Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  She reached down quickly, seized the book, and was instantly out of the carriage. A second later the train was moving. The next day I took the red line to Holešovice, and crossed the platform at the usual time, onto the train back into town. I did not expect her to appear, nor did she. The affair was over, and I never saw her again.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT WAS ABOUT the time of that episode that life at home began to change. Through the under-manager, Mother had obtained a typewriter, together with a supply of thin blue paper and carbon sheets that enabled her to make copies, nine at a time. Each evening after supper she would clear the table and begin to type, usually from hand-written manuscripts that appeared while I was journeying underground. The little room that we shared became a samizdat publishing house, for which Mother chose the name Edice Bez moci—The Powerless Press, after an essay by Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” which everyone was reading in editions smuggled in from the West. She could type a short book of a hundred A4 pages in a week, and when she had finished, she would staple the pages into an elegant papier mâché binding, the boards of which were another gift from the under-manager. Mother met her authors at the back door of the paper factory and she described them to me: long-haired young men with Habsburg beards, often flam-boyantly but shabbily dressed in the dissident manner, with loose kerchiefs and long coats of navy or bottle-green velvet, retrieved from the wardrobes of the dead. Often they would be carrying letters of recommendation from political convicts, or from students and colleagues of Professor Patočka, first spokesman of Charter 77, whom I was told the police had murdered eight years before.

  Mother told me about this in a quiet whisper, knowing that it was never safe to speak too loudly in a place where criminals were housed. Why this little circle of dissident authors had picked on Mother she did not explain. They were simply a part of the unassuming life—the life in defeat—that she had made her own. But she spoke with pride of her new contacts, and of the work that she performed on their behalf. She had discovered her own subterranean path to the really real. Her authors would collect the finished product from the back door of the paper factory; but if she liked what she had typed she would keep a copy for herself, so that within a year we had a 30-volume library of samizdat beneath her bed: works of philosophy, translations of Western authors and Russian dissidents, and even a volume or two of fiction.

  Dad had never permitted television, describing it as a kreténská bedna, a box for morons. On moving to Prague, however, and coming face to face with our isolation, we had succumbed. Like everyone, we had followed the Sunday sitcom, Hospital at the City’s End, by Jaroslav Dietl, which showed ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as though the world of Karel Čapek were with us still, and those chess pieces had not been swept from the table. One of the first acts of Mother’s new occupation was to push the TV into a corner of the room, beneath a pile of wafer-thin A4 paper on which a stapling machine—another gift from the factory—stood like a crown. The TV had been telling us to renounce our futile resistance and to join the normal world. And in turning its face to the wall and our backs to temptation, we knew that we were doing this for Dad.

  Mother had by now abandoned her hopes of becoming a respectable citizen with a proper home and a right to travel. She became active in ways that she had never been when Dad was alive—allowing people even to come to our door in order to borrow one of the volumes from our not-so-secret library. It was thus that I met Betka—but I will come to that. Like Mother, I brought the underground each evening to our little room. While she was typing, I would sit across from her at our improvised table and write out the stories that I had divined in those sightless eyes. And I left the stories for my mother to read. One day I discovered that she had typed them and bound them: I was the owner of nine copies of Pověsti—Rumors—by Soudruh Androš, the name I had written on the title page. And I asked her to show them to her friends.

  This was a mistake. I should have kept those stories to myself, refused the feeble chance of fame that my mother held out to me. I should have stayed belowground, and not allowed my dreams to escape so easily into the daylight, to become those “fried wings, cut from Mercury’s ankles,” of which Vladimír Holan wrote. And there was another mistake, too, though one whose significance I would understand only very much later. The quantities of samizdat were growing; almost everyone who fancied himself as an author could issue his definitive indictment of the system in the nine permitted copies. And his sales would equal those of Havel, Kundera, Patočka. He stood among those famous non-persons like an intruder poking his head into an official photograph. The world of samizdat was an equal world, in which no distinction was made on grounds of talent. No editorial committee, no marketing department, no team of publicity experts interfered in the process whereby two hundred handwritten pages became a hundred pages of type, so that—in the future world of free markets and open competition—we criminals were often looked down upon, as people who had claimed the title of author without establishing a right to it. Even those dearest to us would then sniff the smell of failure, and serve us the meager remainders of literary glory with sidelong pitying glances.

