Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  “You haven’t told me about yourself, Betka.”

  “You’ll learn.”

  “But when this kind of thing happens…”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Well, you could call it love.”

  She screwed up her face like a child.

  “Let’s not start on that. I take risks, but not that one.”

  “But why do you take the others?”

  “Because I want to live. Like I said.”

  “But why do this for me?”

  She looked at me and laughed. Her laughter was close-knit and undulating, like a sloping lawn in the sun.

  “I was crawling underground and look what I found! Why shouldn’t I bring it up into the daylight and watch it blink?”

  “Not very flattering to me.”

  “Very flattering, actually, if you knew.”

  Quite without warning, she kissed me on the cheek and strode away to the stone staircase that led to the bridge across the river. She paused on the turn of the steps and looked back in my direction.

  “Meet me tomorrow, in the Café Slavia at three. If I am with someone, ignore me. If I am on my own, greet me as a friend.”

  And with that, she walked briskly onto the bridge and into town. I hesitated for a moment, wishing to follow her. Then I went in the opposite direction.

  CHAPTER 6

  I CALLED IN at the workshop in one of the little alleys where Smíchov meets the shore road and where each morning I collected my broom, dustpan, and orange street-sweeper’s jacket from Mr. Krutský. He raised his dumpling-colored face and laid big hands on the desk, vainly trying to focus his watery grey eyes. Never in all my dealings with him had Mr. Krutský fixed his look on me. Always, his eyes seemed to stray from side to side, as though he feared a door would open somewhere and a hand reach out for his throat.

  “The StB were here yesterday,” he said, “asking for you. That means trouble.”

  “My trouble, not yours. And anyway, you can’t fire me. I am at the bottom of the ladder. There’s nowhere down from here.”

  “But where were you when they came?”

  “I had a headache. I’m sorry. I will work late.”

  “And now I have to report on you,” said Mr. Krutský, with a weary sigh.

  “Is that what they told you?”

  “Once a week, to be collected.”

  I shrugged.

  “Shouldn’t be too difficult. I’ll write it for you.”

  Taking my broom and dustpan from the rack, and my bright orange jacket from the peg, I left for the Husovy sady. I spent the rest of that morning in a state of euphoria. It hurts to confess this. It hurts to confess that I was glad of Mother’s arrest, glad of the misfortune that had befallen us, glad that I was officially a non-person. I had come up from underground. I was breathing real air, the air that Betka breathed, and I was going to live in another way, in a space that we shared. Side by side with Betka I would live in truth. What a cliché! And what a lie! But I am coming to that.

  I telephoned Ivana from the public phone at Můstek. She lived with a woman whose old townhouse in Brandýs had been taken by the Party in exchange for a couple of rooms in a new block of apartments. The old woman was worn down enough to be indifferent to her lodger’s history. But when I told my sister of Mother’s arrest, she said “hush” as though refusing to be implicated in a crime. By speaking in whispers I reshaped the story as a legend. Ivana was tense, scant, and embarrassed, reluctant to be dragged beyond the confines of her world. She had opted for a clean life within the system, and wanted nothing more to do with crime. I was not surprised when she hung up on me.

  I went that afternoon to the central police station, which occupies one side of Bartolomějská street: a warren of offices and cells behind old facades, punctured at one point by a window of small square panes, stretching over five floors. I entered by the old head-quarters building from the First Republic, which looks as though sculpted from a single piece of coarse red sandstone. Formalized bas-reliefs of workers, miners, and peasants remind the passer-by of what is needed in the life-long business of avoiding arrest. I waited in a dirty room with a window in one wall, behind which an official face appeared, seldom the same face and always staring blankly at my request for news of Mrs. Reichlová. Uniformed figures moved purposefully in and out of the room, ignoring me. A woman entered with a shopping bag of groceries, crowned by a bunch of flowers. She went through a door to the other side of the window, nodding as she passed.

  I began to notice a strange humming in the room, as though an insect were trapped somewhere and uselessly beating its wings. After a while it seemed as though the humming were coming from inside me. I felt an overwhelming urge to sit down, but there were no chairs, only a kind of ledge around the wall on which you could briefly lodge your thighs.

  I propped myself up as best I could. Faces floated past, melting and then hardening as they drifted away. Perhaps an hour passed before one of them fixed itself in front of me, and the humming crystallized as words. The officer’s thin grey face seemed to have been sharpened to an edge, as though to cut through whatever pretenses stood in front of it. He spoke in curt, simplified phrases, as though controlled by a machine that allowed only limited options.

  “Mrs. Reichlová has been transferred to Ruzyně.”

  “I am her son, and have a right to visit her.”

  The words sounded in the room as though spoken by someone else. Everything that concerned Mother had been removed behind a screen, and I saw only shadows outlined against it.

  “The Criminal Code forbids visits during interrogation.”

  He looked at me intently for a moment, and then added, “We need to speak to you, too.”

  “Is she not entitled to a lawyer?”

  “We have appointed a lawyer who will present the case for the defense.”

