“I have something for Paní Reichlová,” she said. “My name is…”
I stopped her short and pointed to the ceiling. She gave me a look, pinching in her nose so that tiny wrinkles lay like folds of white silk along its edges. She was so beautiful that I was afraid to speak. This was not a fiction; it was happening to me—and because I had lost myself to her I had also gained myself. For the first time in my life, I knew who I was: not Soudruh Androš, not even Jan Reichl, but the man facing her.
“One moment,” I said, and indicating that she stay on the threshold, I took a sheet of paper from the table by Mother’s bed. On it I wrote: “Meet you at the Chapel of the Holy Family, below the Nusle Steps, in fifteen minutes. Not safe to talk.”
She took the paper and stared at it. Then she looked up, held my eyes for a moment, nodded and handed the paper back to me. In a moment she had vanished and I was left standing in the doorway, my legs trembling. This was the real thing, and for sure I would make one mistake after another. But mistakes were a proof of reality, and nothing less than reality would now content me. Shamefully, I had put aside the thought of Mother, forgotten the need to let Ivana know what had happened, forgotten my work and my routine. Mother had retreated to the horizon of my world. As I took my steps down the hill, across the railway to the swollen Botič, I thought only of the girl, and of all the things that I would say to her.
She was standing among the maples, staring across the torn barbed-wire fence towards the railway. I was going recklessly forward, as oblivious of her safety as I had been of Mother’s. Still, a small voice of common sense told me to walk on past the chapel and to climb the steps before descending again to meet the girl. There was no one behind me, no one in view at all, save an old woman in a torn shawl, who carried a dog under one arm while pulling herself up the steps with the other. Her face had that stony grey color that was routine among old people then, and I felt a spasm of pity, wondering how she lived and whether the dog were her only companion. Next to the steps, standing among leafless trees, was an old log house, of the kind that the wealthier sort would build in the years of the National Revival, and I stood for a moment and stared at it. The windows were shuttered, the garden overgrown with weeds, and shingles were missing from the roof. But the idea entered my head to live in such a place, to build there a home for myself and the girl from Divoká Šárka, where we would spend our young days in studious isolation, laughing behind closed shutters at the world to which we did not belong. I was so lost in this thought that I did not notice that someone was standing beside me.
“I don’t think you were followed,” she said in a voice that was soft and clear like a child’s. “I assume you are Paní Reichlová’s son.”
“Jan Reichl,” I said. It felt like a pseudonym. “And you?”
“Alžběta,” she replied. “Alžběta Palková. But they call me Betka. Not Bětka, but Betka. Someone passed one of your mother’s books to me, and I said I would return it.”
She nodded as she spoke, as though seeking agreement. There was something eager in her manner that overcame my reticence. It did not occur to me to ask how she knew our address, or why she had come to our apartment at a time when neither I nor my mother should have been home. I wanted to share my trouble, and her steady eyes and unaffected gestures were like a door opened onto a sunlit garden. As I told her about Mother, she continued to nod, looking into my eyes as though the story were written there. I did not mention my part in Mother’s downfall, only the fact that the police had raided us and discovered her crime. And then Betka touched my arm and pointed to the chapel, indicating that we should stand behind it, where we would not be seen.
She took a volume of samizdat from her bag. It was Rumors by Soudruh Androš. I stared at it in silence.
“The person who borrowed this was particularly insistent that I return it straightaway. To tell you the truth, I want to keep it. It is so close to my way of seeing things.”
“Your way of seeing things?”
“Well…” She stopped suddenly and looked at me. “What are we going to do about your mother?”
I had been alone with my thoughts for so long that I could hardly grasp the meaning of her “we.” Was she including me in her life, or asking me to include her in mine? Only the candid look reminded me that it was not I but Mother who concerned her.
“What do you suggest? A lawyer perhaps?”
“Are you crazy? The last time this happened to a friend of mine they jailed the lawyer too. It is a crime to defend people who have committed no crime.”
I looked at her in astonishment.
“Does this happen often to friends of yours?”
“Not often, no. You are pretty safe with me. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
She was standing a pace away from me, her back to the chapel, her eyes fixed on the Nusle steps.
“Do you see that old woman?” she asked.
I turned my eyes in the direction of hers. The woman with the dog was coming down now, handing her body from step to step, gripping the rail and muttering.
“Like the poodle in Faust,” she went on, “he comes in many forms.”
“Who?”
“Mephistopheles. The spirit who always denies.”
The old woman had reached the bottom of the steps and was passing out of view. In the Prague of those days, there was a peculiar emptiness that supervened, in the wake of people who were too much looked at. The specter of the city followed them into the void, and in its wake you saw a pillaged graveyard—dilapidated buildings, cracked pavements, crumbling façades with the air of tombs, and the sad uncared-for trees that the dead had planted. This emptiness haunted me whenever I came up from underground. But never before had I seen it as I saw it then, standing beside a woman who put on display not only her beauty and energy, but her education, too, and who stood above the emptiness as a mother stands above the troubles of her child. I was seized by the conviction that this woman whom I had loved from the moment I saw her had also been sent to rescue me.
