Notes From Underground (5 page)

I ate the scraps in the kitchen as a mouse would, without reference to time. Eventually, in the grey light of a December morning, I awoke to the ringing of the doorbell. I was lying on Mother's bed. Images of hands were rummaging in my half-awoken mind: her hands in handcuffs, Rodin's hands, the hands that held the plastic strap on the bus to Divoká Šárka, Dad's hands, also in handcuffs, held before him like buffers as he was roughly pushed through the door. I looked at the alarm clock, which lay on its back in the middle of the room. It was 8:30, an hour and a half after the time I should report for work. Probably I had already missed a day. I went into the kitchen and looked down at the street: the rain had stopped now and the police car had gone. For a second, I believed that this was not happening to me; that the thing called “I” was elsewhere, and that the whole episode was a fiction in the mind of Comrade Underground.

The doorbell rang again. Whoever it was had come for Mother and Mother was a non-person, whom it was a mistake to know.
Better, therefore, to remain hidden. I went back to her bed and sat down as quietly as I could. Footsteps shuffled outside the door for a moment and then retreated to the stairs. But there they ceased; and in a moment they had changed direction, were approaching our door, and had stopped outside. The doorbell did not ring, but I felt the visitor standing there, breathing softly. I tiptoed across to the spyglass, in whose distorting eye I perceived the face of a young woman with brown hair and a long white neck bound in a rose-pink kerchief.

I opened the door, and there she was, the girl from Divoká Šárka, looking at me from candid silver eyes, her wide pale forehead glinting in the light that entered the stairwell from our living room. Her lower lids were like mother-of-pearl, as though the eyes shone through them. Her cheeks were flushed and glowing with the December cold, so that the lips between them seemed unusually pale and soft. Her face had a childlike seriousness, and she wore no makeup, the brown hair shining like a crown above her brow. Her gloved hands clutched a canvas bag, and she was wearing a loose denim jacket and trousers, the unofficial uniform of the student class. She stood on straight legs, looking at me with a steady page-like poise, as though expecting a command.

“I have something for Paní Reichlová,” she said. “My name is…”

I stopped her short and pointed to the ceiling. She gave me a look, pinching in her nose so that tiny wrinkles lay like folds of white silk along its edges. She was so beautiful that I was afraid to speak. This was not a fiction; it was happening to
me
—and because I had lost myself to her I had also gained myself. For the first time in my life, I knew who I was: not Soudruh Androš, not even Jan Reichl, but the man facing
her
.

“One moment,” I said, and indicating that she stay on the threshold, I took a sheet of paper from the table by Mother's bed. On it I wrote: “Meet you at the Chapel of the Holy Family, below the Nusle Steps, in fifteen minutes. Not safe to talk.”

She took the paper and stared at it. Then she looked up, held my eyes for a moment, nodded and handed the paper back to me. In a moment she had vanished and I was left standing in the doorway, my legs trembling. This was the real thing, and for sure I would make one mistake after another. But mistakes were a proof of reality, and nothing less than reality would now content me. Shamefully, I had put aside the thought of Mother, forgotten the need to let Ivana know what had happened, forgotten my work and my routine. Mother had retreated to the horizon of my world. As I took my steps down the hill, across the railway to the swollen Boti
č
, I thought only of the girl, and of all the things that I would say to her.

She was standing among the maples, staring across the torn barbed-wire fence towards the railway. I was going recklessly forward, as oblivious of her safety as I had been of Mother's. Still, a small voice of common sense told me to walk on past the chapel and to climb the steps before descending again to meet the girl. There was no one behind me, no one in view at all, save an old woman in a torn shawl, who carried a dog under one arm while pulling herself up the steps with the other. Her face had that stony grey color that was routine among old people then, and I felt a spasm of pity, wondering how she lived and whether the dog were her only companion. Next to the steps, standing among leafless trees, was an old log house, of the kind that the wealthier sort would build in the years of the National Revival, and I stood for a moment and stared at it. The windows were shuttered, the garden overgrown with weeds, and shingles were missing from the roof. But the idea entered my head to live in such a place, to build there a home for myself and the girl from Divoká Šárka, where we would spend our young days in studious isolation, laughing behind closed shutters at the world to which we did not belong. I was so lost in this thought that I did not notice that someone was standing beside me.

