Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  How long, O God, must I still bear

  To live in this unshifting care?

  However long you wish to last

  This old frustration, never past,

  I’ll patiently endure my fears

  And humbly ask you in my prayers

  At least that, when the whole thing’s done

  You’ll place a poem on my tongue.

  Yet, when Betka in her thin sweet voice sang the poem to a plangent tune of her own, and let her strange soul shine through the cracks between the words, I was overwhelmed. I heard the voice of my homeland. I was called to a primal experience of belonging, of which Betka was a part. The Plastic People too had sung words by Magor, but it was as though Betka had lifted these verses from the seedy frontier, where the long-haired youth of the seventies had staked its territory, and placed them in the very center of our nation as the common property of our people, the voice of their sufferings then and now and always. She taught me that the life of the dissidents was one small fragment of our world, and that things were changing too fast to remain locked in the griefs and conflicts of our parents. Our concern was to learn, to know the possibilities, and to seek out and destroy every kind of phoniness, including the excusable phoniness that had grown around the harsh privations of dissent.

  Magor’s real name was Ivan Martin Jirous, and he was an art historian by training. It was from his encounter with Václav Havel, Betka told me, that the movement to compose Charter 77 had begun. As a schoolgirl, Betka had been excited by the Charter, and by the fate of those few of her classmates whose parents had signed it, who in consequence had lost, as I had lost, the chance of an education. Our faces had been brushed at that moment by the air from other planets, so she said. But then was then and now is now. Jirous, with his long hair, rude language, and belligerent hippie manner, was, for his contemporaries, the voice of youth. He wanted the Charter to have the impact that John Lennon had. He saw it as two fingers thrust in the face of the establishment. And yet it was not that at all. The Charter was, in Betka’s view, a piece of half-baked philosophy, composed in the same Newspeak as the official protocols of the ruling Party, with its invocation of “progressive forces,” “human development,” pokrok, vývoj, and a hundred other dead words meaning progress and therefore nothing at all, like a speech on May Day. I nodded sadly, and thought of Dad.

  “But you see,” she went on, “that was not Magor’s idiom at all. He is not the kind to swap one lie for another, even if it took prison to wake him up to this. His swan songs are prayers, filled with the love of God and with contrition and repentance.”

  I longed for the opportunity to discuss Mother’s Bible, and the strange world of Father Pavel. Until now I had not dared, but she had made an opening and I took it.

  “Do you believe?” I asked.

  “Believe? In what?”

  “In whatever it is that Christians hold sacred.”

  “Oh yes, Honza, I hold many things sacred, like Magor. But I don’t believe that God is a person, who watches over us, loves us, and is angry at our sins. I don’t believe in the afterlife—one life is enough for me. When you hold something to be sacred then, as Sidonius says, there is a kind of faith that comes with it—a sense of infinite freedom, as though myriad worlds opened before you in the here and now. That’s how I live, and it’s how you should live too.”

  “Show me how,” I begged.

  “It can’t be shown—you must discover it.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, silly. And now. What do you think is happening between us?”

  “And who is this Sidonius?”

  She took from her bag a volume written in Czech, entitled An Invitation to Transcendence. It was edited by Václav Havel and published by an exile press in England. She opened it to a chapter by Sidonius.

  “That’s not his real name, of course. He lives here in Prague. He might even have an official job, as an engineer or something. I’m not sure.”

  I looked at her, aghast. It was as though she had been waiting for my enquiry, and come fully equipped with the things needed to deflect it: an illegal book, a pseudonymous author, an invitation to join in a life that had no explanation save Betka.

  “How did you get hold of such a book?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders and made a puffing noise with her lips. “Don’t ask.”

  She handed it across, and I turned the pages. They were dense with religious ideas: God, Eternity, Transcendence, Being; the door that opens, when love appears, onto the bright garden of the present. And on the horizon, so many miraculous worlds! The words were Czech. But I could not understand them. I had asked her a simple question. And her answer had led me into labyrinths where I was lost without her guidance.

  “Is this what you believe, Betka?”

  “Half and half. Take away the Christian metaphysics, and the rest is truth. We live now or never. And God is another dimension in the now.”

  So what, I asked, did she think of Father Pavel. She looked at me for a while before replying.

  “Listen, Honza, there is a lot to learn from Pavel. But just be careful what you say to him.”

  “Why? You’re not implying…”

  “Of course you can trust him. But just remember, he’s a priest. He will want you to confess to him. That’s his way of exerting power.”

  “And why shouldn’t I confess to him?”

  She seized me by the wrists and looked hard into my eyes.

  “Because your confessions are mine.”

