The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [60]
Bala had long subscribed to the postmodernist notion of “the death of the author”—that an author has no more access to the meaning of his literary work than anyone else. Yet, as the prosecution presented to the jury potentially incriminating details from “Amok,” Bala complained that his novel was being misinterpreted. He insisted that the murder of Mary was simply a symbol of the “destruction of philosophy,” and he made one last attempt to assert authorial control. As he later put it to me, “I’m the fucking author! I know what I meant.”
In early September, the case went to the jury. Bala never took the stand, but in a statement he said, “I do believe the court will make the right decision and absolve me of all the charges.” Wroblewski, who had been promoted to inspector, showed up in court, hoping to hear the verdict. “Even when you’re sure of the facts, you wonder if someone else will see them the same way you do,” he told me.
At last, the judges and jurors filed back into the courtroom. Bala’s mother waited anxiously. She had never read “Amok,” which contains a scene of Chris fantasizing about raping his mother. “I started to read the book, but it was too hard,” she told me. “If someone else had written the book, maybe I would have read it, but I’m his mother.” Bala’s father appeared in the courtroom for the first time. He had read the novel, and though he had trouble understanding parts of it, he thought it was an important work of literature. “You can read it ten, twenty times, and each time discover something new in it,” he said. On his copy, Bala had written an inscription to both his parents. It said, “Thank you for your…forgiveness of all my sins.”
As Judge Hojenska read the verdict, Bala stood perfectly straight and still. Then came the one unmistakable word: “Guilty.”
THE GRAY CINDER-BLOCK PRISON in Wroclaw looks like a relic of the Soviet era. After I slipped my visitor’s pass through a tiny hole in the wall, a disembodied voice ordered me to the front of the building, where a solid gate swung open and a guard emerged, blinking in the sunlight. The guard waved me inside as the gate slammed shut behind us. After being searched, I was led through several dank interlocking chambers and into a small visitors’ room with dingy wooden tables and chairs. Conditions in Polish prisons are notorious. Because of overcrowding, as many as seven people are often kept in a single cell. In 2004, prison inmates in Wroclaw staged a three-day hunger strike to protest overcrowding, poor food, and insufficient medical care. Violence is also a problem: only a few days before I arrived, I was told, a visitor had been stabbed to death by an inmate.
In the corner of the visitors’ room was a slender, handsome man with wire-rimmed glasses and a navy-blue artist’s smock over a T-shirt that said “University of Wisconsin.” He was holding a book and looked like an American student abroad, and it took me a moment to realize that I was staring at Krystian Bala. “I’m glad you could come,” he said as he shook my hand, leading me to one of the tables. “This whole thing is farce, like something out of Kafka.” He spoke clear English but with a heavy accent, so that his “s”es sounded like “z”s.
Sitting down, he leaned across the table, and I could see that his cheeks were drawn, he had dark circles around his eyes, and his curly hair was standing up in front, as if he had been anxiously