Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  “Whose food?” I asked.

  “Ours.”

  “And who are we?”

  “Me, my uncle. And sometimes, though he has drifted away now, my cousin Jakub.”

  The cellar had been hewn in rock, with ledges in the walls supporting gherkins and apricots in large sealed jars. Unlabeled bottles of wine, both white and red, lay in a rack at the cellar’s end, while on the floor, in every available space, were vegetables—carrots, turnips, potatoes, kohlrabi, onions—lying in beds of sand. Drops of clear water were condensed on their skins, and against the pale green flesh of a kohlrabi, a large black spider trembled on frozen legs. Old farm accessories were laid out in a recess—chains, catches, and the heavy hinges of a gate, the only reminder here of the uselessness that reigned above. It was like a place on the frontier, a home provisioned in the teeth of adversity. I recalled a verse of the book of Proverbs that Mother had underlined three times in her Bible: “Better a dish of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred withal.” And I wondered the more about Betka, that she should have acquired such a home in the time of our nation’s homelessness.

  CHAPTER 18

  THAT EVENING, SHE told me. We were sitting at the oak table, warmed by the woodstove, a half-empty bottle of red wine between us, and beside it the oil lamp, whose light stuck to the wall like bits of white paper. Betka had cleared away the remains of our supper of eggs, sausage, and potatoes, which she had cooked with a quiet competence that seemed to belong not to her, but to the space in which she moved. She had diverted all my questions, sometimes with a kiss or a caress, once with Janáček’s beautiful setting of “Zpěvulenka,” in which her right hand on the piano descanted above the voice like a shadow moving on the air. And now she sat across from me holding my hand on the table. Outside in the twilight a nightingale carried its bubbling song from tree to tree. Inside we were secured against the world, self-sufficient and comforted. Everything was arranged with that unassuming good taste that marked Betka out as someone who had never belonged and never would belong among the dispossessed. It was as though she had made an arch in time across the world of the proletariat and its vanguard party, that grey world of queues and slabs and shortages, of an enforced and joyless equality in which every smiling eye was an act of treason. The aristocrat in her had reached to the peasant life of this farmstead and joined forces with it against the ruin in between. I sat in silence, awestruck by her presence, and successively catching and avoiding those still, soft, moonlight-colored eyes. At last I found my voice.

  “Can I tell you something, Betka?”

  “Yes, but I already know.”

  “What is it you know?”

  “You.”

  “And how?”

  “I wanted to show you how to live openly in the space they allowed, how to forget all those imagined secrets and to live for yourself. And when you teach you learn. You taught me to want you. So I let you into my life, and here you are, in the citadel, and I am glad, because I love you.”

  She drank from her glass before returning her hand to mine.

  “My grandfather came to this place at the end of the war. He came with the Red Army, a member of a scratched-together battalion of partisans who were really nothing of the kind, but scavengers and avengers, with an eye for whom they could punish and what they could steal. They forced the locals to wear white armbands, with the letter N for Nazi; they took away their land and their crops, their tools and their animals; they turned a blind eye when people were murdered, and laughed when they committed suicide. And then they took possession of the houses. Oh, of course, it was all done correctly, with documents, committees, and rubber stamps—that is how communism works. Poor Jan Molnar—whom his neighbors knew as Hans Müller, and for whom the plaque dedicating his dwelling to the heilige Jungfrau expressed the sum total of his philosophy—lived the kind of blameless life that you see inscribed on every single object in this house. He prayed to the Virgin mother and she answered in his mother tongue. When his wife was raped and killed by our fraternal allies, he fled, with the few things that he could stack into his cart, and his two babies balanced on top of it. But he didn’t get far. The Russians stopped him on the road and took the horse. He carried the children for a mile or two, and then sought sanctuary under a Calvary. Whoever shot him had the kindness to spare the children. They were taken into care and packed off to Germany—two among the hundreds of thousands expelled under the Potsdam Agreement and the Beneš Decrees. What the world would be without rubber stamps!”

  Betka’s eyes filled with tears. But she spoke calmly, as though relaying an official story.

  “One day, when this nightmare is over and people can travel freely between East and West, those children or their children or their children’s children will be back, seeking their inheritance. I am keeping it for them, and this place that is home to me is not my home at all, but somewhere entrusted to me by suffering.”

  “But how did you come here?”

  She made a sardonic grimace.

  “The house was given to my grandfather by the Party, which has always been generous with other people’s property. His brief pretense at being a partisan had paid off; he was a commissar in Prague, working in the housing department, and of course he needed a second home. His son, my father, inherited it in the early sixties, just after I was born. And when my parents divorced eleven years ago, it was decided that my father would stay in Prague, while my mother and I would be banished to this place that he didn’t care for since nothing ever happens here save peace. That suited everybody very well. After all, Dad was doing fine in the export business, he had a smart young girlfriend who was moving up in Party circles, and Mum had discovered dissident tendencies that made her an embarrassment to her husband. The last service Dad did for her was to fix things when she applied for a job teaching English in Moravská Třebová. The last thing he did for me was to give me a theorbo for my fifteenth birthday, the day before he left for Prague. We never heard from him again, though of course you can read from time to time in Rudé právo of the heroic exploits of Comrade Palek, the well-known expert in international trade.

