Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  I looked for it in vain. All night I lay awake, composing in my head a letter to Mother. I recalled the good things of childhood, thanked her for her devotion, begged forgiveness for my stupid mistake. No such letter could be sent to Ruzyně, and when I fell asleep at last it was with the image of her squeezed into a stinking cell with thieves and fraudsters, listening to them shouting to their imprisoned lovers down the hole of the toilet in the corner of the room. I went to work next morning resolved to contact Bob Heilbronn, and to begin a new campaign for her release.

  Arriving to collect my dustpan and broom, I found Mr. Krutský as agitated as I was.

  “There was a girl here, and she left a note for you,” he said. His watery eyes revolved without addressing me, and his fat hands trembled against the top of his battered old desk.

  “Where is it?” I asked

  “They took it, see. Almost immediately after she left, their car came squealing against the curb outside, and two of them jumped out, the same ones that used to collect my report. I don’t like it, see? Why don’t they arrest you instead of playing these games?”

  He addressed the grey wall of the cleansing department workshop, on which hung a notice forbidding spitting, smoking, and alcohol. He took comfort from this notice, which forbade only recognized and innocent things. When under pressure, he fixed his eyes on it and reduced his speech to the minimum.

  “What did she look like?” I asked.

  “The girl? A nice chick, neat, slim, dressed proper in a blue skirt. Said she couldn’t wait. Funny thing, though. She said the note was for you. But it didn’t have your name on the envelope. Just ‘my mistake,’ like an apology. I don’t know why you have to drag these private things into the workplace. It’ll mean trouble for the rest of us, that’s for sure.”

  “And what did they say, when they took it from you?”

  “What do they ever say? ‘There’s a note in your possession that we need to see,’ something like that. They looked at the envelope, and one of them, the fat one with the flabby face, he laughed and put it into his pocket.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “They sniffed around a bit. Looked in the pockets of your jacket. Told me to write another report. And then left at full throttle.”

  I dropped my dustpan and broom and went into the street, ignoring Mr. Krutský’s protests. Only when I had knocked in vain on Betka’s door for several minutes did I recall that I was wearing the bright orange jacket of my profession. And when, on turning away, I passed the fellow with the jug-handle ears who was standing at the bottom of the stairs, I said aloud, “a thorough clean-up,” and walked stiffly on. Later that day I wrote a report for Mr. Krutský, emphasizing my erratic behavior, describing how I had rushed from the workshop into the street and then returned as though this was all part of the job, and how I had been distracted for many days in any case, as though plotting some interesting initiative that I lacked the courage to embark on. He was very pleased, and as usual failed to notice the spelling mistakes that I always included as proof of his authorship.

  CHAPTER 26

  I MADE NO further attempt to contact Betka. I assumed that a trap had been laid, for her at least and probably also for me, and that it could not be avoided. I went home to Gottwaldova, began again composing a letter to Mother, and then went down to the hostinec for a jug of beer. The police car was no longer at the corner of the street. It was summer now, and the evening peered through the windows of our block as though collecting evidence. A strange feeling came over me. I felt that I did not belong to this place and that all that had happened in the past weeks had in fact happened to someone else, on whose life I had been granted a ringside seat, but whose destiny did not ultimately concern me. I climbed the stairs slowly, pausing on each landing to take a sip from the jug, and listening distractedly to the sounds of families, some broken, some whole, as they settled into their evening routines. Much, I reflected, was permitted, to those who lived within the lie. You could have a family, attend church, take correspondence courses and embark on a fulfilling and interesting career. It was just as possible to live alone, moving from lover to lover, enjoying the abundant food that our masters had provided, watching inane propaganda about tractors and football on the television, and from time to time getting splendidly drunk with your mates. The space within the lie was confined but comfortable; outside its walls, however, a cold wind was constantly blowing, and the effect of it could never be predicted or controlled.

  I sat down with this thought and my jug of beer, and returned to the letter to Mother. I had begun writing about Dad’s love of music, reflecting on the way in which our national powerlessness finds its way into notes—Suk in the Azrael Symphony, for instance, Janáček’s Diary of One who Disappeared, Dvořák’s Rusalka. I wrote in a way that would have been regarded by both of us, only a few months before, as unthinkable and even unseemly. Then the doorbell rang. Through the spy-hole I saw again the girl from Divoká Šárka, the brown hair tied in a bun, the long white neck beneath it, those beautiful silver eyes encased in their rice-paper lids, like diamonds folded in silk.

  I opened the door and stared at her. After a moment she turned abruptly and beckoned me to follow. Not until we had emerged from the streets onto the path into the valley did she speak.

  “I didn’t want them to hear what I have to say,” she said.

  “Do I want to hear it?” I asked, feeling just a pinch of pleasure in the pain that I caused.

  “Yes, because you want things to be as they were between us.”

  “Tell me what was in that note you left for me.”

  “Didn’t you read it?”

  “They got there first. It seems they knew you had written it.”

  “I see,” she said, stopping abruptly. And then, after a moment’s silence, turned towards me, flung her arms around me and pressed her face to mine, saying, “Honzo, miláčku, I can’t bear to lose you.”

