Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  “But we were forgetting the crucial fact, Mr. Reichl. We were forgetting that for us there is no reality outside books. Ours is a nation made by books. We came into being with the Kramerius Publishing House in 1795, designed to shape the new nation as a nation of readers. It was a book, Jungmann’s Dictionary, that rescued our language from oblivion. Our national rebirth was planned and accomplished through books and when people decided that we needed a history, Palacký and Pekař rushed to provide us with books, and nobody knows which version to prefer since neither version has any reality beyond the covers that contain it. It was Josef Kajetán Tyl, a literary man and a man of the theater, who wrote our national anthem. And only a man immersed in books would compose a nation’s declaration of its right to exist in the form of a question: ‘Kde domov můj?’—where is my homeland? And the answer is obvious: in books.

  “Our conflicts have been fought out in books, and our contribution to the wars of the twentieth century has been the books that document their stupidity. Czechoslovakia exists because books had been written to prove that it should, and its first President, who was appointed on account of the books he had written, went on to write more books to prove that the country must go on. The modern Czech, the ordinary man with his dog, his allotment, and his pub, stepped out of the books of Čapek and Hašek. While President Masaryk was churning out his high school philosophy, the communist poets entered the literary scene with their surrealist books about the future. What was it that one of them said? ‘I pause before Prague as before a violin, and gently brush its strings as though to tune it.’ Nezval, I think it was. There you have it: a beautiful image, and a fair account of what those early communists intended. Not to change reality but simply to brush it a bit with words. And when at last people made clear that they didn’t like being brushed in this way it was because there were books that told them so. Nothing happens in this place save books, and the most influential book ever written here tells us that nothing happens in any case, except the narrative that tells us that nothing happens. That, it seems to me, is how we should interpret Kafka’s Castle, would you not agree, Mr. Reichl?”

  I stuttered a few words and then shrugged my shoulders in embarrassment. He resumed his speech as though I were merely an observer, sometimes rolling his eyes in my direction and once or twice, after some particularly acerbic paradox, settling back with a triumphant smile, striking a studied pose like an actor.

  “The dissidents resisted us with books, and we responded by forbidding those books—that is how stupid it has all become. We even started commandeering books and pulping them. And all this culminated in that ‘too loud solitude’ described by Hrabal, whose hero’s one delight in life is to seize from the maw of his hydraulic waste-paper press the books whose fine bindings and fine ideas cry out for rescue and which end up piled to the ceiling on his shelves, with no other use save to remind a powerless person that, whatever power might be, you don’t get it from books. Your mother understood the point perfectly when she described her own flirtation with books as the Powerless Press.

  “And it is worth pointing out, Mr. Reichl, no, please don’t interrupt me, the point is of great importance to you, that Mr. Hrabal owes his success to us. We gave him a challenge. Become an activist, we said, exchange harmless books for futile actions, like Mr. Havel and Mr. Vaculík, and you will become a non-person like them. Stay with your books and your dreams in your forest village, and you will be known and loved all across the world, known precisely as a Czech, a visitor from the land of books, the land that wrote itself into being. We were aware, of course, that those good-for-nothings were pressing him to sign their document, their death sentence against the written word. And we gave him a choice: sign and that great book of yours, the book about books, of which 80,000 copies were printed, bound and stacked on pallets in the printing works in Plzeň, will go the way of the other books described in it, pressed into blocks and pulped. Don’t sign and you will continue to be what you are and what we all appreciate you for being, the prophet of our nation, the person who reveals the latest way of deducing, from the premise that we Czechs exist in books, the conclusion that we exist too in reality.”

  Macháček continued in this vein for some minutes. At one point he allowed himself to raise his voice, speaking dismissively about the “underground kafkologists” who imagine that our system of government is not just stupid—about which we can all agree—but somehow sinister in the way of those endless corridors frequented by unexplained participants in an unexplained drama.

