Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  “How is that possible?”

  He looked at me in an amused way and pointed to the volume of Literární sborník.

  “Like that,” he said. “Though it’s not so easy now. My contact at the paper factory was arrested.”

  I almost resented Mother, that her image and her fate came always like a cloud across my new excitements, reminding me that I was entitled to nothing until the debt of guilt was paid. But I decided to conceal the connection and asked Karel instead how he had got to know Betka.

  “Alžběta? I know her hardly at all. Only once she came here, with her friend Vilém. I asked him round to tune the piano. An odd character, and not to be trusted, I should say. Are you to be trusted?”

  He shot me a mock-accusing look, and then went back to the piano, sitting down to leaf through the old volume of Drejsl’s Budovatelské písně—songs for the building of socialism.

  “Whom do you mean,” I asked anxiously. “Vilém or Alžběta?”

  “Distrust was built in to the system from the beginning,” he said, ignoring my question. “The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn’t matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is ‘Kill all liars!’ That’s what they did to this guy, Radim Drejsl, who came back from the Soviet Union with an odd desire to tell unofficial lies of his own. He ended up on the pavement, five floors below his apartment. In those days you went forward with Gottwald through the nearest window.”

  And with a cheerful laugh he put down the cigar and launched himself again into song.

  Karel’s way of conversing was to package each topic in precise satirical sentences and then move on. So I never learned whether it was Vilém or Betka whom he judged to be untrustworthy. At the same time, in all his talk and actions, something eminently human beaconed from Karel’s eye. In this he was totally unlike Rudolf or Igor, or the people whom I met at their seminars, all of whom, when challenged by some pleasantry, greeted it with a hunted look, as though some secret part of themselves must be at once protected.

  When, during the days of that never-to-be-forgotten spring, I visited Karel, it was at an appointed hour, and only, at his insistence, after walking twice around the block to see that I was not being followed. Sometimes I would bring a copy of Rudé právo so that he could analyze the editorial Newspeak, and always I would hope for a recital of those songs which told me that “Lenin is young again, and a new October comes,” or that “From the wild forests to the British seas, Red Army is best!” Karel regarded all political opinions with irony and all political actions with disdain. He belonged to no dissident circle but enjoyed an ordinary life at home with his wife and son as well as a magic life of kitsch in the world that he had created underground.

  One day I discovered a framed poster showing the profile of Gottwald emerging from those of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin in the sky over Prague. Someone had thrown it into my bin at the Husovy sady. I cleaned it and took it as a gift to Karel, who greeted it with a rendition of Za Gottwalda vpřed and hung it delightedly above his desk. I felt as though I had passed the highest test in discrimination, and could now address him as an equal.

  It was not only because he amused me that I spent time with Karel—though God knows amusement was welcome then. He taught me to understand things in a new way. Words, for Karel, were not the servants of things but their masters: they arrange and rearrange the world. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, language had been doctored so that only the official opinions could be expressed in it. Something like this, Karel argued, had happened to us. The official literature, the official press, even the news on television, deployed a small vocabulary of reliable words, and a syntax permitting only their reliable combinations. People appeared in this discourse not as freely-choosing individuals but as abstractions, through which impersonal forces “struggle” for domination. The forces of progress were bound to win, and the forces of reaction to be defeated. Meanwhile, it was important to fuse the permitted words into bundles, so as to block the doors through which reality might enter. Hence “reactionary” went always with “bourgeois,” “imperialist” and “Zionist,” the last allowing a permitted note of anti-Semitism; “progressive” was invariably tied up with “proletarian,” “fraternal,” and “internationalist.” Our “society” was “building socialism,” and meanwhile living in a condition of “actual socialism” that in some way anticipated the heroic goal. And what, Karel asked, did this word “actual” mean? Just the sediment that sinks to the bottom, when the jar of possibilities has been stirred.

  The abuse of words upon which our official doctrine depended was already prefigured in the sacred texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible. And he compared Newspeak to kitsch, the purpose of which is to destroy the distinction between true and false sentiment, so as to remove emotion from reality and invest it in a world of fantasy, where nothing has a value, though everything has a price.

