I had not missed one of Rudolf’s seminars since I began to attend them. Nor had Betka ever suggested such a thing. The seminar united our community like a religious observance. Why did she want me to break this sacred routine? After all, the opera in those days was no big deal: the tickets were cheap and the performances vile.
“I think we should go to the seminar,” I said.
“Count me out,” she responded. But I detected an uneasiness in her manner that gave zest to my refusal. She had, for the first time, given me a chance to hurt her, and I leapt as though at a liberation.
“Fine,” I said. “But I intend to go.”
She slipped from the bed, came across to me, and flung her arms around my neck.
“Honza, I am asking a special favor. We could be together, as we were in Krchleby. Why do you refuse, just for the sake of an American ghoul who wants to add us to his list of credits?”
“Not for his sake, but for mine,” I answered. “On account of that future I should have thought about before.”
She detached herself and began to get dressed.
“Well,” she said, “if that’s the way you feel. You had better go now. And don’t follow me, OK?”
She was crying. I looked at her for a moment, in the bittersweet relish that her hurt aroused in me. Then I went quickly into the courtyard and out into the street.
CHAPTER 24
FATHER PAVEL WAS shutting the garage when I arrived. He had been working on an old Jawa motorcycle which had to be locked away in the workshop, lest it be stolen. He smiled gently as he washed his black hands in the enamel sink, and remarked on the beauty of motorcycles, and especially of those old models from before the war, which had been put together with loving respect for detail, and which grew from their parts as a work of music grows from its notes. He described the Jawa as a “mereological miracle,” built in the days when people still had eyes for each other and for the things that they used. He added that there was no better way to understand the disaster of communism than to study what happened to this motorcycle when the factory was confiscated in 1948 and thenceforth worked by slaves.
“But of course,” he added, “that’s not what you have come here to talk about.”
I asked him if we could go together to the church of Svatá Alžběta.
“I have been waiting for the moment,” he said, and gestured to the door. He bestowed on the motorcycle one last loving glance before leaving, his only indication yet of an earthly attachment. As we walked through the blighted cemetery, he told me that the church had been broken into and vandalized.
“I noticed the windows were boarded up,” I said.
“Oh, so you pass by from time to time?” he replied, with a curious glance at me.
I nodded, but said nothing. If anything bore witness to Father Pavel’s priestly vocation it was his ability to propagate silence. With Father Pavel, only necessary words had a place, and his unembarrassed face took in the silence like the face of some resting animal.
It was dark in the church on account of the boarded-up windows, and, because the ceiling lights had been disconnected, Father Pavel lit the candles that stood on the altar table. The congregation had done its best to put the place in order: the broken chairs were piled in one corner, the lectern had been repaired with splints made from chair legs, and the few whole chairs remaining had been placed in line before the altar. Liquid of some kind had been thrown at the painting of St. Elizabeth, and a brown stain spread across the face of the saint.
“What happened to Informace o církvi?” I asked.
“Oh, that was the chair they were looking for,” he said. “But they didn’t find it.”
“How come?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I had a hunch, when they took Igor in for questioning, that we might be due for a visit. It’s in the workshop, if you want to read it. And by the way, they released Igor and won’t be charging him.”
I sat down next to him on one of the chairs. It caused me no surprise that a free-thinking Czech, who considered religion to be a helpless refusal to acknowledge that we are helpless, could stumble again and again on the “moments of truth” that his thinking ruled to be impossible, moments like that of Mother’s Bible, like that of the vandalized church of Our Lady of Sorrows, like this in another vandalized church, beside a man who, for whatever reason, had thought it worthwhile to sacrifice the sparse comforts that our regime permitted for the sake of a creed neither believable nor believed. Looking back on those moments now, I know them also as moments of the lie, and know too that, in their intensest and most life-transforming manifestation, the truth and the lie thrive side by side in conflict.
The thought frightens me. It has no place in the world outside my window and forbids me to belong to it. What place in cheerful America for a thought like that? And what instinct was it that led me to confess to Father Pavel, and in the act of confession to invent a life of sin?
I did not look at him as I spoke. His eyes, like mine, rested on the picture of Saint Elizabeth, whose face had bled in a brown stain across the chalky sky. From time to time he brushed the lock of hair from his forehead, as though clearing the way for my words to enter it. I began with Dad, hesitantly at first, but with increasing confidence as I discovered a role for myself, as the one who had never atoned for my own tragic fault in not loving sufficiently that innocent person. Again I imagined Dad’s finger, tracing the lines of books haunted by the ghosts that our rulers had wished to exorcise. And I recalled our summer holidays camping in the Krkonoše mountains, our evenings at home with his collection of long-playing records, our Christmases around Ivana’s Bethlehem where, amid leaden cows and horses, in the lap of a Virgin made of pipe cleaners, lay the tiny wrapped-up Christ child, in whose existence not one of us believed.