  “Then, when I was nineteen, with my heart set on studies in Prague, Mum married again. She moved to Brno, where her husband was a professor of English in the Purkyně University. He was a quiet, nervous man, who had grabbed Mum at a conference on English language teaching. She was the person he had always needed to look after him. After that time, I hardly saw her: Mum’s husband resented my visits, and she would rarely come here to see me. Her brother, my uncle Štěpán, would plant vegetables in the spring, harvest them in summer, and chop the wood in the autumn; and sometimes Jakub, his son, would come with him. Otherwise, I had no one save Mrs. Němcová, whose daughters had moved away to Ostrava and Prague, and who loved me with the remainders of her love, just as I love her. For a year I was alone with my thoughts, and my only desire was to study at the Music Academy in Prague. But there was no way to reach such a destination from a high school in Moravská Třebová. Finally I was admitted to the Secondary School of Nursing in Vinohrady, which was the only place in Prague that would look at my application. That was the beginning of many adventures, you included.”

  I learned many things about Betka on that evening, as her soft, clear, sometimes tearful voice supplied the meaning to the nightingale’s sweet song beyond the window. She told me of her time, aged eleven, in America, when her father was a junior trade attaché at the embassy, and she learned American English and American confidence in a Washington school. She told me of Lukáš, her first boyfriend, whom she had met in Prague, where he was a student of medicine. She told me of her sense of betrayal when he escaped to the West one day in the boot of a diplomat’s car, having kept his plans secret, even from her. She told me of the great change that came into her life through books, and then through the underground, which she had entered bit by bit, until it became a home—a home like this one, taken from others who had the better claim to it, si
nce the sacrifices had been theirs—but a home all the same, in a country where everything was stolen. From time to time she would look at me sadly, as though to say that this elusive, ambitious, world-defying woman could never be tied to a boy whom she had dragged from the sewers. She had come from a place that was hers because it was not hers, to which she was attached without attachment, which would be a home to her forever because it was not a home but a dream. And she would leave me, of that I was sure, just as soon as her ambition required it, and with a tender regret that I could already hear in her voice and see in her beloved eyes.

  That night we lay close. Betka’s tears on the pillow were mingled with mine and from time to time I felt the moth-soft touch of her fingers on my face. In our sweet sadness we were man and wife. All our gestures in the days that followed affirmed this. We walked together in the woods and fields, gathering kindling for the stove and wildflowers for the table. Betka cooked and cleaned, assigned definite hours to reading, walking, singing, and telling stories of our past, of which she had many and I just a few. She read to me the fairy tales of Erben, and the letters of St. Paul, telling me how much she had taken strength from them in her times of near-despair. We studied the local map, showing ancient villages with names that stitched them to the land: Květí (the place of flowers), Řepová (the place of beets), Nebíčko (Little Heaven), Bezpráví (Lawless). And we took two bicycles from the outhouse, wheeled them along the track to the nearby village, and roamed the quiet lanes around Veselí, where the tales of the Cunning Little Vixen once were told. From time to time we stopped in the silent forests to kiss. The sad joy of those days remains with me. It is my most precious memory, and the only known reason for my life.

  CHAPTER 19

  ON THE THIRD day she set off on her bicycle with a certain determination, along a road that branched off into the forest, signposted to Nebíčko. I cycled beside her. The morning sunlight was scattered by the arms of the trees, like balls of fire thrown back and forth above us by the gods. Betka surprised me with her strength and fitness: while I puffed and sweated, she talked calmly, hardly panting from the exercise. She told me the names of trees and birds; she stopped to read the old German milestones, and drew my attention to stone walls, to the enclosures built for animals and to a broken shrine to the Virgin above a spring of fresh water. All these things were precious to her, and seemed to reach to her from the ground where they were half-interred like the supplicating fingers of the dead.

  We reached a fork, where a path of old flagstones diverged from the metaled road. Here we left our bicycles by the road and followed the paved path to a chapel, surrounded by cottages and consisting of a single large room with stucco walls, crowned by a bell gable of brick from which the stucco had crumbled away. This, Betka told me, was her church, Our Lady of Sorrows, closed now for five years, but still a place of prayer for those who knew how to enter it. The west porch had been boarded up, but a side door had escaped the attention of the Department of Religious Affairs, and a local carpenter had removed the old lock and replaced it with another. Nailed to a nearby tree was a bird box, from which Betka took a mortise key that let us into the aisle. As she closed the door behind her an alarmed blackbird flew off, shrieking like chalk on a board. For a second we stood still.

