Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  I accepted her cynical reflections. After all, she was twenty-six, four years older than me, and she had been moving in these dangerous circles for long enough to be aware of the pitfalls. Still, I was not sure that she was really convinced by the course she recommended, or that this person from the American Embassy was not someone more to be avoided than sought.

  “How come you know people like that?” I asked her.

  “How come I know someone like you?”

  “That’s no answer to my question.”

  “Yours is no question to be asked,” she said, and with a quick movement rolled off the bed and came across to me. And when she sat like that in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck, her naked body pressed against me and her kisses exploring my neck like the games of a kitten, I accepted everything she said as a revelation. I would understand this revelation eventually even if its purpose was obscure to me now.

  Two days later she told me that Mr. Heilbronn would meet me the following afternoon. I was to go to the Vrtbovská Garden in Malá Strana, and sit on a stone bench at the end of the second flight of stairs at 2:30. He would come to sit beside me.

  The Vrtbovská Garden is all that remains of the great baroque palace built in the early eighteenth century for Count Jan Josef of Vrtba. It is composed of terraces set in the hillside, joined by elegant flights of steps and embellished with the energetic statues of Matyáš Braun. Terrace rests on terrace like the voices in music, ascending to a little grotto from which you can see across the rooftops of Malá Strana to St. Nicholas, whose cupola and tower, green with verdigris, dominate the skyline. In my days underground it would never have occurred to me to visit such a place, which was trapped in our mournful city like a thought in scare quotes. But I assumed that Betka had chosen it deliberately, to remind me that I could live on terms of my own. This garden was good; Mr. Heilbronn was good; and my being here on a cold stone seat on a cold March day was good, so long as I did as she did, and always looked forward to the exit.

  The man who came to sit beside me was small, dark haired, with heavy black eyebrows behind thick-rimmed glasses that stuck out above sunken cheeks. Nothing showed him to be American apart from a smart pink tie of some silky stuff visible beneath his fur-lined jacket. He sat for a moment without speaking, staring straight ahead, and with his gloved hands resting on the seat to either side of him. Then he spoke quietly in English.

  “You can assume I wasn’t followed,” he said, “and I know for a fact that this place is safe.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But we may need to explain ourselves.”

  It was my first attempt at speaking English, and the words came slowly.

  “Here is the spiel,” he replied. “I am writing a book about baroque gardens; as luck would have it, I bumped into someone who spoke English, and helped me find my way around.”

  “But I don’t know my way around.”

  “Then that’s your homework,” he said. “In case you need it.”

  He had an abrupt way of talking, as though pushing out each sentence fully formed and stopping in the wake of it. It made me think of him as a solitary person, who had no private life of his own. I asked him how he knew Betka.

  “Liz?” he replied. “I met her at the embassy. She came with a little group, to perform old music in the garden. She’s some kid. Speaks good English. Knows everyone. At least, everyone I need to know. You, for instance.”

  “Why me?”

  “She said you’d tell me why.”

  “And do you trust her?” I asked. He smiled ironically.

  “In my profession, trust is not allowed. Certainly not here. But we make distinctions.”

  I wondered how well he knew her and by what means they communicated. And did I have the right to talk of the girl I loved to this agent of Imperial and Zionist forces, which is undoubtedly how he would be described in a Rudé právo editorial when Mother’s case was publicized abroad? I had the image of myself standing on the edge of a precipice, Betka holding me back; and below me, at the bottom, another Betka beckoning. A wave of fear swept over me, and it was a moment before I could speak.

  I told Mr. Heilbronn what I knew. Mother was being held in Ruzyně prison, and would be tried in the coming weeks under Paragraphs 98 and 100 of the criminal code: subversion of the Republic in collaboration with foreign powers, together with incitement and illegal commerce. I gave him the facts of the case, emphasizing that I was not allowed to visit her and that her defense lawyer had been appointed by her accusers from the list of advocates who could be relied upon not to disturb the verdict.

