Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  CHAPTER 20

  WE ROSE EARLY the next morning, and Betka said almost nothing as she prepared the house for our departure. Everything was cleaned and stowed away, and there was an intensity in her way of accomplishing this that drove me once again to the perimeter of her life. When she turned the key in the double doors, looked up at the heilige Jungfrau, and quickly crossed herself, I felt as though I had been hastily ushered out from a place that I had compromised by my presence. We walked in silence past the hay fields, the ruined farms, and the calvaries, and at Krchleby stood side by side in anxiety as we awaited the bus.

  We said goodbye at the Main Station in Prague, since she was hurrying to work. We were to meet in two days’ time at Rudolf’s seminar, Betka having indicated that she could not be free until then. For two days I wandered the streets in a state of distraction, hardly knowing where I was. I called on Karel in his boiler room, hoping that he would cheer me; but he was busy editing a manuscript and asked me to come back at the end of the day. I looked for Father Pavel in his garage and, not finding him, tracked him to the church of Svatá Alžběta, where he was being whispered at in a corner by a young man in jeans. I quickly ducked out, in the hope that he had not seen me.

  A police car had again taken up residence in the street below our apartment. Whenever I passed it, the occupants—usually there were two of them—looked busily in some other direction. Once or twice I thought I was being followed, though the impression occurred only in moments when it could not be verified. Two policemen had been posted outside the building where Igor lived, and demanded identity cards before allowing visitors to pass. Igor was giving weekly classes on St. John’s gospel, in which he argued that the communist order would soon be overthrown, not by violence, but by a sudden self-emptying, as the servants of the system quietly departed from their posts, leaving them undefended. I listened to Igor, not to relish this nonsense, but to glimpse through his words the vision of St. John, who had been commanded to comfort the Mother of Christ, who had once been a comfort to Mother, and who would surely, if I could find the path to him, be a comfort also to me. But I could not focus on holy things without encountering the image of that house in the Moravian Sudetenland, where the door beneath the heilige Jungfrau had been closed against my return.

  Whether it was on account of my state of mind, or whether there had been some real change in the workings of power, I do not know; but Prague in those days seemed wrapped in a cloud of danger. The police were in evidence everywhere; the streets seemed more than normally deserted. And when I walked at night, as I did since I could bear to return to our cupboard only when all other options had been exhausted, I sensed the footsteps close behind me, which stopped and resumed when I did. The day after his seminar, I learned, Igor was taken into custody—a frequent occurrence, but one that I took for a warning. Shortly afterwards, encountering Karel in the street, I watched in astonishment as he stared right through me and walked past without a greeting. Later, answering my knock on the boiler room door, he handed me a note. “You are being followed,” it said. “Don’t come here again.” I went to Rudolf’s apartment that Friday carrying toiletries and Mother’s Bible, in a briefcase that had belonged to Dad.

  There was another reason to be cautious. Two weeks earlier, Rudolf had announced that we were to receive a visitor from America, a distinguished professor of philosophy who would be talking to us that Friday about the concept of human rights. His name was Martin Gunther, and he had written two books on the subject, one of which had been passed round at our seminar. It was full of references and footnotes, and suggested an academic industry devoted to this matter which, for us, had been crammed into a manifesto and then pressed like an icon to the heart. Apparently, Professor Gunther had taken a personal interest in our doings, was anxious to set up a network to assist us in our studies, and would do his best to provide us, through the channels available under the Helsinki Accords, with the visitors and materials that would advance our studies. I had concluded from this that Professor Gunther was either naïve or stupid. Either way, however, he was leading us into unpredictable territory, and I wondered why Rudolf had agreed to this.

  CHAPTER 21

  I ARRIVED EARLY to find Betka waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She came across to me with a darting movement like a swallow. Her manner was strangely excited. She neither greeted me nor looked at me, but seized me by the arm and pulled me into the recess at the back of the stairwell.

  “After the class,” she said, “we go separate ways—OK?”