  Only later did I see the chasm from which she was holding me back.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE FIRST WEEKS of my new life moved fast. Sometimes I had the impression that they were happening to someone else, that I was sitting in a cinema, watching the adventures of a man caught up in events that lay beyond his comprehension. I went with Father Pavel to places that I had never imagined to exist; I met with people whom I believed to have been removed from history; I listened to music that could never be openly performed, and read books that could never be published. I sat in churches whose priests emerged from underground to whisper old and forbidden messages, and who disappeared at the end of the Mass like gnomes into hidden crevices. Father Pavel, like Betka, knew people with the keys to secret places. One member of his congregation was a builder, working on the apartment once owned by Kafka’s parents, with a window set in the wall of the Church of our Lady before Týn. I stood at the place from which the young Kafka had watched Christians assemble and depart as though herded by spells, and a strange shiver of isolation came over me, as though I were peering into my tomb.

  Father Pavel took me to other seminars—to those on Czech history by the bald and fussy František in his house on Kampa, and to those on theology in a dingy apartment in Nusle, where Igor Novák lived with his wife and six children. Igor was a grim, portly figure, with a wispy beard and a face obscured by lamp-like spectacles. He stood in the midst of the assembled listeners like a king among his courtiers, sometimes acknowledging their questions, more often pursuing long, slow rambling thoughts of his own. Everyone deferred to him, and no one more than his wife, who was always present and who would begin timid sentences with a smile, only to hand them over to him for their grim didactic conclusion. For Igor believed himself to be the voice of the nation. He referred often to the myth of Přemysl, the plowman summoned to marry the princess Libuše and thereby to found the first dynasty of our kings. He compared his role as a dissident to that of the simple plowman, who brought the natural world and its truth into the castle of illusions. Igor and Přemysl were both avatars of a higher purpose, sent to reprove us for our faults. We had not confessed to our history. We had denied our inheritance as the heart of Europe.

  The Czechoslovak State, he told us, was a kind of mask worn by Czech society, and onto it was projected, as onto a movie screen, an entirely fictitious story, concocted elsewhere and without reference to the life behind the mask. That life was not the secular, material
istic routine that we were told to believe in, but a moral struggle imbued with the Holy Spirit, according to the hidden law of Europe, which was the law of the Gospel, embodied in a national idea. We must be true to that law, we must establish the alternative customs, laws, institutions, and social networks—and here he gestured widely to the room, while seeming only partly conscious of the people actually contained in it—in order to live as we should behind the mask.

  As he pronounced his implacable verdicts, he stared fixedly into infinity. And I could not help noticing, since Betka had schooled me in this vital matter, that nothing in Igor’s surroundings matched anything else. The brown leather chairs clashed with the pea green nylon cushions that sat on them; a dirty grey carpet with a zig-zag modern design supported an ornate Jugendstil desk edged with nickel. On top of the desk a grotesque modern lamp mounted on a slab of bottle-green glass stood beside a kitsch sculpture of the Virgin and Child. It was as though everything around Igor had washed up there, like garbage at the feet of some howling prophet on the shore. Yet this, too, was life. Looking round at the audience, several of them young like me, and all of them fixing the prophet with intent, expectant eyes, I felt a surge of amused joy. The parallel polis was built from garbage; but it was built by the imagination, and you could assemble it however you liked.

  Afterwards I wanted to share the thought with Father Pavel, and suggested we go for a beer. But he looked serious and preoccupied, refusing my invitation and looking askance at my laughter. After a while I began to understand that amusement did not have much meaning for those who were living in truth. Betka was satirical, yes. But she was a thing apart, more an observer than a participant, and she kept her amusement for me. If I made a joke in Rudolf’s seminar, he would stare at me for a moment, from that place behind his eyes where the machine was kept, and then emit a sudden jagged laugh, like the high-pitched clatter of a xylophone. Only one of my new acquaintances saw what was truly risible in communism, and he kept away from the seminars in a secret world of his own.

  Betka and I had been reading a samizdat journal—Literární sborník—which she was allowed to keep only for a couple of days. She sat at her desk taking notes, and then handed it to me, saying “read this article.” The author wrote under the name of Petr Pius, and his theme was the language of communism. He gave a hundred examples, from Marx and Lenin to the editorials of Rudé právo and the speeches of Comrade Husák, showing the deep syntax of our torment. Substantives were demoted to verbs, and verbs made fluid and directionless; concrete realities were vaporized into abstractions, and the whole set into a kind of demonic motion, with “historical forces” and “progressive elements” swirling one way, and “reactionary elements” and “ideological forces” swirling the other. The writer showed that the torment of Czech society was not imposed by the Evil Empire but by language. We lived under a regime of nonsense, and our sufferings were concocted in the looking glass by the faces that stared at us from there.

  “Who is this man?” I asked.

  “You will meet him,” she replied. “Today.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have to go to work now, so I want you to return this to Petr Pius. You will find him in the boiler room of the Na Františku hospital. I was due to be there at five o’clock prompt. That is when you must knock on his door. Don’t speak, but give him this note from me.”

  She described the door at the bottom of some steps that led down from the street, and handed me the note of introduction. I set off in a state of high excitement, not just because I was to meet the man who had made sudden sense of things for me, but also because Betka was trusting me as a go-between, and allowing me for the first time on equal terms into the life that she kept to herself.

  “By the way,” she said as I left. “His name is not Petr Pius but Ivan Pospíchal, and you should call him Karel.”