  Without waiting for a reply he turned on his heels and marched to the door. Reaching it, he turned slowly around.

  “Stay there,” he said.

  I did as he told me. It was not I who waited, but another who had usurped my body. I was far away, rejoicing still in Betka, and hardly thinking of Mother. When the officer returned it was to beckon me to the door in which he stood. I found myself squeezed against him in a lift, surrounded by his sweaty smell and unable to avoid his intensely staring green eyes between which a knife-blade of nose made short sharp cuts in my direction. He did not push me or guide me but somehow distilled me into a large room, where I sat in a chair against the wall as he took up position behind a desk in front of me. Another officer, who I understood to be the principal interrogator, was standing in the center of the room, and began pacing up and down. He was a soft-featured man of about forty, and addressed me with a schoolmasterly concern for my future. Of course I asked to be a witness at her trial, and the sharp-faced policeman, who was now taking notes, smiled at my request without recording it. I answered their questions with shrugs and evasions, hardly caring what I said. But when they asked me why I was on the bus to Divoká Šárka and whom exactly I was visiting there, I felt a burst of alarm. I told them that I had never intended to get on that bus, that I was distracted by the presence of police, and that I had got off at the last stop without thinking, in a state of somnambulism. The sharp-faced officer again smiled. This time he wrote down my words.

  “Of course,” he said, looking up, “we will learn in due course whom you were visiting.”

  He closed his notebook and lit a cigarette. A third man in plain clothes entered from an adjoining room and began to discuss repairs to a Mercedes, and how to obtain parts for it. As the three talked I began to take note of my surroundings. We were in a room with high windows. I looked out onto a semi-circular opening in the wall of St. Bartholomew’s Church, which peered at me like the half-open eye of a man who has been beaten. On the wall facing me was a poster showing the hatchet face of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s chief of secret polic
e, above his famous slogan: “Clean hands, cool head, warm heart.” I recalled another saying of Dzerzhinsky’s, from a book that Mother had produced about the Russian Revolution: “We represent in ourselves organized terror—this must be said very clearly.” But it wasn’t said clearly around here. The only hint of it was another poster announcing things that were forbidden: smoking, talking when not addressed by an officer, putting your hands in your pockets, consulting papers, taking notes.

  I was seated in a simple chair in a row of four. The officers were standing around the desk, which looked as though it had been there since the days of the First Republic. At one point, the sharp-faced one left with his notebook and began talking loudly in the adjoining room. I stared for a while, then drifted away. Nothing of what was happening seemed to concern me. I thought of Betka’s words to me. What had she meant about bringing me up into the daylight so as to watch me blink? What was she planning—for that she was planning something I did not doubt. They were still talking among themselves when, without deciding to do any such thing, I got up and went towards the door.

  “What are you doing?” the interrogator cried.

  “I assumed you didn’t want me anymore.”

  “Just wait there.”

  The interrogator left for the adjoining room, and returned after a while with two sheets of paper, on which questions and answers had been typed.

  “Read it,” he said. “And when you have read it, sign.”

  The rough grey paper rubbed against my fingers like a file. Some of the words had been typed over with x’s; others were fragments of communist jargon that I could not possibly have used. I had apparently denied all knowledge of my mother’s reactionary beliefs and counter-revolutionary actions, and the words—zpátečnický and kontrarevoluční—were like pieces of an old jigsaw forced into the unfilled places of a puzzle to which they did not belong.

  “What if I don’t agree?”

  “Sign it, I said.”

  I must have signed; I don’t remember. Afterwards I went back to Gottwaldova. I did not return to my life underground. I had emerged from the catacombs into a wholly new kind of loneliness, an assuageable loneliness that came from wanting what was real. When I left work the next day I wandered along the banks of the river for an hour. It was a raw December day, and a thin sunlight placed golden crowns on all the houses. I remember one of them, a plain white house which still retained its stucco, with an attic story where stone nymphs punctuated a balustrade. I remember it because of an unusual feature, which was the figure of a woman leaning from the attic window and looking down on the Smetana embankment. People didn’t lean much out of windows in those days, and certainly not in places where they could be so easily seen. She was young, dark, with strangely lopsided features, as though one side of her face had been assembled without reference to the other. She seemed to be watching me, and I did something unpremeditated and foolhardy: I waved at her. She looked back at me with a puzzled expression, and then promptly closed the window. Recalled now, the experience has the character of a premonition. The world was full of warnings, and I rejoiced in ignoring them.

  Betka was sitting in a window of the Slavia, at one of the marble tables that have since been modernized away. I should have been intimidated by this place frequented by intellectuals and spies. I had heard that a circle of dissidents, who had gathered around the poet Jiří Kolář before his emigration in 1980, still met from time to time at his favorite table. And surely the man filling in the Mladá fronta crossword, whose table commanded a view of the whole interior, was the resident corner-cop. It surprised me that Betka was sitting there, calmly immersed in a book, one finger in the handle of a cup that she had just put down.

