Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  During all this excitement, I felt the watchful presence of Betka in my life. Because she was, in her mysterious way, a part of me, I felt that I could not be harmed. Whatever they did, whatever went wrong for me, for Rudolf, for Mother—and we were all massively threatened, there could be no doubt of it—Betka’s love would redeem it. That this had happened to me was enough. When she permitted, I would visit the little room in Smíchov and enter the enchanted world that we shared. I say “when she permitted,” for Betka lived, spiderlike, on a web of imperatives woven by herself. All our meetings began and ended with a command or a permission, and never could I presume at the end of one day that it was up to me to initiate the next. She was in control of everything; and yet, when I came to her, she welcomed me as her mistake, moje chyba, as though this very regime of commands had been torn asunder, and she had given up trying to repair it.

  She would be waiting for me—not impatiently, since impatience was not her style, but with a heightened appetite for life. In some way I had rescued her from a routine that she could not confess to. She would open the door and immediately stand back from it, one foot slightly to one side like a ballerina, reaching behind me to close the door before swinging me into her arms. And she would repeat the words, moje chyba, adding some gentle explanation such as dech podsvětí—breath of the underworld—which was not an explanation at all but a delicate way of avoiding it. This delicacy was something that I loved in her: once admitted to her presence, I could be wholly myself, and nothing in her manner condemned me. Her gentle laugh, her beautiful glances and turns of phrase, all of which seemed directed to the corners of the room as though taking me in obliquely, so that I loomed at the edge of everything she saw, her fastidious way of arranging the desk or smoothing the bed, putting herself so perfectly on display that often my desire for her could not be contained beyond the first few moments of greeting—all this so drove from my mind the old sense of isolation that I lived those hours in her room as though returning in triumph from an ordeal for which she and all her beauty were the reward.

  We lay on that bed for whole afternoons, Betka rising from time to time to make tea in the little kitchen that lay tucked away behind the glazed partition at the back of the room, and I sometimes reading the books that I took from her shelves—exile press editions, some clumsily-bound copies of samizdat, and philosophical works in German and English. She showed me that it was possible to talk without fear of everything, to praise and condemn with total freedom, to explore in words all that was locked away and forbidden in reality—like those flies that dance on the crest of moving waters and are never wet. And always there was music: the heart-breaking quartets of Janáček, the songs and sonatas of Schubert, and also Betka’s music, to which she devoted much of her time.

  Since Dad’s death, the only music I had encountered was that contained in his record collection—long-playing Supraphon records of the classics, with Smetana, Dvořák, Fibich, and Janáček added as a sinful excess—sinful because personal to Dad and a distillation of his dreams. The records enhanced my apartness. The Czech masters in particular spoke of another world, a natural world, in which human beings rose from the soil like plants and, dying, left their fossilized traces. The art and music of our national revival spoke of homecoming and mother’s love, because those things were more fully longed-for then, when they were being shaped not as disappointments but as promises. But there was no consolation in this music: to connect to that vanished world was impossible, just as it was impossible, now, to disappear. The young man in Janáček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared enjoyed a freedom that we lacked, the freedom to go about the world unobserved. You could not disappear; you could only hide, as I had hidden belowground. And then, when I was brought suddenly to the light by Betka, I appreciated all that old music in another way, not as mine but as Dad’s.

  Music was Betka’s first love, the only one of her loves that she ingenuously displayed to me. And her music was curiously interwoven with her life, in a way that I had not imagined to be possible. The musical instrument that leaned in its black morocco case against the wall was a theorbo, a kind of bass lute, and Betka described the ensemble to which she belonged with a peculiar sweetness, as though unwrapping something precious. For her, the music of the sixteenth century, of the Prague of Rudolf II and the England of Elizabeth, had a purity that cleaned her spirit as she played. She sang Moravian folk songs too, and her own poignant melodies, accompanying herself on the theorbo with a few simple chords. Her voice was thin and clear, and seemed to sound somewhere inside me like a memory of childhood. She promised to take me to one of her private concerts, and to introduce me to the leader of her little ensemble, the very Vilém whose name I already knew, for whom she was collecting music, and who, she one day confided to me, though with a peculiar hesitation as though confessing to something illicit, was the true owner of the room where we met.

  “Then you are lovers?” I cried, as the blade touched my heart.

  “Foolish man!”

  “Well?”

  “Have you not heard of friendship?”

  And she turned her head from me and would not speak until I had asked her to forgive me. It crossed my mind that I had never asked forgiveness of anyone in my whole life before, and I was troubled by this. And then she kissed me and changed the subject.

  She spoke slowly to me, as though to a child. Once, she said, “You cannot hurry with words, otherwise you drop them and they break.” Her language was correct, almost old-fashioned, as though she had learned it from books and not from people. And it is true that, while she was surrounded by people, far more people than I had believed it was possible to know without arousing suspicion, they all occurred on the edge of her life, as though held back by an invisible barrier, where they stood waiting like patients in a surgery or litigants in a court of law. And they were unusual people, too, each with a key to some inner room in Kafka’s castle. One of them is important in what follows, and I must describe him now.

