Notes From Underground (14 page)

“Kafka imagined the corridors leading nowhere, the doors painted on the walls, the floors that were thin ceilings over some other person's life. He was the guide to the labyrinth, and you paid him with sighs. But he told us nothing, nothing at all. It was all literature.”

She spoke with unusual vehemence, as though from some personal hurt. I searched my mind for a reply. But I found only the image of Dad, poring over Kafka's
Castle
, in preparation for one of his weekly meetings. The images of Dad's finger on the page, of his knitted brow and of the pencil held between his teeth, were objects now of an unbearable tenderness, and I could not speak. Betka was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms stretched along her thighs, her eyes fixed on the floor.

“Actually,” she went on, “nothingness has its attractions. You can buy it cheaply, and sell it at a high price. Sometimes I think that's what goes on in Rudolf's seminar. All this solidarity of the shattered, for instance. What does it mean?”

I was shocked by her words, which seemed like a denial of everything we shared.

“So why do you go there?” I asked.

“I wish I knew. Oh, but I do know. I go there because I love those people too. And yes, I want to learn. I want to see our situation as a whole, to complete it, to rescue it.”

In such a way she would always undo the effect of her cynical words, bringing me back to what mattered, which was the love that had its home in that room—the room where she didn't belong.

LOOKING BACK ACROSS
nearly a quarter of a century to those never-to-be recovered days of beauty and fear, I find no ready words to convey her way of being. Americans divided our people into three classes: the oppressors, the dissidents, and the silent majority. From this simple typology, which was all that Bob Heilbronn knew of our national fate, the reams of simplifying journalism flowed. But we were like people everywhere: we refused to be categorized. Each of us had his own way of breathing our poisoned air, so as to minimize its impact on his body. It was through reading and teaching that Dad had made the space in which to pass a form of human life to his children. For others it was music, poetry, country walks, or sport. From Betka I learned about the dissidents. But I also learned that she was not one. She had been a teenager during the years of normalization, and had watched with sympathetic detachment as her contemporaries joined the underground, singing and playing in the style of Frank Zappa or Paul McCartney, gathering in smoke-filled rooms to read poems, plays, and novels that were passed excitedly from hand to hand not for their merits but because
they were forbidden. It was the ambition of many young people then to defy the world with the stomping sound called
Bigboš.
But rock music had no appeal for her, and when, with the trial in 1976 of the Plastic People of the Universe, the regime issued its warning to the youth, Betka's life remained unaffected. For her there was only classical music, and, with a few carefully pondered exceptions such as the amateur bluegrass band in which she had once played the bass, and some smuggled records of the Beatles and Pink Floyd that she kept hidden under her desk, popular music was an offense to her ear. True, she had joined the Jazz Section of the Musicians' Union, through which the regime extended its protection to a “proletarian” art form associated, in earlier times, with communist ideas. But the Jazz Section had branched out, had expanded beyond its permitted maximum of 3,000 to 7,000 members, and had begun to publish texts that could never be issued by our official publishing houses, including the speech given by our national poet Jaroslav Seifert on receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. It had even issued Nietzsche's writings on Wagner that lay, stuffed with paper slips, beside Betka's bed. The regime had begun to move against the Jazz Section; and at the time I am describing, its leader, Karel Srp, was on trial for having kept the thing going as a clandestine network. Needless to say, Betka was part of that network; and also not part of it at all.

In those days of our love, the poet known as Magor, the madman, who had managed the Plastic People, was rolling his “swan songs” into cigarettes and smuggling them from his prison in Ostrov nad Oh
ř
í. The poems made their way to the West, and then back again in tiny cyclostyled editions. Betka obtained a copy, as she obtained her share of all things beautiful and good. She would set the verses to weeping melodies, in a kind of caricature of Dowland. When I first read those words in the tiny book, smuggled from Germany with its own magnifying glass inserted in the spine, they seemed slight:

How long, O God, must I still bear

To live in this unshifting care?

