pride.’

‘I seem to know your face.’

‘My face is of another essence.’

‘You have the face of a friend who died. Tell me, was He merciful to her?’

‘He is merciful to all whose hearts are not hardened by pride.’

‘She couldn’t have been proud, she was only a child.’

‘So she dwells in me.’

‘And what about it? What will happen to it?’

‘The unborn cannot know pride. They become angels straight away.’

‘What would its face be like?’

‘I cannot tell, its face is still of another essence.’

‘Tell me, can it forgive me?’

‘It can forgive everyone. It is in a state of grace.’

‘And what am I to do now? I am alone.’

‘But you are no longer alone. You will never again be alone.’

‘Will you stay with me?’

‘No, I cannot remain on this earth. I am of another essence. But what I bring you will stay with you.’

‘What have you brought me?’

‘I have brought you faith. Whoever believes cannot remain alone. You will become a companion of the angels.’

‘Will you tell me more?’

‘Be good. Go and sin no more!’

‘Don’t leave me yet!’

‘Be meek.’

‘Stay with me. It feels good to have you near.’

‘Only the meek may rise to love. You always longed for love but asked for something in exchange. The meek ask for nothing in exchange.’

‘Are you going already? Tell me who you are?’

‘Look at me!’

‘I am!’

‘I am the light of your soul. The rain of your aridity. I am the one who conquers nothingness.’

‘You smell sweet.’

‘No, I have only freed your breath.’

‘You shine.’

‘No, it is you who sees at last.’

And suddenly it shot upwards and lost its shape and brilliance. She felt a burning in her throat, but she breathed freely and she was so light she could not feel her body. She stood up and set off as in a stupor, up the dark, deserted street.

Before we drink from the waters of Lethe

1

A few days after Martin was born, I received the verdict of a secret tribunal that had dealt with my rebellion. First of all it instructed my party organisation to issue me a reprimand and a warning, and then, on its instructions (it was still the same old beast, the same tormentor of prisoners), my superiors informed me that I would have to leave the institute. However, they had no objections to my returning to legal practice whether as a judge or in some other function. No mention was made of my article. No one contested my views on the death penalty, no one reproved me for anything.

I felt slighted. Not one of my colleagues had taken my part. Oldřich alone consoled me and prophesied an imminent change in the status quo and my subsequent advancement.

My presence at the institute was no longer required — or desired. I could sit at home or in the library, and could study, think or write. But what would be the point of any of it if I was to end up being shunted off somewhere and silenced?

I was supposed to be looking for a job, but I was unable to make up my mind. Maybe subconsciously I was expecting salvation to arrive from elsewhere as so often in my life already, and I would be liberated from my bleak, hopeless fate.

At that time I was also visited at home by a youngster who introduced himself as Petr Fiktus and told me that he and most of his colleagues at our faculty, where he was in his first year as a lecturer, sympathised with me and commended both my attitude and my action, as well as the fact I had not recanted any of my opinions.

I was surprised to discover that they had even heard of my dispute.

We had a short, stilted chat about the death penalty (someone, after all, was ready to talk to me about that issue) and about the penal system. Then he talked to me enthusiastically about his colleagues who were determined to restore the dignity of jurisprudence, and the status of our profession in society. He also quizzed me on my views about the principle of elective judges and the possibility, in our society, of achieving the independence of the judiciary from the other organs of power.

I realised that he looked on me not so much as an academic as a moral authority. It gratified and even reassured me.

It struck me that there was a further dimension to our actions, one which I — as one brought up in the strictly utilitarian world of my father — had not so far perceived.

Then at last fate intervened, as I had earnestly hoped it would. The address on the envelope had been amended several times. The letter was from the President of Michigan University. He had apparently heard about my work from his friend Allan Nagel and learnt of my fate; he had also read some translations of some of my articles, particularly the study of capital punishment (after they had refused to print it I had actually sent that article, in a fit of defiance, to my learned colleague in Massachusetts) and he was both pleased and honoured, on behalf of the law school of his university, to offer me a visiting fellowship for the period of the next academic year. He was sure that my stay would be mutually beneficial and agreeable. The university would pay travelling expenses for myself and my family.

