Notes From Underground (19 page)

“Do you understand?” she asked. She turned to me with the serious expression that summoned my discipleship.

“Perhaps I do,” I replied, and we walked on. The path took us through weed-filled orchards where apples and plums ran wild. To our left stood abandoned houses, their whitewash stained to grey, scabs
of brickwork showing through the fallen stucco. Here and there were broken pedestals, on which stone saints bore witness to vanished joys.

She began to speak to me, for the first time that day, in a voice both urgent and tender, as though imparting a vital lesson to a child.

“You see,” she said, “God laid his hand on these fields, and it lies there invisibly. No human being has been able to lift that hand. All we can do is cover it with rubbish. For these fields are not ours. Those who consecrated them were driven out, but without relinquishing their spiritual claim. Some, when the witch-hunts began, preferred to kill themselves rather than abandon the place that God had given them. This place is home to me. But it is a home that was stolen from the people who made it. That is the story of my life, and the story, too, of yours, if you don't mind me saying.”

She took my arm and pressed against me as we walked. Her words troubled me. I knew about the Czech Germans, about Gottwald's call for retribution against them—not just for the Nazi occupation, but for the Battle of the White Mountain, when the old Czech nation was destroyed—and about their expulsion from their homes. But now I was glimpsing, beneath the willful desecration, the consecrated place that they had made. Those people, who clung in bad times to their inherited way of life, and who were punished for their mistake in doing so, had made a place in which tranquillity and piety achieved such concrete and visible form that not even Gottwald and his thugs had been able to wipe them entirely away. Betka showed me chapels hidden among weeds and creepers, carved milestones along forest paths, and in one place stations of the cross, leading through impassable bushes to some hidden place of pilgrimage. Her words, at once so precise and so gentle, seemed not to describe but to address the things they touched, like invocations of the dead. Somehow, she made this devastated country speak more directly to those old longings for the homeland, for the
domov m
ů
j
of our national anthem, than any landscape made by Czechs.
Of course, as Karel would remind me, the
domov
had been hidden under socialist kitsch; for him, this landscape would be part of the never-ending black joke of communism. But for Betka it was not so. For the first time since Dad's arrest, I had a vision of home, and it was a home that she conjured from a ruined way of life and a pillaged countryside.

We came to a place where small fields had been allocated to individual families by the collective farm. The fences had been mended and the meadows kept for hay. Wildflowers grew amid the grass, and their many-colored heads waved in the evening breeze. Betka told me their names—
kokrhel, chrpa, Å¡
Å¥
ovík
, yellow rattle, knapweed, sorrel dock, as my dictionary tells me—and another, with rose-pink serrated petals,
slzi
č
ky panenky Marie
, “tears of Our Lady Mary,” for which I can find no English name. She pointed to some cottages, recounting the story of those who lived there—people who had kept their heads down, and enjoyed for whatever reason the gift of stolen property. And then we came to a copse of trees beside the track. A steep path rose towards double doors, set in an arch flanked by walls of stone. A stone medallion had been carved into the arch: it showed the Virgin and Child, with the words
bitte für Uns
in Gothic script beneath it. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

I recalled a conversation with Father Pavel. You don't have to believe in life after death, he said, in order to utter that prayer with conviction. Watching Betka as she took a big iron key from her rucksack and turned it in the lock of the double door, I knew what he meant. All time is now; and where there is love both life and death move in love's shadow.

“This,” she said, turning to me, “is my home. And you are the first man I have brought here. The only man I shall ever bring here.”

She kissed me gravely and took me by the hand. We entered a horseshoe-shaped courtyard enclosed by sheds of stone. On one side
were low stalls fronted by an earthenware trough; this, Betka told me, was where the pigs had lived. On the other side was a stable with a divided door, and a large stall for cows with partitions and mangers. Inside the doors, and to either side of them, were huts for ducks and chickens, and in the center, surrounded by a walkway of flagstones, was a deep pit—the dung-heap that had warmed the farm in winter and which was spread on the land each spring. At the back, overlooking this autarkic kingdom, was the house, a single story of rubble and plaster, from which a chimney reached skywards above a roof of tiles.