I let the reminiscences come: small things, family things, even my schoolboy misdemeanors, including the theft of Mother’s homemade liver sausage, the fight at school with Miroslav Fiala, the attempt for no good reason to run away when I got as far as Chomutov before the police caught up with me and made a phone call to Dad’s school, when he came so sadly to collect me without the smallest sign of blame on his dear face, but his eyes turned down and his hand trembling as he reached out to touch me as though to test whether I were real. And as I spoke it occurred to me, maybe for the first time, that I had once been a child, that I had not been born on that day when they took him away forever, and that from that day forth my sins took on another character—no longer misdemeanors but an expanding and soul-subduing fear of other people, a refusal to love or be loved, which was the real engine of those underground journeys and from which I awoke at last only when I followed an unknown girl to Divoká Šárka and in consequence of a Kafkaesque immersion in my own absurdity delivered my mother into the hands of the police and thence to Ruzyně prison.
As the extent of my sinfulness was laid bare, a kind of peace descended on me. I described Mother’s life, her hopes, her mute suffering love for her children, her readiness to forgive Ivana who had cut us off for some understandable reason—a lover, perhaps, a fiancé, whose affection would not survive the revelation of our crimes. Bit by bit, my sense of isolation became an old-fashioned family matter, entirely without erotic overtones, so that Betka hovered on the edge of it, harmless and out of reach. Such was the effect of Father Pavel’s unspeaking form beside me, enveloping me in a mist of contrition. And, uncanny though it seemed, I sensed that he knew all that I was not telling him, that he was through some telepathic process shifting my feelings away from the girl from Divoká Šárka whose identity I had no need to reveal towards the place from which salvation comes. For what is salvation, if not the ability to confess to your faults, and to open yourself to atonement?
We were silent for a while. The flickering light from the altar candles made a pool of deep shadow beneath him, in which the small movements of his hands and head were recorded. I could not tell if he were praying. When at last he
broke the silence, it was in a sibylline whisper.
“Our faults lie in what we hide, not in what we show.”
“Yes,” I said, “and that is why priests are necessary. We come to you to be taken apart. Even if we don’t believe what you believe.”
“And what do I believe, Jan?”
“That God exists. And that what I told you was a pack of lies.”
“We love God, Jan, through loving his absence. That is to love Him in another way, a better way. And what you told me was the truth. The lie is what you did not tell me: the thing that you have hidden away for safety’s sake, the thing that you love more than you should.”
“Then you know?” I said, turning to him.
In that moment it was as though his face were lit from behind. His eyes had lost their softness, and the whites shone out with an opalescent glow. The points of stubble on his cheeks seemed like tiny daggers held against me, and his lips were drawn back from his teeth, revealing a crowded heap of pinnacles between shadowy gaps. It was no longer the face of some lime wood saint, but a primeval landscape, shaped by suffering and by the bleak sad sameness of the mortal world. But it was also the face of someone who could fight in self-defense.
“There is another person inside you, Jan, one who lives in imagination, who rejects reality as second best.”
“Is that how you read my life?”
“Your life is a fiction. You decided to love fictions, since they couldn’t harm you. I am not referring to the girl from Divoká Šárka only, though it is important to learn that you imagined her. Nor are you the only person who lives in this way. This is their greatest achievement, to divide our country in two, on the one hand the cynics who live without morals and who know the price of everything, and on the other hand the pure souls who know the price of nothing and who therefore recoil into the world of the imagination to pursue their beautiful dreams.”
“And you,” I asked. “Which are you?”
As suddenly as it had vanished, his old face returned, and he looked at me with that indescribable softness, brushing the lock of hair from his forehead and nodding as though in receipt of some undeniable truth.
“I know only that God has withdrawn from the world, and he makes each person feel this in his own way. Oh, I have had my share of phantoms. I have pursued imaginary loves just as you have. But I have learned to consign my life to what is absent and untouchable.”
“You talk in riddles, Father.”
“No, Jan, it is you who live in riddles. For a long time now you have wanted to talk to me about the thing that really matters in your life, and you have avoided it, as though all change were to come from outside of you—a change in our political system, for instance, another invasion, a strike by the StB.”
“So what really matters in my life?”
Was it part of Father Pavel’s duty as a priest to be prying in this way? I guessed that it was. For all his sophistication, he believed in that thing called the soul—duše—whose name in Czech evokes the disarming softness of his manner. He believed in the other Jan inside me, the one who had never belonged to the world of daylight, and whose eternal destiny was Father Pavel’s personal concern. But this too was a fiction, and by believing it, Father Pavel put himself beside me, on a precarious ledge above the abyss of nothingness.
“Let me tell you first what matters to them. It is not only that you must live, as Václav Havel says, within the lie. It is also that you must create a life in which truth and falsehood are no longer distinguishable, so that the only thing that counts is your own advantage, to be pursued in whatever way you can. By this means we learn to distrust each other, and every call to love enshrines a summons to betrayal. The precious element from which the soul itself is built, the element of sacrifice, which caused one person once to lay down his life for the rest of us, this precious element is extracted from all our dealings and cast onto the dustheap of history. When I pray, I pray to that person who is the way, the truth, and the life. And at this very moment your mother is praying to him also.”