“I don't think you were followed,” she said in a voice that was soft and clear like a child's. “I assume you are Paní Reichlová's son.”

“Jan Reichl,” I said. It felt like a pseudonym. “And you?”

“Alžb
ě
ta,” she replied. “Alžb
ě
ta Palková. But they call me Betka. Not B
ě
tka, but Betka. Someone passed one of your mother's books to me, and I said I would return it.”

She nodded as she spoke, as though seeking agreement. There was something eager in her manner that overcame my reticence. It did not occur to me to ask how she knew our address, or why she had come to our apartment at a time when neither I nor my mother should have been home. I wanted to share my trouble, and her steady eyes and unaffected gestures were like a door opened onto a sunlit garden. As I told her about Mother, she continued to nod, looking into my eyes as though the story were written there. I did not mention my part in Mother's downfall, only the fact that the police had raided us and discovered her crime. And then Betka touched my arm and pointed to the chapel, indicating that we should stand behind it, where we would not be seen.

She took a volume of samizdat from her bag. It was
Rumors
by Soudruh Androš. I stared at it in silence.

“The person who borrowed this was particularly insistent that I return it straightaway. To tell you the truth, I want to keep it. It is so close to my way of seeing things.”

“Your way of seeing things?”

“Well…” She stopped suddenly and looked at me. “What are we going to do about your mother?”

I had been alone with my thoughts for so long that I could hardly grasp the meaning of her “we.” Was she including me in her life, or asking me to include her in mine? Only the candid look reminded me that it was not I but Mother who concerned her.

“What do you suggest? A lawyer perhaps?”

“Are you crazy? The last time this happened to a friend of mine
they jailed the lawyer too. It is a crime to defend people who have committed no crime.”

I looked at her in astonishment.

“Does this happen often to friends of yours?”

“Not often, no. You are pretty safe with me. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

She was standing a pace away from me, her back to the chapel, her eyes fixed on the Nusle steps.

“Do you see that old woman?” she asked.

I turned my eyes in the direction of hers. The woman with the dog was coming down now, handing her body from step to step, gripping the rail and muttering.

“Like the poodle in
Faust
,” she went on, “he comes in many forms.”

“Who?”

“Mephistopheles. The spirit who always denies.”

The old woman had reached the bottom of the steps and was passing out of view. In the Prague of those days, there was a peculiar emptiness that supervened, in the wake of people who were too much looked at. The specter of the city followed them into the void, and in its wake you saw a pillaged graveyard—dilapidated buildings, cracked pavements, crumbling façades with the air of tombs, and the sad uncared-for trees that the dead had planted. This emptiness haunted me whenever I came up from underground. But never before had I seen it as I saw it then, standing beside a woman who put on display not only her beauty and energy, but her education, too, and who stood above the emptiness as a mother stands above the troubles of her child. I was seized by the conviction that this woman whom I had loved from the moment I saw her had also been sent to rescue me.

She took the glove from her right hand and warmed her fingers in her mouth. I wanted to take the hand in mine and warm it properly. I thrust my hands deeper into the pockets of my coat.

“So what should we do?” I asked.

“The only thing that works is a campaign,” she said. “In the Western press.”

“And who can organize that?”

“Not someone who lives underground.”

“So where do
you
live, Betka?”