It took me several days before I decided to reply. I wrote that the invitation had come as a pleasant surprise and if I managed to obtain permission to travel — which would not be easy in view of my present situation — I would be happy to come with my family.

When I sent the letter that evening, I imagined myself standing somewhere on the shores of Lake Michigan. The mist was rising above that huge expanse of water and a light canoe manned by Indians was nearing the shore.

2

The town we were to live in was quiet and superficially resembled the world I had come from. Spread over a long range of hills either side of the River Huron (whose very name conjured up memories of my childhood reading), it even reminded me of my native city.

And indeed my life there was not too different from the life I had led while still employed in the institute. Three times a week, I would go into the university and attend lectures on American law (on the pavement of the bridge which I had to cross, someone had painted a huge hammer and sickle and the slogan: ALL POWER TO THE WORKERS) and spend some time in conversation with my colleagues. Occasionally I would visit the library. Most of the time I studied and wrote. What was different from my home was the atmosphere in which I was suddenly able to live and work. I didn’t have to worry whether the topic I was studying was acceptable, whether the literature I was reading was admissible as a source, or whether the ideas that came to me could be voiced directly, or only hinted at, or were taboo.

It was there that I realised for the first time that lack of freedom harms people not only by blocking their path to knowledge and curtailing what they can say and where they can go, but also by damaging the very core of their being and enslaving them by switching their attention to themselves alone. I realised how much energy I had been wasting trying to express in a complicated way and through allusions something which people there didn’t even bother to express as they took it for granted. And all the effort I had lavished on finding authoritative quotations to validate the simplest of ideas. I had been obliged to study banalities and regurgitate them, and had I failed to do so I would have aroused suspicion and been excommunicated before anyone even had a chance to hear me. And it had been precisely in that desperate striving to slink around obstacles and deliver in public at least one sentence of my own, even though the words gradually lost their meaning on the way (sometimes totally), that I had finally started to lose myself.

Now the mere absence of the usual obstacles relaxed me.

I assumed that my wife felt very much as I did. After all it had been her wish to know other countries and cultures. But her longing to visit distant lands was only an expression of her need to escape her humdrum life — and that need remained.

One evening I returned from the university. She was sitting in an armchair looking out of the window.

What was she looking at? Nothing. Had there been any post from home? No, there hadn’t. The children? They were asleep. Was she sad? No reply.

The doorbell rang in the apartment below us, where several girl students lived. I could hear the sound of a noisy welcome and then a door banged. Immediately afterwards a record-player started to bellow. I tried to ignore it and actually managed to, only being disturbed by the repeated ringing of the doorbell downstairs. Then I became aware of the strange silence that reigned in our own apartment. Alena was still sitting looking out of the darkened window.

What could she see there, what was she looking at all the time outside that window?

Where was she supposed to look? At me all the time, perhaps?

In our apartment, silence; beneath us, the sound of drums.

Could I hear the music at all? She wouldn’t be surprised if I was unaware of it. And she had always wanted a husband who could hear music. How could I go on sitting and reading with music like that in my ears? And she added, without any sort of logic, that eighteen guests had already arrived, all young people, and they were most likely dancing while we just sat at home, and if we did go anywhere it was just to sit down again and yak.

What did she suggest then?

She would like to go somewhere where something was happening, where people moved around, made love, laughed, danced.

So I rang the doorbell downstairs and asked if we might come to the party.

We entered a packed room that resembled the one we lived in; even the furniture was the same. The walls, however, were covered in posters and photographs and the floor was strewn everywhere with cans of beer and bottles of cheap Californian wine. The far end of the room was almost lost in smoke.