However long you wish to last

This old frustration, never past,

I'll patiently endure my fears

And humbly ask you in my prayers

At least that, when the whole thing's done

You'll place a poem on my tongue.

Yet, when Betka in her thin sweet voice sang the poem to a plangent tune of her own, and let her strange soul shine through the cracks between the words, I was overwhelmed. I heard the voice of my homeland. I was called to a primal experience of belonging, of which Betka was a part. The Plastic People too had sung words by Magor, but it was as though Betka had lifted these verses from the seedy frontier, where the long-haired youth of the seventies had staked its territory, and placed them in the very center of our nation as the common property of our people, the voice of their sufferings then and now and always. She taught me that the life of the dissidents was one small fragment of our world, and that things were changing too fast to remain locked in the griefs and conflicts of our parents. Our concern was to learn, to know the possibilities, and to seek out and destroy every kind of phoniness, including the excusable phoniness that had grown around the harsh privations of dissent.

Magor's real name was Ivan Martin Jirous, and he was an art historian by training. It was from his encounter with Václav Havel, Betka told me, that the movement to compose Charter 77 had begun. As a schoolgirl, Betka had been excited by the Charter, and by the fate of those few of her classmates whose parents had signed it, who in
consequence had lost, as I had lost, the chance of an education. Our faces had been brushed at that moment by the air from other planets, so she said. But then was then and now is now. Jirous, with his long hair, rude language, and belligerent hippie manner, was, for his contemporaries, the voice of youth. He wanted the Charter to have the impact that John Lennon had. He saw it as two fingers thrust in the face of the establishment. And yet it was not that at all. The Charter was, in Betka's view, a piece of half-baked philosophy, composed in the same Newspeak as the official protocols of the ruling Party, with its invocation of “progressive forces,” “human development,”
pokrok, vývoj
, and a hundred other dead words meaning progress and therefore nothing at all, like a speech on May Day. I nodded sadly, and thought of Dad.

“But you see,” she went on, “that was not Magor's idiom at all. He is not the kind to swap one lie for another, even if it took prison to wake him up to this. His swan songs are prayers, filled with the love of God and with contrition and repentance.”

I longed for the opportunity to discuss Mother's Bible, and the strange world of Father Pavel. Until now I had not dared, but she had made an opening and I took it.

“Do you believe?” I asked.

“Believe? In what?”

“In whatever it is that Christians hold sacred.”

“Oh yes, Honza, I hold many things sacred, like Magor. But I don't believe that God is a person, who watches over us, loves us, and is angry at our sins. I don't believe in the afterlife—one life is enough for me. When you hold something to be sacred then, as Sidonius says, there is a kind of faith that comes with it—a sense of infinite freedom, as though myriad worlds opened before you in the here and now. That's how I live, and it's how you should live too.”

“Show me how,” I begged.

“It can't be shown—you must discover it.”

“Where?”

“Here, silly. And now. What do you think is happening between us?”

“And who is this Sidonius?”

She took from her bag a volume written in Czech, entitled
An Invitation to Transcendence
. It was edited by Václav Havel and published by an exile press in England. She opened it to a chapter by Sidonius.

“That's not his real name, of course. He lives here in Prague. He might even have an official job, as an engineer or something. I'm not sure.”

I looked at her, aghast. It was as though she had been waiting for my enquiry, and come fully equipped with the things needed to deflect it: an illegal book, a pseudonymous author, an invitation to join in a life that had no explanation save Betka.

“How did you get hold of such a book?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders and made a puffing noise with her lips. “Don't ask.”

She handed it across, and I turned the pages. They were dense with religious ideas: God, Eternity, Transcendence, Being; the door that opens, when love appears, onto the bright garden of the present. And on the horizon, so many miraculous worlds! The words were Czech. But I could not understand them. I had asked her a simple question. And her answer had led me into labyrinths where I was lost without her guidance.

