Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  I have often tried, and always in vain, to explain to Americans what a real train journey is. Although the tracks of our railways had hardly been repaired since they were first laid during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, none had been destroyed by war, and all were used in a country where rail was still the most important form of transport. Our trains were dirty and smelled of diesel oil. They moved slowly and cautiously along tracks that were often buckled, or perched on adverse bends. They crept beside winding rivers and along the edges of cliffs; they groaned up steep inclines and sang out metaled chords in the valleys. They dropped and took up their passengers in every conceivable place: among the concrete towers of industrial suburbs and in the overgrown parks of ancient castles; in sore red villages amid collective farms and in the centers of cathedral cities; in hectic junctions among mineworks and factories, and by lonely forresters cottages shrouded by trees. There was hardly a human habitation in our country that could not be reached by rail and, as you changed down from branch-line to branch-line, the journey became steadily slower, more intimate, more interspersed with domestic glimpses and confidential scenes.

  I write that now. But it was not what I felt on that day twenty years ago. Mother and I had sometimes taken the train to Brandýs, to visit Ivana. But that had happened in my underground days, when I was seeing only masks and striving to fill them from the sterile source inside. Now I sat opposite the silent Betka, whose grave eyes sometimes crossed mine with a solemn look, and who sat perfectly still, with her hands folded on the little tele—the wanderer’s rucksack of those days—that contained, I discovered, only her nightdress, some papers, and a book of Erben’s folk-tales.

  There was no one else in the carriage, but we did not talk. The train crossed the river and slid through the first suburbs. There followed a ring of weekend gardens, and the scattered factories on the edge of Prague. I peered intently from the window. I was seeing a country that I had never known, a place outside time, outside the reach of the will, an unowned place from which the indigenous gods had retreated. The fields had no edges, and the bald patches among the green stalks of corn were like wounds inflicted by some giant hand. The crops changed from corn to beans and back again without any barrier, and wherever the fields were planted nothing relieved the green save the occasional cluster of poppies, which stained it like a hemorrhage. There were no animals, no people, and the distant villages with their red roofs piled up against the onion-domed churches had an abandoned look, as though killed off by plague. At one point we passed a small town of tower blocks, with pastel-colored slabs set into their sides, and a cemetery of black sculpted marble: nothing else—not even a church or a street. And in the background were bare hills, without trees or grass or bushes, the soil scraped from their surface, leaving only a greyish-white scree.

  Every now and then a factory stood amid the fields, motionless, unvisited, forlorn, and bearing some slogan in giant letters on its roof. Unfinished blocks of concrete stood fixed in their final postures, the rusting cranes poised above them in the interrupted gesture of their death. I recall a modernist structure of tubular steel, with broken windows hanging from its metal limbs, and along its flat roof a sign in yellow letters on a red background: “A peaceful life, the socialist program!” Here and there were piles of hay and silage, shoveled up anyhow, rotting and black beneath their dirty yellow crowns. And long lines of trellises had been installed on the crests of the hills, in an effort to retain the soil against the wind and the rain. It was a landscape whose face had been eaten away, which turned its eyeless contours to the sun like a burnt out leper on his deathbed.

  After Pardubice, however, the country began to change. The patches of woodland grew larger, the hills struggled free from the valleys, and the villages that rose on their sides were more compact and self-contained, as though growing from the churches in their midst. Only the grey concrete blocks, dropped at random and smashing the narrow alleyways, told of the power forbidding the old way of life that had here been inscribed in stucco and stone.

  From Česká Třebová we took a local train, following the path of rivers and gorges, stopping at tiny hamlets where chickens ran in the yards, and snaking through dark woods like a predator stalking its quarry. The still-silent Betka took a packet of sandwiches from her rucksack and spread them on the table that we shared. It was the first meal that she had prepared for me, and she had taken care over it, including what were at the time rare delicacies: smoked carp, bantams’ eggs, and fine Spanish ham. She watched me as I ate, with a motherly smile that seemed to match the intimate scenes that passed our window—scenes of settlement and belonging that I had not imagined, in our dispossessed world, to be possible. And when the train stopped at a little place called Lukavice on the Morava, Betka, who had packed everything away in her rucksack, reached across the table to take my hand and guide me like a child onto the platform.

