Notes From Underground (18 page)

I sat in silence for a while, Betka stroking my hand and trying to capture my eyes. When I looked up, it was with the question that had troubled me from the first.

“Where do you live, Betka?”

“Here, as you know.”

“I mean, where do you
really
live? Where do you go, for instance, when you leave your work?”

“Usually I come back here. In the early hours. Why?”

“I don't say that there's
someone
else. But there's
somewhere
else, I am sure of it.”

She gave me a quizzical look, and then suddenly dropped my hand.

“OK, there
is
somewhere else, the place where I
really
am, and I'm going to take you there. Satisfied?”

“Where is it?”

“A long way from here.”

She looked at me reproachfully and got up. Her way of changing shape, from standing to sitting or sitting to standing, had a fluidity and expertise that seemed to condemn my awkwardness. It was as though she were saying, “see, I belong to the real world; and you are just a boy.” The tears sprang to my eyes as I watched her.

“Don't you see that I belong to you?” I said.

The blood drained from her face as though my words had frightened her. And she dropped down again beside me and buried her head in my breast.

“Oh Honza, my Honza, you are mine; entirely mine. Entirely my mistake.”

And my shirt was damp with her tears.

IT WAS AFTER
this exchange that she decided to reward my love. It was spring, the May Day Parade was about to take place in Prague, a lugubrious time when the people of the city are displayed in all their disgrace, like a conquered army paraded in chains. I had permission for a few days off work, and Betka proposed that she take me to the place where she
really
lived, about which I was to ask no questions until the moment when we arrived there.

Anticipating this event, we were quiet and meek together. I came and went as she instructed; I brought my questions, my reading, and my love to her; and I learned from everything she did. I had received a parcel permit from Ruzyn
ě
, and Betka bought and packaged everything as though already familiar with the task. She insisted that Mother, who did not smoke, would nevertheless need cigarettes to barter, that toilet paper, hand cream, soap, and shampoo were essential, that chocolates filled with strong liqueurs were a hundred times better than the plain variety, that smoked ham and sausage were more precious than sweets. And she had a tender way of wrapping these things and folding them into the cardboard box, as though she
were remembering someone dear for whom she had once performed this service.

The day came for our excursion. Betka had arranged to meet me at the main station, where we were to take a train to Pardubice, and then another to
Č
eská T
ř
ebová, where we would change again. I awoke that morning in a state of high excitement like a child at Christmas. I even looked in our little wardrobe for a suit of clothes that would be smarter than my usual green canvas jacket and cotton trousers, as though I were to be presented as a fiancé. I found the old suit of Dad's that we had been keeping for the day of his release, and which was crumpled now and moth-eaten. I put it on, along with a clean shirt and tie, and packed my rough clothes in a hold-all that had also been his.

Betka was standing by the ticket office, fresh and beautiful in a pair of white slacks and a pale green woolen coat. She came to me, rubbed my upper arm affectionately, and pressed a ticket into my hand. She did not speak as she led me to the platform and installed me on the train. Her movements and gestures were imbued with an unusual gravity, as though she were performing a ceremony, a rite of passage into another mode of being.

I have often tried, and always in vain, to explain to Americans what a real train journey is. Although the tracks of our railways had hardly been repaired since they were first laid during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, none had been destroyed by war, and all were used in a country where rail was still the most important form of transport. Our trains were dirty and smelled of diesel oil. They moved slowly and cautiously along tracks that were often buckled, or perched on adverse bends. They crept beside winding rivers and along the edges of cliffs; they groaned up steep inclines and sang out metaled chords in the valleys. They dropped and took up their passengers in every conceivable place: among the concrete towers of industrial suburbs and in the overgrown parks of ancient castles; in sore red villages
amid collective farms and in the centers of cathedral cities; in hectic junctions among mineworks and factories, and by lonely forresters cottages shrouded by trees. There was hardly a human habitation in our country that could not be reached by rail and, as you changed down from branch-line to branch-line, the journey became steadily slower, more intimate, more interspersed with domestic glimpses and confidential scenes.

