Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  Thus began a collective outburst of a kind that I had never witnessed at Rudolf’s seminar. Several people had raised their hands, and Rudolf, whose face wore an unfamiliar expression of bewilderment, allowed them the floor. Two of the girls objected to Father Pavel, arguing that atheists and agnostics also need guidance in this matter, and if we do not invoke the idea of rights, whence could guidance come? The poet Z.D. suggested that the whole question was inappropriate to our discussions, since it concerned individual choices and not our identity as a nation. Mr. and Mrs. Černý, who always advanced a joint opinion assembled from phrases provided separately by each of them, expressed their concern that, in the land of freedom, the unborn are so entirely at the mercy of the living. And Lukáš, citing John Lennon’s famous song, invited us to imagine a better world, where children would no longer be unwanted.

  What struck me in this was not the vigorous nature of the argument, unusual though that was, but the fact that it really was an argument, about a concrete matter concerning which modern people ought surely to make up their minds. And this cast a new and disturbing light on our previous discussions. We had stepped out of the world of ponderous abstractions, metaphysical grievances, and noble ideals to which Rudolf always invited us, and where we had been at one. We had entered a rough terrain of conflict, where we were divided against each other, as individuals making our separate ways. We had been attending the seminar in search of the faith with which to fortify our shared isolation, and our weekly discussions had been bids for agreement. The questions we had been used to considering were questions that could be settled in any way we chose, without altering in one particular how we set about our business next morning, in the cold light of day. Somehow, Gunther had brought the “air from other planets” of which Betka once spoke. We were discussing things as though preparing to make real choices, laying down paths into the future that would be many and divergent when the time for action came. We were shaping ourselves, for the first time, as the free citizens we would one day need to be.

  Of course, the contest was not equal. Father Pavel had no intellectual resources beyond his priestly intuitions and the dogma of his church, while Gunther was full of subtleties, calling on a wealth of experience that was more or less unknown to us—the experience of professional women in the Western city, of the workings of American courts, and of the discussions in academic journals devoted to issues of life and death. My sympathies, however, were with Father Pavel. He lost the argument, but he called upon some personal emotion beyond the tranquil commitment of his faith. He seemed to speak with the authority of suffering, and I knew that this suffering concerned me in ways I could only guess. At one point, Betka intervened. The discussion merely showed, she said, that this idea of human rights is too malleable to settle our deepest moral questions. It is a notion that puts nothing to the test. And Gunther leapt at this opportunity to bring peace to the room.

  Yes, you are right, he said, with a sequence of nods. We liberals have a habit of making things too easy for ourselves. We live in a world where we are not put to the test, as you are put to the test. Every expansion of our rights is a cost to someone else, and yes the notion of human rights is not adequate to this problem. His reasoning spiraled away into the stratosphere of concepts: person, freedom, individuality, identity—all of which elicited from Father Pavel only a frown and a shake of the head. Someone mentioned Pope John Paul II, who had inspired our makeshift rebellion; Rudolf formed a question, his dingy wife appeared with chlebíčky, and we were back at last with the solidarity of the shattered. Betka came from her corner with intent and inscrutable features, looking at no one in particular but attracting the intermittent gaze of Martin Gunther. At one point she gently touched Father Pavel on the sleeve, but she looked past me as though we had ceased to be lovers. After a while I made an excuse to Rudolf and fled into the street. A police car was parked on the corner, with two dark figures inside. But they made no attempt to intercept me, and I walked on amid clouds of loneliness.

  CHAPTER 22

  AT FIRST I went towards the metro at Vltavská. But then I veered away, descended to the river and walked west along the embankment. Occasional automobiles tore the silence. The bridge that bore the name of Svatopluk Čech strode on its strong pontoons from road to road, bearing nothing besides a small thin man beneath a crumpled hat. Tucked into the bridge’s shoulder by the bank stood the little chapel of the Magdalene, like an octagonal dish cover. Beneath that cover I conjured the breath of the saint. Then I noticed that a group of people were whispering there; a police car, appearing suddenly from under the bridge, stopped to question them. I hurried on, keeping to the river as the road descended into Malá Strana. I saw no one in the street, heard nothing save the creaking of windows and the closing of doors. Then a late tram shrieked in the square, and spots of rain began to tarnish the cobbles.

  In the Újezd I recalled Schubert’s Winterreise, and the song about the road once taken by which none returns. I had put my feet on that road, and they moved forward without my will. Betka had described Winterreise as lying beyond enjoyment, beyond music even, in a sacred, untouchable place of its own. Only rarely, she said, could we mortals enter that place, and only through penitence. Everything within me, all memories, images, melodies, and thoughts, led back to her. Behind every word that I inwardly spoke to myself were her words, and behind those words her face, her presence, her music, her lovemaking. I stood in the rain by the door of her courtyard, waiting for Betka to appear. The raindrops on my face and in my hair were tears of love and jealousy. Soon I was wet to the skin. And when it became clear to me that she would not be returning, I was seized by a fit of trembling.

