Notes From Underground (15 page)

Afterwards I wanted to share the thought with Father Pavel, and suggested we go for a beer. But he looked serious and preoccupied, refusing my invitation and looking askance at my laughter. After a while I began to understand that amusement did not have much meaning for those who were living in truth. Betka was satirical, yes. But she was a thing apart, more an observer than a participant, and she kept her amusement for me. If I made a joke in Rudolf's seminar, he would stare at me for a moment, from that place behind his eyes where the machine was kept, and then emit a sudden jagged laugh, like the high-pitched clatter of a xylophone. Only one of my new acquaintances saw what was truly risible in communism, and he kept away from the seminars in a secret world of his own.

Betka and I had been reading a samizdat journal—
Literární sborník
—which she was allowed to keep only for a couple of days. She sat at her desk taking notes, and then handed it to me, saying “read this article.” The author wrote under the name of Petr Pius, and his theme was the language of communism. He gave a hundred
examples, from Marx and Lenin to the editorials of
Rudé právo
and the speeches of Comrade Husák, showing the deep syntax of our torment. Substantives were demoted to verbs, and verbs made fluid and directionless; concrete realities were vaporized into abstractions, and the whole set into a kind of demonic motion, with “historical forces” and “progressive elements” swirling one way, and “reactionary elements” and “ideological forces” swirling the other. The writer showed that the torment of Czech society was not imposed by the Evil Empire but by language. We lived under a regime of nonsense, and our sufferings were concocted in the looking glass by the faces that stared at us from there.

“Who is this man?” I asked.

“You will meet him,” she replied. “Today.”

“Oh?”

“I have to go to work now, so I want you to return this to Petr Pius. You will find him in the boiler room of the Na FrantiÅ¡ku hospital. I was due to be there at five o'clock prompt. That is when you must knock on his door. Don't speak, but give him this note from me.”

She described the door at the bottom of some steps that led down from the street, and handed me the note of introduction. I set off in a state of high excitement, not just because I was to meet the man who had made sudden sense of things for me, but also because Betka was trusting me as a go-between, and allowing me for the first time on equal terms into the life that she kept to herself.

“By the way,” she said as I left. “His name is not Petr Pius but Ivan Pospíchal, and you should call him Karel.”

In reality I had no opportunity to call him anything. The person who came to the metal door in answer to my knocking was tall, slightly stooped, with a thick beard in which he twined his fingers. He stared at me for a moment, and then took the note that I held out to him. When he raised his eyes to me again it was with an amused but distant look. The high collar of his white shirt framed
his face like a ruff, giving the impression of a seventeenth-century portrait. In his hand was a cigar, and throughout our meeting he smoked, taking a new cigar from his pocket whenever the old one faltered. From the effect of this habit, his teeth were black and scaly like old tombstones.

He looked left and right along the street to see whether I was being followed. Then he ushered me quickly across the threshold into an antechamber containing a broom and a few buckets, and from there into fairyland, which took the form of a large square room, the walls of which were covered in pictures. There were wilting ladies in florid hats; saccharine Madonnas with pneumatic breasts; amorous hussars winking suggestively; doe-eyed children with bare bottoms and pom-poms in their hair. Buxom mermaids offered glasses of frothy beer, fey Rusalkas emerged from their lakes in carefully-ironed crinoline, merry gnomes sang around their tavern tables with tankards raised in salutation, Red Army soldiers thrust their bayonets into the future blessed by the ghost of Stalin in the clouds. I was surrounded by every possible form of kitsch lovingly mounted in gilded frames. Against one wall stood an upright piano, on which were sepia-toned photographs of once-loved people, mounted in padded silk. In a display cabinet fixed to the wall was an array of plaster-cast gnomes and pixies in lurid purples and greens, beside a busty milkmaid in Mucha-style gold and brown.

There were a few slits of glass set high up in the walls at street level. But most of the thick, curdled light in the room came from table lamps, with gold shades mounted on the heads of pink porcelain poodles, and a flame of glass held aloft by a
Rosenkavalier
negro. One of the poodles stood on a desk upon which lay a neat pile of papers beside an old-fashioned fountain pen, of the kind that I had seen on that fateful day. Next to the desk was a bookcase containing the bound volumes of a serious scholar's library. For Karel had been a professor of philology before his expulsion from the university, and
regarded his present employment as affording an ideal refuge for his “editorial work.” He was making a study of falsehood: false theories, false opinions, false sentiments, false loves, and false hatreds, all of which had the capacity to colonize the human soul and turn it into the mocking mirror by which he was surrounded. There are things, he explained, which in their true form cannot be bought and sold: love, honor, duty, sacrifice. But if we wish to buy and sell them nevertheless, we have to construct soft fairyland versions of them. That, he said, is the meaning of kitsch: it is the representation, in a world of falsehood, of ideals that we once had in the world of truth. All this culminates in communism, which is kitsch of a new kind: kitsch with teeth. And with that judgment, he held the cigar away from his mouth and laughed a conclusive laugh, as though there were nothing more to be said.

It was strange and flattering to be spoken to by such an exotic character, although I put his loquacity down to his isolation in this Aladdin's cave, rather than to any feature of myself that could have sparked his interest. He responded to all my questions with a kind of scholarly precision, offering his judgments of our society and culture as though they were the judgments of some visiting anthropologist, testing his theories against the strangest of facts. He had an expert knowledge of what he called the First Church of Marx Scientist—by which he meant the post-war years when we Czechs were told that we were “building socialism.” The main thing we built, he said, was kitsch monuments, while our national assets were being forcibly transferred to the Soviet Union.

