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Authors: Roger Scruton
Notes From Underground
NOTES
FROM
UNDERGROUND
FROM
UNDERGROUND
ROGER SCRUTON
Copyright © 2014 by Roger Scruton
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scruton, Roger.
  Underground notes / by Roger Scruton. âFirst Edition.
     pages cm
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-8253-0728-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
  1. Underground movementsâPrague (Czech Republic)â20th centuryâFiction. 2. CommunismâPrague (Czech Republic)â20th centuryâFiction. 3.  Prague (Czech Republic)â20th centuryâHistoryâFiction.  I. Title.
  PR6069.C78U53 2014
  823'.914âdc23
2013036890
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is a story about truth, but it is not a true story, and, with a few obvious exceptions, the characters involved in it are fictions. I have tried to evoke the atmosphere of Prague around 1985; in doing so, I have taken some topographical liberties, though incidental references to political and cultural realities are largely accurate. In reading Czech words you need only know that
Ä
is pronounced “ye”; that
Ä
,
Å
, Å¡,
Å¥
and ž are softened forms of those consonants; that accents lengthen the vowels over which they stand; that ch is a hard form of h, as in loch, while c is a soft “ts”; and that the stress falls almost always on the first syllable in any word. People are addressed in the vocative case, so Betka becomes Betko,
milá
Ä
ek
(darling) becomes
milá
Ä
ku
, etc. The initials StB were used to refer to the
Státnà bezpe
Ä
nost
, state security apparatus, or secret police.
The poem on p. 108 is my translation from Ivan Martin Jirous:
Magorovy labutà pÃsn
Ä
(The Swan-Songs of Magor), Prague, Torst, 2006, and I thank the publishers for their kind permission to make use of the original. I wish also to thank Barbara Day for constant information, insight and encouragement.
ROGER SCRUTON
Malmesbury, 2012
NOTES
FROM
UNDERGROUND
THE POLICE MUST
have been in our apartment for at least an hour when I arrived. Mother was standing in the kitchen, a large policeman blocking her passage to the room where we lived. Everything was in disarray: the drawers open, the beds unmade and pulled away from the wall, our few possessions piled on the table or pushed in little heaps into the corners. Two more policemen filled the living space. One was thumbing through our samizdat library with slow, patulous fingers. His face was sharp and white, with wisps of soft beard on his chin. The other, who was taking notes in an official-looking notebook with a black plastic cover, looked up as I entered, and I recognized the smooth-shaven officer who had taken my identity card on the bus. He took the card from his pocket, and handed it to me with a sarcastic curl of the lip.
“We don't need this now,” he said.
I looked at him in silence, and then at my mother.
“I told them the truth,” she said, and fastened her eyes on mine. Mother's eyes were dark, with a ring of shadow, and were the most striking feature in her slender face.
“About what?”
“About the typewriter, the paper, the coversâthat I took them without permission.”
Mother was a meek woman, who never raised her voice and did not easily meet another's gaze. But her reckless, almost joyful tone said more to me than all the quiet complaints against misfortune that she had uttered down the years. The chance had been offered to sacrifice herself. And in seizing it she was paying her moral debt to Dad. But her words and looks went through me like a knife. It was not she but I who had prepared this sacrifice: prepared it in those long months underground, when I had lived with purely imaginary companions, and forgotten the only real one. She turned to the smooth-faced officer and nodded, as though to indicate that, whatever had been done to disturb the moral order, she alone was to blame. The patched clothes of yellowish wool and cotton clung to her slim form like the fur of some dingy animal: they were part of her, the outgrowth over years of unceasing poverty. His clean grey-green uniform, with four brass buttons above a brown leather belt, wrapped his body like a banner. The smart green shirt and tie, the laced leather boots and brass-buttoned pockets, were the marks of a power that had no need to take note of this frail woman dressed in re-stitched rags and hand-me-downs. The sight filled me with anger and with fear.
“And who,” said the policeman, picking a volume from the table, “is this Comrade Underground, that Mr. Reichl was reading on the bus?”
“How should I know?” Mother answered quickly. “They come with their manuscripts, and I make them into books. They don't leave their names.”