I write that now. But it was not what I felt on that day twenty years ago. Mother and I had sometimes taken the train to Brandýs, to visit Ivana. But that had happened in my underground days, when I was seeing only masks and striving to fill them from the sterile source inside. Now I sat opposite the silent Betka, whose grave eyes sometimes crossed mine with a solemn look, and who sat perfectly still, with her hands folded on the little
tele—
the wanderer's rucksack of those days—that contained, I discovered, only her nightdress, some papers, and a book of Erben's folk-tales.

There was no one else in the carriage, but we did not talk. The train crossed the river and slid through the first suburbs. There followed a ring of weekend gardens, and the scattered factories on the edge of Prague. I peered intently from the window. I was seeing a country that I had never known, a place outside time, outside the reach of the will, an unowned place from which the indigenous gods had retreated. The fields had no edges, and the bald patches among the green stalks of corn were like wounds inflicted by some giant hand. The crops changed from corn to beans and back again without any barrier, and wherever the fields were planted nothing relieved the green save the occasional cluster of poppies, which stained it like a hemorrhage. There were no animals, no people, and the distant villages with their red roofs piled up against the onion-domed churches had an abandoned look, as though killed off by plague. At one point we passed a small town of tower blocks, with pastel-colored slabs set into their sides, and a cemetery of black sculpted marble: nothing
else—not even a church or a street. And in the background were bare hills, without trees or grass or bushes, the soil scraped from their surface, leaving only a greyish-white scree.

Every now and then a factory stood amid the fields, motionless, unvisited, forlorn, and bearing some slogan in giant letters on its roof. Unfinished blocks of concrete stood fixed in their final postures, the rusting cranes poised above them in the interrupted gesture of their death. I recall a modernist structure of tubular steel, with broken windows hanging from its metal limbs, and along its flat roof a sign in yellow letters on a red background: “A peaceful life, the socialist program!” Here and there were piles of hay and silage, shoveled up anyhow, rotting and black beneath their dirty yellow crowns. And long lines of trellises had been installed on the crests of the hills, in an effort to retain the soil against the wind and the rain. It was a landscape whose face had been eaten away, which turned its eyeless contours to the sun like a burnt out leper on his deathbed.

After Pardubice, however, the country began to change. The patches of woodland grew larger, the hills struggled free from the valleys, and the villages that rose on their sides were more compact and self-contained, as though growing from the churches in their midst. Only the grey concrete blocks, dropped at random and smashing the narrow alleyways, told of the power forbidding the old way of life that had here been inscribed in stucco and stone.

From
Č
eská T
ř
ebová we took a local train, following the path of rivers and gorges, stopping at tiny hamlets where chickens ran in the yards, and snaking through dark woods like a predator stalking its quarry. The still-silent Betka took a packet of sandwiches from her rucksack and spread them on the table that we shared. It was the first meal that she had prepared for me, and she had taken care over it, including what were at the time rare delicacies: smoked carp, bantams' eggs, and fine Spanish ham. She watched me as I ate, with a
motherly smile that seemed to match the intimate scenes that passed our window—scenes of settlement and belonging that I had not imagined, in our dispossessed world, to be possible. And when the train stopped at a little place called Lukavice on the Morava, Betka, who had packed everything away in her rucksack, reached across the table to take my hand and guide me like a child onto the platform.

From Lukavice we took a bus to the village of Krchleby, from where we were to walk to our destination. All my suspicions had been blown away by our journey. Now I trusted Betka completely—trusted her to lead me in the way of truth, which was to unite us in this moment and forever. She held my hand as we walked through the village. We passed a chapel of ochre-colored stucco, where a rococo angel spread its wings over a belfry above the porch. Betka tried the door, but it was locked. And then, to my surprise, she crossed herself before walking on. She led me to a single story house at the edge of the forest, and held me back as the door opened to her knock to reveal a little old woman dressed in a voluminous collection of potato-colored skirts, the lappets of a pale blue cap hanging on either shoulder like the headdress of a sphinx. Her small blue eyes sparkled as she cried out with delight.