She took the glove from her right hand and warmed her fingers in her mouth. I wanted to take the hand in mine and warm it properly. I thrust my hands deeper into the pockets of my coat.
“So what should we do?” I asked.
“The only thing that works is a campaign,” she said. “In the Western press.”
“And who can organize that?”
“Not someone who lives underground.”
“So where do you live, Betka?”
Betka looked at me, and I was out of my depth. How could I find words for this girl who did not whisper, did not hide as others hid from the hidden witness? I thought of Mother. That innocent woman, who had deserved only the very best of life and received only the worst, was now being broken on the wheel of their questions. The spasm of guilt that I felt was like smoke from the turbine of my excitement, which curled away above the chapel and was lost in the void. Words at home had never been direct. The world lay beyond our walls like a threat; we occasionally alluded to it, but never described it as it was. Our conversations were a kind of embroidered silence, each of us buried in the fiction of another life, a life of reckless solitude. All my dealings aboveground had been shaped by the same imperative—to conceal, to retreat, to make my pain so small that I could pack it into a hollow tooth and bite on it.
“I want to say that I live in the real world,” she said. “But they abolished it long ago.”
I muttered something, but she continued to look at me as though waiting for a confession. Still the words would not come.
“I think I know who wrote these stories,” she went on. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Could be.”
“I understand you,” she went on, “because I dreamed you up. And this book lies on the edge of my dream.”
She had taken the volume of Rumors from her bag and held it out to me.
“Keep it. It is safer with you.”
She replaced it with
a smile.
“So there you are,” she said, “back in my dream.”
“I like it inside your dream. I like it very much.”
“Only miracles happen in dreams. And you can’t rely on miracles. We should go, by the way.”
She nodded in the direction of the steps, which the old woman was once again ascending, the limp dog pressed to her side. She walked away.
“Follow me,” she said, “and I won’t look back.”
I followed at a distance, my eyes fixed on her slender figure, which seemed to melt the space in which it moved. She went up the steps two at a time, and walked quickly through the streets of Vinohrady towards the center of town. The traffic was sparse and slow, as though it had lost direction. The shop windows displayed goods that were no longer obtainable but immortalized in contrived pyramids of boxes and tins. Noises were abrupt: the squeal of tram wheels against the rails, the patter of falling stucco from the facades, the occasional siren of a police car. People moved silently, their shoulders shrinking as they passed each other, their eyes fixed on the ground. The buildings stood behind wooden scaffolds like decrepit old people propped on Zimmer frames. Betka was a living woman in the land of the dead, and a glow surrounded her as she moved.
She stopped in the Charles Square, by the New Town Hall, from the windows of which, in 1419, the Hussite leader Jan Želivský had thrown thirteen town councillors to their deaths. Defenestration is a Czech tradition, the only one that the Communists had retained. The monument to Želivský stands in the square, reminding us of our national virtues. No monument commemorates those thirteen councillors. I caught up with Betka, where she stood beneath the effigy of the hero, and she walked on at my side.
“Here is the plan,” she said. “You live as normal. You ask to visit your mother. You give nothing away. And you make yourself known.”
“Known to whom?”
“Look, Jan…”
“Honza,” I corrected.
“Look, Honza, there is only one path to safety, and that lies to the West of us. There is no safety underground. There is no safety for the ordinary person. You have to be known to the Western embassies. You have to be mentioned on the BBC and Radio Free Europe. You have to be a movement, like Charter 77. And then you raise the cost of destroying you, to the point where they might not attempt it.”
“Is that how you live?”
She did not answer me, but walked on with quick, determined steps. We were descending towards the Vltava, on the far bank of which was the street where I would lean each morning against my bin and imagine the lives of passers-by. A mist hung above the river, shifting from side to side like the blanket on a troubled sleeper. A cold white sun peered through the clouds, shedding its light on the walls of the castle, above which the dark form of the cathedral lay like some huge animal that had died there, its frozen limbs locked into the sky. For a long time we did not speak. I followed beside her as though obeying orders, confident that I had acquired a destination and that she was leading me there.
She stopped outside a shop where plain bold letters spelled Antikvariát above a large window encrusted with dirt. She took my arm and guided me through the door. A worn-looking man with spectacles and a Habsburg beard looked up from behind the counter, where he was unpacking musical scores from a brown paper parcel. “Dobrý den,” she said in sing-song tones, and, “ahoj, Betko,” he replied, hardly turning from his work.
“My favorite place,” she said, leading me deep into the shop. The wooden shelves were packed with scores, many of them bound in leather. Betka’s eyes brightened as she ran her finger along the spines, and the flesh around her eyes again had that mother-of-pearl translucency, as though a light had been switched on behind.
“You see what we were,” she said, “when our country began. Music in every household, and look how beautifully engraved.”