  I moved away from her without replying. We walked across the railway and the stream, to the chapel of the Holy Family. I did not mention Professor Gunther, nor did she tell me what she had written in that note. She simply repeated her invitation to Rusalka, and expressed the hope that we could spend the night together afterwards. Soon we were facing each other in front of the chapel, the light of the setting sun trapped in the edges of her hair and haloing her face. One thought filled my mind, which was that the woman before me was dangerous.

  “So what is it you have to say to me, Betka?”

  “I will be away for a few days, a family visit. I want to be with you first. That’s all I said in the note.”

  “Why were they interested in this note?”

  “It was bound to happen, however hard we tried. They have made the connection, so now it doesn’t matter if we are seen together. Please say yes.”

  “Maybe when you return from your family visit. Tomorrow I am going to Rudolf’s seminar. I want to hear Professor Gunther.”

  She looked at me with a flash of anger.

  “You can’t want to hear that man without a soul. What does he have to do with us?”

  “Quite a lot I should say. With you at least.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “For example, your staying behind to talk to him last Friday. And your being deep in conversation with him yesterday in the Zlatá Husa.”

  She paled a little and looked away before replying.

  “I have my reasons for meeting people like him, Honza.”

  There was a pause in which two squirrels chased each other round the trunks of the maple trees, and a train suddenly thundered from the tunnel. Then she took my hands and said,

  “Listen, Honza, I am not against truth. But I need something more useful, which is information. Our world is changing fast. I shall end up, maybe you too will end up, in another place, with opportunities that it would be foolish to despise. Why shouldn’t I discuss the possibilities now?”

  “Is that what you were doing, discussing
your future with a man without a soul?”

  “As it turns out, yes. Of course he made a pass at me. Influential men are like that. And of course I slapped him down.”

  She relinquished my hand and took a step back from me. Her head swayed, framed in the guillotine of the present.

  “So you will come with me tomorrow?” she asked.

  I did not answer. For a long time we looked into each other’s eyes in silence, and slowly hers filled with tears.

  “Oh, Honza,” she said and, turning quickly, bounded up the Nusle steps and was gone. I took a step to follow her, and then sat down in misery on the wall of the chapel precinct. By the time I got up to leave it was dark.

  CHAPTER 27

  I NEVER FINISHED that letter to Mother. It was still there on the trunk of Dad’s books, abandoned halfway through a sentence about Fibich’s Šárka, when I left the next afternoon for Rudolf’s seminar. Rudolf’s strict rule was that we should never form a group on his staircase, but contrive to stagger our arrival, so that a minute or two should elapse between each visitor. I was to come at five minutes to six, but I wandered a little on the way and it was already six when I reached Letenská Square, four minutes from Rudolf’s building. To my surprise I saw Father Pavel, standing in the way. I greeted him, and he took my arm with an anxious gesture.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I need a drink.”

  “But what about the seminar?”

  “I was on my way to it,” he replied, “and then suddenly I asked myself, do I want to listen to that soulless claptrap about the right to kill the innocent?”

  It did not sound to me like a fair summary of Gunther’s views. But I was struck by the word “soulless,” and remembered the flash of anger in Betka’s face, when she had described this “man without a soul.” I reasoned with Father Pavel for a while, but he was immovable. And then it struck me that, since I had decided to attend the seminar only as a rebuff to Betka, a few drinks with Father Pavel would be a better use of my time, a commodity which in any case was largely useless.

  He led me back the way I had come, across the river, to the great Jugendstil Palace on Republic Square, the Municipal House, built before the suicide of Europe. Here you could sit at brass-bound marble tables beneath lamps that hung from the ceiling like inverted sunflowers, their centers bursting with the ripe seeds of lightbulbs. Here you were surrounded by the symbols of a patriotism that had long ago lost contact with reality: bas-reliefs of saints and heroes, and plush frescoes by Preisler, Mucha, and Švabinský showing buxom women and swelling flowers, narratives of our national emancipation in paint and prose, and the empty space that those things now served, in a country where it was dangerous to sit for too long in a place so visible, and where we now sat with a bottle of Traminer wine.

  Father Pavel greeted the bottle with a boyish cheer and seized it from the waitress, promptly filling our glasses to the brim. We had been walking fast, hardly exchanging a word, and now he talked breathlessly, inconsequentially looking from side to side as though expecting to be joined by someone else.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I had been praying for such an intervention. Of course, Professor Gunther is a decent fellow. We should be grateful that he comes to visit us, to tell us of the wonders that we can never know firsthand. But this philosophy of his, which regards everything in life as negotiable, exchangeable, even life itself, and which is charmed by its own proficiency at finding solutions—it is the philosophy of Mephistopheles.”

  He drank his wine in deep gulps, all the time looking around him. The café was empty apart from one table in the far corner, where two men in dark suits had just sat down to play cards. Father Pavel did not fit into this place where the spirit of bourgeois Prague still lingered. His green cotton jacket was shiny with grease, his open collar was black at the edges and his strong right hand gripped the wine glass like a spanner. He seemed anxious to prove to me that we were making better use of our time in this public space than in Rudolf’s private seminar.