  It was three o’clock when I arrived home. The next day was Saturday and I lay all day in bed, sometimes reading in Mother’s Bible, and once or twice getting up to stare down into the street, where a police car was stationed. I could not understand their game, and in any case regarded it with indifference. Whether they arrested me or merely watched me, what did it matter? My stomach was empty, but with the kind of despairing emptiness that refuses food since it can take comfort in nothing.

  On Sunday, I ventured out. I went to Father Pavel’s garage, but there was no one there. The Church of Svatá Alžběta was locked, and boards had been nailed to the windows. Notwithstanding Karel’s prohibition, I visited his boiler room, but was greeted there by an old man with a clotted beard who smelled of vodka, and who identified himself as Karel’s weekend substitute. And then, for long hours, I sat on the Střelecký Island, debating whether to call at Betka’s room, and eventually turning for home with no intention of arriving there. How much clearer things had been underground, and for a moment I regretted the steps that I had taken towards a life in truth—steps from the Metro to a bus stop, and from a bus into the realm of Queen Šárka. It seemed then that I had been following some tempting spirit, a will o’ the wisp or bludička, sent from the lower world to mislead me. It seems now—as I look back across twenty years—that those thoughts belong with the aura of those times, when only books could be trusted, and truth was nowhere to be found, except between their covers.

  The next day I went to her after work, as she had commanded. When she opened the door she did not step back with that little flourish. She did not welcome me with a smile as her big mistake and then lead me by the hand to her bed. Instead, she stood before me in silence, tears running down her cheeks and her eyes red from weeping. Then she leaned forward, slowly closing the door behind me and whispering my name. Never before had I seen Betka like this: meek, vulnerable, beseeching. I asked her the cause and she gave no answer save a shake of the head as she pressed against me. Behind her the room seemed to have changed. The pile of samizdat was there beneath the window. The pictures and candlesticks were in their usual place. The theorbo stood in its case by the wall, the briefcase full of music leaning against it. The books were arranged in the bookcase in their usual order, and the notebook lay open on the desk. But it was all j
ust a fraction neater than usual, as though she had lifted each object and flicked off the dust before replacing it.

  The blue and brown Ukrainian kilim that covered Betka’s bed had been folded back, and the peřina, the feather-bed, too was folded. Beneath the bed was a suitcase, which I was seeing for the first time, since the bedclothes normally concealed it. Visible too was a cardboard box, with the name Olga in black marker ink on its side. For some reason the room had acquired a provisional air, and the neatness and good taste with which Betka subdued and ordered her surroundings seemed like a temporary veneer.

  “Don’t be angry with me, miláčku,” she said. “I couldn’t speak to you on Friday. I couldn’t speak to anyone.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “So many reasons,” she replied, “and also none. Didn’t you think he was awful?”

  “Who?”

  “That American, Professor Gunther. Come to see the exotic creatures in their zoo and add another star to his curriculum vitae.”

  “He certainly was impressed by you,” I said.

  She made a grimace as she pulled away from me. She was no longer crying, but there was a weariness in her features and she made love with a kind of joyless hunger. It was as if she were the victim of her desire and not, as she had always been before, delightedly in charge of it. We lay without speaking until she suddenly rose from the bed and went across to the theorbo and took it from its case. She sang a piece by Dowland:

  Come again, sweet love doth now invite

  Thy graces that refrain

  To do me due delight:

  To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die

  With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

  Her dear voice, those words from a time when life was brief and full of mourning, and the thought of that sweetest sympathy, enjoyed but somehow lost to me, all proved too much. I cried like a child on Betka’s bed, and was still crying after she had put away the theorbo, dressed in the pale blue blouse and pleated skirt that she wore to work, and told me that it was time to go. She kissed me tenderly; but there was a determination in the way she guided me to the door. And this determination was there when she opened that door again to me.

  CHAPTER 23

  IT WAS ON the afternoon of the next day. I stood on the threshold in a state of self-disgust. Yes, I said to myself, I had followed her once before. Out of love and enchantment, I had stepped behind her onto the bus to Divoká Šárka, and then from that bus to the place that may or may not have been her home. But the previous afternoon I had followed her out of jealousy and anger. I had fallen to the level of our rulers, to the level of the person with jug-handle ears who stared past me whenever I discovered him. I had slid from doorways as she passed, ducked behind corners as she turned, watched her every movement as she entered, first a greengrocer to buy some fruit, then a bakery to buy some pastries, then the church of St. Thomas in Malá Strana, where she stood for a moment in the porch, staring at the sealed-off interior. I had followed her up the escarpment named for Jan Neruda, whose tales Dad read to us as children, and who wrote of these jeweled streets as though God himself had shaped them for our uses. And how dirty and diseased I felt as I watched her shrug off a drunk with a walrus mustache, hurry past a young man who turned his beseeching eyes on her, and take the steps up to the castle. She came to the house where the writer Jiří Mucha, son of the painter, had lived, and where, by a miracle, his Scottish wife Geraldine, whom Betka had described as the best of modern composers, was still from time to time in residence. Set within a regular façade of cream and salmon pink stucco panels, beneath a naïve fresco showing St. John Nepomuk risen to glory from the waters of the Vltava, was a door with brass fittings, including a knocker in the shape of a human head. To my surprise, Betka took a piece of paper from her bag, rapped the brass knocker, and stood looking up at the first floor window as though she expected to see a face there. When no one appeared, she replaced the paper in her bag and resumed her journey.

