Notes From Underground (27 page)

A butterfly was flapping its wings against the window, where the sun slipped in at an angle. It was a
babo
č
ka
, which my dictionary translates as “painted lady.” I had learned the name from Betka in those days in Krchleby, when she had given names to everything she saw. These living things fluttered about her like her own eager thoughts, each one replicating some part of her ambition, each possessing its portion of the world. I recalled her competence, her love of words, her care to call things by their names, her illuminating presence in my life. I recalled her naked body as she had first displayed it in this place, the light that shone from her face, her neck, her breasts. And there came to mind a little Czech word, one of those words in which consonants, clustered together like a posy of wildflowers, make a sound softer and sweeter than any vowel.
Srstka
—gooseberry.

I stepped past Vilém and threw open the window. The painted lady flew up above the roof across the courtyard, was caught in the steam that issued from the protruding pipe on the opposite roof, and fluttered dead to the ground.

I squeezed past the electrical charge that surrounded him, and made it to the door.

“Look,” I said. “Much of what you say is relevant and true. But the battle is not wholly lost from your point of view. That American has been arrested. If he isn't jailed on charges of subversion, he will be thrown out.”

He turned to me, dumbfounded.

“How do you know this?” he asked.

“Just let's say that I am giving you this information. And I would like some information in return.”

“Oh?”

“Tell me where she lives.”

Vilém emitted a hollow squeak which I took to be laughter.

“She lives here, in this place, which is mine.”

“But when she is not here, as she plainly isn't?”

“You don't understand, comrade. She forbade enquiry. I was to know nothing about her, nothing about the other guy, if there is one, nothing about anything save what she chooses to reveal. I knew about you, because of a few mistakes she made in the first days of her infatuation. Why the hell do you think I gave her this place? At least I have an address for her.”

So Vilém's case was worse than mine! I took small comfort from this knowledge, but as I turned to go, I said, “If I find out where she is, I will leave a note for you here.”

He stared through me, and then cursed as I closed the door.

My first thought was that she had fled to the house in Moravia, that I should go to look for her there to tell her about the arrests. But then I reflected that, if she had fled, it was because she already knew what was going to happen. She had fled from a disaster, of which I was a part.

I WENT STRAIGHT
from her room to the children's hospital in Hrad
č
any. My head was swimming with thoughts that I dared not confess to. I wanted the truth, whether or not I could live in it.

The nurse who admitted me to the old house in the alleyway was neatly dressed, with a blue apron rimmed in white. She had grey startled eyes above shiny cheeks, and she allowed me to pass from the threshold with a slight genuflection that suggested a person in holy orders. Behind her was a screen of frosted glass, and in the distance, the noise of children, one crying, others babbling excitedly.

When you enter such an institution in America and a person comes enquiringly forward, her first words are, “how can I help?” Helping the stranger, putting yourself from the get-go on the stranger's side, those are the two great virtues of this place to which I have come. And they were more or less unknown in my country. The nurse recoiled from me, and when I told her that I was enquiring after one of her colleagues, who was a close relative, she pointed in silence to a door marked
Ř
editelka—
Director—and quietly retreated behind the screen.

The director, Mrs. Nováková, was a stern-looking matron of about fifty, sitting behind an empty desk and playing with a pencil on the pages of a newspaper. She seemed to fill in half of a crossword before reaching into a drawer of her desk and taking out a smudged old file containing the names of her employees.

“You understand that they come and go,” Mrs. Nováková explained. “It's not my job to keep track of them, only to clear up the mess when they've gone.”

I noticed a dingy-looking woman, perhaps a secretary, who was shuffling papers at a desk in the rear of the office, her small hands unnaturally white against the greyish paper, like hands in a painting. Across her forehead fell a fringe of mousy hair, and her grey eyes were set in a round plain face that had an institutional air to it, as though it had been once issued to her by some authority and grown inseparable through constant use. I had the immediate impression that this woman, who was certainly much older than the director, represented the true spirit of the hospital, and that the director had been appointed to crush that spirit, and to ensure that the Party's instructions were followed even in the matter of dying children.

The director told me there was no one by the name of Palková employed either in the hospital or the
internát
attached to it. As I turned to go, I saw the little secretary get up quietly and slip out of a door at the back of the office. I lingered for a moment in the hallway, trying to find peace in the broken moldings of a rococo ceiling, on which were painted here and there the images of frightened-looking saints. I heard the cries of children, infrequent now and quickly extinguished, serving to emphasize all around me the troubled stillness of disease. The little secretary stood suddenly before me. She wore a metal cross, hanging over the plain grey dress that wrapped her from head to foot. She had the manner that I had come to associate with religious devotion, of placing herself right in front of you, like your own face in a mirror.

“You are Jan Reichl,” she said. Her voice was soft, accentless, with the same institutional character as her face and clothes. I stared at her in astonishment and nodded silently.

“Before she left Alžb
ě
ta asked me to promise her something.”

I continued to nod.

“She said that you would be certain to come looking for her, and that I must find a way to tell you about Olga. I must ask you to understand and forgive, because she had wished only to protect you.”

It sounded like a prayer inserted in the liturgy—part of the office for the day. Information had been stored in this neat receptacle, like a note between the pages of a prayer book. I had a premonition that I would not like the information, and made a bid to postpone it.

“How can you live a consecrated life?” I asked. “Didn't they close the orders in 1954?”

“We Ursulines proved to be necessary—some of us at least. There is nothing in communism that can bring comfort to a dying child.”

She lifted her peaceful grey eyes to mine and a spark of warm humanity showed that she was now departing from her script.

“Alžb
ě
ta Palková,” she told me, “was here every day. She didn't work here, except as a volunteer. I don't understand why Paní
Ř
editelka wanted to hide this from you.”

