Notes From Underground (29 page)

There were meetings of local committees, political parties, cultural programs, often funded by Western organizations anxious to claim credit for their part in rescuing us. Sometimes I attended, intrigued by the cheerful visitors who spoke to us in English of their harebrained schemes which would cost them nothing. The ebullient Bob Heilbronn was often there, claiming credit for a knowledge that he had never acquired, guided around the room by his handshake like a blind man by his stick. At one of the meetings, on his way towards an official dissident, he bumped into me. With a quick apology and without looking up, he took a business card from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. It said “Dr. Robert Heilbronn, President, Heilbronn and Svoboda, Public Affairs Consultants.” The address was that of the carriage door in the Újezd, behind which we had built our house of dreams.

I came across Karel, too. He had been praised for his samizdat essays, now issued by a literary press, and had been appointed to a research professorship in the Academy. His office overlooked the Estates Theater in the Ovocný trh and I called on him there one morning. His “
objets d'art et de vertue
” had followed him from the boiler room beneath the hospital, and he had meticulously recreated his dissident life as an old soldier might hang his lonely room with trophies. He ushered me in with his wonted ceremoniousness, thanking me for remembering him and apologizing for the unavoidable decision he once had made to exclude me from his life. He seemed to have as few visitors in this new workplace as in the old, and I discerned a certain sadness, now that his buffoonery had lost the character of defiance. He dressed more carelessly too, without a tie or neckerchief, and with a short-cut jacket that barely touched his thighs.

Papers lay on the maplewood desk, beneath the lamp raised aloft by a pink porcelain poodle. He was still working, he said, on the
abuse of language, having found so much to examine in the jargon of democracy and human rights that his work would be cut out for another decade. As he said this, however, his face took on another and more resolute aspect; his eyes fixed themselves on the theater where, 200 years before, Mozart had conducted the première of
Don Giovanni.
And I noticed that the page lying uppermost on his desk was covered with figures. He looked down at it as we passed, and after a moment of hesitation covered it with a book. A year later I heard that Karel had made a fortune on our new stock exchange, had invested it in a private academy for the arts on the outskirts of Prague, and was giving classes in theatrical performance to a select group of students. His classes, I learned, were devoted to suffering—the suffering required if a character is to emerge from a body that does not belong to it. His students had to learn voice technique, like the famous actors of old, such as Eduard Vojan and Zden
ě
k Štepánek; they had to practice circus acrobatics; they had to lie still in the darkness as the audience walked over them, or slide down the edge of the curtains onto the stage. They had above all to have a higher purpose than making a fortune in TV commercials, and that purpose was valid, Karel persuaded them, even if there would never again be a theater in which it could be pursued.

When at last I called on Rudolf it was with a certain hesitation, since I had not returned to the seminar since Betka's departure. It was a Wednesday in May, six months after the changes, when I rang his bell after
ob
ě
d
. He pointed me to the living room. He wore the same blue serge jacket, lustrous with use, that had covered his thin body in the days when he sat with his left hand pressed to his temples, his right hand turning the pages of a book, before the assembled room of his disciples. His eyes focused me from across the desk with the same intent gaze, relayed from the same place in the center of his skull. From his steel cheeks and unsmiling lips there issued no enquiries and no small talk. He was still locked in battle with the
enemy. But the enemy was no longer outside the window. He was there in the room.

Rudolf was denouncing the foreign academies that had ignored his request for scholarships, the publishing houses that had rejected his articles, the people who had profited from his instruction and made no attempt to reward it. He was denouncing the new President, who had betrayed his calling, the new democratic process, in which only cheats and frauds had influence, the careers in dishonesty and opportunism that were opening everywhere and which he disdained to pursue. He began to question me about my future, pouncing on every lightly sketched ambition, indiscreetly tearing away its incognito, rudely calling it by name, just as it was flitting by in the course of conversation. Soon I too was denounced for wishing to be a published writer when only time-servers and popularizers had a chance of success. A vague desire to try my luck in America was castigated as an intention to discard my country in its hour of need; and my hopes to establish Mother as a professional translator were dismissed as the belated reaction to a justified guilt. I watched the dark waves of bitterness sweep one after another across his face. And I felt that I was watching a fallen angel out of Hell, ever casting himself upwards into chaos, and always scraping to rest on some black ledge lower down. How I escaped from his presence I do not know. But I recall his look as he closed the door on me: a look of metaphysical dismissal, as though I had lost the right to exist.