  I followed her to the Loretánská, down the hill of U Kasáren to Dientzenhofer’s Church of Saint John Nepomuk, Father Pavel’s favorite, which had been built for the Ursuline convent next door. Betka strode on, never looking back, and leading me at last to the Nový svět—the New World—a street of crumbling houses facing the high wall of a garden. The street seemed abandoned, with no sound save the song of birds among the birch trees in the garden and a rustle of wind in the leaves. I crouched among the watching dead, catching glimpses of Betka as she walked with even steps on the broken cobbles. Then suddenly she was gone. I discovered an alley of stone steps between two gingerbread houses. It led to a large eighteenth-century house with tall casement windows. A door of modern design bore an official-looking plaque in burnished steel, on which was written Ústavní nemocnice pro chronicky nemocné děti—resident hospital for chronically-ill children. From behind the door came the sound of children’s voices, and a woman—not Betka—said “quiet please, let Mikin go first.” I turned away in shame, and hurried on tiptoe to the Loreta church and the steps down to the escarpment.

  Now I stood in her doorway, avoiding her eyes. She said nothing, but stepped back to allow me to enter, and then quietly closed the door. She had been writing. Her notebook was open on the desk, and next to it a volume of samizdat; not one of Mother’s, but Vaculík’s essays, from the Padlock Press created by those official dissidents. I asked her why she spent so many hours with this literature. Her answer surprised me.

  “One day soon,” she said, “the mirage will vanish and we will see that we are standing in an empty place. There will be ways of advancing, ways of claiming this unowned land of ours. Someone has to be first in the field of samizdat scholarship: and that person won’t be Martin Gunther or Bob Heilbronn or any other of our curious visitors. It will be me.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Why do I live as I do, Honza? I have told you many times. I am not a dissident; I am not an underground person; I want knowledge, scope, a way out of this prison. But I also want to learn from it, to store the experience for future use.”

  “You frighten me, Betka.”

  She turned to me suddenly and locked me in a warm embrace.

  “Is it the word ‘future’ that frightens you, Honza?”

  “Yes, because you are preparing a future without me.”

  “And what would a future with you be like?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Maybe you should have thought about it.”

  She detached herself from me and sat down at the desk.

  “By the way, Honza, why did you follow me yesterday?”

  The question was like a pistol shot. I staggered onto the bed and sat there in silence.

  “No matter,” she went on. “You think there are barriers between us. And if I tried to explain that there are no barriers, that would be a barrier.”

  “You speak in riddles,” I said, “and all I want is you. Just you.”

  “Me? Don’t you mean, your idea of me? And isn’t that their way of controlling us, to reduce us all to ideas? Isn’t that what all this stuff is really about?”

  And she waved dismissively at the pile of samizdat.

  “But why are you crying, Betka?”

  “Oh because…”

  She threw herself beside me on the bed, and would say nothing more. Her gestures were clumsy and incomplete. Her body seemed to writhe at my touch, like a wounded thing. It was mid-summer, and the sun had reached over the rooftops into the courtyard. Its rays were exploring the corners of the room, and curling the papers on her desk. Everything in that place was provisional, poised on the edge of things, ready at a moment’s notice to let go. I too must be ready, and with that thought I got up from the bed and began to dress. She watched me from far away, with an otherworldly look, like the Venus of Botticelli.

  “Listen, Honza,” she said. “There is no going back on what has happened between us. You are part of me, and I am part of you. It
may be a mistake, but it is also the truth.”

  “The truth,” I began, but the words would not come.

  “Can I ask a favor, Honza?”

  I nodded.

  “Will you come with me to the opera on Friday? I have two tickets: Rusalka.”

  “Are you sure you want to be seen with me in public?”

  She looked at me long and hard.

  “I think I shall ignore that question,” she said at last. “But please come to Rusalka on Friday.”

  We faced each other for a long moment, she not hiding her body but lying motionless on the bed, her eyes shining moonlight into mine.

  “What about Rudolf’s seminar?” I asked. “Professor Gunther is speaking again.”

  “Do you think I want to listen to that rubbish? And anyway…”

  “Anyway what?”

  “We have rehearsals tomorrow. I want to spend time with you on Friday.”

  “And the hospital?”

  “I have the night off. We could be together here.”