  From Lukavice we took a bus to the village of Krchleby, from where we were to walk to our destination. All my suspicions had been blown away by our journey. Now I trusted Betka completely—trusted her to lead me in the way of truth, which was to unite us in this moment and forever. She held my hand as we walked through the village. We passed a chapel of ochre-colored stucco, where a rococo angel spread its wings over a belfry above the porch. Betka tried the door, but it was locked. And then, to my surprise, she crossed herself before walking on. She led me to a single story house at the edge of the forest, and held me back as the door opened to her knock to reveal a little old woman dressed in a voluminous collection of potato-colored skirts, the lappets of a pale blue cap hanging on either shoulder like the headdress of a sphinx. Her small blue eyes sparkled as she cried out with delight.

  “Bětuško! Moje milá, miloučká, dušinečko moje…”

  The endearments emerged from one another like Russian matryoshka dolls, each more diminutive, more tender than the last. Betka kissed the old woman on her smooth pink cheeks and introduced her as Mrs. Němcová, and me as Jan Reichl, a friend from Prague. We were made to sit down in a tiny parlor on a pair of low wooden chairs piled with woven cushions. A low ceiling of yellowing whitewash crowned the smoke-smeared walls. Photographs of weddings and children cluttered the shallow mantelpiece above an iron stove, and older photographs hung in ornate frames on the walls, showing bearded men in uniform, and women with starched collars and widow’s weeds. Mrs. Němcová went to and fro through a low paneled door, bringing coffee, apple juice, and sweet plum dumplings, talking of the pig who had died in February, of the chickens that had been eaten by a fox last Thursday, of the marrows that still had not flowered, and the local council’s decision to exclude her from the half acre that she “borrowed” from the collective farm. Every now and then she would interrupt her flow of words to bestow a kiss on Betka and to compliment her on her health or looks. And a kind of wonder spread through me, that I, Comrade Underground, could fall like this into a nineteenth-century fairy tale.

  I sat in that darkened room, practicing Father Pavel’s gymnastics of attention, focusing on the armchairs—squat little goblins bursting with horsehair—on the heavy sideboard of oak with its bronze-edged top and, through its glass doors, on the carefully arranged china, as precious to Mrs. Němcová as it was surely worthless to the world. The hum of soft words was the soundtrack of a film, and I was the camera that shot out meanings like an archer. Betka had said nothing to explain Mrs. Němcová, or to put this little cottage in any other context than the one that it declared. But it was enough for me that I stood near the source of Betka’s life, sending arrows of attention into the pool that had produced her.

  The bond between Betka and Mrs. Němcová was not one of affection only. In exchange for fifty crowns, the old woman provided us with bread, cheese, eggs, and sausage, and sent us on our way with a smiling sense of benefits received as well as given. We took a stony track along the forest rim. To our right, the collective farm spread to the near horizon, and under the wrinkled fields were the little bumps of v
anished buildings, like crumbs beneath a tablecloth. Fences stood rotting among the weeds, and every hundred yards or so we would come across a stable, a sheep pen, a pigsty, crumbling to a heap and overgrown with nettles. At one point we passed a dilapidated farmhouse standing among broken-down sheds. The windows were hanging from their frames and a beech tree, rooted somewhere within its walls, rose with outspread arms like an escaping ghost above the roof tiles.

  We came to a fork in the track, marked by a cross of stone, on which the dying Jesus hung above a jar of dried flowers. His face was long, thin, lined by suffering, and the pointed chin seemed to bury itself in his chest like an axe. It was not a work of art; but the sculptor had portrayed in Christ the human archetype as he knew it. And that archetype was German. On a tablet of stone at the foot of the cross was written in Gothic letters: Vater, vergib ihnen. Sie wissen nicht, was sie tun, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—words from St. Luke’s gospel, spoken over fusty guitar chords by Magor, at one of those village concerts by the Plastic People of which Betka possessed the tapes.