  Karel, I came to see, was one of those finely tuned people—Václav Havel was another—who vibrate just to the moment of history when they happen to exist. Ours was the last gasp of the written word—the last time when reality bowed in obedience to our way of describing it. And he stood vigil over language, allowing only the cleanest, the clearest, the most transparent words to pass onto the paper. Betka read his articles with delight. For she, like him, was fastidious with words. But the official words of our rulers interested her less than the words leveled against them, fired in those sparse samizdat editions like precious eggs thrown as a last resort against the advancing tanks.

  One afternoon she sat me down with a samizdat text by the philosopher Egon Bondy, whose real name was Zbyněk Fišer, and who was then living in Slovakia. Everybody loved Bondy, in the semi-official way that they loved Magor, John Lennon, and the Plastic People, for whom he had provided words. He was a prodigious talent, a writer of poems, novels, science fiction, and philosophy, in all of which he promised the truth of our condition. As she ran her finger along the lines of his text, hovering above the words signifying movement, progress, development, technology, all moving in a line towards something called ontovládnost—ontological self-government—I saw the whole puddle of abstractions evaporate into nothingness. These, she said, were words without thought, words to prevent thought.

  She proved the point not by argument, but by placing herself squarely in front of the text and forcing it to face up to her. She did not discuss things but confronted them, as she confronted me, and her very being was a challenge and a revelation. Her careful use of language, her suspicion of popular culture, her deep love of baroque music and of those heart-wrenching chords and phrases in Janáček—all these were signs that, by some miraculous process of self-discipline and spiritual knowledge, she had lifted herself free from our polluted world, and learned to live in another way. And by the same miracle, she was determined to lift me after her. How could I not love the woman who did such a thing for me?

  CHAPTER 15

  LITTLE BY LITTLE I came to understand that it was for each of us to sift the garbage in search of knowledge, freedom, and hope, and that there was no single formula, no set of rules or heroic postures, that would guarantee the outcome. Such was also Betka’s message to me, and she constantly guided me to experiences that would confirm it. She had entered my life as a liberating angel: more, she was my life, which had begun with her, and my underground days were like a chrysalis which had fallen away at her touch.

  Of course, I had paid a price for this. Mother was constantly in my thoughts, and I several times took the bus to Ruzyně, in the days when she was on remand awaiting trial, in the hope of being admitted to her presence, only to be told that her case was in preparation and that I would be called to give evidence if either the prosecution or the defense required it. In fact I was never called. But, as I wrote, Bob
Heilbronn did what was expected; Mother’s case was taken up by the “human rights machine,” as Betka called it. This poor dingy woman whom I loved and pitied became a symbol of the nation that had ignored her. So frequent were the mentions of her case, on Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, on the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle, that she at last received the accolade of an editorial in Rudé právo, referring to the reactionary elements and Zionist conspiracies that had chosen her as their tool. I studied the editorial with Karel, to whom I had finally confessed my connection with his former publisher. He pointed to the word “tool”—nástroj. In Newspeak, he said, this indicated a part of the enemy machine that was not truly dangerous. And so it was. When the charge was finally laid it was not one of subversion in collaboration with foreign powers but the far lesser one of misuse of socialist property for private gain. Mother pleaded innocent, but her defense counsel confirmed her guilt and asked only that she be treated leniently on account of her confused state of mind, as proved by her crazy belief that she, who knew nothing of books, could turn herself into a publisher. She got nine months, with a five-year ban on the use of a typewriter. She smiled at me as they led her away, and there was, in that smile, a kind of triumph, as though she had at last done her duty to Dad. Like me, she had come up from underground to live in another way. And even if she had lost a life on my account, she wanted to tell me that she had also gained one. I tried my best to convince myself of this, but the image of Mother was now at the back of my mind, even in the intensest moments of my newfound happiness.