Some of the guests (most of whom were lying down or sitting on the carpet) told us their Christian names, and two girls made room for us under one of the loudspeakers. Someone handed me a can of beer and asked us what country we had come from. Before I had a chance to reply, he stood up and moved off somewhere else. Then a circulating cigarette reached me. I made the point that I didn’t smoke, but my attitude to smoking was of no interest to anyone, so I passed the cigarette on to my wife. She, to my astonishment, inhaled the smoke before passing the cigarette on. I asked her what sort of cigarette it was and she told me she would find out. She stood up and then I lost sight of her in one of the groups.

Very soon my eyes started to smart from the smoke and I found it hard to breathe, besides which the music deafened me. My age and my mood set me apart from the rest. A girl with long blonde hair (her face immediately merged with the faces of the rest) sat down next to me and asked me if I loved her. She said she loved me, that she loved everyone, particularly the poor little hungry Pakistanis, as well as all animals including polecats, frogs and spiders, she loved everything that lived and moved, and she raised a finger in front of her eyes and said she loved her finger too, because it was alive and moved. Then she went stiff, propped up against the wall, her finger held up in front of her; she had turned into a statue made of warm matter, still breathing.

I closed my eyes slightly and it seemed to focus my perception, as if I were looking from a dark auditorium at a stage and saw actors who had experienced none of the things I had, who had never stood at the gates of death, or even had any inkling of the misery elsewhere in the world: neither the misery of hunger nor the misery of the hypocrisy that buys one’s existence. They had known nothing of that, which is why they could lie here dead drunk, elated and inert: animals born in freedom; what had they done with it — what would people do with freedom?

I got up and went off in search of my wife. She was chatting avidly with some young men. She tried to introduce them to me. I noticed that her eyes too seemed to have acquired a glazed look, that they had been transformed into mirrors and the pupils had expanded and become static. She leaned towards me and asked in a whisper whether I had noticed that they were going off behind that curtain to make love. She would also like to make love. I suggested that we could go home in that case, and she, with a frankness that took me aback, told me that she fancied making love with one of those lads, not with me. But she instantly seemed to take fright and snuggled up to me, telling me she could see a great blue prairie, that was either a field of flax or heather, and we would go to that prairie, and she said that now she was happy among those people, who were innocent, self-sacrificing and unspoilt and thought about nothing but love.

3

One of my new colleagues had a pastor friend in far-off Texas, in a town not far from the world-famous Carlsbad caves. The town itself was of little interest as such, but from there it was scarcely a half day’s drive south to one of the most remarkable national parks. The pastor friend would welcome us as his own.

So during the Christmas holidays — oh, my childhood friends, my murdered childhood friends, I remember how we would walk through the corridors of the barracks and tell each other the stories we had read in books about the Comanches, Apaches and Navahos galloping on their horses, and through them all flowed the Rio Grande; they were unreal names for us and we pinned our thoughts on them because they came from a world where life was different, where one could race through unbounded spaces, and if you were attacked you still had your Winchester rifle to fire at your attackers, and evil and violence were still avenged — I set off on a trip with my family. We drove for two whole days. The only other time we had been so far south was when we visited Menachem in his desert kibbutz; but here an icy wind blew from the mountains and snow lay on the roofs of the Indian puebla. The next morning — we suppressed our urge to drive on straight away — we huddled amidst a group of spectators watching the Indian celebrations in honour of the buffalo. This was where my childhood heroes lived. They took off their ready-made clothes and bared their bodies, now pampered by civilisation, to the cold air. Some of them donned ancient dilapidated, moth-eaten buffaloes’ heads. They walked and danced in time to the drums, their teeth chattering; one of the children was sobbing and one of the youths fainted. I was overcome with a sense of disappointment, or rather sorrow over a world that tried to recall itself in vain, and I willingly acceded to my wife’s request for us to visit instead the world of the future: some nearby communes.