  But again I am anticipating. At the time it seemed that my mother had finally compensated me for the loss of an education, and redeemed the four years that had begun when I huddled over Dostoevsky’s novel by the chapel of the Holy Family, in the little copse of maples between the railway and the Nusle steps. I had graduated to a higher form of underground, where small candles of admiration lit the coffered catacombs, and where forbidden authors paraded in the shadows before their secretive fans. I was on the way to being noticed, maybe on the way to being loved. For the news of Soudruh Androš was already spreading across the city. Mother made a point of lending the precious copies of Rumors to her authors, indicating that she knew the identity of Comrade Underground, but preferred to keep the knowledge to herself. It was because of Rumors that I gained a life, and because of Rumors that she lost one.

  It began on the Green Line between Můstek and Leninova. It was four o’clock on a winter afternoon and the train was crowded, so that at first I did not notice the girl in a white coat of felt, who stood against the partition, half-hidden by the large man in a boiler suit, whose criminal biography I was at the time composing. At Malá Strana, the man got off, to reveal her profile, the delicate face framed by brown hair pulled back in a chignon, the long white neck rising swan-like from the soft white collar of her coat, the flesh like translucent petals around her silver eyes.

  Love at first sight sometimes occurs in the world of normal people; in the underground love exists in no other form. Of course, a small process of checking occurs after that initial coup-de-foudre: does she read books, for instance, is she artistic, how tactfully does she dress, and with what awareness that the dreariness is inescapable? But all such questions were answered at once when the girl in the white coat sat down opposite me, and took from her bag a volume of poetry and a notebook, her white unvarnished fingers moving student-like across the pages—the page in which she read, and the page in which she wrote, holding an old ink fountain-pen with navy-blue marbling, of the kind that had long since disappeared from our sparsely provisioned stationers. The girl never raised her eyes, and when she got out at Leninova, which was the end of the line, I did what I had never done with any of my characters before: I followed her into the street.

  It was dark in the world above, and a faulty streetlamp flickered above the silent crowd at the bus stop. The white coat signaled her presence like a halo and I joined the queue. The gritty aroma of coal smoke, more a taste than a smell, spotted the winter evening. The pavement was islanded by waterlogged potholes, and to avoid them, the queue at the bus stop made elaborate zigzags and circles. There was no sound apart from the clanking and grinding of the trams around October Revolution Square, and the occasional sputter of a Trabant taking the corner in a cloud of oil-smoke. Two police cars stood in the pool of darkness by the M
etro, their occupants motionless and scarcely visible. Despite the cold, I was sweating, and when the bus approached a wave of heat seemed to sweep before it, so that I swayed back on the pavement and splashed in a puddle. The crowd pushed into the bus, and I had to fight my way in behind them as the doors closed on my back. She was by the driver, holding the strap above her head so that the white coat slid back along her arm. All I could see was the slender wrist and the white fingers that gripped the strap. She wore a silver bangle, but no ring. There were lights in the bus; but to me it was as if the whole length of it lay in darkness, apart from that wrist and those fingers, shining above the silent heads like a lamp of alabaster. I was reminded of an old book of Rodin’s sculptures that Mother kept beside her bed, in which were photographs of sculpted hands—hands full of prayer and tenderness, of a kind that had long since gone from the world.