“Is this what you believe, Betka?”

“Half and half. Take away the Christian metaphysics, and the rest is truth. We live now or never. And God is another dimension in the now.”

So what, I asked, did she think of Father Pavel. She looked at me for a while before replying.

“Listen, Honza, there is a lot to learn from Pavel. But just be careful what you say to him.”

“Why? You're not implying…”

“Of course you can trust him. But just remember, he's a priest. He will want you to confess to him. That's his way of exerting power.”

“And why shouldn't I confess to him?”

She seized me by the wrists and looked hard into my eyes.

“Because your confessions are mine.”

Only later did I see the chasm from which she was holding me back.

THE FIRST WEEKS
of my new life moved fast. Sometimes I had the impression that they were happening to someone else, that I was sitting in a cinema, watching the adventures of a man caught up in events that lay beyond his comprehension. I went with Father Pavel to places that I had never imagined to exist; I met with people whom I believed to have been removed from history; I listened to music that could never be openly performed, and read books that could never be published. I sat in churches whose priests emerged from underground to whisper old and forbidden messages, and who disappeared at the end of the Mass like gnomes into hidden crevices. Father Pavel, like Betka, knew people with the keys to secret places. One member of his congregation was a builder, working on the apartment once owned by Kafka's parents, with a window set in the wall of the Church of our Lady before Týn. I stood at the place from which the young Kafka had watched Christians assemble and depart as though herded by spells, and a strange shiver of isolation came over me, as though I were peering into my tomb.

Father Pavel took me to other seminars—to those on Czech history by the bald and fussy František in his house on Kampa, and to those on theology in a dingy apartment in Nusle, where Igor Novák lived with his wife and six children. Igor was a grim, portly figure, with a wispy beard and a face obscured by lamp-like spectacles. He stood in the midst of the assembled listeners like a king among his courtiers, sometimes acknowledging their questions, more often pursuing long, slow rambling thoughts of his own. Everyone deferred to him, and no one more than his wife, who was always present and who would begin timid sentences with a smile, only to hand them over to him for their grim didactic conclusion. For Igor believed himself to be the voice of the nation. He referred often to the myth of P
ř
emysl, the plowman summoned to marry the princess Libuše and thereby to found the first dynasty of our kings. He compared his role as a dissident to that of the simple plowman, who brought the natural world and its truth into the castle of illusions. Igor and P
ř
emysl were both avatars of a higher purpose, sent to reprove us for our faults. We had not confessed to our history. We had denied our inheritance as the heart of Europe.

The Czechoslovak State, he told us, was a kind of mask worn by Czech society, and onto it was projected, as onto a movie screen, an entirely fictitious story, concocted elsewhere and without reference to the life behind the mask. That life was not the secular, materialistic routine that we were told to believe in, but a moral struggle imbued with the Holy Spirit, according to the hidden law of Europe, which was the law of the Gospel, embodied in a national idea. We must be true to that law, we must establish the alternative customs, laws, institutions, and social networks—and here he gestured widely to the room, while seeming only partly conscious of the people actually contained in it—in order to live as we should behind the mask.

As he pronounced his implacable verdicts, he stared fixedly into infinity. And I could not help noticing, since Betka had schooled me in this vital matter, that nothing in Igor's surroundings matched anything else. The brown leather chairs clashed with the pea green nylon cushions that sat on them; a dirty grey carpet with a zig-zag modern design supported an ornate Jugendstil desk edged with nickel. On top of the desk a grotesque modern lamp mounted on a slab of bottle-green glass stood beside a kitsch sculpture of the Virgin and Child. It was as though everything around Igor had washed up there, like garbage at the feet of some howling prophet on the shore. Yet this, too, was life. Looking round at the audience, several of them young like me, and all of them fixing the prophet with intent, expectant eyes, I felt a surge of amused joy. The parallel polis was built from garbage; but it was built by the imagination, and you could assemble it however you liked.