And we did indeed come across a group of huts made out of mud, motor-car chassis and newly felled trees. In the single living room, which was acrid with smoke from burning wood, tobacco and marijuana, several young people sat around and half-naked babies romped about on the mud floor. My wife attempted to take one of them in her arms, but the brat burst into tears and bit her in the hand.

In the communal dining-room, a bespectacled and bearded prophet put aside a book wrapped in newspaper and permitted us to ask him questions. My wife therefore did so and heard everything that she already knew from articles and pamphlets, namely, that the most important thing in this fetish-ridden civilisation, where man and his labour-power had become a commodity, was to seek the love and fellowship of others. In a world of motors, deodorants, flush toilets, artificial insemination and tinned dog-food, in a world where a quarter of humanity went hungry and millions of people were dying of hunger, the only way we could preserve our sanity was by returning to nature, starting to drink spring water and fertilising the soil with what had been used to fertilise it over the centuries; by rejecting all the achievements of civilisation.

And what about when the children fell ill? Alena wanted to know. Didn’t they even take them to a doctor? Nature knew best, as it always had. My wife was captivated and had tears in her eyes, whereas I distractedly opened the book with the newspaper cover and discovered that it was Marx’s Das Kapital.

The next day we finally reached our destination. I left the family, tired from the long journey, at the presbytery, and set off further south on Route 385, which ran through wilderness. All around me stood the grey-brown wrecks of mountains, yellowing prairie grass stuck up through the rocks, as well as low clumps of cactuses. The road was bordered by a monotonous barbed-wire fence; no buildings anywhere, only the occasional hand-written signpost indicating not towns but individual ranches.

I drove as far as the tourist centre beneath the majestically towering peak of the Casa Grande. I hired myself a small cabin, took a shower and drank a glass of milk. After lunch I drove to the banks of the Rio Grande. It was an ordinary river, fairly narrow, in fact, in whose bed a turbid stream flowed lazily along. I crossed it on a punt (no one asked me for my passport) to Mexico. I spent about an hour wandering around the dusty streets of the border village. The huts here were low and squalid. A bunch of half-naked children shouted something at me, but I didn’t understand them. Most likely they were begging for money. It was so pitiful and unromantic and so unlike my childhood notions that I returned disappointed.

The next day, I set off for the mountains with a few sandwiches and an orange in my pocket.