We entered through a low door and were immediately in the central parlor. The room was built around a tiled woodstove, surmounted by a platform on which the family had slept in winter. To one side of the stove stood an old-fashioned kitchen dresser. To the other side were a table and chairs of oak. The facing corners harbored two low beds under cheerful cushions, and above them mullioned windows set in deep white-washed walls. The panes were framed by old gingham curtains, giving the appearance of a girl's bonnet around an unblemished face. The light that entered was filtered and uncertain, strangely reminiscent of the damp smells of the forest, not picking things out but settling everywhere like a mist. Oil lamps stood on bedside tables, and against one wall was a roughly carved cabinet with cloth-bound books in German and Czech. A nineteenth-century painting hung above it, showing a woman with rosy cheeks framed by a high starched collar above a buttoned dress. Opposite stood an upright piano against the wall. Janá
č
ek's collection of Moravian folk songs was propped open above the keys and on the wall behind it was a plaster Calvary on a carved wooden mount. The dresser contained bowls and platters, tureens and skillets, instruments of brass and iron from another more diligent, more penurious, and more pious age, when every object had a precise function that explained it, and every function
was organically linked to the business of survival. These things, once valued as means, lived on as ends, basking in their own once-functional nature. The whole effect of the room was of a shrine maintained, with impeccable taste, to a life that had gone.

My eyes were caught by an old desk beneath one of the windows. It was of plain brown wood, with a blotter and a grey marble inkwell. Next to the inkwell was a cast iron bottle opener, an old matchbox full of paper clips, and a neat row of fountain pens with brass levers for filling the rubber tubes within. I recalled another fountain pen in a white hand, the same hand that had clutched the leather strap on the bus to Divoká Šárka. But none of the pens that lay unused and collected on the desk had the distinctive navy blue marbling that I remembered. A kind of mist descended on my thoughts. For a moment I did not know who it was that shared this room with me.

I turned to look at her. She had taken off her jacket. Her sky blue shirt and slacks, her medallion profile, her long neck from which the brown hair was raised in a bun, and her pale and peaceful hands as they took possession of the things around, all added to the stillness. She was an exhibit, neat, self-contained, and beautiful as the place where she stood.

She told me to sit while she made the room ready for our presence. I watched her unpack Mrs. N
ě
mcová's provisions, and stow them in a gauze-fronted cabinet beside the dresser. I watched her take matches from the cabinet and light the oil lamps in the room. I watched her take sheets from a chest between the beds and make up the larger of them. I watched her rehearse, as though in tribute to it, the life of everyday economies that had once filled this house. And her gestures told me more than any words could have done, that this place was Betka's source, the pool of meaning from which she had come like Rusalka into the world of human beings, never to lose the wonder that it had implanted in her soul.

She took one of the lamps to show me around, leading me through rust-red doors beneath the lintels of which we both had to stoop. In a corridor behind the parlor was a still for slivovitz and a second chimney, with spits for roasting and hooks for the smoking of sausage and ham. Beside the chimney was a coal scuttle of tin with a cast iron shovel, and I felt a kind of tenderness for this object which spoke so eloquently of its former function. Betka's refuge had been built from the uselessness of once-useful things; you could belong here only as Betka belonged, by not belonging. Nearby, in a corner of the corridor, was a large stone vat, in which plums, Betka told me, would be slowly simmered into jam. Containers, bottles, and jars all spoke of the vanished economy of the plum, which had been the source of wine, spirits, jam, sweetener, and relish. One end of the corridor opened into a shed full of tools, with an earth closet and a neat stack of logs ready for burning. At the other end was a cascade of stone steps down to a cellar where the food was stored.

“Whose food?” I asked.