  While I spoke, Mr. Heilbronn made little whistling noises, as though he had never encountered injustice in his life before. The punishment prepared for Mother mattered to me; but his blurted interventions, invoking Jan Masaryk, Miláda Horáková, and all the others who had been done to death by the criminal who had given his name to our Metro station, made me squirm with embarrassment, as though I were engaging in false heroics for the sake of some personal gain. I wanted to play down the facts, even to accuse Mother of her own mistakes—like taking the typewriter from the factory, and retaining copies of the things she produced. I wanted to “normalize” her crime, to remove it from the great game of shadowboxing in which Mr. Heilbronn was engaged, fighting for human rights against the machine of communist repression.

  “Let’s walk,” he said, of a sudden. He got to his feet and began to descend the steps to the lower terrace. He walked with jerky steps, swiveling his head from side to side like the turret of a tank. I tried to guess at his inner life, at the motives that had drawn him into this strange career on the edge of diplomacy. But nothing emerged from him save jargon. He was one machine in conflict with another. He rattled out the provisions of the Helsinki Accords, proved in a hundred ways that Mother was protected by international treaties and by the unwritten law of human rights, and in general remade that poor defeated woman as an American citizen who had somehow strayed into the no man’s land between the warring machines. As he spoke, I fixed my eyes on Braun’s statue of Minerva. The serene grey-stone face spoke of a place where conflicts were the business of gods, and men’s souls were clear of ideology. Perhaps, through the door that Betka had opened, I would enter that place, and stand before the thrones of the immortals, released from the squabbles of machines.

  At one point, I interrupted him.

  “You see,” I said, “my mother’s case is not really about human rights at all.”

  I wanted to say that it was about our country, about the loved and imagined thing that had spawned Dad’s collection of records, about the books under the plank from which Mother and I ate, about the little paradise of statuary that surrounded Mr. Heilbronn and which he seemed not to notice, about the twofold city that hemmed us in. Those precious things were not abstractions like treaties and rights, but realities, reimagined over centuries and constantly loved. And it was Mother, not her accusers, who represented them. Thoughts like those poured through my mind in a confused moment of protest; but I was young, shy, uneducated, and could find no words to utter them.

  Mr. Heilbronn swiveled his glasses round to me.

  “Trust me. It is about human rights.”

  We stopped in the alley that led from the garden to the street. Mr. Heilbronn plunged a gloved hand into his pocket and took out a small business card, containing the legend Robert Heilbronn, Ph.D, Art Historian, and underneath it a London address. As I took it, I noticed a figure in a leather jacket who emerged from a laurel bush and walked past us, his dark eyes fixed on a distant vision of angels. I indicated his retreating form and, like Betka, said “You go that way, I go this.” I left him standing with a puzzled look on his face, as though he were waking from a dream.

  CHAPTER 12

  OVER THE WEEKS that followed I got used to the figure in the leather jacket, who was always passing me and never looking at me. His jug-handle ears and staring eyes hardly suited him to his calling, but why waste the precious gift of i
nvisibility on a pointless case like mine? The fact is that Heilbronn did what was expected, and Helena Reichlová had soon assumed a worldwide significance. One evening I stood with Father Pavel at the back of his workshop, listening to a program about Mother on Radio Free Europe, in which she was portrayed as something vast, pure, truth-telling, a self-sacrificing creature who was fighting for the liberation of her country. Our mother, the timid, worn-down, grieving figure who would cook pancakes in our tiny kitchen, wash clothes in the sink, and spread out her ironing on the board where we would also eat and work. Our mother, who had done only one heroic thing, so far as I could tell, in her whole sad life, which was to condemn herself to prison for the sake of the under-manager of a failed paper factory, a man whom I had never met, and whose traces in Mother’s life were so faint as to be barely observable. Her lined face with its blue-black shadows around the eyes, her pursed lips and frail neck, her long slender hands always at work, and her patched old clothes which she seldom changed and which served as a kind of camouflage of mustard yellow and brown—all these struck me then as signs that she belonged not with the heroes but with our everydayness, our každodennost. The radio program infuriated me. I wanted to call out that this woman was not Joan of Arc or Princess Libuše but a routine product of the system, one who had gotten mixed up with another routine product—the dissident, the intellectual who had found the way to disguise his failure as an inner success, and who had found a niche in which the view from Olympus was painted on the wall.

