Notes From Underground (8 page)

He told me that I could join his seminar, and that they were reading the
Two Studies of Masaryk
by Pato
č
ka. It was one of the
books that Mother had worked on, and which had been taken away from beneath her bed. I asked him how I could obtain a copy. He said it wasn't necessary, that the relevant pages would be read aloud. And he added that there would be special seminars from time to time, with visitors from the West, who would inform us of the latest scholarship, and help us to remember.

“To remember what?” I asked.

He looked at me long and hard.

“To remember what we are.”

He said it like a slogan, something to be repeated in moments of doubt, when his little band of followers might be tempted to give up on him. I glanced around at Betka, but she was lost in the shelves of books. Rudolf and she ignored each other, and she was clearly a familiar presence in his life. I noticed that she had taken off the thick brown jacket and woolen scarf that had wrapped her and thrown them on one of Rudolf's leather-covered armchairs, as though they belonged there. I was troubled by the thought, which somehow suggested that the life I was building had no certain foundations. Yet I must build it: there was no other way.

Rudolf was lecturing me now, telling me that in 1848, when the Austrian authorities had cracked down on the national revival, only two professors were dismissed from the university, and even then it had caused a major scandal, whereas now… I was made to understand that anybody who was anybody in the life of the mind had been driven from the system, and that the “parallel polis” to which Rudolf belonged was the true place of refuge, the temple where ancestral gods kept vigil over our collective soul. Moreover, he implied, just by being washed up in this way on the shore of dissidence, deprived of all weapons and without the instruments of worldly success, you showed your superior title to the life of the mind. He swept the air as he spoke, including books, furniture, a few gloomy pictures, and the enigmatic Betka in his gesture, and emphasizing the
impassable gap between the hope contained in this cluttered interior and the unending nothingness outside.

Beyond the window it was snowing hard, and flakes clung to the window, glowing gold and silver from the streetlight below. I saw that the path to which Rudolf pointed was obligatory, and it was a path of no return. He advised me always to carry the equipment, such as soap and toothbrush, that I would need in jail.

“They can keep us for forty-eight hours,” he said, “and from time to time it strikes them as the right thing to do.”

I turned to Betka, who was sitting now in one of the armchairs.

“Has it happened to you?” I asked, and she shook her head as though ridding herself of the question.

“Alžb
ě
ta is our guardian angel,” said Rudolf. “We are safe when she is here.”

After a while, the visitors—
moji žáci
, my pupils, as Rudolf described them—began to arrive. Someone had left the door ajar, so they entered quietly, discarding their shoes, leaving their coats in a pile by the door, and whispering their greetings as though assembling for some dangerous adventure. A few were young, the boys with long hair and shabby clothes like Western pop stars, the girls neatly dressed, one or two wearing a cross on a gold or silver chain. Some were middle-aged—scholarly men with waistcoats and beards, matronly women in long woolen skirts, an elderly couple who entered hand in hand, stumbling slightly, and a few ill-dressed men who seemed to have been brought in off the street, with shifty gestures and blank faces suggesting they had been recruited against their will. A tall man of a certain age, with finely chiseled features and a shock of white hair, bent beneath the lintel as he entered the room, looking deferentially from side to side like a once-proud nobleman who had lost everything, and was now the debtor of those who used to serve him. I learned that he was the poet Z. D., famous in his day but long since deprived of the right to publish. Other faces, too, were
familiar, though I could not put a name to them. One in particular stood out: a man of about thirty-five in a greasy mechanic's outfit, who wore a wooden cross on a leather thong around his neck and whose pale face and slow-moving brown eyes were suffused with a strange softness. He sat down on the floor next to Betka and smiled at her; returning his smile, she leaned forward to stroke his arm.