She looked up at me with a new animation, her nose and cheeks twitching rhythmically as though sniffing the air.

“I'm telling you,” she went on, “because I am so glad for what has happened. I loved Olga, we all loved her. The thought that she was going to die was hard for us to bear, and the sight of her mother, so determined to prevent it, so full of tenderness and conviction—well, it was an inspiration to us. But of course you know that intractable epilepsy has been pronounced incurable by our ministry of health. The director told us to make the child comfortable and devote our energies elsewhere. Alžb
ě
ta wasn't having it, as perhaps you know, on account of the children's hospital in Boston. How I wish we could
be joined to them! But then—well, you know the problem. None of our doctors would write a recommendation, and there are no better facilities in Czechoslovakia than ours. It all had to be done unofficially. I wrote letters to Boston with the details of Olga's case, while Alžb
ě
ta worked on getting permission to travel.”

We had emerged from the hospital and descended the alleyway towards the steps. I was studying the church of the Loreta, conjuring in my mind the Prague of Rudolf II, the place where all mysteries were exchanged and bartered, and no boundaries set limits to thinking. I imagined myself in that time, believing that all mistakes could be undone by spells, and all losses changed by magic into gains. And then my thoughts returned to the present. In my intoxication with truth, I had ignored the truth that was staring me in the face. I groaned aloud, and the little nun looked up at me in consternation.

“But you see,” she cried, “Olga will be saved. They gave Alžb
ě
ta permission—it was only days ago—to take her to America. Never has a little angel touched our hearts as Olga touched them.”

She talked on more calmly about her plans to visit Boston, about Olga's future in America and her possible return, and about a hundred trivial details that escaped my attention until, with a choked “goodbye,” I went stumbling along the street towards the city.

AT EVERY POINT
during the two weeks that followed I reminded myself that I was alone, that it was up to me to rescue what I could of the little world that had collapsed around me, and that to retreat underground was no longer an option. I left a note for Vilém, explaining what I had discovered. I went every day to work, reassuring Mr. Krutský that I would leave as soon as I had found a job more suited to my uselessness. I asked Igor to inform the official dissidents about the arrest of Father Pavel. I begged him to collect signatures for a letter to the Western press, in which I emphasized that the very public arrest of Martin Gunther while addressing a private seminar had served to distract attention from the furtive seizure of Pavel Havránek. As an unofficial priest, I wrote, Mr. Havránek risked a fate far worse and far more decisive than imprisonment. Igor told me that it would serve no purpose to sign such a letter, other than to invite a charge of subversion in collaboration with a foreign power. All that we could do was to make enquiries through official channels at the Ministry of the Interior, National Security section. I accordingly addressed a letter to the minister and, to my surprise, received
a reply inviting me to the Interior Ministry on Letná, where my request, I was told, would be dealt with by the competent authorities.

The competent authorities turned out to be the two policemen who had been in charge of my previous interrogation. They were waiting for me in the foyer of that ugly tile-clad block, took me straight to the lift, marched me down corridors and through doors and partitions, and at last sat me down across from them at a large bare desk, by a window with a view of the castle and the Sparta stadium. My letter was produced, shaken in my face, and then torn in two.

“So far as we are concerned,” the sharp-faced officer told me, “there is no such person as this Pavel Havránek. And if there were such a person, then the idea that he might be an unofficial priest is simply laughable.”

He told me that I was lucky to be treated with such courtesy, that he would not be surprised—though as a low-ranking officer it was not his business to enquire—if I were not one of their more privileged clients, who had so far enjoyed the protection of someone up there (and he pointed to the ceiling). He made it clear that my continuing association with lawless and subversive elements was jeopardizing Mother's chances of early release, and that, if it were not for the embarrassment already caused by the stupid action of the District 7 Police Force in arresting an American as well as the hooligans who had gathered to gawp at him, they would feel far more free than they temporarily were to lock me up as well.

All these home truths I absorbed as best I could, and pondered them during sleepless nights at Gottwaldova. Meanwhile the American Embassy had made our authorities understand that, when you lock up a liberal American professor, friend of ex-Presidents and Supreme Court judges, there is a diplomatic price to pay. After two weeks, Professor Gunther was put on a plane to New York, and the few members of our seminar who were still detained—Rudolf being
one of them—were released. Warnings were issued, and the solidarity of the shattered was resumed. I gathered this information in snippets, being afraid to return to Rudolf's seminar, for fear of what they might be thinking and saying about Betka.

One day I made the trip to Krchleby, walked to her house through fields now glowing with sunflowers, stood for a while beneath the image of the
heilige Jungfrau
, and then took the road to Nebí
č
ko, Little Heaven. In the early afternoon I arrived at the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows, took the key from the bird box, and let myself into the sacred space of our marriage. It was a warm day, and there was no sound within the chapel save the buzzing of flies and the gentle cooing of a dove under the roof tiles. There were fresh flowers on the altar, and the floor had been recently swept. I sat in the chair where she had sat, in the nurtured tranquillity of a place where only nothing happens. In so many ways she had cared for me, and even if I would never again stand in the sun of her presence, even if everything henceforth were to be shadowy outlines, she had been mine. Of course, Vilém thought something similar. But he was wrong, and I rehearsed the proof of this from a thousand tiny premises. I remembered the kisses, the ironic smiles, the ballerina movements that she kept for me; I remembered her voice, her music, her wondrous competence at everything she attempted; I remembered her lessons, not about books only, but about life, the life that seemed so minutely forbidden but which a person like her could snatch without permission and fly away with. She had briefly appeared at the boundary of my being, like a lovely bird in a window, and she had turned towards me with the softest of kisses before her flight. I could not condemn her, but would be forever hers.