Notes From Underground (6 page)

“My favorite place,” she said, leading me deep into the shop. The wooden shelves were packed with scores, many of them bound in leather. Betka's eyes brightened as she ran her finger along the spines,
and the flesh around her eyes again had that mother-of-pearl translucency, as though a light had been switched on behind.

“You see what we were,” she said, “when our country began. Music in every household, and look how beautifully engraved.”

She had taken down a volume of Janá
č
ek's piano music—
On an Overgrown Path
. How strong and definite the notes looked on the page, as though nothing could sweep them away. And yet, Betka said, all this was a memory: few played the piano, fewer lived in a home that contained one. And the latest editions of this masterpiece contain all the printing errors of the original, since no one in the official publishing house has the competence or the authority to correct them. She asked me if I could read music.

“No. But we listened to it at home. That was one of Dad's favorites.”

“Oh?” She looked up at me. “You speak in the past tense.”

“Yes. He died.”

I wanted to tell her the story. And in that moment it struck me vividly that I had told no one, shared this death with no one apart from Mother and Ivana, both of whom had been as reluctant to speak of it as I was. Slowly, she replaced the score and said, “I used to play this, back home. On my grandfather's piano.”

“Where was home?”

“A little place near Brno. I came here to study.”

“So you're a student?”

“No, that finished two years ago.”

“So what do you do, Betka?”

She peered at a grey cloth spine on which the gold leaf had faded. “Oh, things. And what do you do?”

She took down another score and buried her head in it: songs by Schubert, with the Czech text hand-written above the German in old-fashioned characters. I briefly described my job; she smiled to herself, and changed the subject. She spoke for some time
enthusiastically about the old culture of music-making, how people would gather to sing and play in every home, and how sad it made her to think that this rarely happened. She herself had learned to play the lute, so as to join a baroque ensemble that performed from time to time in the houses of friends. She was proud of this part of her life. Between people touched by that ancient music, she said, whoever they were and however tainted by the system, there were, for the moment, no secrets. While speaking she went through the shelves with firm methodical hands, putting aside the volumes that pleased her, and eventually carrying a little pile across to the counter. I was amazed by this, since secondhand books were coveted possessions, and far too expensive for people like me.

“Can you really afford all that, Betka?” I asked.

“Of course not. I have a friend who is building a library. He collects what I recommend. Here, Petr,” she said, handing the books across the counter. “I will tell Vilém you are keeping them for him.”

“He must have everything by now,” the man said.

“He's getting there.” Turning to me, she added, “We can go now. First me, then you. I will see you in ten minutes on the St
ř
elecký Island. I'll be sitting there.”

She didn't wait for a reply but vanished through the door of the shop. When I found her she was sitting calmly on a wooden bench, staring out across the river, her face to the sun. I tried hard to understand how someone could be so conscious of being followed, yet entirely and naturally calm. It was as though Betka created around herself a space of her own, a space where the rules did not apply. I sat next to that space, on the cold bench that sent a shock through my body. And her face in the sunlight shone back at the sun.

“You don't mind if I speak frankly, Honza?”

“How could I mind?”

“Oh, people do. They prefer whispered suspicions. But I hate that. I want to live. Do you want to live?”

“Now, yes.”

She looked at me directly. It was a look that I was to know well in time: a curious, disarming look from wide, still eyes, which caused me to surrender completely to whatever she proposed. I had the chance then to look into those eyes that had so enchanted me on the Metro to Leninova. From an angle they did indeed have a silver sheen, peering through her lashes like the moon through trees. But this sheen was only the rough summary of their magic. The pupils were greenish-grey with a rim of royal blue, and in the center was a little apricot button, holding the whole tissue tight. Around that small sun revolved a tranquil solar system of glances, drawing the tide of my desire.

“So, Honza. Here is what we shall do. You must report to work as normal. You must go to the police station at Bartolom
ě
jská, and be scrupulously correct when they question you. Then I shall introduce you to the people you need to know. I shall fight for you, in my own way, but first I must teach you to live aboveground.”

