Notes From Underground (28 page)

A strange transformation came over the chapel. The afternoon light, filtered through the dusty windows, outlined the pilasters with shadow so that they seemed to stand forward from the walls as though observing me. The painted saints in the barrel vault parted
and reassembled. The wounds left by the wrenched-away monuments seemed to bleed afresh, like the wounds of the saints that had once stood there in effigy. The chapel slowly came alive, and moved with me to that boundary between worlds of which Father Pavel had spoken—the place where mortal things melt into their eternal counterparts, and where the supernatural reveals itself in human form. The important thing, Father Pavel had said, is not our belief, but His grace. We refuse His gifts out of meanness, for we fear the cost of them. And yes, the cost is everything.

Recalling the mysterious maxims through which Father Pavel ordered and defied the world, I wondered again on his part in our drama. Was he preparing for martyrdom, or, on the contrary, managing his escape from it? And my eyes fell on a small door that I had not noticed before, set in the wall to the side of the great stone altar. Around it had been painted a trompe-l'oeil door frame, which was barely discernible against the pale ochre plaster of the wall. The door itself was composed of clean slats of hardwood, maintained in good repair, and with a handle of brass. In the atmosphere that had filled the simple shrine like incense it seemed as though this door had been revealed especially for my benefit, that it was the door between worlds.

As I went across I had the distinct impression of being followed. Unexplained shadows swept the wall, and there was a sound of footsteps in the aisle. But turning, I saw only the empty interior of the chapel, haunted by sunlight, watching me as our Lady of Sorrows, according to Father Pavel, watches all of us always, awaiting her chance.

The door opened on to a little sacristy. A cupboard contained an old tattered surplice, and hidden beneath its folds two cups that I assumed were used in the furtive sacrament. A broom stood in one corner, beside a sink that was kept clean with a scouring brush. A small round-arched window cast its light on a bare table, with a
wicker chair pushed under it, as though to make a desk. These few objects had a disposable air, ready at any moment to be disowned and discarded. Next to the cupboard was a smaller one in metal, containing oddments—some dishes, a few clothes, a tattered kneeler, some old newspapers—which had been swept there out of sight. A patch of gold leaf glistened behind the pile of junk, and after rummaging for a while I extracted a painted wooden plaque edged with rococo scrolls in gold. It carried a list of names and dates in Gothic lettering. At the top was written,
Kapelle Unserer Lieben Frau der Schmerzen
, and beneath it
Priester dieser Kirche.
The list began with Vater Peter Hindsinger, who was appointed to this Parish in 1845. And it proceeded through fifteen names until 1951, when there was a gap. The last name, written in Czech characters, was that of Father Pavel Havránek, who served the congregation between 1969 and 1971 and again between 1975 and 1979, when presumably he was arrested and the church finally closed. In 1979, Betka would have been nineteen years old. Father Pavel was her priest, her mentor, and surely her lover and the father of her child.

In that moment, Betka's life lay clearly before me. I envisaged the taut, determined girl, abandoned by her parents in a world of distrust, yet imbued with the highest spiritual ambition, wanting to know, to make music, to see God. How could such a girl not be drawn to the most powerless person in that place, the one who lived not by calculation but by sacrifice? In such a way had Betka's love been awakened. And then the disaster of Father Pavel's arrest, the birth of the sickly Olga, the need now to care for two people who were paying the price of the spiritual freedom she had so recklessly assumed. I remembered Betka tenderly wrapping Mother's food parcels, and saw her doing the same for Father Pavel. I recalled her abrupt way of moving on from every situation, of finding the hidden door through which she alone could pass into the future. I imagined the decisive steps that she had taken to move with Olga to Prague, to
explore the avenues through which to rescue this child of a love that could not be openly confessed. I imagined in every detail the flirtation with Vilém, whom she used as best she could, and the contract with the StB, the only ones who could grant the infinitely precious thing that Olga needed.

