Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  The silence of our world was more intense underground. Even at rush hour, when the cars were full and people stood holding the handrails and staring past each other’s ears, there was no noise apart from the roar of the train and the automated voice that told us that the doors were closing. Nobody exchanged greetings or apologies; no face smiled or departed in the slightest particular from the mask that everyone adopted, as the instinctive sign of a blameless inner emptiness, from which no forbidden thought could ever emerge.

  Some passengers would be reading. A few read the sports and TV pages of Rudé právo or Mladá fronta; one or two read the official weeklies. Some read the permitted novels that would appear each Thursday in nicely printed hardcover editions. Once or twice I would catch sight of a foreign text, concealed in a paper wrapper and hastily put away when strange eyes fell upon it. And a few old people would occupy themselves with shabby editions of the classics, Němcová’s Babička or Jan Neruda’s stories of Malá Strana, the Little Side, describing the life that once flowed in those ancient streets around the Castle.

  It took me a couple of years to get through Dad’s library. After a while, I started to take notes. I would write down phrases, sometimes single words, that seemed to sound in that underground silence with a special force. There was a phrase from Kafka’s diaries that particularly struck me: the true path, it said, is a tight rope, stretched just above the ground. I sat pondering that phrase for an hour, wondering what it was telling me. My own path was also a tight rope; but it was stretched belowground, and the interludes of daylight bore no relation to the steps that I took. And another phrase: the wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude. The solitude that I saw around me was conscious, premeditated, and full of timidity. The idea of a reckless solitude filled me with warmth, as though I were not alone in my loneliness, but embraced by it. And because I had discovered this phrase in a book, a book that might have been published in the wake of that Writers’ Union Congress in 1967, when the all-too-obvious things about Kafka’s country were being all-too-obviously said, but which was not published then and was soon unpublishable in any case, it had a special authority for me. Such phrases were the proof of my inner reality, and they could never be taken away.

  Life underground is ordered in its own way. There are two voices: the inner voice of thought, which constantly changes in response to the page in front of you, and the public voice, to which no personality attaches, but which announces the opening and the closing of the doors. A toneless female voice governed the Green Line, a toneless male voice the Red.

  “Ukončete výstup a nástup, dveře se zavírají.”

  “Stop getting on and off, the doors are closing.” Later, after the changes, when the blank mask of subservience had been replaced by the blank smile of commerce, the word “please,” found its way into the message: “Ukončete prosím výstup a nástup, dveře se zavírají.”

  I am struck by this because, in that little word, “please,” is summarized all that separates the days that I am describing from the days in which I write.

  My underground journeys, in those times of hiding, were ordered by short sharp barks of command. They were the voice of daylight, dividing and fragmenting our spells in the tomb. My thoughts took on a new urgency whenever they sounded: they reminded me that I did not belong to the world above, that I had cast off its rules and its goals, and that my life was here inside me, protected by my own personal strategies from whatever the rules required. In some way, I was mortifying that voice by my refusal to credit its authority. The whole bleak system of commands that spoke through it, and which reached to the perimeter of my being, was brought to nothing by the countervailing force of my thinking.

  But what was I thinking? For a year or more I knew only that I was thinking, and thinking hard, and that my thoughts isolated and protected me. My life was one of neat, closed beginnings, like a book of preludes. I was living in the catacombs, worshipping strange gods, the close companion of martyrs and outcasts. Distant murmurs in the darkness suggested the presence of others like me, people who were breathing the same exhausted air, and whose thoughts were drifting along the same forbidden tracks. Of course, I had a view of my situation. When I thought of Dad, a kind of gasping disgust besieged me. My throat became dry as though I had swallowed some of the dust that had choked him to death, and a lump formed in my stomach, so that sometimes I bent over and fought back the desire to vomit. What I felt was beyond anger, beyond resentment. It was an existential feeling, like the nausea that Sartre describes in the novel that I had found in the trunk, in an English translation heavily marked by Dad’s pencil. And over the months, my thoughts began to crystallize.

  I came to the conclusion that the daylight world was not a world of outward oppression, that the stuff we heard on Radio Free Europe about our condition was really the most superficial propaganda and that the “evil empire” in whose grip we were held was an empire of our own devising. Two years after I discovered Dostoevsky’s book, I began to understand its purport. The real slavery, he was telling us, is a disease of the will, a kind of self-entrapment, whereby we build up for ourselves expectations that we know will be defeated. For instance, there was Dad’s hope that, by establishing a group in our little town to read those not-quite-forbidden classics, he would find a way out of the maze—a hope that he knew to be nonsense, and which therefore held him in a vise-like grip of self-contradiction, all the time that he waited for that fatal knock at the door. For instance, there was the habit I had acquired of writing letters to the Minister of Justice, demanding my constitutional right to a higher education—letters to which I received, and expected, no reply, and yet which served to perpetuate an irrational belief in miracles. For instance, there was Mother’s absurd belief that she could, with the under-manager’s support, get permission to travel to Yugoslavia, on one of those holidays from which people regularly escaped to the West—a belief that caused her to look always with despair on the few scant savings she had made, and which would sometimes cause her to weep bitter tears of frustration, as though it were only the lack of money that prevented us from traveling.

