Notes From Underground (23 page)

Come again, sweet love doth now invite

Thy graces that refrain

To do me due delight:

To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die

With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

Her dear voice, those words from a time when life was brief and full of mourning, and the thought of that sweetest sympathy, enjoyed but somehow lost to me, all proved too much. I cried like a child on Betka's bed, and was still crying after she had put away the theorbo, dressed in the pale blue blouse and pleated skirt that she wore to work, and told me that it was time to go. She kissed me tenderly; but there was a determination in the way she guided me to the door. And this determination was there when she opened that door again to me.

IT WAS ON
the afternoon of the next day. I stood on the threshold in a state of self-disgust. Yes, I said to myself, I had followed her once before. Out of love and enchantment, I had stepped behind her onto the bus to Divoká Šárka, and then from that bus to the place that may or may not have been her home. But the previous afternoon I had followed her out of jealousy and anger. I had fallen to the level of our rulers, to the level of the person with jug-handle ears who stared past me whenever I discovered him. I had slid from doorways as she passed, ducked behind corners as she turned, watched her every movement as she entered, first a greengrocer to buy some fruit, then a bakery to buy some pastries, then the church of St. Thomas in Malá Strana, where she stood for a moment in the porch, staring at the sealed-off interior. I had followed her up the escarpment named for Jan Neruda, whose tales Dad read to us as children, and who wrote of these jeweled streets as though God himself had shaped them for our uses. And how dirty and diseased I felt as I watched her shrug off a drunk with a walrus mustache, hurry past a young man who turned his beseeching eyes on her, and take the steps up
to the castle. She came to the house where the writer Ji
ř
í Mucha, son of the painter, had lived, and where, by a miracle, his Scottish wife Geraldine, whom Betka had described as the best of modern composers, was still from time to time in residence. Set within a regular façade of cream and salmon pink stucco panels, beneath a naïve fresco showing St. John Nepomuk risen to glory from the waters of the Vltava, was a door with brass fittings, including a knocker in the shape of a human head. To my surprise, Betka took a piece of paper from her bag, rapped the brass knocker, and stood looking up at the first floor window as though she expected to see a face there. When no one appeared, she replaced the paper in her bag and resumed her journey.

I followed her to the Loretánská, down the hill of U Kasáren to Dientzenhofer's Church of Saint John Nepomuk, Father Pavel's favorite, which had been built for the Ursuline convent next door. Betka strode on, never looking back, and leading me at last to the Nový sv
ě
t—the New World—a street of crumbling houses facing the high wall of a garden. The street seemed abandoned, with no sound save the song of birds among the birch trees in the garden and a rustle of wind in the leaves. I crouched among the watching dead, catching glimpses of Betka as she walked with even steps on the broken cobbles. Then suddenly she was gone. I discovered an alley of stone steps between two gingerbread houses. It led to a large eighteenth-century house with tall casement windows. A door of modern design bore an official-looking plaque in burnished steel, on which was written
Ústavní nemocnice pro chronicky nemocné d
ě
ti
—resident hospital for chronically-ill children. From behind the door came the sound of children's voices, and a woman—not Betka—said “quiet please, let Mikin go first.” I turned away in shame, and hurried on tiptoe to the Loreta church and the steps down to the escarpment.

Now I stood in her doorway, avoiding her eyes. She said nothing, but stepped back to allow me to enter, and then quietly closed the
door. She had been writing. Her notebook was open on the desk, and next to it a volume of samizdat; not one of Mother's, but Vaculík's essays, from the Padlock Press created by those official dissidents. I asked her why she spent so many hours with this literature. Her answer surprised me.

“One day soon,” she said, “the mirage will vanish and we will see that we are standing in an empty place. There will be ways of advancing, ways of claiming this unowned land of ours. Someone has to be first in the field of samizdat scholarship: and that person won't be Martin Gunther or Bob Heilbronn or any other of our curious visitors. It will be me.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Why do I live as I do, Honza? I have told you many times. I am not a dissident; I am not an underground person; I want knowledge, scope, a way out of this prison. But I also want to learn from it, to store the experience for future use.”