  Later, when he was called as a witness in her trial (which I was allowed to attend only as an observer), the under-manager revealed himself to be a disheveled, grey-faced creature with a lopsided mustache and a nervous tic that continually dented his left cheek as though another person were hidden behind it, anxiously tugging it like a sleeve. He expressed his outrage at the way in which Mother had abused his trust and her position, and the shock with which he had learned that his precious stores of socialist paper were being used to distribute such filth. It was inconceivable that there could have been love between them, and Mother resolutely refused to look at him across the courtroom. Instead, she turned her eyes to me, silently begging my forgiveness for this folly. By then, I had come to see Mother in another way, as the owner of that Bible above her bed, who had lived in the tiny corner assigned to her, nurturing a kind of soul-music that at last was audible to me. Her drab clothes and rimmed Picasso eyes, her knitting-needle fingers and taut unsmiling mouth all bore witness to the inner determination that governed her. Meeting her glance across the courtroom I no longer saw an ordinary victim. Those evening sorties from which she returned with a secret look on her face were no longer the pathetic refuge of someone whom life had passed by. And I looked back on my underground years with a revised conception of their meaning. It was not I but she who had tunneled beneath the castle of illusions, who had packed the cellars with explosives, and who had been arrested too late. It was true what she said to the StB officer at the time of her arrest. She had done what she did for love: not for some abstract idea, but for Dad. Freedom could not be won through the war of machines, or the trading of abstractions. Nor did it come from that drastic solidarity of which Patočka wrote. Freedom was won through love: the love that pays the price of its own lastingness. Mother had paid that price, and the foundations of the system shook above her deed.

  All that became clear to me in time. But already I knew from Betka that the way out from underground was not political but personal. We created in that little room a space apart, where the writ of everydayness did not run. In that space I could breathe and I could love. It was the place of my redemption, the place where I wanted to be entirely open and entirely known. Yet for that very reason it also troubled me. Betka was with me only there, in the room that she borrowed, the room that was removed from the real life that she softly but firmly prevented me from entering. In Rudolf’s seminar she would sit apart from me. She told me that she worked in the evenings and only her days were free. I asked if I could come to one of her concerts, which tended to occur on Saturday afternoons, and she screwed up her face and said, “wait awhile.” And then I began to doubt her.

  “What do you know about me, Betka?” I asked one afternoon.

  “Oh, everything!”

  “Am I so easy to decipher?”

  “Yes, or you wouldn’t use that word.”

  “What word?”

  “Dešifrovat. Most people would say rozluštit, which is at least Czech and not Latin. You make yourself into a secret. And secrets can be pried apart. It is only when people live openly that they are hard to know.”

  “Is that why I know so little about you?”

  “That’s one reason.”

  “But you hide so much from me.”

  “That’s where you are wrong, Honza. I hide nothing that you need to know, and would answer any question, if you knew how to ask it.”

  Her clever reply left me tongue-tied.

  “But you see,” she went on, “I made a decision, not just to live in the open, but to unlock other people’s secrets, yours for instance. And the secret is that there is no secret. Just as in Kafka. Rudolf makes a big thing about Kafka. In those days Kafka was the prophet, the one who had foreseen it all.”

  She had a particular way of referring to “those days”—v té době— when the dissidents, who had yet to use that word to describe themselves, emerged from the rubble and lit their pale candles in the dark. She wanted me to admire those people, and also to suspect them.