  The illusions and deceptions that haunted the daylight world were stopped at the threshold of the underground as though by a spell, to stay wailing and whimpering as I sank out of view. No sooner had the doors of the train closed behind me than I would begin my study of the other passengers. In those days, when silence meant safety, and contact meant danger, each person seemed to be surrounded by a bottle of glass. Eyes would stare from their bottles as though sight had long ago expired in them, and the features even of the youngest bore the shadows that come from suspicion and fear. I was surrounded by faces that did not so much avoid the eyes of others as strive with all their might to deny that others were real, to live inside their bottles as though transported through a dream, unconnected to the things that vaguely moved in the space beyond. Because of this, I could study without embarrassment the types of my countrymen and women.

  In those days, clothes, posture, body rhythm, and character all showed the marks of central distribution. Ours was a collectivized way of life, and to stand out was a mistake. All around me I saw the same mustard-colored jerkins of nylon and cord; the same plastic shoes, with ribbed soles, looking as though glued together without stitching and all dust-covered and unpolished. I saw the same oilskin and mock-leather shopping bags with ruined zips and frayed handles. Men had navy blue pants shiny at the knees and large rough hands that rested in their laps, dry-skinned and motionless like old potatoes.

  Of course, there were people, women especially, who attempted a measure of gaiety. But the result had a random and absurd appearance, adding to the general impression of drabness precisely through its futile attempt to escape from it: the woman with ham-shaped thighs in bright blue trousers and a pullover of mauve and orange stripes, who looked as though she had taken her clothes from a dressing-up box; the one with paste jewelry hanging in large dollops from her neck and ears like rottin
g fruit, wobbling precariously on high heels that might at any moment snap under her weight. All such attempts at difference had the opposite effect to the one intended. For they emphasized that, in the midst of this randomness, you saw only the one identical expression: eyes staring into the distance, and lips held firmly shut as though against some pervasive infection. Our people had collectively solved their shared problem, which was how to keep the mask in place, while showing that it is only a mask. People collaborated in the great deception, so as not to be deceived.

  On the other hand—and this was the intriguing part—each person exhibited some revealing detail, betraying the accidents that no central authority had yet been able to banish. Hence I could sort them into categories, endow each with a private life, sometimes a family circle, and maybe a record of deals and betrayals whereby they had found their passage through. The woman with the worn green jacket, for instance, whose greying hairs fussed around her ears and whose blue eyes, set wide apart, stared sightlessly at the carriage door. Her thin lips had been open once or twice in anger and in passion, though they were closed now on her secrets and her grief. Her husband, the Professor, had left her for a younger woman, a Party member like himself, whom he had helped in her university career. She had tried her luck with other men, and then settled down to a life on the edge of things, teaching Russian in the local gymnasium, going alone to the theater and cinema, and sometimes lingering afterwards over a beer in the Lucerna Music Bar. There she would read the books of free verse that were written for would-be intellectuals, and which were even published, with kitsch illustrations of doe-eyed lovers, in the official press: verse going everywhere, carried about the page on a breeze of white paper, always fresh, naïve, and purposeless, like spring blossom blown from a tree. And in this verse, she caught glimpses of her stolen soul. “I am what the poet writes,” she thinks. “I am the inflammation made by words, when they rub against the world.”

  Or the young man in the leather jacket sitting across from me, whose nervous hands were shuffling papers in his lap, and whose flaccid mouth seemed to be chewing some unpleasant substance that had lodged between his teeth. He had wanted to study for a doctorate, had been called for an interview, to be told that he must report on the neighbors who shared a staircase with his family. He had discussed the matter in whispers with his timid sister, but when they told him that his family would be moved out of town, to one of the estates of paneled towers beyond Žižkov, if he did not do as they required, he gave in. He told himself that it was for his sister’s sake, since she must not leave her school in Nové Město, which was the best in Prague. But he needed that doctorate if he was to travel, and was it such a price to pay, to submit each week an account of the visitors who stood for a moment at the door beneath his own? And had he not acquired his own distinctive underground view of them, imagining a life for each, and wondering how they would fare when the fatal visit came? For a while he deceived himself thus. And then came the stale sense of alienation which, like some cheap restaurant gravy, made every experience taste the same.

