Notes From Underground (10 page)

But you could stand in the squares and streets of Prague and listen to the quiet noises of a city settling down: the lifting of a latch, the turning of a key in a lock; a window opening; the flapping of
curtains in a sudden breeze: the noises made by strangers as they retire, divided by thin partitions, and melt into a shifting silence. Those people sitting side by side in that ancient city probably never spoke to one another by day, or did so only in the cautious way that the Party required of them. At night, however, in the side-by-sideness of domesticity and of sleep, they seemed unconsciously to acknowledge their need, and to repair in secret ways the social bond that the machine tore apart each day. Betka and I stood for an hour or more in a street beside the Maltese church, listening to those noises, clinging to each other, each of us lost in secrets and in dreams. And when we reached the Malostranská Metro station, and she looked up to say that she would leave me there, I saw in her eyes not only anxiety, but also longing, and that longing was for me.

DURING THOSE WEEKS
that led from winter into spring, everything changed for me. I walked in the streets and parks as though belonging there, my eyes and mind now open to the world. I did not invent the lives of passersby, but allowed them to live with their secrets. I knew their fear and their resentment, and I sympathized. As I traveled underground I took no pleasure in exploring their weary faces and felt no need to prolong my daily journey. I turned up for work as before, and helped Mr. Krutský write his reports. But I did this with a lightness of heart, as though I were soon to be free of all such sublunary matters, lifted to the orbit where Rudolf and Betka circled among the stars.

Each Friday I attended the seminar, taking notes and asking questions. Rudolf had read
Rumors
, and when Betka explained their authorship, he began to treat me with a special regard. I was admitted to the privileged group of “pupils” who could borrow books from his library, signing for them in a notebook that was tied to a shelf by the door. I was allowed to call on him in the hour after
ob
ě
d
—the meal that divides the Czech day in two—and which he kept for his
special visitors. I would go there each Wednesday with my private questions and my little attempts at essays. I devoured the literature of the Austrian twilight: Rilke, Musil, Roth, and von Hofmannsthal. I dipped into the philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and the revered Pato
č
ka, trying to extract from them, though without much success, the messages that could guide me more firmly into the orbit that was Rudolf's. I read works of history, studied the controversy between Palacký and Peka
ř
, when they fought over the meaning of Czech history, in those days when our collective soul hung above us like a vision in the clouds. I read Zden
ě
k Kalista, who had spent many years in prison after the war, and whose writings were no longer published in our country. His posthumously collected essays on the
Face of The Baroque
, describing the twofold art that lifts time to eternity and summons eternity back into time, had just been published in Germany by an exile press. Rudolf had obtained a copy and generously lent it to me, along with his most precious possession, a samizdat journal—
St
ř
ední Evropa
, Central Europe—devoted to exploring the history and culture of our country and to showing that we are not what Mr. Chamberlain had said we were at the time of Munich, a far-away country of which the British know nothing, but the very heart of Europe.

I was amazed by what I read, for although I had sneered at our official history lessons in school, I had no knowledge of an alternative. To think of the baroque city not as a foreign incrustation, a veneer sprayed onto our Czech obstinacy from an aristocratic scent-bottle, but as the essence of what we are, to think of this fragile cake of crumbling stucco as the realized form of eternal meanings, to think of our folksy national revival as simply one manifestation of a central European consciousness that is rooted as much in Germany as in the territories settled by Hungarians and Slavs—to think such things caused an upheaval all the greater in that it reminded me guiltily of Dad. For all his hatred of what the Communists had done, Dad
believed the official myth concerning the Battle of the White Mountain. He believed that we had been enslaved in 1620 by a decadent aristocratic culture, and not been fully liberated from the German yoke until the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. And those old-fashioned beliefs, which I was discovering to be so much propaganda, endowed Dad's image with a special poignancy, since they were proof, in their own way, of his innocence. I shared my thoughts with Betka, who listened to my tales of Dad with a kindness that was something more than the kindness of a lover. In all her words to me she sought to lift me free from the darkness, to open my eyes to better and clearer things. And, in time, I understood what she meant when she said she was seeing how I blinked.

I began to explore my city, visiting the National Museum, the Castle Gallery, and the few churches that were open, studying maps and learning the names of the palaces and the stories of the great families—Lobkowicz, Sternberg, Wallenstein, Schwarzenberg—who had lived in them. And I began to identify with another Rudolf, the Emperor Rudolf II, who reigned from 1576 until 1611, and who had vainly attempted to conciliate the religious passions that would soon drag us into that Battle of the White Mountain and so replace one civilization with another. The Prague of Rudolf II was a place of religious tension; but it was home to art, science, and the patronage that supported them; it was a place where alchemists and chemists pursued their uneasy rivalry; where philosophy and magic, religion and sorcery, fed from each other's extravagances. Something of that time still lived in the city, seeping down into our catacombs across centuries of repudiation, even bypassing through some hidden capillaries the concrete barrier called Progress. Rudolf's empire was stolen from him; and his remedy was the very one that we had rediscovered, which was the life of the mind. And the world of spells over which he presided was with us still, handed down like the elixir that promised eternal life to Elena Makropoulos, and from which she
turned, at last, when she understood that it is the quality and not the quantity of life that counts.

During all this excitement, I felt the watchful presence of Betka in my life. Because she was, in her mysterious way, a part of me, I felt that I could not be harmed. Whatever they did, whatever went wrong for me, for Rudolf, for Mother—and we were all massively threatened, there could be no doubt of it—Betka's love would redeem it. That
this
had happened to
me
was enough. When she permitted, I would visit the little room in Smíchov and enter the enchanted world that we shared. I say “when she permitted,” for Betka lived, spiderlike, on a web of imperatives woven by herself. All our meetings began and ended with a command or a permission, and never could I presume at the end of one day that it was up to me to initiate the next. She was in control of everything; and yet, when I came to her, she welcomed me as her mistake,
moje chyba
, as though this very regime of commands had been torn asunder, and she had given up trying to repair it.