  “In Kafka,” he said, with a dismissive gesture, “judgment cannot be avoided, since innocence is proof of a deeper guilt. That is just a comfortable bourgeois clerk’s attempt to deal with the oppressive mental presence of his father. And the result is not truth but literature. You should give us more credit than you do, Mr. Reichl. All our efforts—and they are expensive efforts as you see—are designed to spare the innocent, to warn the guilty, and if necessary to correct the guilty, though only, as you must admit, with the mildest of punishments.”

  I record here the words of this curious character, since they struck a chord in me, just as Father Pavel’s words had done in the Church of Svatá Alžběta. In pursuit of truth I had entered a labyrinth of fictions. Even the mysterious Other, the collective “they” of our panoptical prison, turned out to be a fiction, playing an improvised part in a drama that none of us understood. When the car stopped in a dark wood, some twenty-five kilometers out of Prague, and the young man who had been taking notes got out to open the door for me, Mr. Macháček held out his hand. I hesitated, and then took it with a shudder of distaste. It lay for a moment in my palm, like a wet fish.

  “You will find your way easily back from here,” he said. “And count yourself lucky.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I WALKED ALL night. As I entered the suburbs it began to rain, and in the early hours, wet through and with broken heels, I boarded the first Metro from Holešovice. My thoughts were of Father Pavel. I reasoned that quite possibly he had known what would happen if he took me to the Municipal House, known even that those particular men were waiting for him. But it was also inconceivable that he, who had given everything to the dissident cause, should also be a part of their network. I concluded that it was therefore not I but he whom they had been tracking, and I was merely a diversion, to be got out of the way as efficiently as possible. By keeping me close, Father Pavel had delayed his arrest, and also secured a witness to it. If I kept quiet he could be murdered in secret, as had happened to several underground priests in recent times. If I broadcast the news of his arrest he would have to be brought to trial. And his trial would be a cause célèbre, which would embarrass the fools who had arrested him. I therefore resolved to make contact as soon as possible with Professor Gunther, before he left for New York.

  I was able to change my clothes and rest for a while before ringing Mr. Krutský from the Gottwaldova Metro station to tell him that I was ill and could not report for work. He told me that “they” had been round again, that he did not like it and that I should look for another job. I hung up without responding to the suggestion. And then I took the Metro to Vltavská, and set out for Rudolf’s apartment. As I turned the corner of his street, I saw that the building had been cordoned off. Two policemen stood outside checking the identities of residents and visitors. A police car was parked opposite, and officers were carrying files, papers, and books across to it. I walked on briskly, hoping not to attract their attention.

  Nowadays, and especially here in America, news does not spread slowly through a community, nor does it travel fast. It does not travel at all. The air-waves are instantly replete with every happening, the now is a universal presence, and—while this leads to an undeniable lack of understanding, since the present is meaningful only in relation to the past, which is instantly drowned by the flood of new information—the result is that there is no news. We are instantly aware of every event that affects us. Then, and especially in thos
e countries where information was a precious commodity, to be hidden by those whom it enriched, and confiscated by those whom it threatened, news still existed, and percolated slowly through hidden channels. I bought a copy of Rudé právo, in the slight hope that it would contain some hints of what had happened. But it contained only the usual stuff: cheerful statistics about the wheat harvest, news of a trade delegation from Mongolia, the award of an honorary degree to a French communist, a treaty of friendship with Ethiopia.

  I called on Igor, who informed me that Rudolf’s seminar had been raided, and everyone—Professor Gunther included—taken into custody. Although it was possible that they would all be freed after the statutory forty-eight hours, it was being officially rumored, according to Lukáš, whom they had already released, that Gunther was a Zionist agent in the pay of imperialist powers.