“And of course they pay you, Soudružko Reichlová. Stealing property in socialist ownership, operating an unlicensed business, and possibly Article 98, subversion of the Republic in collusion with foreign powers. It doesn't look good.”
Mother stiffened, affecting what dignity she could.
“Nobody pays me; I do it for love,” she replied.
“For love!” the policeman repeated with a laugh.
He nodded to his large colleague who, taking the handcuffs from his belt, locked them quickly onto Mother's wrists. She blanched and stared before her, avoiding their eyes.
“We're taking her for interrogation,” the smooth-faced policeman said, addressing me. “At Bartolom
Ä
jská. We will probably need you tomorrow.”
They gathered up our library in a plastic sack, and took the books, the typewriter, and Mother too, to the car that was waiting outside. I stared at our desecrated room, and a kind of blankness came over me, as though the self, the I, the being identical with me, had been suddenly blown away and only scattered thoughts drifted here and there in my head like bits of paper in a windswept lot. And one little regret kept returning, which was that the last volume of
Rumors
had been lostâthe volume in which here and there I had pencilled, though so lightly that only I could read them, my thoughts for some future, official, fully-public edition.
AS THE AUTHOR
of
Rumors
, I was Soudruh AndroÅ¡, Comrade Underground, and it was how I thought of myself, almost forgetting at times that I was also Jan Reichl. The samizdat writers, the long-haired dissidents, the unofficial rock bands, the clandestine priestsâall belonged beneath the city, in a place where a forbidden life went on. We described that place with an English word, for English was a symbol of freedom. It was the “underground” haunted by the “underers,” the
androši
.
I was young then, the age when I should have been getting a university education, except that Dad had sacrificed my right to it. Not that he had done anything heroic, so far as we know. It was in the early 1970s, the time of “normalization” following the Soviet invasion of our country, and people were looking around for some quiet and unobtrusive way to understand what we had lost. Dad organized a reading group in our village, where he was headmaster of the school, and a few retired people would assemble each week to discuss the banished prophetsâDostoevsky, Kafka, Camusâwhose words they would ponder in search of an exit from
the maze. I was thirteen when my father was arrested. It was the last time I saw him, and he remains in my feelings as he was for me thenânot Father, but
Tati
, Dad.
There were loud noises in the middle of the night: Mother weeping, boots stamping on the stairway of the block where we lived. My sister, Ivana, and I slept in the sitting room, on a bed that was rolled up each morning to make room for the work table. We could see through the glass door into the tiny lobby, where Dad stood in his pajamas, his handcuffed wrists in front of him, his face white and frozen. He was found guilty of subversion in collaboration with a foreign power. We never knew which foreign power they had in mind. The power of literature, maybe. Or perhaps his reading parties were the cover for something more serious that they chose not to reveal. Anyway, he got five years hard labor. Three years on, we were told that a mine had collapsed, burying a dozen enemies of the people. Dad was one of them.
By that time we had moved to Prague. They had discovered a seam of coal under our village. They sold the village to a Hollywood movie company, to provide footage for B movies about the Second World War. Just two years ago, in a cinema in Washington, I saw one of them:
The Love Song of Captain Mendel
âabout a Jewish captain in the American army, on a private mission to rescue a family of Jews from the last train to Auschwitz. In the concluding battle you see the onion-dome of our church sway above the rooftops, bits of molding falling away, the Virgin in her niche suddenly breaking free and flying as though to save the child in her arms, and then the whole thing sliding down in a cloud of debris. In the background, the baroque palace that was my father's school springs apart like a firework, sending out shoots of stucco on long arms of dust. I went back to the cinema three times to watch it. On the third visit I took some of the students from my class on “Everyday life in Communist Europe.” I had intended to draw their attention to the battle
scene, to say, “Do you recall the church, the statue of the Virgin, the whole thing blown to smithereens? Well, that was my village.” But Jake said how cheesy the movie was; Meg wondered what the story had to with their course on International Relations; Alice dismissed Captain Mendel as a drip. I bought them pizza and, as they bandied about their cheerful opinions, recalled in silence those times of fear.