  “Look,” she said, and nodded towards the landscape before us. We stood on a hillock, the horizon rimmed by forest. Here and there a ruined farmhouse stood in an apron of trees, and the fields bore wide scars where the banks had been flattened and plowed. Those old boundaries of earth and piled-up stone, which divided owner from owner, had protected both the people and the land that they had settled; facing this skull-like vista of mud and clay, I could not escape the feeling that the communist war on property and on the škůdci—the pests—who owned it had been, in every sense, a war on the soil. The hills were crisscrossed by tracks like the one on which we stood and a few stone crosses still punctuated the fields, spreading long afternoon shadows like defensive hands. But those crosses, I saw, were rooted in another ground, which lay below the surface, packed with the God-fearing dead.

  “Do you understand?” she asked. She turned to me with the serious expression that summoned my discipleship.

  “Perhaps I do,” I replied, and we walked on. The path took us through weed-filled orchards where apples and plums ran wild. To our left stood abandoned houses, their whitewash stained to grey, scabs of brickwork showing through the fallen stucco. Here and there were broken pedestals, on which stone saints bore witness to vanished joys.

  She began to speak to me, for the first time that day, in a voice both urgent and tender, as though imparting a vital lesson to a child.

  “You see,” she said, “God laid his hand on these fields, and it lies there invisibly. No human being has been able to lift that hand. All we can do is cover it with rubbish. For these fields are not ours. Those who consecrated them were driven out, but without relinquishing their spiritual claim. Some, when the witch-hunts began, preferred to kill themselves rather than abandon the place that God had given them. This place is home to me. But it is a home that was stolen from the people who made it. That is the story of my life, and the story, too, of yours, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  She took my arm and pressed against me as we walked. Her words troubled me. I knew about the Czech Germans, about Gottwald’s call for retribution against them—not just for the Nazi occupation, but for the Battle of the White Mountain, when the old Czech nation was destroyed—and about their expulsion from their homes. But now I was glimpsing, beneath the willful desecration, the consecrated place that they had made. Those people, who clung in bad times to their inherited way of life, and who were punished for their mistake in doing so, had made a place in which tranquillity and piety achieved such concrete and visible form that not even Gottwald and his thugs had been able to wipe them entirely away. Betka showed me chapels hidden among weeds and creepers, carved milestones along forest paths, and in one place stations of the cross, leading through impassable bushes to some hidden place of pilgrimage. Her words, at once so precise and so gentle, seemed not to describe but to address the things they touched, like invocations of the dead. Somehow, she made this devastated country speak more directly to those old longings for the homeland, for the domov můj of our national anthem, than any landscape made by Czechs. Of course, as Karel would remind me, the domov had been hidden under socialist kitsch; for him, this landscape would be part of the never-ending black joke of communism. But for Betka it was not so. For the first time since Dad’s arrest, I had a vision of home, and it was a home that she conjured from a ruined way of life and a pillaged countryside.

  We came to a place where small fields had been allocated to individual families by the collective farm. The fences had been mended and the meadows kept for hay. Wildflowers grew amid the grass, and their many-colored heads waved in the evening breeze. Betka told me their names—kokrhel, chrpa, šťovík, yellow rattle, knapweed, sorrel dock, as my dictionary tells me—and another, with rose-pink serrated petals, slzičky panenky Marie, “tears of Our Lady Mary,” for which I can find no English name. She pointed to some cottages, recounting the story of those who lived there—people who had kept their heads down, and enjoyed for whatever reason the gift of stolen property. And then we came to a copse of trees beside the track. A steep path rose towards double doors, set in an arch flanked by walls of stone. A stone medallion had been carved into the arch: it showed the Virgin and Child, with the words bitte für Uns in Gothic script beneath it. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

  I recalled a conversation with Father Pavel. You don’t have to believe in life after death, he said, in order to utter that prayer with conviction. Watching Betka as she took a big iron key from her rucksack and turned it in the lock of the double door, I knew what he meant. All time is now; and where there is love both life and death move in love’s shadow.

  “This,” she said, turning to me, “is my home. And you are the first man I have brought here. The only man I shall ever bring here.”

