Notes From Underground (7 page)

“Of course,” he said, looking up, “we will learn in due course whom you were visiting.”

He closed his notebook and lit a cigarette. A third man in plain clothes entered from an adjoining room and began to discuss repairs to a Mercedes, and how to obtain parts for it. As the three talked I began to take note of my surroundings. We were in a room with high windows. I looked out onto a semi-circular opening in the wall of St. Bartholomew's Church, which peered at me like the half-open eye of a man who has been beaten. On the wall facing me
was a poster showing the hatchet face of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin's chief of secret police, above his famous slogan: “Clean hands, cool head, warm heart.” I recalled another saying of Dzerzhinsky's, from a book that Mother had produced about the Russian Revolution: “We represent in ourselves organized terror—this must be said very clearly.” But it wasn't said clearly around here. The only hint of it was another poster announcing things that were forbidden: smoking, talking when not addressed by an officer, putting your hands in your pockets, consulting papers, taking notes.

I was seated in a simple chair in a row of four. The officers were standing around the desk, which looked as though it had been there since the days of the First Republic. At one point, the sharp-faced one left with his notebook and began talking loudly in the adjoining room. I stared for a while, then drifted away. Nothing of what was happening seemed to concern me. I thought of Betka's words to me. What had she meant about bringing me up into the daylight so as to watch me blink? What was she planning—for that she was planning something I did not doubt. They were still talking among themselves when, without deciding to do any such thing, I got up and went towards the door.

“What are you doing?” the interrogator cried.

“I assumed you didn't want me anymore.”

“Just wait there.”

The interrogator left for the adjoining room, and returned after a while with two sheets of paper, on which questions and answers had been typed.

“Read it,” he said. “And when you have read it, sign.”

The rough grey paper rubbed against my fingers like a file. Some of the words had been typed over with x's; others were fragments of communist jargon that I could not possibly have used. I had apparently denied all knowledge of my mother's reactionary beliefs and counter-revolutionary actions, and the words—
zpáte
č
nický
and
kontrarevolu
č
ní
—were like pieces of an old jigsaw forced into the unfilled places of a puzzle to which they did not belong.

“What if I don't agree?”

“Sign it, I said.”

I must have signed; I don't remember. Afterwards I went back to Gottwaldova. I did not return to my life underground. I had emerged from the catacombs into a wholly new kind of loneliness, an assuageable loneliness that came from wanting what was real. When I left work the next day I wandered along the banks of the river for an hour. It was a raw December day, and a thin sunlight placed golden crowns on all the houses. I remember one of them, a plain white house which still retained its stucco, with an attic story where stone nymphs punctuated a balustrade. I remember it because of an unusual feature, which was the figure of a woman leaning from the attic window and looking down on the Smetana embankment. People didn't lean much out of windows in those days, and certainly not in places where they could be so easily seen. She was young, dark, with strangely lopsided features, as though one side of her face had been assembled without reference to the other. She seemed to be watching me, and I did something unpremeditated and foolhardy: I waved at her. She looked back at me with a puzzled expression, and then promptly closed the window. Recalled now, the experience has the character of a premonition. The world was full of warnings, and I rejoiced in ignoring them.

Betka was sitting in a window of the Slavia, at one of the marble tables that have since been modernized away. I should have been intimidated by this place frequented by intellectuals and spies. I had heard that a circle of dissidents, who had gathered around the poet Ji
ř
í Kolá
ř
before his emigration in 1980, still met from time to time at his favorite table. And surely the man filling in the
Mladá fronta
crossword, whose table commanded a view of the whole interior, was the resident corner-cop. It surprised me that Betka was sitting there,
calmly immersed in a book, one finger in the handle of a cup that she had just put down.

The Slavia had maintained some memory of its past, as the place where the cheerful believers in our nation had drunk together while the band played dumkas and polkas from the dais. The few tired waiters wore the shreds of old uniforms, with white collars and black bow ties; the tables and chairs were unchanged from the Jugendstil pattern acquired in the last days of Austro-Hungary, and against the wall of the dais, next to an upright piano, a double bass leaned as though exhausted from its labors. A few tidily-dressed men sat at one table, staring silently into glasses of wine. Two women whispered in a corner, one of them toying with a necklace of imitation pearls, as though debating whether the time had come to strangle herself. The place was another warning, and Betka was inviting me to ignore it.