I walked alone. The stony trail rose steeply up the mountainside and as I got higher more and more mountain ranges emerged in front of me. The ones towards the south were entirely bare, just stones, waterless valleys, grey-blue rocks riven with gullies, a non-terrestrial landscape, even more desolate than the one I had seen in the Holy Land. I only stopped when I was just below the peak, and I sat down on a warm stone to gaze at the motionless matter which nothing enlivened. It struck me that the time of a stone must be different from the time of people, animals or plants, and it seemed to me that I was being penetrated by that different time. The present and the past, both distant and recent, all merged, and suddenly I was dismayed, terrified and moved by words and events that had long since lost all meaning, and from the depths of my memory there emerged already forgotten figures, forgotten faces, and I could see Arie (was it really him?); his face was almost inhumanly pale, but the eyes that looked at me, his blue eyes, were full of life. I could say to him: Here I am! and for a moment I stiffened, expecting him to reply and say: Of course — we’re both together! And I was panic-stricken by the thought: what if not only he, but I also am long dead? What if neither of us returned from there, and this is actually my Valley of Death? And I remembered my mother; I saw her as a young woman, still in the days when she would sit at my bedside as I fell asleep: what had she wanted, what had she yearned for in those years? Sometimes she would talk to me about men who had once courted her, but I had received those revelations as I did all the other stories, like fairy tales or something I was read from a book. Her destiny did not affect me. And now I was racked with regret that our worlds had remained so remote from each other, that I knew nothing about my mother, and even if I wanted to ask her now, I could not. How remote I was from everyone. And what had my father actually felt when they arrested him? When he realised that his arrest was not an exception but a manifestation of the new order of things and relations, and that he had been wrong in all he had believed up till then? Had he not, even for one moment, longed to die? Had he ever contemplated death at all? What did love mean to him? Had he had any other women apart from my mother? I don’t know; he never spoke about anything of the kind; I knew only a tiny portion of his world: his enthusiasm for machines and politics. And what did I know about my wife? About my brother? About Magdalena? So she stood there motionless at the bus stop in her dark headscarf, while I left her further and further behind. And I hadn’t taken her with me on this journey though she had longed for it. Why hadn’t I? But it is you I am thinking of, my darling; you were actually my first wife. I am lying on ground which is stony and warm; it’s the day before Christmas; you and your parrot Theo are most likely snowbound, but I, if I look southwards, can see petrified waves and a great big bird of prey soaring above the mountain ridge. Do you recall all those times we would watch a buzzard circling above the valley below us? You yearned to escape. I have so many important things to tell you, all assuming that anything to do with me could still interest you, or if anyone could be interested in what happened yesterday, seeing that we two don’t have a past; and I, in particular, have no past because I learnt to forget it, it was too nasty; but when and where was the past ever good? Here they used to sacrifice youths to the gods, laying them on the altar and cutting their hearts out of their live bodies with stone knives; but that’s not the main thing; I have to tell you the most important thing, what I regard as the purpose of life — at that moment I went numb with horror that I was unable to define it. I didn’t know, I didn’t know the meaning, and that was why I had remained silent all those years. But no, I’m sorry. All I have to do is concentrate a bit more. I always knew it, after all. In fact, at an age when most people had their minds on other things entirely, I was sure I knew what I wanted. Yes, now I recall. When I was lying on that wooden bunk in a town which an empress had built for quite different purposes, I imagined to myself that I was a president or a general with the power of bringing people their freedom. I did not know yet what rights went to make up freedom, but I had come to know what lack of freedom was, I had an inkling what was felt by the youth who was laid upon the altar stone to have his heart cut out and his blood drunk, and, in the name of a god, at that moment impassive and hostile, to lose for ever his one and only — unrepeatable and unrenewable — life. I had an intimation what lack of freedom was: that it was a sacrificial altar on which we lay bound hand and foot and watched with alarm the movements of the sacrificing priest. I wanted to abolish that state of apprehension with a single magnificent decree, to end that state of the world in which victims were dragged to various altars. I know you’ll not be able to believe me, my far-off first wife. For you I was a judge and therefore a sacrificing priest with a knife in my hand; I was like the eagle circling on high not because it is free but because it is following its prey. But that was not me. I had simply made a bad choice. One has to fall in line and submit to another’s will, and if you have chosen badly, it often takes all your energy in order to try to eliminate the consequences. And did I choose at all? Rather I let myself be fitted in to life, by circumstances or fate, or whatever. That is where I went wrong; can you still hear me? I have to explain it to you. I was unable to take decisions; but it wasn’t simply weak-mindedness — I increasingly realised that every decision in this life is wrong from some point of view: fateful and wrong; I always used to spend so long weighing it up that in the end someone took the decision for me. That’s why I’m here now and you are snowbound so very far away. I couldn’t make up my mind to ask you to marry me, I couldn’t make up my mind to say: Let’s leave! But do you really think we would have been happier? After all there is nowhere to go to and no one to go with; we’re all alone; I’m alone and you would have remained alone on the edge of the desert and the bare rocks of the Sierra del Carmen.

In the grey overcast sky, the sun slowly sank towards the sharp mountain peaks. If I stayed here, a bear might come in the night, pumas might rush up to me, snakes might hem me in, or some demon with a woman’s face might arrive from the sky and press its lips to mine. But most likely nothing would happen, I would just spend a lonely night. Once upon a time, sages would spend many days and nights alone. If I had forty days and nights ahead of me on this rocky cliff, I might just manage to come up with one single answer, but tomorrow I have to be back with my family and in a few days I have to dash back up north and visit dozens of people and write hundreds of letters and talk about everything, in other words, nothing, then board a plane and return to my homeland, relate my experiences, rush from place to place: that was the sign I was born under, that was the sign we were born under; will I ever really manage to call a halt?