“But why should you do this?” I asked.

“For you.”

“You don't know me.”

She smiled, and took the copy of
Rumors
from her bag.

“I have this window where you stand.”

We walked for a while on the St
ř
elecký Island. And when, from time to time, I took her hand, she did not look at me, but smiled to herself and returned the slight pressure of my fingers. I told her about Dad, about Ivana, about my underground journeys, and she listened attentively. But about herself she was reticent, admitting only that she was living an independent life the details of which were of no interest to me. She took a notebook from her pocket and tore a sheet of paper from the center. On it she wrote the address of someone called Rudolf Gotthart, telling me that she would introduce me on Friday to his weekly seminar, and that I was to be there at 6 o'clock,
before the seminar began. She wrote with a ballpoint, and I fought back the desire to ask why she did not use her fountain pen. She was never to know that it was I who had followed her to Divoká Šárka and whose cry had sounded from the trashcans by her door.

Then I noticed another thing. She was not wearing the bangle that I had seen then on her wrist. A curious thought entered my mind: that she had two quite separate lives. The thought no sooner occurred than it became a knife of jealousy. The girl who cultivated dissidents, who was exploring the world of samizdat, who was in some strange way excited by the opportunity to recreate me as a hero and a martyr, was the holiday version of another being entirely. I imagined her as mistress to some slick Party member with the right to foreign travel, who provided a nice old farmhouse on the edge of Prague, and the spare cash to kit herself in bourgeois style. So sharp was this thought that I groaned aloud.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“You haven't told me about yourself, Betka.”

“You'll learn.”

“But when this kind of thing happens…”

“What kind of thing?”

“Well, you could call it love.”

She screwed up her face like a child.

“Let's not start on that. I take risks, but not that one.”

“But why do you take the others?”

“Because I want to live. Like I said.”

“But why do this for me?”

She looked at me and laughed. Her laughter was close-knit and undulating, like a sloping lawn in the sun.

“I was crawling underground and look what I found! Why shouldn't I bring it up into the daylight and watch it blink?”

“Not very flattering to me.”

“Very flattering, actually, if you knew.”

Quite without warning, she kissed me on the cheek and strode away to the stone staircase that led to the bridge across the river. She paused on the turn of the steps and looked back in my direction.

“Meet me tomorrow, in the Café Slavia at three. If I am with someone, ignore me. If I am on my own, greet me as a friend.”

And with that, she walked briskly onto the bridge and into town. I hesitated for a moment, wishing to follow her. Then I went in the opposite direction.

I CALLED IN
at the workshop in one of the little alleys where Smíchov meets the shore road and where each morning I collected my broom, dustpan, and orange street-sweeper's jacket from Mr. Krutský. He raised his dumpling-colored face and laid big hands on the desk, vainly trying to focus his watery grey eyes. Never in all my dealings with him had Mr. Krutský fixed his look on me. Always, his eyes seemed to stray from side to side, as though he feared a door would open somewhere and a hand reach out for his throat.

“The StB were here yesterday,” he said, “asking for you. That means trouble.”

“My trouble, not yours. And anyway, you can't fire me. I am at the bottom of the ladder. There's nowhere down from here.”

“But where were you when they came?”

“I had a headache. I'm sorry. I will work late.”

“And now I have to report on you,” said Mr. Krutský, with a weary sigh.

“Is that what they told you?”

“Once a week, to be collected.”

I shrugged.

“Shouldn't be too difficult. I'll write it for you.”

Taking my broom and dustpan from the rack, and my bright orange jacket from the peg, I left for the Husovy sady. I spent the rest of that morning in a state of euphoria. It hurts to confess this. It hurts to confess that I was glad of Mother's arrest, glad of the misfortune that had befallen us, glad that I was officially a non-person. I had come up from underground. I was breathing real air, the air that Betka breathed, and I was going to live in another way, in a space that we shared. Side by side with Betka I would live in truth. What a cliché! And what a lie! But I am coming to that.