  She kissed me gravely and took me by the hand. We entered a horseshoe-shaped courtyard enclosed by sheds of stone. On one side were low stalls fronted by an earthenware trough; this, Betka told me, was where the pigs had lived. On the other side was a stable with a divided door, and a large stall for cows with partitions and mangers. Inside the doors, and to either side of them, were huts for ducks and chickens, and in the center, surrounded by a walkway of flagstones, was a deep pit—the dung-heap that had warmed the farm in winter and which was spread on the land each spring. At the back, overlooking this autarkic kingdom, was the house, a single story of rubble and plaster, from which a chimney reached skywards above a roof of tiles.

  We entered through a low door and were immediately in the central parlor. The room was built around a tiled woodstove, surmounted by a platform on which the family had slept in winter. To one side of the stove stood an old-fashioned kitchen dresser. To the other side were a table and chairs of oak. The facing corners harbored two low beds under cheerful cushions, and above them mullioned windows set in deep white-washed walls. The panes were framed by old gingham curtains, giving the appearance of a girl’s bonnet around an unblemished face. The light that entered was filtered and uncertain, strangely reminiscent of the damp smells of the forest, not picking things out but settling everywhere like a mist. Oil lamps stood on bedside tables, and against one wall was a roughly carved cabinet with cloth-bound books in German and Czech. A nineteenth-century painting hung above it, showing a woman with rosy cheeks framed by a high starched collar above a buttoned dress. Opposite stood an upright piano against the wall. Janáček’s collection of Moravian folk songs was propped open above the keys and on the wall behind it was a plaster Calvary on a carved wooden mount. The dresser contained bowls and platters, tureens and skillets, instruments of brass and iron from another more diligent, more penurious, and more pious age, when every object had a precise function that explained it, and every function was organically linked to the business of survival. These things, once valued as means, lived on as ends, basking in their own once-functional nature. The whole effect of the room was of
a shrine maintained, with impeccable taste, to a life that had gone.

  My eyes were caught by an old desk beneath one of the windows. It was of plain brown wood, with a blotter and a grey marble inkwell. Next to the inkwell was a cast iron bottle opener, an old matchbox full of paper clips, and a neat row of fountain pens with brass levers for filling the rubber tubes within. I recalled another fountain pen in a white hand, the same hand that had clutched the leather strap on the bus to Divoká Šárka. But none of the pens that lay unused and collected on the desk had the distinctive navy blue marbling that I remembered. A kind of mist descended on my thoughts. For a moment I did not know who it was that shared this room with me.

  I turned to look at her. She had taken off her jacket. Her sky blue shirt and slacks, her medallion profile, her long neck from which the brown hair was raised in a bun, and her pale and peaceful hands as they took possession of the things around, all added to the stillness. She was an exhibit, neat, self-contained, and beautiful as the place where she stood.

  She told me to sit while she made the room ready for our presence. I watched her unpack Mrs. Němcová’s provisions, and stow them in a gauze-fronted cabinet beside the dresser. I watched her take matches from the cabinet and light the oil lamps in the room. I watched her take sheets from a chest between the beds and make up the larger of them. I watched her rehearse, as though in tribute to it, the life of everyday economies that had once filled this house. And her gestures told me more than any words could have done, that this place was Betka’s source, the pool of meaning from which she had come like Rusalka into the world of human beings, never to lose the wonder that it had implanted in her soul.

  She took one of the lamps to show me around, leading me through rust-red doors beneath the lintels of which we both had to stoop. In a corridor behind the parlor was a still for slivovitz and a second chimney, with spits for roasting and hooks for the smoking of sausage and ham. Beside the chimney was a coal scuttle of tin with a cast iron shovel, and I felt a kind of tenderness for this object which spoke so eloquently of its former function. Betka’s refuge had been built from the uselessness of once-useful things; you could belong here only as Betka belonged, by not belonging. Nearby, in a corner of the corridor, was a large stone vat, in which plums, Betka told me, would be slowly simmered into jam. Containers, bottles, and jars all spoke of the vanished economy of the plum, which had been the source of wine, spirits, jam, sweetener, and relish. One end of the corridor opened into a shed full of tools, with an earth closet and a neat stack of logs ready for burning. At the other end was a cascade of stone steps down to a cellar where the food was stored.