She would be waiting for me—not impatiently, since impatience was not her style, but with a heightened appetite for life. In some way I had rescued her from a routine that she could not confess to. She would open the door and immediately stand back from it, one foot slightly to one side like a ballerina, reaching behind me to close the door before swinging me into her arms. And she would repeat the words,
moje chyba
, adding some gentle explanation such as
dech podsv
ě
tí—
breath of the underworld—which was not an explanation at all but a delicate way of avoiding it. This delicacy was something that I loved in her: once admitted to her presence, I could be wholly myself, and nothing in her manner condemned me. Her gentle laugh, her beautiful glances and turns of phrase, all of which seemed directed to the corners of the room as though taking me in obliquely, so that I loomed at the edge of everything she saw, her fastidious way of arranging the desk or smoothing the bed, putting
herself so perfectly on display that often my desire for her could not be contained beyond the first few moments of greeting—all this so drove from my mind the old sense of isolation that I lived those hours in her room as though returning in triumph from an ordeal for which she and all her beauty were the reward.

We lay on that bed for whole afternoons, Betka rising from time to time to make tea in the little kitchen that lay tucked away behind the glazed partition at the back of the room, and I sometimes reading the books that I took from her shelves—exile press editions, some clumsily-bound copies of samizdat, and philosophical works in German and English. She showed me that it was possible to talk without fear of everything, to praise and condemn with total freedom, to explore in words all that was locked away and forbidden in reality—like those flies that dance on the crest of moving waters and are never wet. And always there was music: the heart-breaking quartets of Janá
č
ek, the songs and sonatas of Schubert, and also Betka's music, to which she devoted much of her time.

Since Dad's death, the only music I had encountered was that contained in his record collection—long-playing Supraphon records of the classics, with Smetana, Dvo
ř
ák, Fibich, and Janá
č
ek added as a sinful excess—sinful because personal to Dad and a distillation of his dreams. The records enhanced my apartness. The Czech masters in particular spoke of another world, a natural world, in which human beings rose from the soil like plants and, dying, left their fossilized traces. The art and music of our national revival spoke of homecoming and mother's love, because those things were more fully longed-for then, when they were being shaped not as disappointments but as promises. But there was no consolation in this music: to connect to that vanished world was impossible, just as it was impossible, now, to disappear. The young man in Janá
č
ek's
Diary of One Who Disappeared
enjoyed a freedom that we lacked, the freedom to go about the world unobserved. You could not disappear;
you could only hide, as I had hidden belowground. And then, when I was brought suddenly to the light by Betka, I appreciated all that old music in another way, not as mine but as Dad's.

Music was Betka's first love, the only one of her loves that she ingenuously displayed to me. And her music was curiously interwoven with her life, in a way that I had not imagined to be possible. The musical instrument that leaned in its black morocco case against the wall was a theorbo, a kind of bass lute, and Betka described the ensemble to which she belonged with a peculiar sweetness, as though unwrapping something precious. For her, the music of the sixteenth century, of the Prague of Rudolf II and the England of Elizabeth, had a purity that cleaned her spirit as she played. She sang Moravian folk songs too, and her own poignant melodies, accompanying herself on the theorbo with a few simple chords. Her voice was thin and clear, and seemed to sound somewhere inside me like a memory of childhood. She promised to take me to one of her private concerts, and to introduce me to the leader of her little ensemble, the very Vilém whose name I already knew, for whom she was collecting music, and who, she one day confided to me, though with a peculiar hesitation as though confessing to something illicit, was the true owner of the room where we met.

“Then you are lovers?” I cried, as the blade touched my heart.

“Foolish man!”

“Well?”

“Have you not heard of friendship?”

And she turned her head from me and would not speak until I had asked her to forgive me. It crossed my mind that I had never asked forgiveness of anyone in my whole life before, and I was troubled by this. And then she kissed me and changed the subject.

She spoke slowly to me, as though to a child. Once, she said, “You cannot hurry with words, otherwise you drop them and they break.” Her language was correct, almost old-fashioned, as though she had
learned it from books and not from people. And it is true that, while she was surrounded by people, far more people than I had believed it was possible to know without arousing suspicion, they all occurred on the edge of her life, as though held back by an invisible barrier, where they stood waiting like patients in a surgery or litigants in a court of law. And they were unusual people, too, each with a key to some inner room in Kafka's castle. One of them is important in what follows, and I must describe him now.

Pavel Havránek was an ordained priest of the Catholic Church, who had been banned by the Ministry of Culture's Religious Affairs Department on account of an article he had written, published abroad, about Pacem in Terris, the organization of disloyal and compromised priests through which the Party controlled the Catholic Church. Pacem in Terris had been proscribed by the Vatican in 1982, three years before the events that I am describing. It was Father Pavel who had sat next to Betka on my first visit to Rudolf's seminar, wearing the smudged clothes from his day-time job as a mechanic, and also the cross of his vocation. He came each week, and Betka would smile at him and stroke his arm, though without making any effort to introduce us. It was on my third visit to the seminar, when for some reason Betka had left early, indicating with a silent glance that I was not to follow her, that I fell in with Father Pavel. I was walking away from Rudolf's apartment towards the Vltavská Metro station when he came up beside me and began to talk. He spoke softly and slowly, with a Moravian accent.

“Rudolf tells me that you are Soudruh AndroÅ¡,” he said. I replied with a nod.

“The book meant a lot to me. It was like a door into the underworld, where the silent bodies lie. It gave me such hope.”