  The seminars, visits to Igor and Karel, walks with Father Pavel, and the never-ending flow of books and music—all this had its center and its meaning in that room where I was side by side with Betka. I came there after work, always with her permission. She would open the door and stand back from it with her familiar gesture, before embracing me. Those first moments of silence were, for me, the most important. She was not fighting me with words, not putting me in my place, not warning, teaching or dramatizing, but simply acknowledging, in every trembling part of her body, that she wanted me and needed me. All the long grey hours apart from her were redeemed in those moments, and never have I been happy as I was then.

  In that room, I practiced Father Pavel’s “gymnastics of attention.” I studied each object, not so as to dissolve it in some narrative of my own, but so as to allow it to speak for itself. Objects around Betka lent themselves to this exercise. For she displayed them with a natural and easy-going grace that gave them the character of heirlooms, things that were there because they were there. I saw her framed at her desk between an old-fashioned lamp of brass, its bulb shaded by a bowl of frosted crystal, and an equally old-fashioned telephone in black Bakelite, which she had found in a junk-shop and never sought to have connected. She kept the telephone, she said, because it was a symbol of our country, begging speech but not transmitting it. For me, however, it had a voice. I thought of those telephones in plays and operas—in the Makropulos Case, for instance, which Betka especially loved. This thing contained the congealed remains of human dialogue; it was the tomb in which speech had been buried. Its black sheen was dignified, sepulchral, and addressed to our collective memory. Not since Dad’s arrest had there been a telephone at home: we were too criminal to have a right to one, and not criminal enough that they should need one to keep track of us. Betka’s telephone therefore addressed me directly. It was like a sculpture of a telephone, one of those pop art objects that seem to have suffered a metamorphosis from concrete object to abstract idea, while still remaining the same. In that black tomb was contained a history, a society, a pathos, and I lay on the bed communing with it as though hearing the voices within.

  So it was with the other objects in that room: the two rococo candlesticks on the bookcase beneath the other window; the still life oil painting above the bed, in which a misshapen pear wrestled with two green apples for possession of a plate; the old Russian icon of the Virgin and Child in an ebony frame, which hung on the opposite wall between the desk and the bookcase. I would watch these things until conscious that they were watching me. And the quiet rustle of Betka at her desk, as she took notes on the latest piece of samizdat, or wrote in the black-bound folder that I was forbidden to touch, was like a summer breeze, filling my heart with hopes for the future and inspiring in me a kind of confidence that I was really living.

  But the fountain at which I drank sometimes had a bitter after-taste. Even if I could keep the thought of Mother out of mind, it was evident that I, too, was in trouble. I was puzzled, indeed, by my freedom. The creature with staring eyes and jug-handle ears whom I occasionally glimpsed in my wake must surely be acting under instructions. The vandalizing of the apartment at Gottwaldova must surely have been a warning. The contemptuous dismissal with which I had been greeted at Bartolomějská must surely indicate that my case was in hand and that there would be no escaping it. And yet nothing happened. I was free to come and go, to pursue my new life as though with official sanction, gaining the education that I had fruitlessly petitioned for, just as if the Minister himself had suddenly put his rubber stamp on the typewritten permit. Yet above me, still and intent in every changing breeze, the hawk was motionlessly watching.

  More troubling still was the source of my happiness, Betka. It mattered that she was four years older than me. She had a life behind her already, one that she would not reveal. We had been lovers for three months, and still I had no idea what she did when not with me. Since discovering that the little room that was our only sanctuary was not hers, and since asking myself why she said nothing of that house at Divoká Šárka where she was so evidently at home, I ceased to trust her entirely. At the same time my distrust belonged to the world I had left behind, the world of lies, fears, and betrayals, and I strove to banish it. I was side by side with Betka, and her candid eyes addressed me sorrowfully if ever I hinted that she was withholding some part of herself.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “there is a short circuit between Heaven and Hell and the lights go out everywhere. That’s what it’s like when you question me.” In such a way she strove to set me again on the path that I called living in truth.