  In reality I had no opportunity to call him anything. The person who came to the metal door in answer to my knocking was tall, slightly stooped, with a thick beard in which he twined his fingers. He stared at me for a moment, and then took the note that I held out to him. When he raised his eyes to me again it was with an amused but distant look. The high collar of his white shirt framed his face like a ruff, giving the impression of a seventeenth-century portrait. In his hand was a cigar, and throughout our meeting he smoked, taking a new cigar from his pocket whenever the old one faltered. From the effect of this habit, his teeth were black and scaly like old tombstones.

  He looked left and right along the street to see whether I was being followed. Then he ushered me quickly across the threshold into an antechamber containing a broom and a few buckets, and from there into fairyland, which took the form of a large square room, the walls of which were covered in pictures. There were wilting ladies in florid hats; saccharine Madonnas with pneumatic breasts; amorous hussars winking suggestively; doe-eyed children with bare bottoms and pom-poms in their hair. Buxom mermaids offered glasses of frothy beer, fey Rusalkas emerged from their lakes in carefully-ironed crinoline, merry gnomes sang around their tavern tables with tankards raised in salutation, Red Army soldiers thrust their bayonets into the future blessed by the ghost of Stalin in the clouds. I was surrounded by every possible form of kitsch lovingly mounted in gilded frames. Against one wall stood an upright piano, on which were sepia-toned photographs of once-loved people, mounted in padded silk. In a display cabinet fixed to the wall was an array of plaster-cast gnomes and pixies in lurid purples and greens, beside a busty milkmaid in Mucha-style gold and brown.

  There were a few slits of glass set high up in the walls at street level. But most of the thick, curdled light in the room came from table lamps, with gold shades mounted on the heads of pink porcelain poodles, and a flame of glass held aloft by a Rosenkavalier negro. One of the poodles stood on a desk upon which lay a neat pile of papers beside an old-fashioned fountain pen, of the kind that I had seen on that fateful day. Next to the desk was a bookcase containing the bound volumes of a serious scholar’s library. For Karel had been a professor of philology before his expulsion from the university, and regarded his present employment as affording an ideal refuge for his “editorial work.” He was making a study of falsehood: false theories, false opinions, false sentiments, false loves, and false hatreds, all of which had the capacity to colonize the human soul and turn it into the mocking mirror by which he was surrounded. There are things, he explained, which in their true form cannot be bought and sold: love, honor, duty, sacrifice. But if we wish to buy and sell them nevertheless, we have to construct soft fairyland versions of them. That, he said, is the meaning of kitsch: it is the representation, in a world of falsehood, of ideals that we once had in the world of truth. All this culminates in communism, which is kitsch of a new kind: kitsch with teeth. And with that judgment, he held the cigar away from his mouth and laughed a conclusive laugh, as though there were nothing more to be said.

  It was strange and flattering to be spoken to by such an exotic character, although I put his loquacity down to his isolation in this Aladdin’s cave, rather than to any feature of myself that could have sparked his interest. He responded to all my questions with a kind of scholarly precision, offering his judgments of our society and culture as though they were the judgments of some visiting anthropologist, testing his theories against the strangest of facts. He had an expert knowledge of what he called the First Church of Marx Scientist—by which he meant the post-war years when we Czechs were told that we were “building socialism.” The main thing we built, he said, was kitsch monuments, while our national assets were being forcibly transferred to the Soviet Union.

  For Karel, no sign of the cultural degradation of those times was more eloquent than its music and, at my request, he sat at the piano to play some of the Red Army marches that he had heard as a school-child during the 1950s: “White Army, Black Baron,” “The March of Stalin’s Artillery,” and “The Battle Is On Again.” Every once in a while he would put his cigar in the ashtray on his
desk, take a pair of grey overalls from the hook beside an inner door, cover himself with these, and then go through to an adjoining room to feed coke into the boiler that was housed there.

  Karel clearly regarded all clothes as provisional, to be changed at once as the situation evolved. At one point, he paused to take a long redingote in dark blue velvet from a closet set in the wall. Dressed in this music-hall costume, he accompanied himself in the song composed by Radim Drejsl for the First Church of Marx Scientist, Czechoslovak branch: Za Gottwalda vpřed, “Forward with Gottwald,” which he sang in a high caressing tenor. The effect was so ludicrous that I found myself curled up in laughter on a broken-springed sofa, clutching in my merriment the batting-eyed doll in frilly underwear that occupied one of its corners.

  I asked Karel why I never saw him at Rudolf’s seminar. Surely he could make an important contribution, of which we all stood in need?

  “Seminars are good,” he replied, leaning his head sideways towards his cupped right hand, as if to decant his eyes into it. “Good too are the protests and petitions, the exile presses. Et cetera. But I work in another way. I look for the right words, which are also the wrong words. The forbidden words: words with the shape of the things they describe. I must work in my own way, in my own space.”

  “But when you have discovered those words, what do you do with them?”

  “I shake them, ferment them, distill them. And sometimes, when they have lain on the desk long enough and taken on the aroma of old maplewood, I publish them.”