This was my first experience of a social gathering, and I was overwhelmed by it. I had known imaginary friendships and invented love affairs; but real love and friendship are learned by example, and—except for Dad who betrayed me and Mother whom I betrayed—the examples had never come my way. Of course there was Ivana; but observing this room of drop-outs and criminals, I imagined the shudder of disdain with which she would instinctively shield herself from entering it. Here, littered across the carpet like the aftermath of battle, were the remains of our true society: people who had declared their solidarity, and whose need for each other was revealed in the tenderness with which they wove their whispered greetings from filaments of air. I was seized with a burning desire to be part of what I saw, and I took my place on the floor beside Betka, my heart pounding with excitement. And yet she seemed so cool, so calm, as though this gathering were one form of life among many, and nothing special for her. She looked on the people who greeted her as though from a place of safety, a guardian angel, just as Rudolf said.

Rudolf took up position behind his desk, on which stood a large lamp of frosted glass, borne aloft by a naked nymph in bronze. He stood, slightly leaning on the desk, and began to talk, his white hands circling in the air, his lips moving from side to side as though printing the words, the words themselves dark and serious, since all smiles had been sucked from them. I saw that Rudolf's standing in his world was as high as any to be achieved in the official life outside. Here was authority, visible, tangible, the power of the powerless in a
wiry torso. Whatever privations he had suffered, they were the price of a far greater freedom, which was the freedom to command the thoughts and feelings of an audience, and to come before them as a guide.

I looked around at the books shelved side by side from floor to ceiling, some leather-bound in glazed cases, others with the neat cloth covers of the First Republic, their spines embossed with streamlined lettering, their irregular sizes and experimental colors the outward signs of the same freedom that spoke through Rudolf—a freedom that lived in words, and which was exhaled like a breeze when you opened the covers of a book. Rudolf was reading from the book on his desk, the
Two Studies of Masaryk
, some copies of which Mother had managed to distribute, but which Rudolf seemed to possess in a neat edition from an exile press. The passage spoke of the twentieth-century wars, of the reckless night in which the price of everyday senselessness is paid.

Pato
č
ka's drastic words, mixing philosophical technicalities and frightening invocations of an all-encompassing destruction, were like spells, summoning the ghosts of our ruined country into the room. And around me I sensed the held breath, the intent stares into nothing that bound us together in a conspiracy of apartness. In the new kind of night, Rudolf read, into which the soldier goes without purpose, lies the reality of sacrifice, and in sacrifice an awareness of freedom. My own reality as a soul, whose nature is to care, is brought home to me; in the moment of sacrifice comes an intimation of the meaning that daylight had bleached away. In that moment I break out of the prison of the everyday, and there, in life at the apex, I experience the only form of
polis
which we may now attain, the “solidarity of the shattered.”

I write these words now in suburban Washington, looking down on a quiet street where mothers pass with prams and wheelchairs, and a few old people walk their dogs. And the words are like dream
debris, washed up in the weary light of dawn. It is only with a certain effort that I recall their sound in Czech. But when Rudolf pronounced them on that evening twenty years ago, a shudder passed through the room. This
solidarita ot
ř
esených
was a presence among us and I felt it on my arm like the grip of a neighbor in a shared moment of fear. No tragedy, no ritual performance, no encounter of warriors on the eve of battle, could have been more charged with feeling than the room in which we sat. We were assembled on that floor in a state of total togetherness. We were side by side, sharing life, hope, and danger in our own threatened space. The faces all around were focusing on Nothing with intense and seeking stares. I had the impression that it wanted only the fatal knock on the door for a great smile of acceptance to sweep across our faces like a burst of sunlight. Betka, however, seemed to withhold herself, and I let my eyes dwell on that calm, collected face, astonished by its beauty.

When Rudolf had finished reading, he looked round in a kind of triumph, emphasizing with his fierce eyes and rigid posture that we had been led into another realm, where truth alone was the goal. He alluded to writers whom I had never encountered, to books that I could never have read, to a world of reasoning and feeling that stood before me like a pool into which I wanted to jump and be cleansed of my isolation. And he illustrated everything with thoughts of his own, connecting the most abstruse arguments to our daily routines of selfishness.