  I went straight to Betka’s hideaway in Smíchov. I let the metal door slam shut behind me and for a moment stared at the courtyard. In the far corner two skull capped jackdaws were debating some intricate question of theology. Somehow their presence suggested that the place had been shut off from life. I bounded up the stairs, determined to speak to her, whomsoever she was with and however angry she might be at the disturbance. But the door was wide open, and inside the room was bare, like a stage at the end of a run of performances, when all the sets have gone. I stood on the threshold, practicing my gymnastics of attention on the eloquent nothingness before me. The bookcase which had held her precious collection of samizdat: empty. The desk: swept clean. The still-life painting in over-ripe colors: gone. The candlesticks and the little Russian icon: vanished. The bed: stripped bare. The case beneath it and the box marked Olga: both gone. I became aware of a presence behind me.

  “You see,” spoke a deep male voice, “it got cleaned after all. She was too quick for me.”

  I turned to discover the man with jug-handle ears, who fixed me from his deep black eyes with a round, expressionless, bird-like stare.

  “You must be Vilém,” I said.

  He said nothing but pushed past me into the room, swearing beneath his breath. His presence in that room was a line drawn through a story that had started brilliantly, and then wandered into obscurity and doubt. His profile was handsome, despite the ears, with a fine chiseled nose and a clear intelligent brow. Only the leather jacket and trainers, signs of wealth and Western connections, belied his bookish and bohemian air. He spoke rapidly, directing his stare into the corners of the room, his top lip glossy with phlegm.

  “If it had just been you I could have dealt with it. But now this American who offers her everything—everything. You can see it in her face when they are talking: a scholarship, a doctorate, publications, a career in some American university, and of course a certificate of marriage, which has ‘exit’ embossed in gold. There was a moment when I could have killed you—she so infatuated with a mere boy, who couldn’t believe his luck to be taken up by a woman with looks and brains. But I knew it couldn’t last. Forgive me, but you are just not one of us. There are two kinds of people in this world: those going somewhere, like me and Alžběta, and those going nowhere, like you. If I stuck to it, she was bound to come back to me. I could wait. Yes, I kept track of you. It was my right. You’d do the same if you were me. She was mine, see, mine. That was the truth, no matter what she may have said. We were going to the top, both of us, and that’s where we would be together.”

  He continued in this vein for some time, turning every now and then to stare right through me at the wall so as to prove that I did not exist.

  “Whatever was normal in her life I provided, see? I was security and culture, money and music both. I had contacts, friends, a way around the system. We could have set up house together, I was prepared to leave wife, family, everything. And then you came along. How the hell did she discover you? I mean, from what miserable corner of our world did you emerge? I don’t get it.”

  His words were full of venom, but his tone had become hesitant and beseeching, as though surreptitiously begging my permission to abuse me and begging me too to agree with the conclusion that I didn’t really exist. He described her evasiveness, her constant shifts from warm to cold and back again, her openness to the world and her flight from it, as though prompting me to discuss the point, to reassure him that perhaps it wasn’t true, or that the good outweighed the bad, and we should both attempt to forgive her. I let him continue and stared at the blank room where no vestige of my Betka remained. She had become a figment, a vapor lingering above the marsh of suspicion in which Vilém’s life was stuck.

  A butterfly was flapping its wings against the window, where the sun slipped in at an angle. It was a babočka, which my dictionary translates as “painted lady.” I had learned the name from Betka in those days in Krchleby, when she had given names to everything she saw. These living things fluttered about her like her own eager thoughts, each one replicating some part of her ambition, each possessing its portion of the world. I recalled her competence, her love of words, her care to call things by their names, her illuminating presence in my life. I recalled her naked body as she had first displayed it in this place, the light that shone from her face, her neck, her breasts. And there came to mind a little Czech word, one of those words in which consonants, clustered together like a posy of wildflowers, make a sound softer and sweeter than any vowel. Srstka—gooseberry.

  I stepped past Vilém and threw open the window. The painted lady flew up above the roof across the courtyard, was caught in the steam that issued from the protruding pipe on the opposite roof, and fluttered dead to the ground.