  The hand dropped from the strap like a bird shot from its perch. I saw then that the people in the bus were more than normally rigid, their faces frozen in expressions of fabricated innocence. Security checks were frequent, and it did not surprise me that the two policemen were interested in the girl in the white coat. They were men like me, after all, anxious to show off their power to an attractive female. But compared with them I could offer no protection, and when I caught sight of her pale face, nodding quiescently as they thumbed the pages of her notebook, I felt a stab of futility and helplessness.

  The bus was approaching Divoká Šárka, the cluster of housing blocks on the edge of Prague where the bus line terminated, when the policemen reached me. By then, there was only a handful of passengers. I was sitting in the rear. The girl in white was also seated, at the front of the bus. Her hands were folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the darkness beyond the window. I tried not to look at her. I tried to think of nothing, hoping that the policemen would ignore me. Then one of them turned in my direction, and the words “občanský průkaz”—identity card—sounded in that peculiar contemptuous tone that spelled out the impassable distance between the citizen and those who controlled him. At first I pretended that the command was addressed to someone else. But the policeman was standing in front of me, his hand outstretched, his clean-shaven face wrinkled into a scowl. His mud-colored eyes lay flat, glistening and expressionless on the surface of his face, as though they had been painted there. I took the red booklet from my pocket and handed it to him, my attention fixed on the girl who was getting up to leave. As the bus slowed down, the policeman turned to his companion, to check my details against a list that the other was carrying.

  In a moment the bus had stopped, the girl had gotten out, and I too was on the pavement. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed the policemen watching me with quiet interest. But the bus was moving now towards the terminus, and I was walking rapidly down a small street opposite the bus stop, between expensive-looking villas. I crossed what seemed to be a railway line, whose rails were half-covered by grass, and then turned a corner into a street of broken concrete paving, to either side of which rose blocks of cheap housing. The buildings had a raw and unfinished appearance, like a stage set on which I was practicing my lines. I found myself by an old-fashioned gate of wooden palings, which opened onto a straggling orchard between two apartment houses where a few dim lights were shining. A street lamp cast a yellow glow across the orchard, faintly illuminating a little farmhouse that stood at its end. She was walking between the trees towards the door of the house. Her steps were light but sure, and she swung her bag beside her in the relaxed way of a person coming home.

  Tall trashcans stood beside one of the blocks, and I hid among them to watch her. I tried to imagine the home that she had made in that old house—maybe her grandparents had run the little farm before it had been confiscated and the land turned over to housing. Maybe her mother had been allowed to stay here after the grandparents died, and maybe the girl had spent all her years in this place perched above the gorge of Wild Šárka. I imagined her in the role of Šárka, the legendary princess who had led an army of women in the futile attempt to liberate her homeland. I heard in my mind some snatches of Fibich’s opera: there was an old performance from Brno that had been one of Dad’s favorite records. I remembered him singing along with it—the aria in which Prince Ctirad communes with himself as he wanders through enchanted woods, soon to come across the lovely form of Šárka bound to a tree. In legends, we Czechs are capable of heroic deeds: and behind these great myths we hide our little lies. Why did Dad come striding then into my consciousness? Why had I metamorphosed into Prince Ctirad, as he would do on those Sunday afternoons before the catastrophe, when the plug was pulled on our illusions and all the lights went out? Why had the pent-up longing of my underground life suddenly spilled out in this act of madness, so that—having left my real self, the self reduced to a number on an identity card, in the hands of a policeman—I was pretending to conquer a fair princess who, according to the stupid fairy tale, must also conquer me?