  Pavel Havránek was an ordained priest of the Catholic Church, who had been banned by the Ministry of Culture’s Religious Affairs Department on account of an article he had written, published abroad, about Pacem in Terris, the organization of disloyal and compromised priests through which the Party controlled the Catholic Church. Pacem in Terris had been proscribed by the Vatican in 1982, three years before the events that I am describing. It was Father Pavel who had sat next to Betka on my first visit to Rudolf’s seminar, wearing the smudged clothes from his day-time job as a mechanic, and also the cross of his vocation. He came each week, and Betka would smile at him and stroke his arm, though without making any effort to introduce us. It was on my third visit to the seminar, when for some reason Betka had left early, indicating with a silent glance that I was not to follow her, that I fell in with Father Pavel. I was walking away from Rudolf’s apartment towards the Vltavská Metro station when he came up beside me and began to talk. He spoke softly and slowly, with a Moravian accent.

  “Rudolf tells me that you are Soudruh Androš,” he said. I replied with a nod.

  “The book meant a lot to me. It was like a door into the underworld, where the silent bodies lie. It gave me such hope.”

  “Why hope?”

  To me, looking back on it, my stories sprang from despair, though a despair that I had now miraculously discarded.

  “They are not dead, you see, only sleeping. And all of them are purified by grief.”

  I was intrigued by his words and because we were walking past a pub, I suggested we enter. We found ourselves in a dark corner, two tall glasses of beer on the table between us, and no other company apart from three workmen at the bar who from time to time broke the silence with loud shouts about football.

  “There is something very Christian in your vision,” Father Pavel said. “I assume you were brought up in the faith?”

  “No,” I replied. “Ours was a modern family. We had no faith, only doubts.”

  “But doubt can
be faith. You knock on doors, and at last someone opens. To your surprise, you already know his face.”

  His words touched something in me and I asked him to explain. He leaned back and studied me for a moment. A lock of dark hair fell across his brow, and he swept it aside with his hand, which was large, rough, and blackened with grease. His brown eyes fixed me with a calm, even gaze. The taut lower folds of his cheeks stretched across the edges of his mouth like the flanges of a helmet, and his nose was strong, slightly arched, with a notch dividing the gaze. I had seen faces like that carved from limewood in a book about German altarpieces that stood on the shelf over Mother’s bed. Father Pavel drew in his breath before speaking, like a child repeating something from memory.

  “Mine was a modern family, too. My father was a Party member, manager of a collective farm near Olomouc and also big in the local committee; my mother was raised as a believing communist in a family of peasants. They had a fit when I converted, but that was back in 1968, in the days of ‘socialism with a human face,’ and they couldn’t stop me entering the seminary. I pray for them now each day.”

  “Then they are dead?”

  “No: you can pray for the living, too. But for them I am dead, because I have changed my life. I have learned to accept the void without throwing myself into it as they did.”

  “But isn’t it hard for you now, to be a priest, when nobody believes?”

  “You really think that nobody believes?”

  I hesitated. His eyes seemed to reach into me, shining their light on unacknowledged regions of my soul.

  “Well, I don’t believe. Nor can I.”

  “You are wrong about that. The gift is offered to everyone. I read your stories and they are like a question, forever repeated. Simone Weil writes that when we cry out for an answer and it is not given to us, it is then that we touch the silence of God. I find that silence in your stories. And I know it in my life.”

  “But if there is no God?”

  “God has withdrawn from the world: that we know, and we Czechs perhaps know it more vividly than others. Our world contains an absence, and we must love that absence, for that is the way to love God.”

  “But how can you love an absence?”

  He gave me a look of indescribable sweetness, as though I had touched on what was dearest in his life.

  “I was called to this love, and at first I did not find it. During my early years as a priest, I felt powerless to help. People came to me as a refuge from the system, laying their problems at my door, asking for the proofs of another and a better world than this one. And I had no proofs. As a refuge from the system I was also part of the system, an improved version of the slavery they knew. I thought all the time of my failure to be what they wanted, which was an alternative. And if you spend your days obsessed with your powerlessness, then every good and beautiful thing is like an insult. It was only when I was thrown out of the official church that I understood what was being asked of me. I was abandoned among the abandoned, and I had to love them for what they lacked. Quite suddenly, my life as a priest was full of joy. My flock still came to me, for they had witnessed the cloven hoof under my successor’s cassock. But they did not come for refuge. They came for prayer, for stillness, for the life of the imagination to which the gospel so beautifully speaks. I would kneel beside them and we would become nothing together, because in our nothingness we could encounter the love of God. Perhaps that sounds strange to you?”