So it was with all the attempts that I made, during those times of transition, to revisit the world of beautiful defiance. That world was mine and it was Betka's. It was the world of all the people who had a part in our drama. And it had vanished. Prague has since become a replica—a Disneyland version, a stage-set for
Die Meistersinger
. The global market has cleared the center of its old and settled residents, and ghettoized the poor. Those who can afford it are moving to the
suburbs, or retiring to sweet country cottages in the Sudetenland. The poorer people of Žižkov, where doctors and tram-drivers lived side by side, where people of every occupation came to pray in the forbidden shrine of St. Elizabeth, have been abandoned by their better-off neighbors, and look on helplessly as Ukrainian mafiosi, illegal immigrants from the Balkans, and international smuggling rings take up residence on their once silent stairwells, to settle old scores with guns. The hypermarkets and shopping malls are descending from the stratosphere into the fields around the city, while the little shops that served the shy, frugal outcasts who attended the unofficial seminars (many of whom hurried for a while like Igor from one official building to another in chauffeur-driven cars) are closing down. Those beautiful self-wrestling buildings that stood between two worlds are now dragged into the marketplace, raising their strained heads above the commotion like noble horses above a pack of wolves. That is how it seems to me, at least, when I return each summer to visit Mother in the little flat near the Metro station once named after Gottwald, and where we are sometimes joined by Ivana, separated now from her disgraced husband, and sad and childless. For I remember those alleyways and palaces, those echoing stairwells and mansard studios, when they were held in trust for that other
polis
, the twofold city of Father Pavel, hovering always between the real and the transcendental, between the transitory and the eternal, celebrating the marriage of time and eternity in a wedding cake of stucco.

But one book remained to be written. It was during that time of transition that the first major study of our unofficial culture appeared under the imprint of a New York university—the very university where Martin Gunther was Professor of Human Rights. According to the blurb, the author, Alžb
ě
ta Palková, had emigrated from Czechoslovakia during the last years of communism, bringing with her much precious material, a vigorous English prose style, and a well-read and skeptical mind. Professor Palková's text was widely
praised for its realistic account of the heroism, as well as the self-deception, of those who were forced by their love of books to live in the catacombs. It became a standard text for American students of international relations, and in due course I obtained a copy through the library of the American Embassy, which I had joined as a borrowing member. The book bore a dedication, “To Pavel, and in memory of our dearest Olga.” A chapter on
samizdat
singled out
Rumors
, by Soudruh AndroÅ¡. It was, she wrote, a leading example of “phenomenological realism.” She praised the young author, whom she compared in passing to Samuel Beckett, for his way of combining stark objectivity with a suffering inwardness, and in a footnote revealed his identity as one Jan Reichl, whom she hoped soon to see publishing under his own name.

It was thanks to this reference that I received an invitation to teach in the department of international relations at Wheaton College, Washington. That was fifteen years ago, when all American colleges wanted a tame survivor from the years when they had turned their backs on us. I was assured that, with a few scholarly publications, I would soon be a full professor. After a year or two, when the excitement had died down, and the world had discovered that ex-underground intellectuals are just ordinary people with needs, jealousies, rivalries, and appetites like the rest of humankind, my future presence at Wheaton College began to look less and less relevant. The scholarly publications did not come. I retreated into solitude, not the loud solitude of Hrabal, but the kind of solitude that exists in an American city, where everyone is friendly because nobody believes very strongly in the inner life that hides behind the bright exterior. I more and more regretted the loss of the last copy of
Rumors
, and clung to the belief that it would have given me the confidence to start again, to transcribe my “phenomenological realism” into saleable English prose. Perhaps it would have found me a companion, too, as once it had.

