Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  Each building seemed to embrace its neighbor, gable touching gable, curlicue wrapped in curlicue, roof sloping into roof. The lines of window frames and moldings were picked out by the snow; cornices and stringcourses seemed to shoot sideways, rush together like hectic streams, and lose themselves in foreign windowsills. Turrets and pediments poked through the white blanket, and the crumbling wall of a palace, propped on scaffolding, was like the face of a dying person, desperately sucking the snowflakes in his thirst. The wedge-capped towers of gates and bridges, the spikes of onion domes, the gesticulating statues on the parapets, barely arrested in the architectural whirlwind, like flimsy ballerinas on a surging sea of stucco—this superfluity of form and detail was thrown into drastic relief by the snow and the decay. Things seemed to be standing only by a miracle, each building propped against its neighbor, reduced to a flaking shell. One breath and the whole contraption would collapse, and I felt the quiet streets vibrating to either side of me as my wet shoes shoveled through the slush.

  I crossed the river at the Střelecký Island and made my way towards Nusle. Everything appeared to me as though newly revealed, as though I came from some distant land and was seeing the truth that was hidden from those who lived in the untended graveyard of my city. At one point, I passed an Agitation Center, the place where some local branch of the Party rehearsed its immutable decrees. Behind glass that had never been cleaned, in a window that had never been dusted, a sloping board of posters proclaimed the socialist cause: Nazi-faced American GIs thrust their bayonets into Vietnamese babies, fat capitalists with bulging cigars stood on the heads of helpless workers, and huge missiles, decorated with the stars and stripes, flew in regimented flocks over the cowering cities of Europe. Dusty photographs showed weary communist potentates in grey alpaca suits, signing with fat old hands the bits of paper set before them on modernist desks, while Marx and Lenin stared across their porcine bodies into the future. Notices were pinned to a screen of cork behind the window: more slogans, written in a shaky old hand, composed in the same impersonal syntax, and with the same impenetrable vagueness: “Forward with the Party to a Socialist Future!!” “Long live our Friendship with the Soviet People!!” Strange, I reflected, that some frail old person should have taken the trouble to copy out those empty words, to etch them round with quotation marks, and to place them in this dusty shrine. I sensed the pathos of the Agitation Center: the pathos of an agitation that has dwindled to a palsy. The message of the Center was that you are not to hope or plan or strive, that everything has been fixed eternally, and that nothing remains for each successive generation but to append its signature to the senseless decree of Progress. Looking through that dirty window, I saw something for which I found words only here, in America, in a poem by T.S. Eliot, another exile from modernity: I saw ‘fear in a handful of dust’. I had lived with that fear all around me, and now I was fighting it, not on my own behalf but on behalf of my city, my country, and my friends. It scarcely seemed to matter at that moment that I had no friends, nor did I see that I was striding into solitude. But I will come to that.

  It was at the railway line beneath the Nusle Bridge that I knew I was being followed. The barrier was down at the crossing and I had to wait as a local train carrying a few huddled forms clanked through the darkness towards the river. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the figure moving quickly out of sight into a doorway. I crossed the railway and hid for a moment in the bushes that lined the path. I saw him hesitate and turn back. Then, when I began to walk, my footsteps echoed faintly below me as he resumed his pursuit. I had not seen his face, and his form was hidden beneath a heavy black coat. But there was something intimate in his way of moving, as though he already knew me.

  There was a police car parked in front of our block. I did not turn round, but I knew from his steps that my companion had suddenly veered away, like a sparrow at the sight of a hawk. Whoever it was, therefore, he was not working for them. This thought troubled me, since it suggested that his motives were personal. And who, besides Betka, could possibly have a personal interest in me?