  It did not sound strange at all. Father Pavel’s words came from a place that I had never known and that I was suddenly eager to enter. His liquid accent sounded in my ears like a pure stream in a dark gully, welling up from some underground region unpolluted by the poison in the air above. His soft brown eyes, moving slowly from side to side as he spoke, seemed to take in his surroundings with a look that was both blessing and forgiveness. And his shabby cotton clothes, stained with the oil and grease of the garage, were like the rags of a pilgrim, worn thin on a journey that stretched from shrine to shrine the whole length of a life.

  He talked to me in this vein for an hour or more, pausing every now and then to sweep back the lock of dark hair that fell across his brow, and for a moment looking at me quietly before resuming his narrative. I asked him how it was to be in holy orders secretly.

  “Oh, there is no secret about it,” he responded, holding out the cross at his neck. “I am there for whoever needs me, and I have nothing to hide. They sent me to prison for a while, so now they can assume that my case is closed.”

  At that moment, however, one of the workmen who had been leaning against the bar with his companions turned in our direction, and Father Pavel lowered his voice.

  “If you want to know how it is,” he went on, “then come to me at the garage after work, and I will show you.”

  He told me the address of the garage, near the Olšanský cemetery, and we arranged to meet on the following Tuesday. I rode the Metro to Gottwaldova in a state of high excitement. To have met, in the space of weeks, three people such as Betka, Rudolf, and Father Pavel, to have acquired in one bewildering sequence a capacity for love, a need for friendship, an awareness of the mystery in which we lived, and a glimpse of the key that would unlock that mystery—all this went to my head, and caused me to look forward impatiently to the next day, a Saturday, when Betka and I were to spend the afternoon together.

  On the shelf above Mother’s bed, where she had kept her small collection of art books and which I had put back together as best I could, there was an old Kralice Bible which I had never seen her read. Late on that Friday night, arriving in our vandalized cupboard, I took it down. It was full of pencil marks—underlinings, multiple exclamation marks, marginal notes—in a hand that was clearly hers. On the flyleaf was written, “To Helena Košková, from her parents, Easter 1952.” Košková was Mother’s maiden name, and this book, given to her when she was ten years old, at the height of the communist terror, and with the reference to a forbidden festival, told me much. I knew that she had been brought up in the Protestant church; but I assumed that faith had never been more than skin-deep in her, and that she, like Dad, had accepted agnosticism as the best way to negotiate our life—certainly the best way to bring up children. Reading her cramped marginalia, however, I knew that I was observing another personality, one that she had hidden not because she was ashamed of it but because she knew that to reveal things did no good. Her pencil marks spoke to me now of feelings that had been locked within her, and of a hundred silent sacrifices. I saw that I must make her part of the new life that was to be mine, and so pay the debt that I owed for all that she had suffered, on Dad’s account, and on mine. For she, too, had glimpsed this “life in truth,” and tried, at some period long past, to follow it.

  Some of her marginalia referred to a “he” whom they did not name. At first I assumed this to be Christ. Verse 8 of the first epistle of John reads, “If we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” She had underlined the last phrase twice: a pravda v nás není. And next to it she had written “but it is in him.” And the words of Christ to Thomas in St, John’s gospel, so famous that even I, even in those days of official atheism, had heard them spoken—“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”—had been given three underscorings, with the words “truth” linked to the margin, in which she had written “Your truth is in him—let him believe!!” I knew then that she was not referring to Christ and closed the book sadly; for I had uncovered her love for Dad, still warm and bleeding in the place where she had hidden it. And it is especially significant to me now that she had hidden her love in a book.

  CHAPTER 10

  FATHER PAVEL’S GARAGE lay on a backstreet among featureless buildings of concrete. It consisted of a courtyard that was also a scrap heap and a sheltered area at the back where two or three vehicles stood awaiting repair, official vehicles with Hlavní Město Praha—the capital city of Prague—stenciled on their doors. Behind them was a workshop with a line of windows in
wooden frames. Father Pavel was the only person there when I called, and I found him standing by a blue Avia truck that had been squeezed into the recess, notwithstanding a broken rear axle. He was wiping his hands on a cloth and staring at the damaged vehicle with his mild expression, as though he pitied it. Only when I greeted him did he acknowledge that I was there.

  “Jan, thank you,” he said, “I am so glad you came.”

  “But how would I not?”

  He brushed the hair from his eyes and looked at me.

  “I spoke about intimate things, and those things hurt.”

  I dismissed his worry with a wave of the hand.

  We walked through the Olšanský cemetery, where the once proud families of our nation lay interred, though not at rest. The doors of their ornate sepulchres had been wrenched from their hinges, the vaults pried open, and pieces of broken marble scattered across the floors. “No full stop is allowed under communism,” Father Pavel said, “for even among the dead the wheel of Progress turns.” He seemed to me like a child, describing things as though encountering them for the first time. A little pile of phalanges and metacarpals had been thrown, stripped of their rings, by the ransacked tomb of the Bradatý family. “But one ring remains,” Father Pavel said, “which is the ring of truth.” And he made a sign over the bones that I took to be a blessing.