Notes From Underground

by Roger Scruton

  “You are Jan Reichl,” she said. Her voice was soft, accentless, with the same institutional character as her face and clothes. I stared at her in astonishment and nodded silently.

  “Before she left Alžběta asked me to promise her something.”

  I continued to nod.

  “She said that you would be certain to come looking for her, and that I must find a way to tell you about Olga. I must ask you to understand and forgive, because she had wished only to protect you.”

  It sounded like a prayer inserted in the liturgy—part of the office for the day. Information had been stored in this neat receptacle, like a note between the pages of a prayer book. I had a premonition that I would not like the information, and made a bid to postpone it.

  “How can you live a consecrated life?” I asked. “Didn’t they close the orders in 1954?”

  “We Ursulines proved to be necessary—some of us at least. There is nothing in communism that can bring comfort to a dying child.”

  She lifted her peaceful grey eyes to mine and a spark of warm humanity showed that she was now departing from her script.

  “Alžběta Palková,” she told me, “was here every day. She didn’t work here, except as a volunteer. I don’t understand why Paní Ředitelka wanted to hide this from you.”

  She looked up at me with a new animation, her nose and cheeks twitching rhythmically as though sniffing the air.

  “I’m telling you,” she went on, “because I am so glad for what has happened. I loved Olga, we all loved her. The thought that she was going to die was hard for us to bear, and the sight of her mother, so determined to prevent it, so full of tenderness and conviction—well, it was an inspiration to us. But of course you know that intractable epilepsy has been pronounced incurable by our ministry of health. The director told us to make the child comfortable and devote our energies elsewhere. Alžběta wasn’t having it, as perhaps you know, on account of the children’s hospital in Boston. How I wish we could be joined to them! But then—well, you know the problem. None of our doctors would write a recommendation, and there are no better facilities in Czechoslovakia than ours. It all had to be done unofficially. I wrote letters to Boston with the details of Olga’s case, while Alžběta worked on getting permission to travel.”

  We had emerged from the hospital and descended the alleyway towards the steps. I was studying the church of the Loreta, conjuring in my mind the Prague of Rudolf II, the place where all mysteries were exchanged and bartered, and no boundaries set limits to thinking. I imagined myself in that time, believing that all mistakes could be undone by spells, and all losses changed by magic into gains. And then my thoughts returned to the present. In my intoxication with truth, I had ignored the truth that was staring me in the face. I groaned aloud, and the little nun looked up at me in consternation.

  “But you see,” she cried, “Olga will be saved. They gave Alžběta permission—it was only days ago—to take her to America. Never has a little angel touched our hearts as Olga touched them.”

  She talked on more calmly about her plans to visit Boston, about Olga’s future in America and her possible return, and about a hundred trivial details that escaped my attention until, with a choked “goodbye,” I went stumbling along the street towards the city.

  CHAPTER 31

  AT EVERY POINT during the two weeks that followed I reminded myself that I was alone, that it was up to me to rescue what I could of the little world that had collapsed around me, and that to retreat underground was no longer an option. I left a note for Vilém, explaining what I had discovered. I went every day to work, reassuring Mr. Krutský that I would leave as soon as I had found a job more suited to my uselessness. I asked Igor to inform the official dissidents about the arrest of Father Pavel. I begged him to collect signatures for a letter to the Western press, in which I emphasized that the very public arrest of Martin Gunther while addressing a private seminar had served to distract attention from the furtive seizure of Pavel Havránek. As an unofficial priest, I wrote, Mr. Havránek risked a fate far worse and far more decisive than imprisonment. Igor told me that it would serve no purpose to sign such a letter, other than to invite a charge of subversion in collaboration with a foreign power. All that we could do was to make enquiries through official channels at the Ministry of the Interior, National Security section. I accordingly addressed a letter to the minister and, to my surprise, received a reply inviting me to the Interior Ministry on Letná, where my request, I was told, would be dealt with by the competent authorities.

  The competent authorities turned out to be the two policemen who had been in charge of my previous interrogation. They were waiting for me in the foyer of that ugly tile-clad block, took me straight to the lift, marched me down corridors and through doors and partitions, and at last sat me down across from them at a large bare desk, by a window with a view of the castle and the Sparta stadium. My letter was produced, shaken in my face, and then torn in two.

  “So far as we are concerned,” the sharp-faced officer told me, “there is no such person as this Pavel Havránek. And if there were such a person, then the idea that he might be an unofficial priest is simply laughable.”

  He told me that I was lucky to be treated with such courtesy, that he would not be surprised—though as a low-ranking officer it was not his business to enquire—if I were not one of their more privileged clients, who had so far enjoyed the protection of someone up there (and he pointed to the ceiling). He made it clear that my continuing association with lawless and subversive elements was jeopardizing Mother’s chances of early release, and that, if it were not for the embarrassment already caused by the stupid action of the District 7 Police Force in arresting an American as well as the hooligans who had gathered to gawp at him, they would feel far more free than they temporarily were to lock me up as well.