  The wood had splintered away from the hinges of our door, which hung from its lock at an angle. I stepped across the wreckage and pressed the light switch, but nothing happened. The dim light from the stairwell went out, and for a moment I groped in darkness among broken glass and overturned furniture, until finding the bent metal lamp that Mother kept on the table beside her bed. I pressed the little button in its base, and felt a sudden stab of grief, remembering her presence in this room, and her hand reaching out to this button, which was the last thing that happened each night at home, when she had put aside her book and settled down to sleep. She touched this little button in order to wrap the day’s troubles in a parcel of darkness, and I recalled her way of arranging our penury in neat and compact shapes, so that the trouble of our life was both controlled and stored. When the lamp came on, showing the smashed remains of her dominion, with the shards of glass from the ceiling light scattered across the upturned chairs and shelves torn down in cascades of plaster, I could not retain my tears.

  After a while, however, I began to look on the disaster in another way—a way that showed that it was not a disaster at all, but a challenge. My life underground had been possible only because everything else was predictable. Although we lived in poverty and had no worldly hopes, we had our routine. Food appeared on the table; wages were paid; Dad’s books were at hand, and Mother was busy each evening with the typewriter. I was free to invent my world, and that is what I had done, leaving Mother to pay the cost of it. Now, however, the fictions had been swept aside and another landscape appeared. You must change your life. Yes, and I could; because of Betka I could live in truth. That was the thought with which I went across broken crockery to the kitchen window, and looked down in defiance at the street.

  The police were driving away, having no doubt reported my return. It was pointless to complain of a crime to those who had committed it, so I had no choice but to return to my changed life, restoring our little cupboard as best I could and planning for a long-lasting program of intimidation. I pushed the door back into place, and cleared away the debris. And the next morning, because it was a Saturday, I devoted myself to repairs, using the box of Dad’s old tools that we kept in a cupboard in the kitchen. I sawed up one of the broken chairs, and used the pieces to secure the splintered door on its hinges. I took down the shattered light and fixed a bare bulb to the wires with insulating tape. And I hung the shelves in such a way as to hide the holes in the plaster where their brackets had been torn away. I returned Dad’s paintings to the wall, and shelved the books that had been thrown in a corner. I made the place look like a home, to which Mother might one day return and where Betka, too, could visit. A queer feeling of apprehension came over me when I thought of Betka sitting here on Mother’s bed. And I quickly closed the door of the apartment and set off into town.

  The snow had settled in scattered precincts and there was no traffic on the roads. A chill yellow sunlight fell on the castle, which shone above the river mist like a mirage. Everything was beautiful and full of hope, and the sight of Betka, sitting amid untrodden snow on the Střelecký Island, her head wrapped in a woolen scarf, her gloved hands gripping a book, opened a door in my soul through which light streamed in. She looked up and fixed me with a smile, not moving or speaking but winding me in along her eyebeams, until we were face to face. Then she jumped up, kissed me on the cheek, pushed the book into her pocket and said, “Honzo! Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She took my arm, steering me towards the steps, which wound on themselves, making a little alcove with a curved seat of stone. She stopped for a moment, looked at me silently, and then with a sigh and a shake of the head led me across the bridge to Smíchov. She was silent, trembling, and pressed against me as though fearing something. We walked along the Újezd to an old arch between stucco façades, where a metal panel opened in a
wooden carriage door. The panel slammed shut behind us, excluding the world. Before us was a long courtyard. On one side there were buildings with a functional appearance, like warehouses, one of them belching steam from a pipe that pierced the roof tiles. On the other side, casement windows, neatly framed in stucco, faced the courtyard, and in the middle of them a door opened onto some old wooden steps. We went up a flight. Two more doors bordered a flagstone landing.

  Betka took an iron key from her pocket and let us into a room with an antique desk, a bed, some shelves full of books and papers, and a glazed partition leading to a kitchen. On one wall, above the bed, was an oil painting—a still life of fruit in the manner of Cézanne, whose paintings I knew from one of Mother’s books. Above the desk was a window through which I could see the roof of the building opposite. Against the wall stood the case of a large musical instrument. It was warm in the room and everything within it was neat, harmonious, arranged with a kind of visual competence that I could not explain, for taste had been absent from our life at home. Betka took off her coat and hung it carefully in an old-fashioned cupboard that stood against the wall behind the door.

  “But where are we, Betka?”

  “This is where I live, silly.”

  “But I thought...” I stopped myself.

  “What did you think?”