  Then everything changed. It began on a Wednesday in April. It was late afternoon and I had just returned from Ruzyně, where I had been allowed to visit Mother for the first time. In the minutes allowed to us, she had said very little, only that she shared her cell with five other women, and that boredom was the hardest part of it. But I could see from her weary face that the moment of courage was past, and that her days were days of suffering. Betka did her best to comfort me, and we lay still for a while on that bed like fugitives. Evening sunlight stretched across the desk like a reaching hand, almost touching her thigh. Two voices in the yard exchanged inaudible words. A tram squealed distantly. Then footsteps sounded on the stairs, and I felt Betka freeze beside me.

  There was only one door at the top of the stairs apart from Betka’s, and that opened onto her tiny bathroom. The footsteps were those of a man, and the knock, tentative at first, but then loud and insistent, had a tone of accusation. Betka put her hand over my mouth and lay still. The intruder was now turning the handle of the door, and it struck me that Betka always locked the door when we were together, and left the big key in the mortise, so that nobody could unlock it from outside. Was the intruder expected, then? Did he have a claim on her that was earlier, better, and more urgent than my own? I waited for him to speak, to call out her name, to explain the nature of his connection. But after a few seconds of rattling and muttering, he retraced his steps, and we heard the clang of the metal door as he left the courtyard.

  “So who was that, Betka?”

  She had jumped from the bed and was putting on her clothes.

  “How should I know? Maybe someone who had this room before.”

  The explanation didn’t satisfy me, but she was rushing now, telling me that she was late for work and I must go. I did not see her until the following Friday, when
we were both at Rudolf’s seminar. But there was something evasive in her manner, and afterwards, as we met on the stairway, she said that she could not see me on the Saturday, since her group was performing at one of the embassies and she had a rehearsal in the morning. In fact, she could not see me until Monday afternoon. Looking me in the eyes, she said only “Honzo!” and turned away. I did not know whether it was a reproach or a confession, and all that weekend I lay on Mother’s bed in a state of distress.

  Father Pavel had lent me a samizdat copy of Eva Kantůrková’s My Companions in the House of Sadness, describing life in Ruzyně prison. He was reluctant at first, but I told him that I needed to prepare myself, so that I could confess to my part in Mother’s suffering. He looked at me with a kind of tenderness as he handed over the book. But as I read the sad stories of those imprisoned women, it was not Mother I thought of but Betka, who had taught me to follow truth and then concealed it.

  CHAPTER 16

  SUNDAYS IN OUR block were a torment. Our neighbors to either side were builders from Slovakia, brought to Prague to work on a housing project in Žižkov. On Sundays they stayed at home, drinking and quarreling, so that our little cupboard was filled with the sound of their shouts and blows. By the early afternoon the noise was intolerable, and on that Sunday especially so, since it echoed in the void inside me. I went down into the valley, to the Chapel of the Holy Family which I had haunted in my days underground. I had found consolation in this abandoned place. Like me, it had no use and belonged to no one. It was always there, waiting for me, as a blank sheet of paper awaits the pen. But I found no comfort in it now. This place had been frequented by another, simpler person: one who had adopted the clean untroubled discipline of loneliness. I was no longer that person.

  I walked up the Nusle steps into the Nové Město, and took the Metro to Leninova. A girl with a pale pretty face wrapped in a pink scarf sat opposite. She was looking at me, and her mouth fluttered as I returned her gaze, as though she were enquiring into my sadness. I was glad when she got out at Malostranská. I took the bus to Divoká Šárka, and went in search of Betka’s house. It was only a few hundred meters from the bus stop, down a little lane that branched off the street named after Lenin, across an old railway line, and then branching away between blocks of colored concrete panels. My image of the little farmhouse was so complete that I could count the number of casement windows in the old stucco façade—six—and the number of trees in the little orchard—eight. I remembered exactly how the tall trashcans were arranged along the alley beside the apartment block, and how it all looked from this angle—although it had been dark then, and I had had no clear impression of the house’s depth.