  The Slavia had maintained some memory of its past, as the place where the cheerful believers in our nation had drunk together while the band played dumkas and polkas from the dais. The few tired waiters wore the shreds of old uniforms, with white collars and black bow ties; the tables and chairs were unchanged from the Jugendstil pattern acquired in the last days of Austro-Hungary, and against the wall of the dais, next to an upright piano, a double bass leaned as though exhausted from its labors. A few tidily-dressed men sat at one table, staring silently into glasses of wine. Two women whispered in a corner, one of them toying with a necklace of imitation pearls, as though debating whether the time had come to strangle herself. The place was another warning, and Betka was inviting me to ignore it.

  She had tied up her hair in a chignon, and the sight of her pale neck aroused in me a love quite unlike any that had haunted my travels underground. I wanted to make her my own. I sat down, and she looked up with a smile. She put a scrap of paper in her book, closed it, and pushed it into the center of the table. It was the Heretical Essays by Jan Patočka, published in Canada by an exile press. I asked her how she had acquired this work by a famous non-person, first spokesman of Charter 77, who had been interrogated to death, so I had been told, by the StB, and whose dense, laden prose had been one of the weights under Mother’s bed.

  “No need to know,” she answered. “But it’s pretty unreadable stuff.”

  “He wrote that way because he was wrestling with darkness,” I protested.

  “His own darkness.”

  It had not occurred to me that a famous dissident might be frankly criticized. It was part of our impotence, that the few touchstones could not be shifted. Betka moved in an illuminated space of her own, in which nothing was protected, and all was provisional.

  I found myself talking to her as though coming home from a long adventure, and it dawned on me that my conversations with Betka were the first real conversations in my life. I was speaking to her of my failed education and my journeys underground. I talked about Dostoevsky and Kafka, and she nodded her encouragement, saying hardly a word. How ordinary my confidences sounded, but how special was the glance with which she greeted them. There was a kind of ingenuous amazement in her features, as though I had fallen into her world in just the way she had fallen into mine. And when I had finished, she held my hand gently for a moment and said “Jan,” as though baptizing me.

  I asked her about her parents.

  “They are irrelevant,” she answered. “Not the kind of people you would want to know.”

  “But what do they do?”

  She looked down at her hands, which lay as though discarded on the table.

  “They are divorced. Dad manages an export business, but I never see him.”

  A Party member, then. It could hardly have been otherwise, since she was so rich and so free.

  “And you?” I asked. “Do you live with one of them?”

  She looked at me for some moments with an ambiguous stare.

  “Not really,” she said. “At least not with Dad.”

  She was silent for a while and I placed my hand on hers.

  “That was your mother’s mistake,” she said suddenly, “not to be known. There she was, an ordinary person, deviating from the official routines like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eight-Four, and she hadn’t told anyone about it. Anyone who matters, that is. Public criminals have an electric halo and cannot be touched. Private criminals are defenseless.”

  I thought ruefully of Dad and nodded my agreement.

  “But how did they discover her?”

  Her question was like a mirror, in which I saw my own frightened face.

  “I guess they came across one of her books. It wouldn’t be difficult to discover where the paper came from.”

  She looked at me curiously, as though knowing there was more that I could tell. Slowly she withdrew her hand from under mine.

  “They could arrest you, too, of course,” she said. “But what would they gain by it? Think of it this way, Honza. You have been given an opportunity. You can step into the light. And there is nothing more that they can take from you.”

  “If they don’t take you.”

  “Oh, they can’t take me.”

  Without warning she got up and beckon
ed to the waiter. Before I could detain her, she had paid for our coffees and was walking to the door. I caught up with her outside, but she turned away from me. “You go that way,” she said, “and I go this way. I’ll see you at Rudolf’s on Friday. Meet you in the street outside at a quarter to six. I want to introduce you to him first, before the seminar starts. OK?”

  In time I got used to his habit of hers, of bringing things abruptly to a close as though terminating an interview. I came to think of it as proof of her superior reality, that she appeared and disappeared through doors whose existence I had not guessed at and which opened without warning when my mind was elsewhere.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE NEXT TWO days were the strangest I had known. I was alone in our cupboard at Gottwaldova, and yet for the first time not alone. I ate scraps of food from the corner shop—black bread and dusty sausage—and drank beer that I brought up in a jug from the hostinec at the end of our street. And my little meals were celebrations, which I shared in my imagination with the girl who had disinterred me. I hardly thought of Mother: she was like a numb spot in my consciousness from which my thoughts rebounded to another place, the place where Betka stood. And that was why Betka so astonished me. Here was a girl who did not whisper, as Mother did; who did not look at me askance who did not seem shifty, uncertain, and as though haunted by some unconfessed failing as she tried out her repertoire of permitted words. Here was a girl with the frank manner, the ironical glances, and the occasional bursts of laughter that I remembered from a week of Westerns inexplicably shown at the cinema next to Dad’s school. This manner has become so familiar to me now, after fourteen years in an American university, that I no longer take note of it. But then it could only amaze me. Her

  unfathomable self-assurance: how and from whom had she acquired it? Her easy smile and untroubled sympathy: what sun of love had warmed these seeds in her?