“You frighten me, Betka.”

She turned to me suddenly and locked me in a warm embrace.

“Is it the word ‘future' that frightens you, Honza?”

“Yes, because you are preparing a future without me.”

“And what would a future
with
you be like?”

“I haven't thought about it.”

“Maybe you should have thought about it.”

She detached herself from me and sat down at the desk.

“By the way, Honza, why did you follow me yesterday?”

The question was like a pistol shot. I staggered onto the bed and sat there in silence.

“No matter,” she went on. “You think there are barriers between us. And if I tried to explain that there are no barriers, that would be a barrier.”

“You speak in riddles,” I said, “and all I want is you. Just you.”

“Me? Don't you mean, your idea of me? And isn't that their way of
controlling us, to reduce us all to ideas? Isn't that what all this stuff is really about?”

And she waved dismissively at the pile of samizdat.

“But why are you crying, Betka?”

“Oh because…”

She threw herself beside me on the bed, and would say nothing more. Her gestures were clumsy and incomplete. Her body seemed to writhe at my touch, like a wounded thing. It was mid-summer, and the sun had reached over the rooftops into the courtyard. Its rays were exploring the corners of the room, and curling the papers on her desk. Everything in that place was provisional, poised on the edge of things, ready at a moment's notice to let go. I too must be ready, and with that thought I got up from the bed and began to dress. She watched me from far away, with an otherworldly look, like the Venus of Botticelli.

“Listen, Honza,” she said. “There is no going back on what has happened between us. You are part of me, and I am part of you. It may be a mistake, but it is also the truth.”

“The truth,” I began, but the words would not come.

“Can I ask a favor, Honza?”

I nodded.

“Will you come with me to the opera on Friday? I have two tickets:
Rusalka
.”

“Are you sure you want to be seen with me in public?”

She looked at me long and hard.

“I think I shall ignore that question,” she said at last. “But please come to
Rusalka
on Friday.”

We faced each other for a long moment, she not hiding her body but lying motionless on the bed, her eyes shining moonlight into mine.

“What about Rudolf's seminar?” I asked. “Professor Gunther is speaking again.”

“Do you think I want to listen to that rubbish? And anyway…”

“Anyway what?”

“We have rehearsals tomorrow. I want to spend time with you on Friday.”

“And the hospital?”

“I have the night off. We could be together here.”

I had not missed one of Rudolf's seminars since I began to attend them. Nor had Betka ever suggested such a thing. The seminar united our community like a religious observance. Why did she want me to break this sacred routine? After all, the opera in those days was no big deal: the tickets were cheap and the performances vile.

“I think we should go to the seminar,” I said.

“Count me out,” she responded. But I detected an uneasiness in her manner that gave zest to my refusal. She had, for the first time, given me a chance to hurt her, and I leapt as though at a liberation.

“Fine,” I said. “But I intend to go.”

She slipped from the bed, came across to me, and flung her arms around my neck.

“Honza, I am asking a special favor. We could be together, as we were in Krchleby. Why do you refuse, just for the sake of an American ghoul who wants to add us to his list of credits?”

“Not for his sake, but for mine,” I answered. “On account of that future I should have thought about before.”

She detached herself and began to get dressed.

“Well,” she said, “if that's the way you feel. You had better go now. And don't follow me, OK?”

She was crying. I looked at her for a moment, in the bittersweet relish that her hurt aroused in me. Then I went quickly into the courtyard and out into the street.

FATHER PAVEL WAS
shutting the garage when I arrived. He had been working on an old Jawa motorcycle which had to be locked away in the workshop, lest it be stolen. He smiled gently as he washed his black hands in the enamel sink, and remarked on the beauty of motorcycles, and especially of those old models from before the war, which had been put together with loving respect for detail, and which grew from their parts as a work of music grows from its notes. He described the Jawa as a “mereological miracle,” built in the days when people still had eyes for each other and for the things that they used. He added that there was no better way to understand the disaster of communism than to study what happened to this motorcycle when the factory was confiscated in 1948 and thenceforth worked by slaves.