  “For Gunther,” he said, “there are only two things that we can be: heroic dissidents fighting for the liberation of our people, or weary cynics, sunk in orgies and drunkenness, just as their novelists describe us. It would never occur to him that there is a truth more easily perceivable by us than by him.”

  “And what is that truth?” I asked. My thoughts turned again to Betka. Had she gone to the opera after all, and if so was it Vilém who had accompanied her or some other man whose existence she had not confessed to? The wine fell on these thoughts and they burst into flames.

  “That there are sacred barriers, and that to cross them we must deny what we are.”

  “But if you don’t know what you are?”

  “That is not your case, Jan. Of course self-knowledge takes time. We become what we are, through contest and opposition. And in the end we understand that we must give everything, our whole life, without remainder. Don’t you agree?”

  The two men in the corner had got up and packed away their cards. There was a strange light in Father Pavel’s eyes, a light of interrogation that burned into me. It was as though he wanted to fix me in that place, surrounded by my troubles.

  “But,” I said.

  I did not know how to continue. Unobserved, the two men in suits had covered the entire space of the café and now stood above us. Father Pavel repeated his question.

  “Don’t you agree?” he asked, looking at me intently, as though to shut out the intruders. “There are sacred barriers, and only those who deny their own nature can cross them.”

  The fatal words občanský průkaz sounded above us. Father Pavel ignored them, while I fished inside my jacket, finally escaping the grip of Father Pavel’s eyes to search the face of the tall young man who took the little red booklet that I held out to him. His face was tight as a clenched fist, and the eyes watched me from behind ridges of flesh. His companion was shorter, balding, with a well-fed look and fleshy lips that were curled in an ironical smile. There was a silence, during which Father Pavel’s attention did not shift away from me. And then the tall man reached in his direction. While still looking fixedly at me Father Pavel took his identity card from an inside pocket and placed it in the outstretched hand. Our actions had an air of ritual, as though they had been rehearsed long before to be accomplished according to unalterable instructions. As we were walked towards the door, through that temple to the gods of old Prague, our movements became rigid and robotic. We were wading through a viscous substance that impeded our legs, and our arms were swinging to each side of us as though paddling our bodies along.

  Two unmarked cars were waiting outside. Father Pavel smiled and said, “God bless you,” as he was pushed out of sight into one of them. I was led to the other.

  CHAPTER 28

  I FOUND MYSELF in the back of a comfortable Volga. Beside me sat the shorter of the two men who had interrupted our conversation. In front of me were two others, one driving, the other writing in a notebook. All wore suits and ties, as though accompanying some dignitary on an official visit. We were driving fast towards the suburbs, a blue light flashing above us and casting an eerie glow across the road. My neighbor introduced himself politely as Macháček, and informed me that, while he was by no means in charge of my case, he had been given the task of removing me for a while from harm’s way, and perhaps using the opportunity to convey a few useful truths about my situation. He spoke rapidly and softly, in an educated accent, opening his lips in a faint smile as though the words were excited children waiting to burst through into the air. The moist, plump flesh of his face wobbled slightly, as though in need of a shell. Occasionally he would turn in my direction, and look at me curiously from slightly bloodshot eyes, assessing the impact of his speech. And then he would resettle himself comfortably and let the flow of words resume. As we left the suburbs of Holešovice, his discourse turned to books.

  “One of the things that I like about my job, Mr. Reichl, is that it brings me into contact with boo
ks, and especially those books that you enjoy, which for one reason or another have fallen foul of our stupid system. When they decided to open a file on you, I was lucky enough to get hold of a book that you yourself had written—I believe it is you, is it not, this Soudruh Androš who has such harsh things to say about the strangers who surround us on our underground trains? No matter. It is an interesting book—a book about people who are made of books. And of course, this stupid system of which you pretend they are the victims, though I would rather say that they are victims of your bookish way of describing them, this stupid system was itself born between the covers of a book. Nobody now reads that book: Das Kapital is the foundation of our curriculum, and foundations remain unknown and unvisited for as long as the building stands. But the demon born between its covers got out, jumped from book to book until finally taking shape as a threat and a cry. You will remember it, of course, since you have been studying how it is that we got into this mess, as you consider it to be. I mean What is to be done? by Chernychevsky, which led to another book of the same title by Lenin. That is the moment when books began to take their revenge. Until that moment books had grown from reality, and especially here in Bohemia’s woods and fields.”

  Mr. Macháček interrupted himself to gesture from the window towards a featureless collective farm, vaguely outlined in the darkness like the unlit side of the moon. I recalled the song by Pink Floyd. Betka had purchased the album out of curiosity, from a girl who sold smuggled Western records each Saturday morning in a wood outside Prague. I stared into the darkness, and I recalled Betka’s face, screwed up in distaste, as the sound of Pink Floyd burst from the record player under the desk in Smíchov.

  “In those days, nobody was threatened by books: the romantic tale of Babička, the stories of Malá Strana, the tales of that observant little court-mouse Ignát Hermann, all the ways in which we Czechs wrapped up our homeland in comforting words—these helped to make it seem as though we belong here, as though this country is ours.