“Ours.”

“And who are we?”

“Me, my uncle. And sometimes, though he has drifted away now, my cousin Jakub.”

The cellar had been hewn in rock, with ledges in the walls supporting gherkins and apricots in large sealed jars. Unlabeled bottles of wine, both white and red, lay in a rack at the cellar's end, while on the floor, in every available space, were vegetables—carrots, turnips, potatoes, kohlrabi, onions—lying in beds of sand. Drops of clear water were condensed on their skins, and against the pale green flesh of a kohlrabi, a large black spider trembled on frozen legs. Old farm accessories were laid out in a recess—chains, catches, and the heavy hinges of a gate, the only reminder here of the uselessness that reigned above. It was like a place on the frontier, a home provisioned in the teeth of adversity. I recalled a verse
of the book of Proverbs that Mother had underlined three times in her Bible: “Better a dish of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred withal.” And I wondered the more about Betka, that she should have acquired such a home in the time of our nation's homelessness.

THAT EVENING, SHE
told me. We were sitting at the oak table, warmed by the woodstove, a half-empty bottle of red wine between us, and beside it the oil lamp, whose light stuck to the wall like bits of white paper. Betka had cleared away the remains of our supper of eggs, sausage, and potatoes, which she had cooked with a quiet competence that seemed to belong not to her, but to the space in which she moved. She had diverted all my questions, sometimes with a kiss or a caress, once with Janá
č
ek's beautiful setting of “Zp
ě
vulenka,” in which her right hand on the piano descanted above the voice like a shadow moving on the air. And now she sat across from me holding my hand on the table. Outside in the twilight a nightingale carried its bubbling song from tree to tree. Inside we were secured against the world, self-sufficient and comforted. Everything was arranged with that unassuming good taste that marked Betka out as someone who had never belonged and never would belong among the dispossessed. It was as though she had made an arch in time across the world of the proletariat and its vanguard party, that grey world of queues and slabs and shortages,
of an enforced and joyless equality in which every smiling eye was an act of treason. The aristocrat in her had reached to the peasant life of this farmstead and joined forces with it against the ruin in between. I sat in silence, awestruck by her presence, and successively catching and avoiding those still, soft, moonlight-colored eyes. At last I found my voice.

“Can I tell you something, Betka?”

“Yes, but I already know.”

“What is it you know?”

“You.”

“And how?”

“I wanted to show you how to live openly in the space they allowed, how to forget all those imagined secrets and to live for yourself. And when you teach you learn. You taught me to want you. So I let you into my life, and here you are, in the citadel, and I am glad, because I love you.”

She drank from her glass before returning her hand to mine.

“My grandfather came to this place at the end of the war. He came with the Red Army, a member of a scratched-together battalion of partisans who were really nothing of the kind, but scavengers and avengers, with an eye for whom they could punish and what they could steal. They forced the locals to wear white armbands, with the letter N for Nazi; they took away their land and their crops, their tools and their animals; they turned a blind eye when people were murdered, and laughed when they committed suicide. And then they took possession of the houses. Oh, of course, it was all done correctly, with documents, committees, and rubber stamps—that is how communism works. Poor Jan Molnar—whom his neighbors knew as Hans Müller, and for whom the plaque dedicating his dwelling to the
heilige Jungfrau
expressed the sum total of his philosophy—lived the kind of blameless life that you see inscribed on every single object in this house. He prayed to the Virgin
mother and she answered in his mother tongue. When his wife was raped and killed by our fraternal allies, he fled, with the few things that he could stack into his cart, and his two babies balanced on top of it. But he didn't get far. The Russians stopped him on the road and took the horse. He carried the children for a mile or two, and then sought sanctuary under a Calvary. Whoever shot him had the kindness to spare the children. They were taken into care and packed off to Germany—two among the hundreds of thousands expelled under the Potsdam Agreement and the BeneÅ¡ Decrees. What the world would be without rubber stamps!”