  She had taken the key from her pocket and was turning it in the lock when I cried out. It was not only the card that I had left behind: my canvas workbag, too, the bag containing my own copy of Rumors, and along with it the book of essays that Mother had just produced—essays by foreign writers, on the state of our desecrated country. I ran towards the wooden gate and into the road, not daring to show my face to the girl whose peace I had disturbed. I reached the terminus to discover that the bus had turned back to the city; I could see only the red and orange glow of its lights as it sped down the hill. I ran beyond the little pool of light surrounding the buildings, down the dark road towards the place where the bus routes unite. When I plunged underground at last at the Leninova Metro, I felt the wailing monsters of that upper world burst through the barrier to sit around me in the train.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHEN THEY HAD pushed her into the stairwell and slammed the door, I sat on Mother’s unmade bed and stared at the faded patch on the wall where a photograph of Dad had hung. They had thrown the photograph into a corner with the other pictures, including a couple of the grey-green abstracts that Dad had painted in his youth. I must have sat there for several hours, observing the scraps of thought that rustled on the edges of my mind. I was awoken the next day by the sound of rain in the courtyard below and on the kitchen window. I noticed the book about Rodin’s sculptures, which had been knocked from the bedside table onto the floor. It was open to a pair of hands entitled La Cathédrale. I saw the hands of the girl in white as they grasped the key to the farmhouse door. Who was waiting beyond that door? Did she raise those hands to another’s face, and were they now at rest on some other person? I felt cold and hollow inside.

  I got up from the bed and went into the kitchen. Our apartment was on the sixth floor, two floors below the roof, and water from a blocked gutter poured across the window. Through the stream I could see the street below, a narrow lane between faceless blocks. A parked police car wriggled in the lens of flowing water as though dancing on a grave. I knew that I should go down to Gottwaldova to ring my sister from the public telephone. But the thought of that car trailing slowly behind me as I walked through the rain gave me a feeling almost of shame. In this new world, I was a naked victim, my defenses confiscated. For a moment I almost resented Mother, who had freed the door behind which they were always waiting. And then I went back and sat on her bed.

  Of course, it was I who had freed that door, not Mother. During the days that followed, I viewed her with a kind of numbness. “Mom died today. Or yesterday maybe. I don’t know.” Such were the chilling words that open the English translation of Camus’s L’Étranger, which I had found in Dad’s trunk. And they express my state of mind during the days that followed, as I crawled with my burden of guilt, unable to examine it, and unable to put it down.

  I ate the scraps in the kitchen as a mouse would, without reference to time. Eventually, in the grey light of a December morning, I awoke to the ringing of the doorbell. I was lying on Mother’s bed. Images of hands wer
e rummaging in my half-awoken mind: her hands in handcuffs, Rodin’s hands, the hands that held the plastic strap on the bus to Divoká Šárka, Dad’s hands, also in handcuffs, held before him like buffers as he was roughly pushed through the door. I looked at the alarm clock, which lay on its back in the middle of the room. It was 8:30, an hour and a half after the time I should report for work. Probably I had already missed a day. I went into the kitchen and looked down at the street: the rain had stopped now and the police car had gone. For a second, I believed that this was not happening to me; that the thing called “I” was elsewhere, and that the whole episode was a fiction in the mind of Comrade Underground.

  The doorbell rang again. Whoever it was had come for Mother and Mother was a non-person, whom it was a mistake to know. Better, therefore, to remain hidden. I went back to her bed and sat down as quietly as I could. Footsteps shuffled outside the door for a moment and then retreated to the stairs. But there they ceased; and in a moment they had changed direction, were approaching our door, and had stopped outside. The doorbell did not ring, but I felt the visitor standing there, breathing softly. I tiptoed across to the spyglass, in whose distorting eye I perceived the face of a young woman with brown hair and a long white neck bound in a rose-pink kerchief.

  I opened the door, and there she was, the girl from Divoká Šárka, looking at me from candid silver eyes, her wide pale forehead glinting in the light that entered the stairwell from our living room. Her lower lids were like mother-of-pearl, as though the eyes shone through them. Her cheeks were flushed and glowing with the December cold, so that the lips between them seemed unusually pale and soft. Her face had a childlike seriousness, and she wore no makeup, the brown hair shining like a crown above her brow. Her gloved hands clutched a canvas bag, and she was wearing a loose denim jacket and trousers, the unofficial uniform of the student class. She stood on straight legs, looking at me with a steady page-like poise, as though expecting a command.