For Karel, no sign of the cultural degradation of those times was more eloquent than its music and, at my request, he sat at the piano to play some of the Red Army marches that he had heard as a school-child during the 1950s: “White Army, Black Baron,” “The March of Stalin's Artillery,” and “The Battle Is On Again.” Every once in a while he would put his cigar in the ashtray on his desk, take a pair of
grey overalls from the hook beside an inner door, cover himself with these, and then go through to an adjoining room to feed coke into the boiler that was housed there.

Karel clearly regarded all clothes as provisional, to be changed at once as the situation evolved. At one point, he paused to take a long redingote in dark blue velvet from a closet set in the wall. Dressed in this music-hall costume, he accompanied himself in the song composed by Radim Drejsl for the First Church of Marx Scientist, Czechoslovak branch:
Za Gottwalda vp
ř
ed
, “Forward with Gottwald,” which he sang in a high caressing tenor. The effect was so ludicrous that I found myself curled up in laughter on a broken-springed sofa, clutching in my merriment the batting-eyed doll in frilly underwear that occupied one of its corners.

I asked Karel why I never saw him at Rudolf's seminar. Surely he could make an important contribution, of which we all stood in need?

“Seminars are good,” he replied, leaning his head sideways towards his cupped right hand, as if to decant his eyes into it. “Good too are the protests and petitions, the exile presses.
Et cetera.
But I work in another way. I look for the right words, which are also the wrong words. The forbidden words: words with the shape of the things they describe. I must work in my own way, in my own space.”

“But when you have discovered those words, what do you do with them?”

“I shake them, ferment them, distill them. And sometimes, when they have lain on the desk long enough and taken on the aroma of old maplewood, I publish them.”

“How is that possible?”

He looked at me in an amused way and pointed to the volume of
Literární sborník.

“Like that,” he said. “Though it's not so easy now. My contact at the paper factory was arrested.”

I almost resented Mother, that her image and her fate came always like a cloud across my new excitements, reminding me that I was entitled to nothing until the debt of guilt was paid. But I decided to conceal the connection and asked Karel instead how he had got to know Betka.

“Alžb
ě
ta? I know her hardly at all. Only once she came here, with her friend Vilém. I asked him round to tune the piano. An odd character, and not to be trusted, I should say. Are you to be trusted?”

He shot me a mock-accusing look, and then went back to the piano, sitting down to leaf through the old volume of Drejsl's
Budovatelské písn
ě
—songs for the building of socialism.

“Whom do you mean,” I asked anxiously. “Vilém or Alžb
ě
ta?”

“Distrust was built in to the system from the beginning,” he said, ignoring my question. “The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is ‘Kill all liars!' That's what they did to this guy, Radim Drejsl, who came back from the Soviet Union with an odd desire to tell unofficial lies of his own. He ended up on the pavement, five floors below his apartment. In those days you went forward with Gottwald through the nearest window.”

And with a cheerful laugh he put down the cigar and launched himself again into song.

Karel's way of conversing was to package each topic in precise satirical sentences and then move on. So I never learned whether it was Vilém or Betka whom he judged to be untrustworthy. At the same time, in all his talk and actions, something eminently human beaconed from Karel's eye. In this he was totally unlike Rudolf or Igor, or the people whom I met at their seminars, all of whom, when challenged by some pleasantry, greeted it with a hunted look, as though some secret part of themselves must be at once protected.

When, during the days of that never-to-be-forgotten spring, I visited Karel, it was at an appointed hour, and only, at his insistence,
after walking twice around the block to see that I was not being followed. Sometimes I would bring a copy of
Rudé právo
so that he could analyze the editorial Newspeak, and always I would hope for a recital of those songs which told me that “Lenin is young again, and a new October comes,” or that “From the wild forests to the British seas, Red Army is best!” Karel regarded all political opinions with irony and all political actions with disdain. He belonged to no dissident circle but enjoyed an ordinary life at home with his wife and son as well as a magic life of kitsch in the world that he had created underground.

One day I discovered a framed poster showing the profile of Gottwald emerging from those of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin in the sky over Prague. Someone had thrown it into my bin at the Husovy sady. I cleaned it and took it as a gift to Karel, who greeted it with a rendition of
Za Gottwalda vp
ř
ed
and hung it delightedly above his desk. I felt as though I had passed the highest test in discrimination, and could now address him as an equal.

It was not only because he amused me that I spent time with Karel—though God knows amusement was welcome then. He taught me to understand things in a new way. Words, for Karel, were not the servants of things but their masters: they arrange and rearrange the world. In Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, language had been doctored so that only the official opinions could be expressed in it. Something like this, Karel argued, had happened to us. The official literature, the official press, even the news on television, deployed a small vocabulary of reliable words, and a syntax permitting only their reliable combinations. People appeared in this discourse not as freely-choosing individuals but as abstractions, through which impersonal forces “struggle” for domination. The forces of progress were bound to win, and the forces of reaction to be defeated. Meanwhile, it was important to fuse the permitted words into bundles, so as to block the doors through which reality might enter. Hence
“reactionary” went always with “bourgeois,” “imperialist” and “Zionist,” the last allowing a permitted note of anti-Semitism; “progressive” was invariably tied up with “proletarian,” “fraternal,” and “internationalist.” Our “society” was “building socialism,” and meanwhile living in a condition of “actual socialism” that in some way anticipated the heroic goal. And what, Karel asked, did this word “actual” mean? Just the sediment that sinks to the bottom, when the jar of possibilities has been stirred.

The abuse of words upon which our official doctrine depended was already prefigured in the sacred texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible. And he compared Newspeak to kitsch, the purpose of which is to destroy the distinction between true and false sentiment, so as to remove emotion from reality and invest it in a world of fantasy, where nothing has a value, though everything has a price.