And yes, I was part of that contract, someone who must be watched for the simple reason that he was a mystery—a mystery to himself and to them, but no longer a mystery to her, once she had brought him up into the daylight to see how he blinked. And then, because I was useless, because there was nothing to be gained from me, because I was a poor creature living in reckless solitude, yet with the same ambition to know that had put her on the path to her disasters, I appeared before her as an object of love—that precious love, born of the highest yearning, for which there was also the highest price to pay. She was a free being, who accepted the cost of what she most truly felt; therefore she had decided to protect me. About Olga she could not speak: to reveal that part of her life would have destroyed everything between us. The room in Smíchov was a temple removed from the world, a place from which all the calculations into which she was forced by her secret need had been excluded. We were together there in the only form of togetherness that she would allow, the togetherness that made no contact with the world of daily compromise. Right until that last moment by the Chapel of the Holy Family, when she looked into my eyes as though hoping that I could read the story there as I was reading it now in the gilded plaque of wood that I held before me in trembling hands, she had wanted to rescue both me and Olga. And when, in my anger, I had rejected her, she had sent Father Pavel to intercept me. And maybe, in some recess of her all-encompassing consciousness, she had obscurely foreseen that I would be put into the hands of Officer Machá
č
ek, and brought down by that official lever from the heights of our impossible love into the world of everyday survival.

All that passed in a moment through my mind, and I knew for the first time fully what I had lost. I walked along the road that we had taken on the day of our marriage. I lay down beside the stream where we had made love. I crossed myself at the icon of the
heilige Jungfrau
above her door, and again at the Cavalry by the nearby crossroads, where Hans Müller or Honza Molnar had been shot. And I walked on through the twilight into the forest, to lie down beneath a spreading copper beech, tired, miserable, and hungry. I awoke shivering in the early hours, my clothes saturated with dew. It was midday by the time I arrived in Prague, too late for work. I went straight to Ruzyn
ě
, since Mother had been allowed a visit for that very afternoon. And there, facing her across iron bars, I asked her forgiveness for all the ways in which I had neglected her. She smiled wanly, since direct expressions of emotion embarrassed her. She had for the last two weeks been cheered by the presence in her cell of Helena Gotthartová, Rudolf's wife, who had told her everything. The guard interrupted her at this point, but I easily guessed what “everything” included. We turned to the kinds of trivia that occupy people when they are watched and censored, and as I got up to leave, she said, “By the way, I heard from Ivana. She is marrying a policeman in Brandýs. She sends her love, and says that the wedding will be a private affair, just the two of them and a couple of witnesses. She hopes we will understand why it is best you stay away.”

A MONTH LATER
Mother was home from prison. We knew now that things were changing. Gorbachev was two years into his reign as sixth Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the diplomatic disaster of Martin Gunther had led our police to survey us with a lighter touch. Rudolf was aspiring to emigrate, Karel to emerge from his boiler house, and Igor to be either Pope or President, I could never tell which. I found a new job in an
antikvariát
, making use of all the things that I had learned through Betka, and studying how to forget her. For a while I almost thought that it was possible. There were one or two girlfriends of a Western-leaning pop-bothered kind. One of them even suggested looking for the orgy described, or invented, by Philip Roth. I refused, of course. But only afterwards did I acknowledge to myself that it was Betka who prevented me—Betka whom I would betray with any girl I slept with. Only one person came near to replacing her in my affections, and that person, Markéta, was so embarrassed when I left a performance of Janá
č
ek's folk song arrangements in tears that she broke off the relationship.

Mother found work as a translator, and in our evenings we began to reassemble the Powerless Press. The manuscript of
Rumors
had been confiscated during the course of Mother's arrest. I wanted to start again as a writer, making use of things that had happened during my brief time living in truth. I needed those stories as proof that I was me. But the last typed copy of
Rumors
had disappeared with Betka, and I presented this fact to myself as the only good reason to regret her departure. I did not speak of Betka to Mother, and Mother did not speak of her time in prison. Instead, we set up home together in a new way, knowing that each had grown towards the other, and that whatever had happened during our eight months apart had happened for the good of both of us. When, a year later, we were arrested and charged with running an illegal business, we were able to laugh at the charges. Vilém Sládek, with whom I had become quite friendly, and whose concerts of baroque music I frequently attended, made a fuss on our behalf, contacting Bob Heilbronn's successor at the American Embassy and threatening to raise a petition which would embarrass the government not only towards the Western press but also towards our masters in the Soviet Union. The charges were dropped within a week and we were released unconditionally.

But a curious detail arose during the course of my interrogation, and I record it here since it casts a little more light on my discoveries. I had asked Igor if he knew what had happened to Father Pavel Havránek. There had been no news of a trial, Father Pavel had left his work at the garage, and the Church of Saint Elizabeth had been definitively sealed up with metal screens. Igor put on the look of distracted holiness with which he dismissed mere realities, and changed the subject. After a while I began to think that, whatever Betka had done by way of making her escape, Father Pavel had done also. It was with this thought in mind that I confronted day two of my interrogation, in the now familiar room at Bartolom
ě
jská before
the now familiar policemen. I pointed out that Mother's decision to found a samizdat press was entirely her own, and that I had taken no part in the process of production. In response, they played a tape recording of a long conversation in which I described my relations with Mother, and all that her bid for freedom had meant to me. It was the conversation that I had had with Father Pavel in the Church of Svatá Alžb
ě
ta. Did Father Pavel have a part in ensuring that this confession was recorded for their future use? I could not believe it; but my not believing it was more a decision than a conviction.

Some time later, when the Berlin wall had fallen, and our Communist Party had decided to negotiate a transfer of power, I happened to be passing the window that a trembling old hand had once filled with memoranda in praise of our enslavement. It had ceased to be an Agitation Center and now housed the local branch of the Civic Forum. The dusty relics in the window had been replaced by the symbols of the emerging future: posters of John Lennon and Michael Jackson, an icon of the Blessed Agnes of Bohemia, and childish smiley faces in yellow and orange saying “Ahoj,” as though we were proceeding, as Karel might have said, from kitsch with teeth to kitsch of the toothless variety.

I stood for a moment in the doorway. There, behind a desk piled high with leaflets, and wearing a brown corduroy suit, sat Father Pavel, speaking to a small crowd of young people about the need for a new kind of politics, an “anti-politics,” which would permit us to be no longer slaves or subjects but citizens, enjoying our freedom and our rights. The speech could have been scripted by Professor Gunther, so replete was it with clichés, and so far from the mysticism that had awoken in me the frail spirit of discipleship.

He seemed tired. His brow was furrowed and his hair receding, so that the lock that used constantly to fall from it no longer summoned the sweep of the hand. One eye had sunk lower than the other, and peered slightly sideways, as though jealous of its companion that
gazed calmly from the notch at the top of his nose. The cheeks were fuller, flabbier, unstrung from those fine ligaments that had seemed to encase the corners of his mouth like the flanges of a helmet, and his lips were somehow more sensual, as though they had acquired the habit of luxuries that they could not afford, and craved always for some new sensation.

He looked in my direction, and stared beyond me to the street from which I barely intruded. I turned quickly and walked on. It was Mother's birthday and I was carrying a cake and a bottle of Becherovka with which we were intending to celebrate. In the street it occurred to me that the man I had seen was not Father Pavel, and that this last image from a vanished world was just another fiction, born of my need.

IT MUST SURELY
have delighted Officer Machá
č
ek that our new President owed his position to the books he had written—some of them while imprisoned for the other things he wrote. But now it was the turn of reality, and against reality the books were helpless. Prague awoke from its enforced slumber and became a modern city. Fast-food restaurants, porn shops, travel agents, and multi-national chain stores arose to stimulate the lust for new experience, while also ensuring that never again will experience be truly new; flocks of chirping tourists began to settle and spurt up again like migrating starlings; expensive cars came to stand bumper to bumper in the street, poisoning the narrow alleyways; the churches, once tranquil islands in a sea of fear, became busy thoroughfares where foreign voices sounded; on the dull stucco of neglected chapels and along the corniced walls—those frail membranes between the worlds where the ghosts of the old city had come to peer at us—the graffiti now were sprawling. The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons. Pop music sounded in every bar, filling the corners where, not so long ago, we whispered of Kafka and Rilke, of Mahler
and Schoenberg, of Musil and Roth and
The World of Yesterday
that Stefan Zweig so movingly lamented.