  “Forever?”

  She made a pert face and turned away.

  “Don’t be stupid. Just do as I say. Come to my place after work on Monday and I’ll explain.”

  She didn’t wait for a response but went quickly to the stairs and climbed them two at a time. I next caught sight of her in Rudolf’s living room, half-hidden in a corner behind Mr. and Mrs. Černý, two frail old lecturers in philosophy, who had refused to sign the official denunciation of Charter 77 and as a result had been dismissed from the university. She made no effort to catch my eye as I sat down on the floor beside Father Pavel.

  Professor Gunther was already installed at Rudolf’s desk. Since arriving in America and becoming acquainted with the template used to create the type, I can no longer be surprised by the individual instance of Professor Gunther. Then, however, I looked on him as a creature belonging to another form of life, about as relevant to our situation as a migrating bird to the branch she sits on. He was young, with pale skin and freckles, and wore thick-rimmed glasses that stuck out beyond the edges of his narrow face like the bars of a cage. His was a mobile face, of a kind that we Czechs, in our attempts to go unnoticed, had long since discarded. His nose made a neat right angle with his thin straight lips and he pushed his head forward on his long neck like a curious rodent exploring the air beyond his territory. He wore a loose green jacket of some expensive material that we never saw in our shops, and a wristwatch of a kind worn in our country only by the Party bigwigs who could freely travel abroad. He shuffled papers on the desk and repeatedly swallowed, so that his prominent Adam’s apple moved up and down in his throat like a ball in a fountain. But his serious manner was punctuated by bursts of sociable laughter, as though everything around him could be understood, in the last analysis, as fun. And his lanky good looks gave him the air of a hero in some comedy of university life. I took immediately against him, distrusting him, but distrusting my judgment too.

  Rudolf explained that it was Professor Gunther’s first visit to our country, that he had come in response to Rudolf’s own appeal for academic contacts with the West (the “free world” as Rudolf put it), and that this visit would be the first of many through which we could learn about the latest intellectual developments in places where scholarship was officially permitted. Rudolf’s face glowed with self-importance as he spoke, and this too displeased me, since I saw the whole episode as a needless provocation. It was not possible that this visit should have escaped the attention of the police, and all of us were now at risk from Rudolf’s act, as I saw it, of heedless self-promotion. But Professor Gunther was enjoying his part in the affair, and stood up to address us with that air of cost-free humility that I have come to know so well in America. His words were translated by Lukáš, a boy of my age, with long hair and slouching manners who, since his expulsion from the university, had become a Lennonist, to use Václav Havel’s expression—a devotee of the Beatles, of the easily achieved “outsiderism” of the 1960s, and of the ethic of protest. His English was good, though when it came to philosophical terms he had to improvise, since the works of John Lennon contain so few of them. As a result, Professor Gunther’s self-confident presentation of himself, as a person privileged to make contact with the courageous people before him, and humbled by their interest in what he had to say, lost some of its necessary edge. I should not have been so cynical. But my heart was filled with foreboding, and somehow Martin Gunther had become tainted by it.


  As Gunther spoke I continually sought Betka with my eyes. But she never emerged from her corner to show her face. There were some twenty of us in that room, bound together not by courage but by a shared experience of defeat. Our visitor stood on the edge of an arena in which the solidarity of the shattered was displayed, as in a zoo. But Betka wasn’t part of it, for she too stood on the edge. As I saw it, they were made for each other.

  Gunther told us of his deep concern for those who struggle for human rights. The word “struggle” was often on his lips, and it had a rather absurd effect, since Lukáš, who hated communist jargon and refused to use it, translated it not as boj or zápas, Newspeak words full of belligerence, but as pokus, attempt. Gunther expressed his admiration for our part in this attempt, and told us that he would not dream of comparing his situation with ours, he enjoying a secure position in a New York university, and free to travel around the world in pursuit of experience and knowledge. Nevertheless, he felt he could make a small contribution to our endeavors by reflecting on the meaning of human rights, and their fate in his country which, for all its virtues, was by no means the bastion of individual freedom that those oppressed by totalitarian government make it out to be. He paused every now and then to let his eyes flicker across the audience, who leaned forward with eager faces, as captive animals might observe the person who brings them food.

