They left the court in the chairman’s car. So as untouchable they had seemed while checking everything up, placing law before everything else, as human they proved to be during the meal. They enjoyed the food, the drinks, and the smutty jokes. It was an evening beyond expectation, a real feast.
In the almost empty restaurant, at a remote table, there were other important people, at least that was what the attention the staff were paying to them gave everyone else to understand. The two groups ignored each other, although the chairman commuted between the two tables. The judges were not curious to know who those people were, one thing that couldn’t be said about the other group, intrigued by the staff acting so obligingly and by their rivals not minding them.
After having several glasses, flushed with wine, Jean Gulerez felt the need to go to the toilette. He stood up, a little unsteady, and instead of heading for the gents’, he opened the first door he bumped into and found himself on the balcony.
“Hey, asshole, that’s the balcony, the john’s in the opposite direction,” shouted one of the people at the other table to the others’ roars of laughter.
Gulerez had never been insulted like that before. He turned around red with anger and said:
“Look who’s talking! A beast’s asshole! Why do you care where I want to go or what doors I open?”
“Watch your mouth, you, mutant, or I’ll measure your length on the floor!”
“Well, if I’m a mutant, you’re a bloody drinking mutant!”
The chairman jumped between them. Choking with embarrassment, he tried to settle the conflict.
“Gentlemen, please, don’t forget you’re public figures, you’re in high positions, you aren’t supposed to make a rumpus in such a place!”
Too late. The two men broke loose, swearing at and threatening each other. It took the chairman quite a while to calm them down. When the judge returned from the toilette, Viorel Opris came to his table together with the man who had aggressed him verbally.
“I think I should introduce you to each other, after all. This is Judge Jean Gulerez, inspecting our county. This is—”
“Ion Cristian, the county Prefect.”
Both parties were taken aback. The judges hadn’t expected the boor to be such a high official. Jean Gulerez came down a peg and shook the prefect’s hand.
Everyone sighed with relief when the prefect sat down at the judges’ table. He was a stout man, a little bit overweight, russet- to fair-haired or the other way round, a man who breathed out prosperity.
“Gentlemen, it just happens when you’ve had a glass too many! I apologize for the coarse language. Since it was I who started it, I’d like to be the one to end it.”
“I admit I overdid it too,” said Jean Gulerez.
“It must have been the bear paw, I’ve never tasted anything like that before,” his colleague tried to make a joke.
Everyone burst out laughing and the feast went on. They sat together at the same table for about two hours and all this time they emptied three bottles of red wine and one of white wine, and ate boar salami and deer stake. The only thing they missed was a fiddler to stir up their feelings and mix them with liquid nostalgia.
Suddenly, Ion Cristian stopped eating, gazed at the people around him and said in a morose hoarse voice:
“Listen up, you, assholes, do you know who I am?” Then he scanned solemnly, “I am the Prefect, number one in the county, I represent the Government. And who the hell are you? Some old farting judges, inspectors today, nothing tomorrow, but I, I can be a minister any time!”
The air froze instantly. The magistrates looked at each other trying to grasp what was happening and if it was worth answering a man who had already swallowed several bottles of red and white wine, a mixture which would have finished anyone.
“My dear Prefect, I may have exaggerated things a little bit, but now that we’ve known each other I can’t see why we should resume fighting,” replied Jean Gulerez in an incredibly calm manner.
“Since when have we known each other, you, bloody scroungers, coming here for a free meal! So you’re inspectors, are you? If you are what you claim to be, why don’t you pay for the meal? You look like criminals to me, not judges! I think I should have you arrested!”
The chairman winced as if lashed and tried for the second time to calm things down. No way. Offended, the judges stood up and headed for the door. Behind them the prefect howled like a wild beast:
“Me apologize to those criminals?! I’d better call the Ministry of Justice! You’ll just have to walk to your hotel! Walk, do you hear me? No free ride! I’m the authority here and you are the disgrace of Justice! And don’t let me see you in my town again!”
Vasile Lazar had experienced a similar scene, maybe a tougher one, ten years before. Staying at a hotel in Brasov, he had gone down to the receptionist’s around midnight and asked the receptionist to have the heat turned up, it was too cold in his room. At the desk there was a drunken police captain who was whiling away his time gazing at the receptionist’s generously exposed breasts. The policeman felt a sort of call-up in him, like males do when in heat. “What’s up, jerk? Do you feel like getting wacked a little?” Dumbfounded, the judge answered, “I just want more heat in my room and I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.” “So you’ve got nothing to talk to me about. Do you know who I am?” “I don’t know who you are. I just know you’re drunk and since you’re wearing your uniform probably on duty. Which is not exactly in accordance with the rules.” “Ah, you want me to apply the rules, don’t you? All right, scrounger, here’re the rules!” And before Lazar realizing it, the policeman raised his truncheon and hit him on the back. There followed other blows. “Stop it, I’m a judge, stop it, I’m a judge!” It was very hard for the receptionist to stop the policeman, who had somewhat got tired, and then take Vasile Lazar to his room.
The next day at about noon, bent by the blows, Vasile Lazar was listening in the court president’s office to the policeman serenely apologizing to him. It wasn’t the words that mattered, it was the way in which they were being uttered—the beast was using humble words offensively. Something like, “I’m sorry, it just happened, I couldn’t help it.”
His own experience embittered Vasile Lazar and urged him to persuade Jean Gulerez to walk to the town, though the latter rather dragged his left foot. But after a few hundred feet a taxi, which Viorel Opris must have called, caught up with them and took them to the hotel in a state bordering on hysteria.
* * * *
Two years later, Jean Gulerez fell ill. One day he felt a pain in his right side and, for the first time in his life, was taken to hospital. A week of tests and the diagnosis fell like a guillotine: widespread cancer. The judge whom no law paragraph had bent, no tear of regret had softened, no family, no acquaintance had puzzled out, a man who had been a demon for work on thick obscure files, a man who had had a meal in a restaurant every two years and had only one friend, Vasile Lazar, received the news of his imminent final departure with peace. “Pity, there’re still some things to do.” Then he started the preparations, getting good jobs for his children and, again for the first time in his life, pulling a few strings to get a house from the Town Hall for his daughter.
Three months later he died. His photo remained on his desk for a long time, several years in fact, no one wanting to replace him in that space. Every morning, before entering the court room, his friend lit the votive light next to his photo. And from it Jean Gulerez smiled as gravely as he had done when he was around.
Judge Vasile Lazar, who no longer did any inspection work, lived a few blocks away from the court so he usually went back to his office late in the afternoon. One day a file leapt to the eye. A name which went to and fro in his mind for a while made him start: Ion Cristian. The file had reached the Court of Appeal, after the Court of Law