She had taken down a volume of Janáček’s piano music—On an Overgrown Path. How strong and definite the notes looked on the page, as though nothing could sweep them away. And yet, Betka said, all this was a memory: few played the piano, fewer lived in a home that contained one. And the latest editions of this masterpiece contain all the printing errors of the original, since no one in the official publishing house has the competence or the authority to correct them. She asked me if I could read music.
“No. But we listened to it at home. That was one of Dad’s favorites.”
“Oh?” She looked up at me. “You speak in the past tense.”
“Yes. He died.”
I wanted to tell her the story. And in that moment it struck me vividly that I had told no one, shared this death with no one apart from Mother and Ivana, both of whom had been as reluctant to speak of it as I was. Slowly, she replaced the score and said, “I used to play this, back home. On my grandfather’s piano.”
“Where was home?”
“A little place near Brno. I came here to study.”
“So you’re a student?”
“No, that finished two years ago.”
“So what do you do, Betka?”
She peered at a grey cloth spine on which the gold leaf had faded. “Oh, things. And what do you do?”
She took down another score and buried her head in it: songs by Schubert, with the Czech text hand-written above the German in old-fashioned characters. I briefly described my job; she smiled to herself, and changed the subject. She spoke for some time enthusiastically about the old culture of music-making, how people would gather to sing and play in every home, and how sad it made her to think that this rarely happened. She herself had learned to play the lute, so as to join a baroque ensemble that performed from time to time in the houses of friends. She was proud of this part of her life. Between people touched by that ancient music, she said, whoever they were and however tainted by the system, there were, for the moment, no secrets. While speaking she went through the shelves with firm methodical hands, putting aside the volumes that pleased her, and eventually carrying a little pile across to the counter. I was amazed by this, since secondhand books were coveted possessions, and far too expensive for people like me.
“Can you really afford all that, Betka?” I asked.
“Of course not. I have a friend who is building a library. He collects what I recommend. Here, Petr,” she said, handing the books across the counter. “I will tell Vilém you are keeping them for him.”
“He must have everything by now,” the man said.
“He’s getting there.” Turning to me, she added, “We can go now. First me, then you. I will see you in ten minutes on the Střelecký Island. I’ll be sitting there.”
She didn’t wait for a reply but vanished through the door of the shop. When I found her she was sitting calmly on a wooden bench, staring out across the river, her face to the sun. I tried hard to understand how someone could be so conscious of being followed, yet entirely and naturally calm. It was as though Betka created around herself a space of her own, a space where the rules did not apply. I sat next to that space, on the cold bench that sent a shock through my body. And her face in the sunlight shone back at the sun.
“You don’t mind if I speak frankly, Honza?”
“How could I mind?”
“Oh, people do. They prefer whispered suspicions. But I hate that. I want to live. Do you want to live?”
“Now, yes.”
She looked at me directly. It was a look that I was to know well in time: a curious, disarming look from wide, still eyes, which caused me to surrender completely to whatever she proposed. I had the chance then to look into those eyes that had so enchanted me on the Metro to Leninova. From an angle they did indeed have a silver sheen, peering through her lashes like the moon through trees. But this sheen was only the rough summary of their magic. The pupils were greenish-grey with a rim of royal blue, and in the center was a little apricot button, holding the whole tissue tight. Around that small sun revolved a tranquil solar system of glances, drawing the tide of my desire.
“So, Honza. Here is what we shall do. You must report to work as normal. You must go to the police station at Bartolomějská, and be scrupulously correct when they question you. Then I shall introduce you to the people you need to know. I shall fight for you, in my own way, but first I must teach you to live aboveground.”
“But why should you do this?” I asked.
“For you.”
“You don’t know me.”
She smiled, and took the copy of Rumors from her bag.
“I have this window where you stand.”
We walked for a while on the Střelecký Island. And when, from time to time, I took her hand, she did not look at me, but smiled to herself and returned the slight pressure of my fingers. I told her about Dad, about Ivana, about my underground journeys, and she listened attentively. But about herself she was reticent, admitting only that she was living an independent life the details of which were of no interest to me. She took a notebook from her pocket and tore a sheet of paper from the center. On it she wrote the address of someone called Rudolf Gotthart, telling me that she would introduce me on Friday to his weekly seminar, and that I was to be there at 6 o’clock, before the seminar began. She wrote with a ballpoint, and I fought back the desire to ask why she did not use her fountain pen. She was never to know that it was I who had followed her to Divoká Šárka and whose cry had sounded from the trashcans by her door.
Then I noticed another thing. She was not wearing the bangle that I had seen then on her wrist. A curious thought entered my mind: that she had two quite separate lives. The thought no sooner occurred than it became a knife of jealousy. The girl who cultivated dissidents, who was exploring the world of samizdat, who was in some strange way excited by the opportunity to recreate me as a hero and a martyr, was the holiday version of another being entirely. I imagined her as mistress to some slick Party member with the right to foreign travel, who provided a nice old farmhouse on the edge of Prague, and the spare cash to kit herself in bourgeois style. So sharp was this thought that I groaned aloud.
Notes From Underground Page 4