  The sounds that filled Rudolf’s apartment, whether in Martin Gunther’s English or in Lukáš’s Czech, were like a distant imitation of our everyday speech. Words like “justice,” “oppression,” and “power,” which we attached to specific situations and specific forms of punishment, were recalled from common use and wrapped in elaborate theories. These theories had no meaning for us, being claims to academic territory in faraway places that we could never visit. I recalled a remark of Wittgenstein, whose words were often on the lips of Father Pavel: if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Rudolf tried to take notes, but he dropped his pencil after a minute or two and began to stare in amazement at the intruder, who strolled back and forth behind the desk, his eyes often turning to the corner where Betka sat invisible.

  Kant, Gunther told us, had subsumed the idea of human rights into the categorical imperative and the moral law; Bentham had dismissed the idea as “nonsense upon stilts;” Hegel had thought one thing, John Stuart Mill another. New thinkers had taken up the question, with a consensus gradually emerging in America, that rights protect groups against their oppressors. Gunther referred to learned American journals, to the traditions of American pragmatism and American liberalism, to philosophers like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, whose names we were hearing for the first time, and to the faraway feuds of the American academic class, which seemed as applicable to our position as the tournaments of well-paid mud wrestlers.

  At a certain point, Rudolf’s apartment detached itself from Prague. We were journeying to the moon like Mr. Brouček in the fantasy novel by Svatopluk Čech, which Betka’s beloved Janáček had set to music. We were being carried higher and higher by Gunther’s stream of hot air, seeing below us the contours of Absurdistan, to which we must one day return and be punished for our futile attempt to escape from it, but which for a moment had no claim on us since we were protected by a dream.

  Below us were the formal gardens of Letná, and the wide street named for the “defenders of the peace” whose patrol car stood at the corner, waiting to defend our peace from foreign philosophy. Dwindling into nothingness was the empty plinth for Stalin’s statue, whose sculptor had committed suicide in 1955, shortly before the inauguration of the statue that shamed him before the world; further still was the greasy Vltava, journeying towards freedom with its cargo of waste. Invisible now were the empty streets, the furtive bars, the dirty foyers where men and women passed each other in silence; invisible the dilapidated city of dreams beneath the crust of fear, where harmless old people still cared for the dead and where suspicious lovers lay together in the stolen afternoons. The chains that tied us to our city had been miraculously sundered, and we were floating upwards in a hot-air balloon, powered by Gunther’s discourse. Strange rumors hung on the atmosphere, like conversations blown on summer thermals. We were conscripted to the rights of women, homosexuals, minorities, and marginalized groups. We overheard protests against American writers and thinkers who had defied the march of history. We were warned against corrupt and conservative ideas of freedom that were nothing more than disguises for selfishness or pieces of free market ideology. We heard of demonic forces that were ruining the world beyond our borders—corporations, lobbyists, interest groups, obscure conspiracies born of a false idea of freedom. Our small-scale local conflict was absorbed into a “struggle” as vast and all-embracing as that of the Russian Revolution. But the contours of this struggle were unknown to us. Nothing concrete or familiar was suggested by Gunther’s words, and for a while we floated in a dream of pure abstractions, liberated from reality and staring in wonder at the visiting lion.

  He mentioned Richard Rorty, whose name we were hearing for the first time, and who had changed American scholarship with a new theory of truth. The true belief, we learned, is the useful belief, the one that enables you to affirm the rights of your group, and to gain the illuminated plateau of liberation. Truth means power, just as Nietzsche and Foucault had said. I recalled our official doctrine, according to which the power of the Party and the truth of its theories are one and the same. And by the time Gunther told us that claims to human rights, whenever made by a community in search of liberation, are inherently justified, my head was spinning out of control. Whose side was he on? And on whose side was I?