  All these home truths I absorbed as best I could, and pondered them during sleepless nights at Gottwaldova. Meanwhile the American Embassy had made our authorities understand that, when you lock up a liberal American professor, friend of ex-Presidents and Supreme Court judges, there is a diplomatic price to pay. After two weeks, Professor Gunther was put on a plane to New York, and the few members of our seminar who were still detained—Rudolf being one of them—were released. Warnings were issued, and the solidarity of the shattered was resumed. I gathered this information in snippets, being afraid to return to Rudolf’s seminar, for fear of what they might be thinking and saying about Betka.

  One day I made the trip to Krchleby, walked to her house through fields now glowing with sunflowers, stood for a while beneath the image of the heilige Jungfrau, and then took the road to Nebíčko, Little Heaven. In the early afternoon I arrived at the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows, took the key from the bird box, and let myself into the sacred space of our marriage. It was a warm day, and there was no sound within the chapel save the buzzing of flies and the gentle cooing of a dove under the roof tiles. There were fresh flowers on the altar, and the floor had been recently swept. I sat in the chair where she had sat, in the nurtured tranquillity of a place where only nothing happens. In so many ways she had cared for me, and even if I would never again stand in the sun of her presence, even if everything henceforth were to be shadowy outlines, she had been mine. Of course, Vilém thought something similar. But he was wrong, and I rehearsed the proof of this from a thousand tiny premises. I remembered the kisses, the ironic smiles, the ballerina movements that she kept for me; I remembered her voice, her music, her wondrous competence at everything she attempted; I remembered her lessons, not about books only, but about life, the life that seemed so minutely forbidden but which a person like her could snatch without permission and fly away with. She had briefly appeared at the boundary of my being, like a lovely bird in a window, and she had turned towards me with the softest of kisses before her flight. I could not condemn her, but would be forever hers.

  A strange transformation came over the chapel. The afternoon light, filtered
through the dusty windows, outlined the pilasters with shadow so that they seemed to stand forward from the walls as though observing me. The painted saints in the barrel vault parted and reassembled. The wounds left by the wrenched-away monuments seemed to bleed afresh, like the wounds of the saints that had once stood there in effigy. The chapel slowly came alive, and moved with me to that boundary between worlds of which Father Pavel had spoken—the place where mortal things melt into their eternal counterparts, and where the supernatural reveals itself in human form. The important thing, Father Pavel had said, is not our belief, but His grace. We refuse His gifts out of meanness, for we fear the cost of them. And yes, the cost is everything.

  Recalling the mysterious maxims through which Father Pavel ordered and defied the world, I wondered again on his part in our drama. Was he preparing for martyrdom, or, on the contrary, managing his escape from it? And my eyes fell on a small door that I had not noticed before, set in the wall to the side of the great stone altar. Around it had been painted a trompe-l’oeil door frame, which was barely discernible against the pale ochre plaster of the wall. The door itself was composed of clean slats of hardwood, maintained in good repair, and with a handle of brass. In the atmosphere that had filled the simple shrine like incense it seemed as though this door had been revealed especially for my benefit, that it was the door between worlds.

  As I went across I had the distinct impression of being followed. Unexplained shadows swept the wall, and there was a sound of footsteps in the aisle. But turning, I saw only the empty interior of the chapel, haunted by sunlight, watching me as our Lady of Sorrows, according to Father Pavel, watches all of us always, awaiting her chance.

  The door opened on to a little sacristy. A cupboard contained an old tattered surplice, and hidden beneath its folds two cups that I assumed were used in the furtive sacrament. A broom stood in one corner, beside a sink that was kept clean with a scouring brush. A small round-arched window cast its light on a bare table, with a wicker chair pushed under it, as though to make a desk. These few objects had a disposable air, ready at any moment to be disowned and discarded. Next to the cupboard was a smaller one in metal, containing oddments—some dishes, a few clothes, a tattered kneeler, some old newspapers—which had been swept there out of sight. A patch of gold leaf glistened behind the pile of junk, and after rummaging for a while I extracted a painted wooden plaque edged with rococo scrolls in gold. It carried a list of names and dates in Gothic lettering. At the top was written, Kapelle Unserer Lieben Frau der Schmerzen, and beneath it Priester dieser Kirche. The list began with Vater Peter Hindsinger, who was appointed to this Parish in 1845. And it proceeded through fifteen names until 1951, when there was a gap. The last name, written in Czech characters, was that of Father Pavel Havránek, who served the congregation between 1969 and 1971 and again between 1975 and 1979, when presumably he was arrested and the church finally closed. In 1979, Betka would have been nineteen years old. Father Pavel was her priest, her mentor, and surely her lover and the father of her child.