“But of course,” he added, “that's not what you have come here to talk about.”

I asked him if we could go together to the church of Svatá Alžb
ě
ta.

“I have been waiting for the moment,” he said, and gestured to the door. He bestowed on the motorcycle one last loving glance
before leaving, his only indication yet of an earthly attachment. As we walked through the blighted cemetery, he told me that the church had been broken into and vandalized.

“I noticed the windows were boarded up,” I said.

“Oh, so you pass by from time to time?” he replied, with a curious glance at me.

I nodded, but said nothing. If anything bore witness to Father Pavel's priestly vocation it was his ability to propagate silence. With Father Pavel, only necessary words had a place, and his unembarrassed face took in the silence like the face of some resting animal.

It was dark in the church on account of the boarded-up windows, and, because the ceiling lights had been disconnected, Father Pavel lit the candles that stood on the altar table. The congregation had done its best to put the place in order: the broken chairs were piled in one corner, the lectern had been repaired with splints made from chair legs, and the few whole chairs remaining had been placed in line before the altar. Liquid of some kind had been thrown at the painting of St. Elizabeth, and a brown stain spread across the face of the saint.

“What happened to
Informace o církvi
?” I asked.

“Oh, that was the chair they were looking for,” he said. “But they didn't find it.”

“How come?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I had a hunch, when they took Igor in for questioning, that we might be due for a visit. It's in the workshop, if you want to read it. And by the way, they released Igor and won't be charging him.”

I sat down next to him on one of the chairs. It caused me no surprise that a free-thinking Czech, who considered religion to be a helpless refusal to acknowledge that we are helpless, could stumble again and again on the “moments of truth” that his thinking ruled to be impossible, moments like that of Mother's Bible, like that
of the vandalized church of Our Lady of Sorrows, like this in another vandalized church, beside a man who, for whatever reason, had thought it worthwhile to sacrifice the sparse comforts that our regime permitted for the sake of a creed neither believable nor believed. Looking back on those moments now, I know them also as moments of the lie, and know too that, in their intensest and most life-transforming manifestation, the truth and the lie thrive side by side in conflict.

The thought frightens me. It has no place in the world outside my window and forbids me to belong to it. What place in cheerful America for a thought like that? And what instinct was it that led me to confess to Father Pavel, and in the act of confession to invent a life of sin?

I did not look at him as I spoke. His eyes, like mine, rested on the picture of Saint Elizabeth, whose face had bled in a brown stain across the chalky sky. From time to time he brushed the lock of hair from his forehead, as though clearing the way for my words to enter it. I began with Dad, hesitantly at first, but with increasing confidence as I discovered a role for myself, as the one who had never atoned for my own tragic fault in not loving sufficiently that innocent person. Again I imagined Dad's finger, tracing the lines of books haunted by the ghosts that our rulers had wished to exorcise. And I recalled our summer holidays camping in the Krkonoše mountains, our evenings at home with his collection of long-playing records, our Christmases around Ivana's Bethlehem where, amid leaden cows and horses, in the lap of a Virgin made of pipe cleaners, lay the tiny wrapped-up Christ child, in whose existence not one of us believed.

I let the reminiscences come: small things, family things, even my schoolboy misdemeanors, including the theft of Mother's homemade liver sausage, the fight at school with Miroslav Fiala, the attempt for no good reason to run away when I got as far as Chomutov
before the police caught up with me and made a phone call to Dad's school, when he came so sadly to collect me without the smallest sign of blame on his dear face, but his eyes turned down and his hand trembling as he reached out to touch me as though to test whether I were real. And as I spoke it occurred to me, maybe for the first time, that I had once been a child, that I had not been born on that day when they took him away forever, and that from that day forth my sins took on another character—no longer misdemeanors but an expanding and soul-subduing fear of other people, a refusal to love or be loved, which was the real engine of those underground journeys and from which I awoke at last only when I followed an unknown girl to Divoká Šárka and in consequence of a Kafkaesque immersion in my own absurdity delivered my mother into the hands of the police and thence to Ruzyn
ě
prison.