  Gradually, the underground people responded to my unobserved observing, like seeds sprouting under a laboratory sunlamp. I entered the Metro at the end of my shift around midday to take up a seat beside the doors, where I would read one of Dad’s books, over-scoring his pencil marks with marks of my own. Between midday and two o’clock, the trains were comparatively empty, and I had my best chance to warm those silent faces into life. With some of them I became intimate, listening to their imagined confessions and adding confessions and plans of my own. With others I kept my distance, inventing lives armor-plated against sympathy, which repelled my unmeant offers of assistance. Of course, the faces changed continually, and sometimes I had no more than a minute or two to attach a life to them. But there were regulars, too: people who would get on at a certain time and a certain stop, and travel to a fixed destination. With several of these, I would renew the conversation each day, and especially with those who were in some way marked out from the crowd—say, by a Bible hidden in paper wrappings, which only I had noticed, or by a pair of hand-knitted gloves, in which I could discern the record of a very private affection.

  Relationships sprang up all around me, and I was a part of them, as I was part of the intrigues and angers that had closed these faces against the world. And among those guarded faces I looked everywhere for the one who might have been Dad, had his life been permitted. The one in the greasy yellow Mackintosh, who holds a crumpled trilby on his knees and looks fixedly ahead as though for an official photograph: is that he? Or the one in the corduroy trousers with a stick, who staggers slightly because he carries a large packet wrapped in brown paper under his spare arm, and who wears on his round sallow face an expression of innocent bewilderment reminiscent of a Čapek drawing: could that be what Dad has come to?

  I watch this man for a while, noting that no one surrenders a seat to him and all stare past him as though embarrassed by his presence. The parcel constantly slips from his armpit and must be hoisted up, sometimes by the hand that grips the stick, so rendering the whole body unstable. At one point he falls backwards against the knees of a girl in an expensive-looking woolen dress, who brushes him away disgustedly. Inside the parcel I imagine precious texts—Chekhov’s stories, Nezval’s poems, and yes, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground—which he had lent to some other member of his reading circle and is now returning to the trunk back home. But Dad would not have faced the world with so defeated a look, would not have accepted, as this poor creature accepts, being kicked about like a helpless animal. And, thinking of this, I am once again overcome by that choking feeling, which causes me to withdraw from all thinking and stare at the carriage floor.

  In the underground there was sadness and longing; there was self-interest and suspicion. There was also sex: sex that drove on fiercely to its imagined goal. Don’t get me wrong. I am not the kind of pervert who works himself into a lather over a girl who has no idea that he is watching her, and whom he treats merely as a prop in his own games of fantasy. I had hung out with girls after school, snatched kisses and sometimes more. But those whispered encounters on the edge of things were furtive and uncertain, as though at any moment a door would open and we would be hauled away in chains. Desire was something else, something that grows in solitude. I wanted my women to live in the same solitude that I did. And I wanted to invite them to beat against the wall of that solitude, breaking at last into a place that was fully imagined, and recklessly shared.

  For instance, there was a fresh-faced girl who got on at Holešovice each day just after two, and who traveled the Red Line to Muzeum; she wore a loose corduroy jacket that concealed the contours of her body and created a kind of softness around her. Her hands were smooth, tanned, with long fingers that held open the pages of a book—usually a novel; and her clear grey eyes would sometimes look up from the page and address the world, as though in search of the person who would answer to the words that she read. And this was the important point: it was only those eyes that still sought for contact, eyes which had not been sprayed with the official lacquer of sightlessness, that could arouse true desire.

  After a while I managed to catch her glance. She looked at me curiously for several seconds before returning to her book. When she glanced up again it was in my direction, and her gaze rested for a moment on the book that I held before me, as though wishing me to know that this, at least, we had in common, that both of us lived in books, and sought in books for the things that had been erased from the daylight world. At Muzeum, she got up quickly and went out, vanishing into the crowd. But the next day she was back in the same seat, and when her eyes met mine they made a slight flutter of recognition before turning to her book. And then, at Hlavní nádraží, just one stop before her usual destination, she suddenly twisted in her seat, so that the corduroy jacket fell open, revealing the smooth line of her breasts, and a long, taut body on whose contours I allowed my eyes to dwell. She got up without a glance
in my direction and left; the automated voice announced the closing doors, and the doors opened wide within me.

  This game continued, with variations, to the point where we knew to the minute which train we should catch and which carriage we should sit in, contriving to arrive unnoticed in the foreseen place. It dawned on us simultaneously that the moment of consummation could no longer be postponed. We had positioned ourselves opposite each other, our books open in trembling hands. Her jacket was loose, and the top two buttons of her blouse were undone. I could see the rhythmic breathing of her breast, and feel the hot light of her eyes that watched me when I looked away, and looked away when I watched. We remained like this, gripped by the invisible vise that united us, until we reached her usual stop at Muzeum. To my surprise, she did not get out, but stayed sitting in the same pose, avoiding eyes only to provoke them, until my own stop of Gottwaldova. It was there that she acknowledged the imagined space in which we stood together, naked and aroused. For a long moment we stared deep into that strange metaphysical emptiness which is the source and the target of desire. Those grey eyes were translucent, and through their hazy screen I glimpsed the prowling animal as it fastened its will to mine. Her lips were parted in a kiss, and our two bodies trembled in unison; in a single moment our books slipped from our laps to the floor of the carriage and the voice told us that the doors were closing.