  “Oh, I imagined you living, you know, in some old family farmhouse, somewhere on the edge of town.”

  She turned to me with a serious face.

  “The person you imagined, Honza, is not the one you see. Look at me.”

  I looked at her and with eyes fixed on mine, her hands shaking, she began to take off her clothes. Her soft skin, her breasts tight and firm, with a kind of gooseberry translucence, the trembling flesh of her neck as she steadied her eyes on me, these excited such desire and tenderness that I, too, began to tremble.

  “So?” she said.

  The softly-spoken word, half-question, half-command, still sounds in my memory. Takže? I say it to myself as I look down at the autumn leaves blown here and there on the street below my window, three thousand miles and twenty-three years from that place and time. And I hear again the sweet sad anguish of Janáček’s “A Blown-Away Leaf”—the piece that Betka put on the record player, when she got up later from the bed where we had lain.

  In the afternoon, we walked in the Strahov orchard. The snow, which had thawed in the sun, was freezing again as the short day ended. It was like walking in a virgin place, the ground crunching beneath us as though receiving its first human imprint. No figure moved in the shadows, and the mist from the river drew the horizon close around us, so that we moved in a space of our own. I asked her again what she did and how she lived.

  “Oh,” she replied, “I work in the evenings sometimes. In a hospital for sick children in Hradčany.”

  “And what do you do there?”

  “Medical things. I qualified as a nurse.”

  “But you are studying, too?”

  “It’s my hobby,” she replied, “the unofficial culture. One day I’ll write a book about it.”

  “So I’m a hobby of yours?”

  “Oh, Honzo,” she said, taking my hand. “You are a mistake of mine. A big mistake.”

  “How come?”

  She did not reply, but pulled me to a standstill and pressed her cold face to mine. It seemed to me that her cheeks were wet. But when I drew back to look at her, she hid her face and walked on.

  I recounted what had passed on the previous evening: the footsteps behind me, the shattered door of the apartment, and the chaos inside. She listened in silence, sometimes shaking her head, and at one point stamping her foot as though in anger.

  “I wonder why he followed you,” she said at last. It was a strange remark, and I asked her whom she meant.

  “Whoever it was,” she replied, and then fell silent. We had left the orchard and were walking in the dusk through Malá Strana. We lived then in a world of enigmas. Each person was a secret to the other, and also to himself, and it did not trouble me, but on the contrary enhanced my love, that I walked beside a mystery. To every side were secrets: silent buildings, doors quietly closing, lights that shone dimly behind curtains furtively drawn.

  I am writing of an experience that has disappeared from the world, and am writing in America. The American city never sleeps as Prague slept then in its mortuary silence. All night long in Washington, the noise, the light, and the commotion continue; for the American city has taken leave of its residents and functions like a machine. It has been programmed to work, to speak, to sing, and to riot on its own, almost without human company; to enter such a city is to be taken up by it, to be swept along into a rhythm that is more relentless than a monologue and more exhausting than a dance.

  But you could stand in the squares and streets of Prague and listen to the quiet noises of a city settling down: the lifting of a latch, the turning of a key in a lock; a window opening; the flapping of curtains in a sudden breeze: the noises made by strangers as they retire, divided by thin partitions, and melt into a shifting silence. Those people sitting side by side in that ancient city probably never spoke to one another by day, or did so only in the cautious way that the Party required of them. At night, however, in the side-by-sideness of domesticity and of sleep, they seemed unconsciously to acknowledge their need, and to repair in secret ways the social bond that the machine tore apart each day. Betka and I stood for an hour or more in a street beside the Maltese church, listening to those noises, clinging to each other, each of us lost in secrets and in dreams. And when we reached the Malostranská Metro station, and she looked up to say that she would leave me there, I saw in her eyes not only anxiety, but also longing, and that longing was for me.