  Then I watched with astonishment as she first knelt and then crossed herself at the threshold. Touching my hand, she detached herself and walked on tiptoe to one of a line of chairs in the center of the Church. She sat for a long moment with her hands pressed over her eyes. I could not see her lips, but her cheeks moved as though in prayer. She was surrounded by emptiness: the church furnishings were gone, and although the large stone altar remained, nothing stood on it apart from a simple cross of wood. There was no lectern, no pulpit, no pictures on the damp-stained ochre walls. Here and there an altar or a monument had been prized away, leaving patches of rough brick like exposed wounds in the plaster. The tall windows divided the chapel into lozenges of light and dark. In a thin slice of sunlight, the face of Betka shone like a vision, and shone more brightly from the tears on her cheeks. I stood by the door, troubled by the transformation that had come over her, not daring to approach for fear of precipitating the decision that I knew to be imminent, whether I was to be part of her life. And when she turned in my direction, I avoided her eyes, looking up into the barrel vault of the nave where faded pictures of rococo saints gestured absurdly into the vacant space beneath them. She and the chapel enfolded each other in a shared form of defiance, disregarding all that had forbidden them. She had arisen from nowhere, with a hunger to possess the world. And these abandoned things responded to Betka’s need as the sleeping castle to the awaited kiss.

  She came across to me and took my hand.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” she said. “I am weak too.”

  She led me to one of the chairs and we sat in silence. Doves were cooing on the chapel roof, and their soft voices bubbled in the vault like hidden children. I conjured in my mind the vanished congregation, the priest at the altar, the mumbled words, and the teenage Betka, the sheath of childhood just fallen from her body, kneeling to receive the faith that had left this indelible trace in her. I turned to her.

  “Is it because you are weak that you believe?”

  She looked at me with a slight smile.

  “God found me here and he lost me here. I am no more a believer in my daily life than you are. But this is not my daily life. And anyway, we all need to pray, you as much as anyone.”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  “The important thing, miláčku, is not to ask but to give: to give thanks, since it is all that we have.”

  She had never addressed me as “darling” before. It was as though I were entirely hers, but only in this special place, where the God of love was briefly, at her bidding, resurrected. She leaned against me, pressed her cheek to mine, and we sat in silence. We had reached the turning point. She had brought me here, to store me among her treasures. And soon she would return to that daily life, from which I was always banished to the periphery. For this, she implied, I was to give thanks. And yes, I did so, not knowing to whom or why.

  From my window I look down on the sunlit suburb of Friendship Heights, where overweight people in summer costumes walk with cell phones pressed to their ears. Across from my block of rented apartments is the local nursery school, where cartoon animals project their vapid grins from the windows, and stickers in primary colors tell me that today is Shirlene’s birthday. Before my mind is the image of two figures, clinging to each other in a chancel light, around them a quiet like falling ashes, and it is a tableau in some hidden passageway, an altar kept by a secret devotee. The world that then surrounded us has no equivalent now. We were not strung on wires of communication across a warm sea of comforts, grinning from puppet faces and mouthing trivial words. We came to each other out of vast and fearful silences, using what tools were available to make ourselves known. Nothing protected us, save the friendships we had made, and the knowledge, so carefully and painfully acquired, that enabled us to rise above our situation. We were the last romantics. Our words were poetry, and our deeds were crime. And because we lived in hiding, every touch had the force of a revelation. Looking at that tableau now, I see the workings of necessity. It was necessary that we came to that place, necessary that we sat in silence, fused into a single substance, necessary that Betka should recite those famous lines from our first romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha, which Dad had taught me and which she had learned in school.

  For those sweet years, my childhood years

  The fury of wild Time has borne away;

  Far is that dream, that vanished shade:

  A vision of white towns in the water’s womb…

  It was necessary that we should look for long minutes into each other’s eyes, necessary that we should depart from that place on tiptoe, as though leaving our marriage there, in the place where it had been made.

  This sense of necessity, whic
h haunted all that happened from that moment, is disappearing from the world. I live here in the aftermath of unalterable things; and from those things I learned the lesson of Spinoza, that freedom is the consciousness of necessity. Here, in the land of the free, all can be altered and freedom is never achieved. Willingly would I abandon this life of multiple choices, if I could return to that brief moment of freedom in the Moravian forest, and experience again the necessity that tied love and loss in a single knot, and which led us hand in hand and speechless away from the chapel towards our fate.

  We cycled slowly home, pausing sometimes to look at each other, once silently making love beside a stream. We stood for a while by the clear water. In the depths, minnows faced the current, their tails flicking them into place. From the distance came the cry of an animal, a deer perhaps, like a lid being prized from a coffin. She took my hand and said, “Let’s go.”

  We lit the stove, and cooked the last of Mrs. Němcová’s sausage, with that strange vegetable—kedlubna, or kohlrabi—which Americans never eat. After supper she sang to me from Janáček’s settings of Moravian folk songs. In one song, a girl wanders through the meadow, plucking flowers with which to conjure love, and the names of the flowers are like spells, kúkolí, polajka, dobromysel, navratnička—think-well-of-me, forget-me-not, come-back-to-me. The names and the melody haunt me still, bound together in a garland around the face of Betka, which was never again to turn to me as it did on that evening in the unowned place that she owned.