“
B
ě
tuško! Moje milá, milou
č
ká, dušine
č
ko moje
…”

The endearments emerged from one another like Russian matryoshka dolls, each more diminutive, more tender than the last. Betka kissed the old woman on her smooth pink cheeks and introduced her as Mrs. N
ě
mcová, and me as Jan Reichl, a friend from Prague. We were made to sit down in a tiny parlor on a pair of low wooden chairs piled with woven cushions. A low ceiling of yellowing whitewash crowned the smoke-smeared walls. Photographs of weddings and children cluttered the shallow mantelpiece above an iron stove, and older photographs hung in ornate frames on the walls, showing bearded men in uniform, and women with starched collars and widow's weeds. Mrs. N
ě
mcová went to and fro through a low
paneled door, bringing coffee, apple juice, and sweet plum dumplings, talking of the pig who had died in February, of the chickens that had been eaten by a fox last Thursday, of the marrows that still had not flowered, and the local council's decision to exclude her from the half acre that she “borrowed” from the collective farm. Every now and then she would interrupt her flow of words to bestow a kiss on Betka and to compliment her on her health or looks. And a kind of wonder spread through me, that I, Comrade Underground, could fall like this into a nineteenth-century fairy tale.

I sat in that darkened room, practicing Father Pavel's gymnastics of attention, focusing on the armchairs—squat little goblins bursting with horsehair—on the heavy sideboard of oak with its bronze-edged top and, through its glass doors, on the carefully arranged china, as precious to Mrs. N
ě
mcová as it was surely worthless to the world. The hum of soft words was the soundtrack of a film, and I was the camera that shot out meanings like an archer. Betka had said nothing to explain Mrs. N
ě
mcová, or to put this little cottage in any other context than the one that it declared. But it was enough for me that I stood near the source of Betka's life, sending arrows of attention into the pool that had produced her.

The bond between Betka and Mrs. N
ě
mcová was not one of affection only. In exchange for fifty crowns, the old woman provided us with bread, cheese, eggs, and sausage, and sent us on our way with a smiling sense of benefits received as well as given. We took a stony track along the forest rim. To our right, the collective farm spread to the near horizon, and under the wrinkled fields were the little bumps of vanished buildings, like crumbs beneath a tablecloth. Fences stood rotting among the weeds, and every hundred yards or so we would come across a stable, a sheep pen, a pigsty, crumbling to a heap and overgrown with nettles. At one point we passed a dilapidated farmhouse standing among broken-down sheds. The windows were hanging from their frames and a beech tree, rooted somewhere
within its walls, rose with outspread arms like an escaping ghost above the roof tiles.

We came to a fork in the track, marked by a cross of stone, on which the dying Jesus hung above a jar of dried flowers. His face was long, thin, lined by suffering, and the pointed chin seemed to bury itself in his chest like an axe. It was not a work of art; but the sculptor had portrayed in Christ the human archetype as he knew it. And that archetype was German. On a tablet of stone at the foot of the cross was written in Gothic letters:
Vater, vergib ihnen. Sie wissen nicht, was sie tun
, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—words from St. Luke's gospel, spoken over fusty guitar chords by Magor, at one of those village concerts by the Plastic People of which Betka possessed the tapes.

“Look,” she said, and nodded towards the landscape before us. We stood on a hillock, the horizon rimmed by forest. Here and there a ruined farmhouse stood in an apron of trees, and the fields bore wide scars where the banks had been flattened and plowed. Those old boundaries of earth and piled-up stone, which divided owner from owner, had protected both the people and the land that they had settled; facing this skull-like vista of mud and clay, I could not escape the feeling that the communist war on property and on the
Å¡k
ů
dci
—the pests—who owned it had been, in every sense, a war on the soil. The hills were crisscrossed by tracks like the one on which we stood and a few stone crosses still punctuated the fields, spreading long afternoon shadows like defensive hands. But those crosses, I saw, were rooted in another ground, which lay below the surface, packed with the God-fearing dead.