  CHAPTER 9

  DURING THOSE WEEKS that led from winter into spring, everything changed for me. I walked in the streets and parks as though belonging there, my eyes and mind now open to the world. I did not invent the lives of passersby, but allowed them to live with their secrets. I knew their fear and their resentment, and I sympathized. As I traveled underground I took no pleasure in exploring their weary faces and felt no need to prolong my daily journey. I turned up for work as before, and helped Mr. Krutský write his reports. But I did this with a lightness of heart, as though I were soon to be free of all such sublunary matters, lifted to the orbit where Rudolf and Betka circled among the stars.

  Each Friday I attended the seminar, taking notes and asking questions. Rudolf had read Rumors, and when Betka explained their authorship, he began to treat me with a special regard. I was admitted to the privileged group of “pupils” who could borrow books from his library, signing for them in a notebook that was tied to a shelf by the door. I was allowed to call on him in the hour after oběd—the meal that divides the Czech day in two—and which he kept for his special visitors. I would go there each Wednesday with my private questions and my little attempts at essays. I devoured the literature of the Austrian twilight: Rilke, Musil, Roth, and von Hofmannsthal. I dipped into the philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and the revered Patočka, trying to extract from them, though without much success, the messages that could guide me more firmly into the orbit that was Rudolf’s. I read works of history, studied the controversy between Palacký and Pekař, when they fought over the meaning of Czech history, in those days when our collective soul hung above us like a vision in the clouds. I read Zdeněk Kalista, who had spent many years in prison after the war, and whose writings were no longer published in our country. His posthumously collected essays on the Face of The Baroque, describing the twofold art that lifts time to eternity and summons eternity back into time, had just been published in Germany by an exile press. Rudolf had obtained a copy and generously lent it to me, along with his most precious possession, a samizdat journal—Střední Evropa, Central Europe—devoted to exploring the history and culture of our country and to showing that we are not what Mr. Chamberlain had said we were at the time of Munich, a far-away co
untry of which the British know nothing, but the very heart of Europe.

  I was amazed by what I read, for although I had sneered at our official history lessons in school, I had no knowledge of an alternative. To think of the baroque city not as a foreign incrustation, a veneer sprayed onto our Czech obstinacy from an aristocratic scent-bottle, but as the essence of what we are, to think of this fragile cake of crumbling stucco as the realized form of eternal meanings, to think of our folksy national revival as simply one manifestation of a central European consciousness that is rooted as much in Germany as in the territories settled by Hungarians and Slavs—to think such things caused an upheaval all the greater in that it reminded me guiltily of Dad. For all his hatred of what the Communists had done, Dad believed the official myth concerning the Battle of the White Mountain. He believed that we had been enslaved in 1620 by a decadent aristocratic culture, and not been fully liberated from the German yoke until the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. And those old-fashioned beliefs, which I was discovering to be so much propaganda, endowed Dad’s image with a special poignancy, since they were proof, in their own way, of his innocence. I shared my thoughts with Betka, who listened to my tales of Dad with a kindness that was something more than the kindness of a lover. In all her words to me she sought to lift me free from the darkness, to open my eyes to better and clearer things. And, in time, I understood what she meant when she said she was seeing how I blinked.

  I began to explore my city, visiting the National Museum, the Castle Gallery, and the few churches that were open, studying maps and learning the names of the palaces and the stories of the great families—Lobkowicz, Sternberg, Wallenstein, Schwarzenberg—who had lived in them. And I began to identify with another Rudolf, the Emperor Rudolf II, who reigned from 1576 until 1611, and who had vainly attempted to conciliate the religious passions that would soon drag us into that Battle of the White Mountain and so replace one civilization with another. The Prague of Rudolf II was a place of religious tension; but it was home to art, science, and the patronage that supported them; it was a place where alchemists and chemists pursued their uneasy rivalry; where philosophy and magic, religion and sorcery, fed from each other’s extravagances. Something of that time still lived in the city, seeping down into our catacombs across centuries of repudiation, even bypassing through some hidden capillaries the concrete barrier called Progress. Rudolf’s empire was stolen from him; and his remedy was the very one that we had rediscovered, which was the life of the mind. And the world of spells over which he presided was with us still, handed down like the elixir that promised eternal life to Elena Makropoulos, and from which she turned, at last, when she understood that it is the quality and not the quantity of life that counts.