  In that moment, Betka’s life lay clearly before me. I envisaged the taut, determined girl, abandoned by her parents in a world of distrust, yet imbued with the highest spiritual ambition, wanting to know, to make music, to see God. How could such a girl not be drawn to the most powerless person in that place, the one who lived not by calculation but by sacrifice? In such a way had Betka’s love been awakened. And then the disaster of Father Pavel’s arrest, the birth of the sickly Olga, the need now to care for two people who were paying the price of the spiritual freedom she had so recklessly assumed. I remembered Betka tenderly wrapping Mother’s food parcels, and saw her doing the same for Father Pavel. I recalled her abrupt way of moving on from every situation, of finding the hidden door through which she alone could pass into the future. I imagined the decisive steps that she had taken to move with Olga to Prague, to explore the avenues through which to rescue this child of a love that could not be openly confessed. I imagined in every detail the flirtation with Vilém, whom she used as best she could, and the contract with the StB, the only ones who could grant the infinitely precious thing that Olga needed.

  And yes, I was part of that contract, someone who must be watched for the simple reason that he was a mystery—a mystery to himself and to them, but no longer a mystery to her, once she had brought him up into the daylight to see how he blinked. And then, because I was useless, because there was nothing to be gained from me, because I was a poor creature living in reckless solitude, yet with the same ambition to know that had put her on the path to her disasters, I appeared before her as an object of love—that precious love, born of the highest yearning, for which there was also the highest price to pay. She was a free being, who accepted the cost of what she most truly felt; therefore she had decided to protect me. About Olga she could not speak: to reveal that part of her life would have destroyed everything between us. The room in Smíchov was a temple removed from the world, a place from which all the calculations into which she was forced by her secret need had been excluded. We were together there in the only form of togetherness that she would allow, the togetherness that made no contact with the world of daily compromise. Right until that last moment by the Chapel of the Holy Family, when she looked into my eyes as though hoping that I could read the story there as I was reading it now in the gilded plaque of wood that I held before me in trembling hands, she had wanted to rescue both me and Olga. And when, in my anger, I had rejected her, she had sent Father Pavel to intercept me. And maybe, in some recess of her all-encompassing consciousness, she had obscurely foreseen that I would be put into the hands of Officer Macháček, and brought down by that official lever from the heights of our impossible love into the world of everyday survival.

  All that passed in a moment through my mind, and I knew for the first time fully what I had lost. I walked along the road that we had taken on the day of our marriage. I lay down beside the stream where we had made love. I crossed myself at the icon of the heilige Jungfrau above her door, and again at the Cavalry by the nearby crossroads, where Hans Müller or Honza Molnar had been shot. And I walked on through the twilight into the forest, to lie down beneath a spreading copper beech, tired, miserable, and hungry. I awoke shivering in the early hours, my clothes saturated with dew. It was midday by the time I arrived in Prague, too late for work. I went straight to Ruzyně, since Mother had been allowed a visit for that very afternoon. And there, facing her across iron bars, I asked her forgiveness for all the ways in which I had neglected her. She smiled wanly, since direct expressions of emotion embarrassed her. She had for the last two weeks been cheered by the presence in her cell of Helena Gotthartová, Rudolf’s wife, who had told her everything. The guard interrupted her at this point, but I easily guessed what “everything” included. We turned to the kinds of trivia that occupy people when they are watched and censored, and as I got up to leave, she said, “By the way, I heard from Ivana. She is marrying a policeman in Brandýs. She sends her love, and says that the wedding will be a private affair, just the two of them and a couple of witnesses. She hopes we will understand why it is best you stay away.”

  CHAPTER 32

  A MONTH LATER Mother was home from prison. We knew now that things were changing. Gorbachev was two years into his reign as sixth Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and the diplomatic disaster of Martin Gunther had led our police to survey us with a lighter touch. Rudolf was aspiring to emigrate, Karel to emerge from his boiler house, and Igor to be either Pope or President, I could never tell which. I found a new job in an antikvariát, making use of all the things that I had learned through Betka, and studying how to forget her. For a while I almost thought that it was possible. There were one or two girlfriends of a Western-leaning pop-bothered kind. One of them even suggested looking for the orgy described, or invented, by Philip Roth. I refused, of course. But only afterwards did I acknowledge to myself that it was Betka who prevented me—Betka whom I would betray with any girl I slept
with. Only one person came near to replacing her in my affections, and that person, Markéta, was so embarrassed when I left a performance of Janáček’s folk song arrangements in tears that she broke off the relationship.

  Mother found work as a translator, and in our evenings we began to reassemble the Powerless Press. The manuscript of Rumors had been confiscated during the course of Mother’s arrest. I wanted to start again as a writer, making use of things that had happened during my brief time living in truth. I needed those stories as proof that I was me. But the last typed copy of Rumors had disappeared with Betka, and I presented this fact to myself as the only good reason to regret her departure. I did not speak of Betka to Mother, and Mother did not speak of her time in prison. Instead, we set up home together in a new way, knowing that each had grown towards the other, and that whatever had happened during our eight months apart had happened for the good of both of us. When, a year later, we were arrested and charged with running an illegal business, we were able to laugh at the charges. Vilém Sládek, with whom I had become quite friendly, and whose concerts of baroque music I frequently attended, made a fuss on our behalf, contacting Bob Heilbronn’s successor at the American Embassy and threatening to raise a petition which would embarrass the government not only towards the Western press but also towards our masters in the Soviet Union. The charges were dropped within a week and we were released unconditionally.