4

Even though excited letters were arriving from the homeland calling us back (what we had longed for all those years was at last coming about, Matěj wrote to me, and everyone is needed here, whereas there you’re of no use to anyone) and we wanted to return as soon as possible, we did not manage to get away before the middle of summer. One more farewell to the world of highways (anyway, all the newspapers were writing about my homeland, firing my impatience), a few nights of neon lights, nights in motels on the edge of small towns I would not see again, buying as many postcards as I could, a last crossing into Kentucky (I would never make Wisconsin now), gifts for my niece Lucie, some fashionable sunglasses for my wife, books for Matěj and Oldřich, woollen stockings for my mother and a shawl for my mother-in-law, a few records, at least, for my brother, and there, behind the glass doors of the airport, stood my parents: my mother in a hat that was fashionable twenty years before; they were waving, and behind them, next to my brother, I could make out the figure of Matěj. The customs officers seemed to me unusually friendly and unofficious. In a fit of impatience I asked Matěj to invite all the friends to come over that very evening.

The flat was strewn with suitcases and heaps of brochures, maps, postcards and posters, as well as bottles of Kentucky bourbon, foam-rubber figures and magazines which would have seemed to me such a rarity only a year before; I was scarcely able to find enough chairs for everyone.

I was prepared to report on my journey and my research into foreign mores, but amazingly enough no one displayed any curiosity; they were all too preoccupied with their own problems. So in the end it was I who listened: to news of the last parliamentary session (did I know that they no longer voted unanimously?), news of newly created organisations (even the tens of thousands of those who had been unjustly sentenced over past years were allowed to establish them), news of new journals (Matěj had brought a package of them; I was to read them straight away in order to understand what was actually happening — one could even find out things from the newspapers now, as people were writing for them freely). They drowned each other out and choked on news reports — even Oldřich, for whom politics was more of a game which he observed with interest but unemotionally — and pronounced heated judgements. While I had been away, they had all signed lots of appeals, attended lots of meetings, spoken at various assemblies; now they wanted to know what I intended to do. I could, of course, return to the institute, because all the charges that were laid against me had now been dropped, or would be. (Nimmrichter had already been dismissed; it had been discovered that once, when he was still working as a warder, he had tortured some priests and would be having to answer for it in court.) But it would not be advisable for me to waste time in the institute, I would be needed in more important areas. Indeed at this very moment reliable judges were being sought for the rehabilitation tribunals. (Surely I knew that parliament had passed laws allowing the investigation of unjust convictions?) There was such a shortage of people with the necessary skills who also commanded people’s trust.

But I wasn’t publicly known.

I was mistaken; the specialised public knew me.

When they left after midnight, I sat down with the journals. The same faces stared out at me from the different title pages — caricatures of politicians, even: something very novel to my eyes. Dawn was already breaking outside as I scanned the pictures. It was like reading over a fellow-passenger’s shoulder in the tram; my attention was caught by particular headlines and I would read random paragraphs, readers’ letters, complaints about the injustices and crimes of the previous years, and I started to become aware of the purgative significance of what had happened here, and I started to acquire my friends’ enthusiasm, and their excitement at the longed-for freedom which had been unexpectedly obtained. It was as if my long-lost dreams of a perfect state, a juster society and freedom to associate were coming alive within me again. Only this time I was not a powerless youngster, I was of an age when I could take part; and it could well be that the society I lived in expected it of me.

I dozed off in the armchair where I was reading, and in the morning was unable to restrain my impatience and drove into town, parking the car right in front of the Main Station. I stopped at a kiosk to buy some newspapers and behind the glass I could see a postcard with a picture of our first President and even a book about him, as well as some postcards with naked girls. I bought all the daily papers and an illustrated magazine I had never seen before.

