be more concise, besides, this old story is simple in the end, or at least it seems simple when looking at it now and the details only weaken it, the thing is that on a certain day, a decisive day, I didn’t have any more millimeters to nibble at, absolutely zero, I was stuck at the starting line, I could have claimed my defendant was unfit to plead but even this was untenable, it wasn’t a proper mitigating circumstance for a talented journalist who everyone knew had never dissented from the regime, but how was it possible, a man like him not responsible for his own actions?They’d have laughed in my face. The case was this: my defendant had leaked some things to a German weekly, documents about the regime’s repression, he had a mole at the Ministry of the Interior and had prepared everything carefully, he’d asked for a passport to go to Frankfurt to do a piece on West German decadence, imagine that, he was supposed to cross the border on January tenth and on the twelfth, a Saturday, the weekly was supposed to publish the photocopies of the documents in a story signed under a pseudonym, which in fact was him. I don’t know what happened, the weekly had the copies for a while and perhaps feared they’d go stale, your press is always afraid news will get old, the inevitable never happens and the unexpected always does, someone wrote, and the unexpected had been this, a banal fact of advance disclosure, this was the turtle’s situation, it wasn’t a matter of nibbling away at millimeters anymore, maybe I could get him into a psychiatric prison, a bit better than labor camp, because the intellectuals who ended up there toiled less and were treated with more respect, but from a moral point of view it was even worse, when I rose for my closing statement I felt I was neither a dog nor a turtle, I really felt like a worm, headed right down the biological ladder, but as I was saying before, the inevitable never happens, the unexpected always does. And the unexpected was that the door to the courtroom swung open, an usher entered followed by a man who approached the bar, he was a tall man, with a few gray strands in his hair, I thought he was a bailiff, he was holding a piece of paper, which he showed to the judges, those magistrates read it in turn and began chattering amongst themselves,the president of the tribunal beckoned the bailiff, he went to the back of the courtroom and let in a young guy with a camera and a microphone, this kid placed the microphone in the middle of the room, then opened a tripod and put a camera on it that faced the bench and would film me and the defendant from the back, the president nodded for me to rise, it was my turn, the robes on my shoulders felt heavy and all of a sudden I felt excessively hot in that courtroom where it was freezing, I was defending a really difficult case and I gave my speech with conviction even though it would amount to nothing, as I told you, they used to stay only a few minutes in the council chamber, the judges in that democracy were in a hurry to get home, especially in winter, when the Warsaw roads are full of icy snow and it’s better to return before nightfall. But this time they were late in reentering, and the minutes passed. There was a silence in that room, you can’t imagine it, to say the silence of a tomb is a cliché, but I can’t find other words, rather, to pay homage to a writer from the country where we find ourselves now, I’d say there was a netherworldly silence. Finally the court came back, yet before reading the verdict the president took care to say that to err is human, to persist is diabolical, and the court was sure the defendant wouldn’t persist, he was a person too highly esteemed by the government and by the people to persist in his error, and this was the verdict, the atonement expected from him was a public admission of his error, possibly in the Party newspaper, which would offer him its generous hospitality. Even though
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