  Then it all changed. Martin Gunther’s speciality, he informed us, was “abortion rights,” a sphere in which, dare he say it, our country had a better record than his. There was a sudden tension in the room. Of course the topic of abortion had been debated in Czechoslovakia. But the Catholic Church had no public voice, and the matter had been resolved, like every other, to the convenience of the Communist Party, which preferred to address the problem of unwanted children by disposing of them before it arose. Younger people discussed the matter, but we knew that we touched on something fearful and intimate, for which we had no adequate words. Gunther was offering those words, but I felt that his summoning of the “human rights machine” somehow missed the point and that it certainly would not go down well with Betka. Nor was I wrong.

  His eyes, which had roamed instinctively in Betka’s direction, wavered and then lowered as though sensing a rebuke. Father Pavel leaned forward with a serious expression, waving back his lock of stray hair and looking intently at the speaker. Women, Gunther told us, are an oppressed class, whose reproductive nature has been stolen from them by patriarchal structures installed for the benefit of men. A woman’s right to control her own body has been ignored by a system of government that forces her to carry an unwanted fetus and by a culture which encourages violence against doctors who terminate her pregnancy. The discourse had become concrete, and we were plummeting to earth under the weight of a novel kind of Newspeak. A woman, in Gunther’s view, should be seen as the victim of her pregnancy; her unborn child not as a human being but as a fetus, a medical condition in search of a remedy. He discussed a famous case before the American Supreme Court, in which it was definitively proven that this fetus has no rights under the Constitution. And so, with a friendly gesture of shared triumph, he concluded his talk, arguing that, however much we Czechs may suffer from the unjust restriction of our human rights, so too did women suffer in America.

  It took us a little while to grasp the argument; but one thing was certain: we had landed back with a bump in Absurdistan. Rudolf was stuttering out a commentary, and I felt a stab of pity as he tried to claim familiarity with the works to which Gunther had referred, and to show himself au fait with current Western discussions. Father Pavel’s face glowed with defiance, and he was leaning forward, ready to speak. But it was Betka’s voice, speaking in English fro
m her place of concealment, that captured our visitor’s attention.

  “I have a question. When you say this to your students in America, do they report on you? Are you putting your life in the balance? And another question. Suppose you were one of us, born here, confined here, unable to move without permission. Would you worry that it was all too easy for you, an intellectual, to speak like you do, knowing that out there somewhere, someone will pick up your signal and broadcast it, and that you would become a celebrity of sorts like our famous dissidents?”

  I was taken aback by her tone, which revealed depths of anger and frustration that I had never previously suspected. And there was something personal too, as though she were singling out Martin Gunther as someone who henceforth must be accountable to her. He responded at once, confessing to faults that he eagerly described as though each one were a gift for Betka. Yes, he was a comfortable middle-class person, whose defense of human rights was a defense of his own peculiar privilege. Yes, it needed no courage to speak in America as he had spoken in this room. Yes, he belonged to the class that was in any case rewarded for such courage as it showed by the general endorsement of the culture. He thanked the young lady for making this so clear to him, and hoped that it did not adversely affect the reasonableness of what he had said.

  “But it does,” said Father Pavel, who spoke through the fluttering veil of Lukáš’s English. “These rights of which you speak—you admit it yourself—are the privileges of comfortable people. According to you, the professional woman has the right to kill the child who hampers her career, while the child has no right to her protection. Maybe your subtle philosophers and judges have impeccable arguments for thinking that the unborn can be disposed of according to our convenience. But for us the word právo means right and also justice, and it is one part of pravda, meaning truth. I am the way, the truth, and the life, said our Savior, and he gave his life so that we should live. In the catacombs we make use of this word “right,” not because we have those subtle arguments, but because it expresses the thing that they cannot steal from us, which is our humanity. It tells us to protect those who have done no harm and who come into the world without offending it. But you tell us that such people have no rights.”