“All the things that are required of us,” he said, “like queuing for essentials, pulling strings, reporting on our friends and colleagues, marching on May Day, are so much easier to do for selfish than for noble motives. Who could queue for two hours simply in order that a child in Africa should be saved from starving? Who could betray his colleagues in order to prepare his own martyrdom as their leader? But to do these things for a loaf of bread—nothing is easier.”

He went on to compare us to those people in the ancient world whose city has been destroyed and who have been led away into slavery. No motive remains that will keep us to the path of honor and justice. We steal from each other, even what we love. We become scavengers. And when one of us shows that it need not be so, that he, for one, is prepared to make a sacrifice, there is suddenly joy and light and for a brief moment we remember what we were. And then we go back to captivity, for we have nothing else.

They were simple thoughts. But Rudolf linked them to such a wealth of philosophy and culture that I found myself shaking with desire for the path of truth and sacrifice that he described. He held my attention as the hand of eternity holds the apple of time, and I watched as the thin dust of humanity was blown across that apple and then polished away. My underground life, I saw, had been another form of selfishness and fragmentation. I had been avoiding even the fear that I should have been feeling, the fear that I saw all around me and which, had I opened my heart to it, would have saved my mother from her fate. This fear was real; I heard it in Ivana's voice on the telephone, as she shut the door on the life that we had shared. I saw it in Mother's face as she was led away. It was the all-pervading substance from which
Rumors
had crystallized, the stuff from which my underground friends and lovers had been composed. And yet I had avoided it until this moment, had allowed myself to fall in love with the girl beside me precisely because she showed no sign of it. The new life required me to acknowledge fear and to open my heart to it. And by fighting this fear in myself, I would be fighting it in the world around me.

Rudolf stopped speaking and discussion began. I looked on eagerly, astonished to find myself in a gathering where questions were posed as though they were common property and where knowledge was assumed, not displayed. At a certain point, Rudolf's wife, Helena, entered, carrying a tray of
chlebí
č
ky
: she was a small woman,
with a soft wrinkled face like a dried apricot. She smiled timidly at the guests as they helped themselves to the little circles of bread, on each of which a piece of cheese and a slice of gherkin had been balanced like a hat.

Never since Dad's death had there been guests in our apartment. I associated hospitality with the gatherings of apparatchiks, with their expensive leather coats and plump mistresses wrapped in fur. Hospitality belonged to the unapproachable world of
them
, where it signified not kindness or compassion but the insolence of privilege. Yet, here before me was the vivid disproof of that: powerless people offering and receiving gifts. A new dimension of being was outlined before me in a dramatic tableau that invited me to change my life. Someone was talking next to me of a poem that ended with just those words—
musíš zm
ě
nit sv
ů
j život
, you must change your life. The poem was by Rilke, whose
Duino Elegies
had found their way into Dad's trunk, and the discussion of it spread like laughter through the gathering. I smiled at Rudolf, and then at Betka. I did not mind that the bread was stale or the cheese hard and acrid, with the texture of a toenail. That was the way we lived. I was standing in a sunbeam, and had lost all consciousness of the surrounding storm.

I find it hard to recapture the experience now, for that dream-scape has been swept away. Here in America's capital, where the ripe fruit of abundance hangs from every tree, where days end in parties, where friends come and go with easy hilarity and where fear is a specialist product, to be bought and sold in videos or downloaded from the Internet, how can I conjure a world where words were kept close like secrets, and friendship had the furtiveness of sin? All I can say is that I left the seminar as though walking on air. As we descended the stairs, Betka told me to meet her the next day on the St
ř
elecký Island. Her light touch in the street, as she looked in my eyes and said “You go that way,” and then promptly turned in the opposite
direction, was a promise, an assurance that life had already changed for us, and that we had no need to make a display. I walked down to the river, imagining her on the bus to Divoká Šárka, neatly bundled against the window, showing tissue-paper eyelids as she looked down on her book. And behind those eyes as I imagined them was the thought of me.