As I walked along Příkopy, I encountered two young fellows, both long-haired and one of them bearded, reminiscent of the students in Michigan, standing in the middle of the pavement manning a stall covered in sheets of paper. Passers-by would stop and some would add their signatures.

I went up to them and read the text on one of the sheets, but there was too much commotion for me to concentrate.

I was about to move on when the bearded youngster asked me whether I would like to sign, or whether I had any questions. In sudden confusion I shook my head, pulled out my pen, and added my name to a long column of signatures.

5

A few days after I returned — and on the eve of ‘that night’ — I received a visit from my Uncle Gustav in the unwitting role of harbinger of doom. I had not seen him for a long time and had only heard from my mother that he was not well, that his wounded leg and his heart were playing him up. He hung his stick on the back of the chair and limped heavily around the flat at my heels. He commended listlessly our standard furniture and standardised rooms and then asked after my wife and the children.

I didn’t know what to talk to him about; I had no idea why he had dropped in out of the blue like that: the uncle whom I was once fond of and even admired when he returned as a hero after the war. So I started to tell him about America, but he interrupted me and started to hold forth about America himself. He recalled the black soldiers he had fought with in Africa; they had told him all about the misery of the shanty towns they lived in and the discrimination they suffered. I pointed out that times had changed, but Uncle told me with irritation not to try and tell him how things were, he could see very well what ‘my favourites’ were up to in Vietnam, how they’d found some other coloured subject-race to shoot at and keep their factories in business. Then he asked me whether it was true that we were planning to proclaim innocent all those convicted reactionaries, class enemies and agents who had been found guilty at one time in accordance with the laws in force then. And my uncle’s hands trembled, his eyes became bloodshot, veins stood out on his brow and the froth formed at the corners of his mouth.

I said that it would be necessary to exonerate all those who were truly innocent.

And how did we plan to find out after all these years?

It would be necessary to do all that was humanly possible.

They had all been guilty in their way, my uncle declared. They had hated the new regime and would have happily shot those who supported it.

I said that they had good reason to feel hatred and no one could be convicted for what he would like to do, nor rewarded for that matter. People could only be convicted for what they did, not what they thought. Anyway, he knew very well that savage sentences had been handed out to people who had done nothing wrong at all, not even in their thoughts. Could he have forgotten my father?

He asked me not to bring my father’s case into it. Of course, Viktor had been innocent, but people like him had been, or would be, rehabilitated within the Party; they didn’t need to drag in the courts; that was obvious to every true Communist.

I made the comment that people who had been wrongly convicted by a court must be acquitted of those false charges by a court, even if they themselves did not seek redress.

He replied that I and the rest of my ilk were all mistaken. We were naive and were being taking for a ride by our enemies. We had forgotten that we were in the middle of a life-and-death struggle in our country, not some village brawl.

I tried to explain something but my uncle was not listening. He informed me that if some injustices had occurred, it was necessary for us to accept the fact. It was the inexorable law of every power struggle. But struggle was a matter for men and not for the sentimental sons of the petty bourgeois. They went soppy over every little injustice, every instance of force, even the justified use of force which revolutions always entail. But what injustices had occurred in actual fact? my uncle asked. It had been no more than a case of the losers suffering the consequences of their defeat. I hadn’t known those losers when they were still in power. I didn’t remember their cruelty, when little orphans had been turned away hungry from their doors, while they themselves lived in the luxury of their many-roomed villas, surrounded by servants, chamber-maids, governesses, cooks and tutors. I didn’t remember anything. But the least I could do would be to read about the Jews of old, and to my amazement, my uncle started to quote from the Bible, about how they had been proud of their intransigence, and how, when they conquered enemy cities, they did not leave one soul alive. It never used to strike them that they ought to apologise for their victims, let alone to them! No power on earth could afford such a luxury: to stop in the midst of battle and start examining itself and disavowing the actions which had won it authority.

I said that the only chance the present regime had of obtaining any authority was by seeking to rectify its actions or, rather, its crimes.

My uncle stood up, raised his stick and shouted that I was a subversive. We were all subversives who were undoing the work of whole generations in a few moments.

As if I was not aware that fanatics can only be appeased, never convinced, I tried to explain to my uncle where he was wrong. What was happening was precisely the last attempt to save the work of those generations. I trusted he thought me an honourable person with no ulterior or self-seeking motives. I assured him that it was only now as an adult that I was experiencing for the first time the uplifting feeling that my work not only gave my life meaning, it also served some greater ideal, something that transcended me — an ideal which I represented and which, I believed, was not alien to him.

My uncle froze for a moment, then dropped his raised arm and leaned on his stick. I could hear his heavy breathing. He could see that his visit had been a waste of time. We no longer spoke the same language. I had become a renegade.

He stopped once more in the doorway. He said he was curious what we would make of it. He was curious, though he would sooner not live to see it. Luckily he had hopes of not living to see it. Uncle Gustav made an attempt at ironic laughter and was gripped by a fit of coughing.

I heard his coughing fade into the distance and the sound of his stick on the stairs, and could see again my childhood home: me lying on my bed waiting impatiently for my uncle to arrive and yank me out of my loneliness and immobility with his lively stories. I realised that my uncle would probably never come again, and I mourned the old-fashioned embittered stubbornness of the lonely old man.

As on every evening. I still had work to do and my wife went off to bed before me. For a while, I sat reading some manuscripts and then perusing the magazines that had piled up on my desk.

It was not yet midnight when I fell asleep, and I must have slept very soundly because I was unable to rouse myself, even though the telephone must have been ringing for a long time. Even before I lifted the receiver, I was aware of the roar of some distant machines.

I picked up the receiver. Adam, is that you? Matěj yelled like a madman. Adam, do you know what’s happened? The Russians are here!

I said something like why, or when, and then hung up.

It was a quarter past three; I went into the kitchen and cooked myself some breakfast. Dawn was beginning to break. I wrote a note: They say the Russians are here! I left the note lying on the table.

Then I set off for town. It was light already. Several tanks were standing in front of the radio building surrounded by a throng of people. There was a sound of sporadic gunfire from nearby. The shouts merged. An ambulance siren sounded and I saw two men with a stretcher. Someone was lying on it, but he was covered up, with only the top of his head showing. Oddly enough, I felt no fear at that moment. I elbowed my way through until I was near one of the tanks and could hear the artless phrases which my unknown and unarmed fellow-citizens were using to try to convince the soldiers to go back to where they had come from.

I continued down along Wenceslas Square. There were more and more people about, some carrying flags.

Even on my own square there was a close-packed crowd, some of them singing. Foreign troops stood on guard around the Old Town Hall. I noticed a tall man in glasses get up on a bench (I knew his face from somewhere; most likely we had attended the same conference some time) and start to explain something to the soldiers in Russian. I did not manage to catch what he was saying, but the soldiers listened motionless, or rather, with obduracy. Then an officer appeared and gave an order to the soldiers who then dragged him down from the bench and led him off somewhere.

I made my way into one of the adjacent lanes and leaned against the wall of a house. There was a time when I used to walk this way to school, I realised. A radio was playing loudly from a window above my head, but it sounded distant to me.

The tanks could start to move and open fire at any moment. I remembered my small daughter, who was probably not even awake yet. I thought how in a moment she would wake up — into this cruel, pitiless world: a world of soulless steel and power which never brought anything but destruction. How could I have forgotten, even for a moment, how could I have doubted its essence?

And I had nothing with me, no weapon, not even a knife. And there was no point in screaming, I didn’t know how to anyway, and I’d forgotten how to cry. It crossed my mind that I would soon be thirty-seven and I could well be at the mid-point of my life, and from here people most likely looked backwards — to take stock, and forwards, to try to guess their future.

But what could I have seen, what could I have seen now?