Betka looked at me, and I was out of my depth. How could I find words for this girl who did not whisper, did not hide as others hid from the hidden witness? I thought of Mother. That innocent woman, who had deserved only the very best of life and received only the worst, was now being broken on the wheel of their questions. The spasm of guilt that I felt was like smoke from the turbine of my excitement, which curled away above the chapel and was lost in the void. Words at home had never been direct. The world lay beyond our walls like a threat; we occasionally alluded to it, but never described it as it was. Our conversations were a kind of embroidered silence, each of us buried in the fiction of another life, a life of reckless solitude. All my dealings aboveground had been shaped by the same imperative—to conceal, to retreat, to make my pain so small that I could pack it into a hollow tooth and bite on it.

“I want to say that I live in the real world,” she said. “But they abolished it long ago.”

I muttered something, but she continued to look at me as though waiting for a confession. Still the words would not come.

“I think I know who wrote these stories,” she went on. “It was you, wasn't it?”

“Could be.”

“I understand you,” she went on, “because I dreamed you up. And this book lies on the edge of my dream.”

She had taken the volume of
Rumors
from her bag and held it out to me.

“Keep it. It is safer with you.”

She replaced it with a smile.

“So there you are,” she said, “back in my dream.”

“I like it inside your dream. I like it very much.”

“Only miracles happen in dreams. And you can't rely on miracles. We should go, by the way.”

She nodded in the direction of the steps, which the old woman was once again ascending, the limp dog pressed to her side. She walked away.

“Follow me,” she said, “and I won't look back.”

I followed at a distance, my eyes fixed on her slender figure, which seemed to melt the space in which it moved. She went up the steps two at a time, and walked quickly through the streets of Vinohrady towards the center of town. The traffic was sparse and slow, as though it had lost direction. The shop windows displayed goods that were no longer obtainable but immortalized in contrived pyramids of boxes and tins. Noises were abrupt: the squeal of tram wheels against the rails, the patter of falling stucco from the facades, the occasional siren of a police car. People moved silently, their shoulders shrinking as they passed each other, their eyes fixed on the ground. The buildings stood behind wooden scaffolds like decrepit old people propped on Zimmer frames. Betka was a living woman in the land of the dead, and a glow surrounded her as she moved.

She stopped in the Charles Square, by the New Town Hall, from the windows of which, in 1419, the Hussite leader Jan Želivský had thrown thirteen town councillors to their deaths. Defenestration is a Czech tradition, the only one that the Communists had retained. The monument to Želivský stands in the square, reminding us of our national virtues. No monument commemorates those thirteen councillors. I caught up with Betka, where she stood beneath the effigy of the hero, and she walked on at my side.

“Here is the plan,” she said. “You live as normal. You ask to visit your mother. You give nothing away. And you make yourself known.”

“Known to whom?”

“Look, Jan…”

“Honza,” I corrected.

“Look, Honza, there is only one path to safety, and that lies to the West of us. There is no safety underground. There is no safety for the ordinary person. You have to be known to the Western embassies. You have to be mentioned on the BBC and Radio Free Europe. You have to be a movement, like Charter 77. And then you raise the cost of destroying you, to the point where they might not attempt it.”

“Is that how you live?”

She did not answer me, but walked on with quick, determined steps. We were descending towards the Vltava, on the far bank of which was the street where I would lean each morning against my bin and imagine the lives of passers-by. A mist hung above the river, shifting from side to side like the blanket on a troubled sleeper. A cold white sun peered through the clouds, shedding its light on the walls of the castle, above which the dark form of the cathedral lay like some huge animal that had died there, its frozen limbs locked into the sky. For a long time we did not speak. I followed beside her as though obeying orders, confident that I had acquired a destination and that she was leading me there.

She stopped outside a shop where plain bold letters spelled
Antikvariát
above a large window encrusted with dirt. She took my arm and guided me through the door. A worn-looking man with spectacles and a Habsburg beard looked up from behind the counter, where he was unpacking musical scores from a brown paper parcel. “
Dobrý den,”
she said in sing-song tones, and, “ahoj, Betko,” he replied, hardly turning from his work.