  “Kafka imagined the corridors leading nowhere, the doors painted on the walls, the floors that were thin ceilings over some other person’s life. He was the guide to the labyrinth, and you paid him with sighs. But he told us nothing, nothing at all. It was all literature.”

  She spoke with unusual vehemence, as though from some personal hurt. I searched my mind for a reply. But I found only the image of Dad, poring over Kafka’s Castle, in preparation for one of his weekly meetings. The images of Dad’s finger on the page, of his knitted brow and of the pencil held between his teeth, were objects now of an unbearable tenderness, and I could not speak. Betka was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms stretched along her thighs, her eyes fixed on the floor.

  “Actually,” she went on, “nothingness has its attractions. You can buy it cheaply, and sell it at a high price. Sometimes I think that’s what goes on in Rudolf’s seminar. All this solidarity of the shattered, for instance. What does it mean?”

  I was shocked by her words, which seemed like a denial of everything we shared.

  “So why do you go there?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew. Oh, but I do know. I go there because I love those people too. And yes, I want to learn. I want to see our situation as a whole, to complete it, to rescue it.”

  In such a way she would always undo the effect of her cynical words, bringing me back to what mattered, which was the love that had its home in that room—the room where she didn’t belong.

  CHAPTER 13

  LOOKING BACK ACROSS nearly a quarter of a century to those never-to-be recovered days of beauty and fear, I find no ready words to convey her way of being. Americans divided our people into three classes: the oppressors, the dissidents, and the silent majority. From this simple typology, which was all that Bob Heilbronn knew of our national fate, the reams of simplifying journalism flowed. But we were like people everywhere: we refused to be categorized. Each of us had his own way of breathing our poisoned air, so as to minimize its impact on his body. It was through reading and teaching that Dad had made the space in which to pass a form of human life to his children. For others it was music, poetry, country walks, or sport. From Betka I learned about the dissidents. But I also learned that she was not one. She had been a teenager during the years of normalization, and had watched with sympathetic detachment as her contemporaries joined the underground, singing and playing in the style of Frank Zappa or Paul McCartney, gathering in smoke-filled rooms to read poems, plays,
and novels that were passed excitedly from hand to hand not for their merits but because they were forbidden. It was the ambition of many young people then to defy the world with the stomping sound called Bigboš. But rock music had no appeal for her, and when, with the trial in 1976 of the Plastic People of the Universe, the regime issued its warning to the youth, Betka’s life remained unaffected. For her there was only classical music, and, with a few carefully pondered exceptions such as the amateur bluegrass band in which she had once played the bass, and some smuggled records of the Beatles and Pink Floyd that she kept hidden under her desk, popular music was an offense to her ear. True, she had joined the Jazz Section of the Musicians’ Union, through which the regime extended its protection to a “proletarian” art form associated, in earlier times, with communist ideas. But the Jazz Section had branched out, had expanded beyond its permitted maximum of 3,000 to 7,000 members, and had begun to publish texts that could never be issued by our official publishing houses, including the speech given by our national poet Jaroslav Seifert on receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. It had even issued Nietzsche’s writings on Wagner that lay, stuffed with paper slips, beside Betka’s bed. The regime had begun to move against the Jazz Section; and at the time I am describing, its leader, Karel Srp, was on trial for having kept the thing going as a clandestine network. Needless to say, Betka was part of that network; and also not part of it at all.

  In those days of our love, the poet known as Magor, the madman, who had managed the Plastic People, was rolling his “swan songs” into cigarettes and smuggling them from his prison in Ostrov nad Ohří. The poems made their way to the West, and then back again in tiny cyclostyled editions. Betka obtained a copy, as she obtained her share of all things beautiful and good. She would set the verses to weeping melodies, in a kind of caricature of Dowland. When I first read those words in the tiny book, smuggled from Germany with its own magnifying glass inserted in the spine, they seemed slight: