Father’s attorney was so unprepossessing that nothing about him stuck in my memory except his small, gold-rimmed glasses. But these belonged merely to his external appearance, just like his gray jacket. He suggested we go to a café, where he said he had a table. He then offered me a cigarette (which I refused), addressed me as “my dear boy,” and informed me that the prosecution, as he’d learned from the documents, was apparently trying to prove that my father had committed sabotage. As I was surely aware, certain changes of a general nature had occurred, and now, although he didn’t want to promise anything, it looked as if he might be able to ask for an acquittal. He assured me he would do everything in his power, even though as I was certainly aware. .
I said I had no idea what he was talking about.
These days, he explained, a lawyer could do less than— He looked around to see if anyone was sitting at the neighboring tables and said in almost a whisper, “A lawyer can accomplish less than a cleaning lady from the district committee.”
When I entered the dreary courtroom, where the only décor was the state symbol and a picture of President Zápotocký, I felt a weight descend upon me.
The court entered, then five uniformed hulks brought in Father and four other accused. Father seemed the smallest. He was extremely pale but not unrecognizably emaciated the way he was when we first saw him after being liberated from the concentration camps.
He saw me sitting there, forced a weak smile, and acknowledged me with just a nod because he was handcuffed.
I was so flustered when I saw Father sitting on the bench of the accused that I nearly couldn’t follow the prosecutor’s speech. He spoke without any zeal, as if he were trying to put the court to sleep as quickly as possible. Then we were ordered from the room.
The next day toward evening I was let into the courtroom to hear the verdict.
“The defendant Klíma,” announced the judge, who didn’t bother with Father’s academic title, “in his capacity as the director of the national enterprise MEZ Development, which he held from August 1, 1947, to June 30, 1951, did not see to proper labor organization. Furthermore,” he continued, “he did not devote the proper care to the training of personnel, tolerated criticism of his work with difficulty, and systematically did not cooperate with the manufacturing plant even though he knew the machines he had designed could be built only by personnel who were both professionally and politically adept.”
At the same time, the judge allowed that the machines Father had designed were so demanding that the personnel at the manufacturing plant could not even assemble such complicated apparatus.
The court also established that the accused attempted to refute most of the accusations by claiming he had tried to point out and warn against these shortcomings during the manufacturing process.
“The national economy, however, has suffered considerable damage, the extent of which it is impossible to determine without a thorough investigation,” he continued in the voice of a weary shopkeeper who toward evening was already suspecting that no one would buy his limp produce. “Nevertheless, the court believes it cannot conclude that the accused is guilty of sabotage, for he attempted to rectify the situation.”
Father and the other accused engineers were sentenced to thirty months in prison; father was also fined two thousand crowns.
Immediately after the trial, the agitated attorney ran up to me and led me aside where no one could hear us and said the court was supposed to sentence them only to the time they had served during the investigation, and because all of the accused had been given a year’s pardon owing to the recent amnesty, they could go home immediately, but the blockhead of a judge did not take into consideration that Father had been arrested three months later than the others, so he’d actually given him three extra months.
I confessed that I had no idea what Father had been found guilty of, since he clearly had not done anything unlawful.
“But my dear boy,” said the attorney, amazed, “it’s a matter of how things are interpreted, not how they are in reality. That would smack of bourgeois rule, wouldn’t it? Just a year ago, your father would have received at least twenty years for the same thing. And a year before that. . It’s best not to think about it.”
*
When I next brought one of my reviews to the editorial office of Mladá fronta, I was asked if I’d like to take a trip to one of the border regions and write a news story about it. At that time, the Union of Youth had announced a big campaign of long-term agricultural brigades to the border regions, which had still not managed to recover from the mass deportation of their German inhabitants.
I said I’d be glad to try.
They also wanted to know if I had a special relationship with any particular part of the border regions, and, fearing they might change their mind, I said I liked Šumava.
Šumava appealed to them as well. A certain group of brigade workers in the Kašperské Mountains were promising to harvest the hay on fifty acres of mountain fields even though they had only two scythes. This time I had no one to invite to accompany me, so the next day I got on my bicycle and took off in the direction of Plžeň. Along with my ordinary things, I took with me a folding map from 1935, which displayed features that were missing from contemporary maps for reasons of secrecy. It also listed the population from 1930. I read that in the district of Sušice, where the Kašperské Mountains were located, there had been twenty thousand Germans. Now they were undoubtedly no more.
After nine hours, I rode into town, where it looked as if the war had ended only a few weeks ago. I climbed off my bicycle, went into a restaurant, and sank down on the nearest chair. At a long table sat two scruffy, ragged, and obviously somewhat drunken men who looked at me with apparent suspicion or perhaps even malice. In the tavern, which reeked of cheap cigarette smoke, beer, goulash, and mildew, sat several other half-drunken, scruffy fellows wearing overalls. In the corner of the room sat a group of young people bawling out a drunken song, or at least trying to.
After a while a similarly drunk waiter shambled over and wordlessly placed before me a half liter of beer. Sometime later he appeared with a bowl of soup, and I asked where I could register for a room.
He was surprised it had occurred to me I could get a room here; maybe in Sušice at Fialka, he suggested. It was a big hotel. I said I couldn’t make it to Sušice; there had to be someplace in town I could spend the night.
Maybe at the farmhouse where they took all the military bunks. There would certainly be a free spot there since half the brigade workers had already run off. He pointed at the group of young drunks sitting in the corner, and I realized that these were the brigade workers I’d pedaled nine hours to see.
There were ten of them, six boys and four girls. None of them was wearing the blue Union of Youth shirt. The girls seemed drunker than the boys. A quite pretty brunette was wearing a khaki military shirt almost completely unbuttoned with nothing covering her breasts. She was sitting on the lap of a boy dressed like a cowboy and giggling. When I walked over to the table, the boy pushed her off, lifted his cowboy hat, and waved to me. He was obviously the leader.
I asked him for a place to spend the night but I did not betray my journalistic profession. I said I was a student on vacation; this cheered up the brigade workers, and they wanted to know if I perhaps intended to leave the country. I denied any such intention, and this cracked them up again. They assured me I had nothing to be afraid of. Some of them had come to Šumava for precisely that reason, but then they discovered they couldn’t leave through here because those green swine would start shooting right away. It’s better to go through Berlin.