I telephoned Ivana from the public phone at M
ů
stek. She lived with a woman whose old townhouse in Brandýs had been taken by the Party in exchange for a couple of rooms in a new block of apartments. The old woman was worn down enough to be indifferent to her lodger's history. But when I told my sister of Mother's arrest, she said “hush” as though refusing to be implicated in a crime. By speaking in whispers I reshaped the story as a legend. Ivana was tense, scant, and embarrassed, reluctant to be dragged beyond the confines of her world. She had opted for a clean life within the system, and wanted nothing more to do with crime. I was not surprised when she hung up on me.

I went that afternoon to the central police station, which occupies one side of Bartolom
ě
jská street: a warren of offices and cells behind old facades, punctured at one point by a window of small square panes, stretching over five floors. I entered by the old head-quarters building from the First Republic, which looks as though sculpted from a single piece of coarse red sandstone. Formalized bas-reliefs of workers, miners, and peasants remind the passer-by of what is needed in the life-long business of avoiding arrest. I waited in a dirty room with a window in one wall, behind which an official face appeared, seldom the same face and always staring blankly at
my request for news of Mrs. Reichlová. Uniformed figures moved purposefully in and out of the room, ignoring me. A woman entered with a shopping bag of groceries, crowned by a bunch of flowers. She went through a door to the other side of the window, nodding as she passed.

I began to notice a strange humming in the room, as though an insect were trapped somewhere and uselessly beating its wings. After a while it seemed as though the humming were coming from inside me. I felt an overwhelming urge to sit down, but there were no chairs, only a kind of ledge around the wall on which you could briefly lodge your thighs.

I propped myself up as best I could. Faces floated past, melting and then hardening as they drifted away. Perhaps an hour passed before one of them fixed itself in front of me, and the humming crystallized as words. The officer's thin grey face seemed to have been sharpened to an edge, as though to cut through whatever pretenses stood in front of it. He spoke in curt, simplified phrases, as though controlled by a machine that allowed only limited options.

“Mrs. Reichlová has been transferred to Ruzyn
ě
.”

“I am her son, and have a right to visit her.”

The words sounded in the room as though spoken by someone else. Everything that concerned Mother had been removed behind a screen, and I saw only shadows outlined against it.

“The Criminal Code forbids visits during interrogation.”

He looked at me intently for a moment, and then added, “We need to speak to you, too.”

“Is she not entitled to a lawyer?”

“We have appointed a lawyer who will present the case for the defense.”

Without waiting for a reply he turned on his heels and marched to the door. Reaching it, he turned slowly around.

“Stay there,” he said.

I did as he told me. It was not I who waited, but another who had usurped my body. I was far away, rejoicing still in Betka, and hardly thinking of Mother. When the officer returned it was to beckon me to the door in which he stood. I found myself squeezed against him in a lift, surrounded by his sweaty smell and unable to avoid his intensely staring green eyes between which a knife-blade of nose made short sharp cuts in my direction. He did not push me or guide me but somehow distilled me into a large room, where I sat in a chair against the wall as he took up position behind a desk in front of me. Another officer, who I understood to be the principal interrogator, was standing in the center of the room, and began pacing up and down. He was a soft-featured man of about forty, and addressed me with a schoolmasterly concern for my future. Of course I asked to be a witness at her trial, and the sharp-faced policeman, who was now taking notes, smiled at my request without recording it. I answered their questions with shrugs and evasions, hardly caring what I said. But when they asked me why I was on the bus to Divoká Šárka and whom exactly I was visiting there, I felt a burst of alarm. I told them that I had never intended to get on that bus, that I was distracted by the presence of police, and that I had got off at the last stop without thinking, in a state of somnambulism. The sharp-faced officer again smiled. This time he wrote down my words.