His words were a kind of warning. Whether he was referring to Betka I did not know. But it was suddenly obvious to me that I had never for one moment considered how I might forego some advantage for Betka’s sake. Sacrifice had not entered my thoughts of her, and for that very reason my love for her had grown around a core of distrust. And Father Pavel was right to remind me of Mother, whose life had been one continuous sacrifice and who had never distrusted anyone close to her, not even the under-manager of the paper factory, who had condemned her in court as a Zionist agent and an enemy of the Czechoslovak people. I could not pray to that person who called himself the way, the truth, and the life—not through pride, as I clung to my ledge above the abyss, but because I believed Him too to be a fiction, whose power consists only in the quantity of helpless suffering that had been offloaded onto His imaginary shoulders, and fallen through them into the void. But I asked Father Pavel to pray for me and for Mother, and said that I would begin now to live only for her.
“Not only for her, Jan. But for her, at least. For you know, this life of cynical distrust will change, maybe not soon, but nevertheless all of a sudden. She will need you then more than ever.”
Of course, I had heard such cheerful prophecies before: always they were on Igor’s lips, and several of the older people at Rudolf’s seminar gave credence to them. Even Betka seemed to act as though she believed the nightmare would end, preparing herself for a career in another environment than the one we knew. But I shrugged the prophecies off as part of the great fiction to which Father Pavel subscribed, the fiction of a benign creator who could watch mankind enslave itself, reduce itself to the condition of mutual antipathy, and in general make itself loveless and unlovable and still have plans to rescue us. God, if he existed, was surely not so daft.
CHAPTER 25
THE STRANGE THING is that those skeptical thoughts, which were my normal response to religion, retreated into the background. Sitting with Father Pavel in that ruined church, with the broken chairs piled up in one corner, two candles in cracked cups on the rickety altar, the stained painting of the saint, and the windows smashed and boarded up, I knew that I was in a consecrated space, that all thought and speech had a different meaning here, as music has a different meaning when it is breathed into the silence. Father Pavel’s God had withdrawn from the world, but as the sea withdraws, leaving behind it these little pools of clear water in which the spirit still lives. And whatever our condition, however tainted we were by those sordid calculations by which we were forced to live, we could bathe in these secret waters and be refreshed.
Thus it was that, in my journey from Svatá Alžběta to Gottwaldova I felt some of the calm of the confessional: the calm that comes when atonement is at last accepted and begun. For some months now I had avoided the Metro, which belonged to the life that I had left behind. The trams too repelled me, packed as they were with the same silent cargo. I walked everywhere, my eyes turned down to the mosaic pavements that hem the fluttering robes of our buildings and stitch them to the street. Those pavements, made from small cubes of white sandstone and blue granite, were then in poor repair, punctuated by puddles and in places pushed up in heaps. But they were a symbol of our city and of the care that had been expended over centuries to endow this place with a soul. My own soul too had been scuffed and trampled into heaps and hollows, and was in need of reassembling. I followed their pattern, often inventing it where it was broken or obscured, listening to the sound of footsteps on the cobbles. I was conscious that I was often followed, expected always to be stopped and questioned, and was never sure whether it would not be a relief at last, to be taken into custody. What did they hope to gain from my spurious freedom? Did they not have the evidence they needed to remove me and all the others, Betka and Father Pavel too, to the cellar?
I found myself in Wenceslas Square, where tourists gathered in plush hotels, and the young whores, some of them so pretty and enticing that I had to
wrench my eyes from them, drifted in and out of the bars. Only foreigners could afford to stay in these places, and I glanced through the plate glass window of the Zlatá Husa, the Golden Goose Hotel, knowing that our American visitor would have looked for just such a place in order to complete his experience—perhaps hoping for the orgy described by Philip Roth in a little novella about the Prague of those days, as Americans imagined it.
And yes, there he was, deep in conversation by the window, next to a table lamp held aloft by a naked water nymph in bronze. The girl whom he addressed had her back turned to the street, but she was nodding vigorously—an English speaker and a high-class whore, therefore, one that would cost him not only money but the risk of blackmail. He was even more stupid than I thought, and deserved whatever trap it was that they were leading him into. Of course, it was absurd to think that Betka, my Betka, could be playing this game, and the resemblance of that long neck and gathered hair to my beloved, my ex-beloved, I should say, was surely accidental. I moved away lest she should turn and see me, staring into windows like a madman, like the Doppelgänger in that frightening poem by Heine, which Schubert had made into a yet more frightening song.
The cloud of peace that surrounded me had moved on, and I hurried to catch up with it. Round which corner of our city had it disappeared? Was it lingering in the great porch of the National Museum? Had it waited somewhere along the avenue of Victorious February, date of the Communists’ Coup, to rejoin me on my walk to Nusle? Was it there at the corner of Bělehradská, ready to accompany me down into the valley, across the Botič and the railway line and up the steep incline to Gottwaldova, where the police car was still installed, I noticed, at the end of our street? Would it at least wait for me at the bottom of our stairwell, with its broken lift and ill-lit concrete steps, so as to lead me gently at last into the lonely cupboard where Mother and I had once been happy, in our way? Or had it perhaps wafted before me onto the landing and through our broken door, to fold itself away between the pages of Mother’s Bible?
Notes From Underground Page 18