But a few weeks ago I received a letter from my head of department, Professor Richard Lopes, and it is this letter that brought my drama to an end. His florid signature, looking like the design for a wedding cake, took up the blank quarter of the page that he always left for it. “Dear Jan,” it said, “I was disappointed that you felt unable to attend the lecture of our distinguished visitor, Professor Alžb
ě
ta Palková, yesterday. As you know, she is a leading expert on the Czech dissident movement, and she spoke brilliantly and critically about the influence of Western pop music on the culture of protest. It would have helped the department's standing greatly, had you been there to represent us. I have noticed for some time now that you have taken less and less interest in the subject of the Czech alternative culture, even though it is the subject that we hired you to teach. I feel therefore we must discuss our future relations, and I would be grateful if you could ring Fiona to arrange a time when you might come to my office tomorrow. Professor Palková, by the way, sends her greetings, and has left a packet for you.”

Professor Lopes rose to academic eminence in the 1970s as an expert in Soviet affairs. In former days, the proud possessor of a visa that his more honest colleagues could never obtain, Lopes was much in demand. No one was in a position to deny his firsthand reports or to cast doubt on their favorable tenor. But he prudently discovered in himself a loathing of the Soviet system at the very moment when it lost its power to grant him favors. He became a champion of the dissident culture and quickly put himself in a position that made it impossible to dismiss him from teaching, even though there was nothing now that he could teach. I had been recruited as a vital adjunct to his new career.

But then, I reflected, what use could a smart American college make of a sardonic Czech intellectual, whose only published work, of which no copies now exist, had appeared in a samizdat edition, in the days when whoever wished for it could claim the title of writer, poet,
artist, or composer, and pass himself off as an outcast? Betka's book had damned us with faint praise. Looking back on it now, through the microscope that she provided, it was obvious that we were cheats. We had taken advantage of our situation to escape from critical judgment, to present ourselves as geniuses at a time when nobody could publicly deny it. Few of those books that Mother painstakingly copied each evening were worth the paper they were typed on—even if the paper were socialist property and therefore all but worthless in any case. Betka's brutal realism had the ring of truth.

But what had I done for my American students, with their bright toothpaste smiles and high-five salutes, so eager to understand our country, so keen to fit this curmudgeonly newcomer into the frame of “international relations,” a department which extracted $120,000 from each of them, in exchange for teaching them to read newscasts? How could I explain to these young people that there was a time when books were as important as life itself, when we touched those precious volumes, which it was often a crime to own and a still greater crime to produce, with the awe afforded to sacred things? How could I explain that a sentence, lifted from the world of mortal events and given permanent shape upon a page, can pierce the heart like an arrow, can have the meaning of a glance of love or a vow of marriage?

I look back on that solidarity of the shattered and recognize that it was, indeed, as Officer Machá
č
ek had said, a literary invention, a wondrous transformation of everyday life in the crucible of the written word. And in this crucible, rising from it like incense, was the intoxicating love that changed my life, attaching me forever to the person who loved me in the world of imagination that we shared and who was trapped, like me, in a real world of distrust. I look back on that moment, knowing that I lived in it more fully, more perfectly, and more spiritually, than I shall ever live again, and that our story was written in the purest fairy-tale Czech. And when has our language been more purely used than in fairy tales? Even the tourists
who flood across our city, where the lovely twofold façades now hide their visions of the transcendental behind advertisements for cars and jeans and makeup, even those tourists know that they are in fairyland. And if one or two of them have read those books that set my story in motion—the half-forbidden books by people for whom a normality outside literature was as absurd an impossibility as an angel in the street—then it will be scholarship, not life, that leads them into this trap. We, holding in our hands the page of Kafka's on which was written, “far, far away world history takes its course, the world history of your soul,” were called by those words to another life, the inner life that I searched for in those underground faces, and which led me to a farmhouse at Divoká Šárka. Did that farmhouse exist outside the world of my imagination, and was it Betka's face that led me there? How could I know? Maybe Father Pavel was right, that I had imagined that part of the story. But what, in the end, did it matter?