  I squeezed past the electrical charge that surrounded him, and made it to the door.

  “Look,” I said. “Much of what you say is relevant and true. But the battle is not wholly lost from your point of view. That American has been arrested. If he isn’t jailed on charges of subversion, he will be thrown out.”

  He turned to me, dumbfounded.

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  “Just let’s say that I am giving you this information. And I would like some information in return.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tell me where she lives.”

  Vilém emitted a hollow squeak which I took to be laughter.

  “She lives here, in this place, which is mine.”

  “But when she is not here, as she plainly isn’t?”

  “You don’t understand, comrade. She forbade enquiry. I was to know nothing about her, nothing about the other guy, if there is one, nothing about anything save what she chooses to reveal. I knew about you, because of a few mistakes she made in the first days of her infatuation. Why the hell do you think I gave her this place? At least I have an address for her.”

  So Vilém’s case was worse than mine! I took small comfort from this knowledge, but as I turned to go, I said, “If I find out where she is, I will leave a note for you here.”

  He stared through me, and then cursed as I closed the door.

  My first thought was that she had fled to the house in Moravia, that I should go to look for her there to tell her about the arrests. But then I reflected that, if she had fled, it was because she already knew what was going to happen. She had fled from a disaster, of which I was a part.

  CHAPTER 30

  I WENT STRAIGHT from her room to the children’s hospital in Hradčany. My head was swimming with thoughts that I dared not confess to. I wanted the truth, whether or not I could live in it.

  The nurse who admitted me to the old house in the alleyway was neatly dressed, with a blue apron rimmed in white. She had grey startled eyes above shiny cheeks, and she allowed me to pass from the threshold with a slight genuflection that suggested a person in holy orders. Behind her was a screen of frosted glass, and in the distance, the noise of children, one crying, others babbling excitedly.

  When you enter such an institution in America and a person comes enquiringly forward, her first words are, “how can I help?” Helping the stranger, put
ting yourself from the get-go on the stranger’s side, those are the two great virtues of this place to which I have come. And they were more or less unknown in my country. The nurse recoiled from me, and when I told her that I was enquiring after one of her colleagues, who was a close relative, she pointed in silence to a door marked Ředitelka—Director—and quietly retreated behind the screen.

  The director, Mrs. Nováková, was a stern-looking matron of about fifty, sitting behind an empty desk and playing with a pencil on the pages of a newspaper. She seemed to fill in half of a crossword before reaching into a drawer of her desk and taking out a smudged old file containing the names of her employees.

  “You understand that they come and go,” Mrs. Nováková explained. “It’s not my job to keep track of them, only to clear up the mess when they’ve gone.”

  I noticed a dingy-looking woman, perhaps a secretary, who was shuffling papers at a desk in the rear of the office, her small hands unnaturally white against the greyish paper, like hands in a painting. Across her forehead fell a fringe of mousy hair, and her grey eyes were set in a round plain face that had an institutional air to it, as though it had been once issued to her by some authority and grown inseparable through constant use. I had the immediate impression that this woman, who was certainly much older than the director, represented the true spirit of the hospital, and that the director had been appointed to crush that spirit, and to ensure that the Party’s instructions were followed even in the matter of dying children.

  The director told me there was no one by the name of Palková employed either in the hospital or the internát attached to it. As I turned to go, I saw the little secretary get up quietly and slip out of a door at the back of the office. I lingered for a moment in the hallway, trying to find peace in the broken moldings of a rococo ceiling, on which were painted here and there the images of frightened-looking saints. I heard the cries of children, infrequent now and quickly extinguished, serving to emphasize all around me the troubled stillness of disease. The little secretary stood suddenly before me. She wore a metal cross, hanging over the plain grey dress that wrapped her from head to foot. She had the manner that I had come to associate with religious devotion, of placing herself right in front of you, like your own face in a mirror.