She had tied up her hair in a chignon, and the sight of her pale neck aroused in me a love quite unlike any that had haunted my travels underground. I wanted to make her my own. I sat down, and she looked up with a smile. She put a scrap of paper in her book, closed it, and pushed it into the center of the table. It was the
Heretical Essays
by Jan Pato
č
ka, published in Canada by an exile press. I asked her how she had acquired this work by a famous non-person, first spokesman of Charter 77, who had been interrogated to death, so I had been told, by the StB, and whose dense, laden prose had been one of the weights under Mother's bed.

“No need to know,” she answered. “But it's pretty unreadable stuff.”

“He wrote that way because he was wrestling with darkness,” I protested.

“His own darkness.”

It had not occurred to me that a famous dissident might be frankly criticized. It was part of our impotence, that the few touchstones
could not be shifted. Betka moved in an illuminated space of her own, in which nothing was protected, and all was provisional.

I found myself talking to her as though coming home from a long adventure, and it dawned on me that my conversations with Betka were the first real conversations in my life. I was speaking to her of my failed education and my journeys underground. I talked about Dostoevsky and Kafka, and she nodded her encouragement, saying hardly a word. How ordinary my confidences sounded, but how special was the glance with which she greeted them. There was a kind of ingenuous amazement in her features, as though I had fallen into her world in just the way she had fallen into mine. And when I had finished, she held my hand gently for a moment and said “Jan,” as though baptizing me.

I asked her about her parents.

“They are irrelevant,” she answered. “Not the kind of people you would want to know.”

“But what do they do?”

She looked down at her hands, which lay as though discarded on the table.

“They are divorced. Dad manages an export business, but I never see him.”

A Party member, then. It could hardly have been otherwise, since she was so rich and so free.

“And you?” I asked. “Do you live with one of them?”

She looked at me for some moments with an ambiguous stare.

“Not really,” she said. “At least not with Dad.”

She was silent for a while and I placed my hand on hers.

“That was your mother's mistake,” she said suddenly, “not to be known. There she was, an ordinary person, deviating from the official routines like Winston Smith in
Nineteen Eight-Four
, and she hadn't told anyone about it. Anyone who matters, that is. Public criminals have an electric halo and cannot be touched. Private criminals are
defenseless.”

I thought ruefully of Dad and nodded my agreement.

“But how did they discover her?”

Her question was like a mirror, in which I saw my own frightened face.

“I guess they came across one of her books. It wouldn't be difficult to discover where the paper came from.”

She looked at me curiously, as though knowing there was more that I could tell. Slowly she withdrew her hand from under mine.

“They could arrest you, too, of course,” she said. “But what would they gain by it? Think of it this way, Honza. You have been given an opportunity. You can step into the light. And there is nothing more that they can take from you.”

“If they don't take you.”

“Oh, they can't take
me.
”

Without warning she got up and beckoned to the waiter. Before I could detain her, she had paid for our coffees and was walking to the door. I caught up with her outside, but she turned away from me. “You go that way,” she said, “and I go this way. I'll see you at Rudolf's on Friday. Meet you in the street outside at a quarter to six. I want to introduce you to him first, before the seminar starts. OK?”

In time I got used to his habit of hers, of bringing things abruptly to a close as though terminating an interview. I came to think of it as proof of her superior reality, that she appeared and disappeared through doors whose existence I had not guessed at and which opened without warning when my mind was elsewhere.

THE NEXT TWO
days were the strangest I had known. I was alone in our cupboard at Gottwaldova, and yet for the first time not alone. I ate scraps of food from the corner shop—black bread and dusty sausage—and drank beer that I brought up in a jug from the
hostinec
at the end of our street. And my little meals were celebrations, which I shared in my imagination with the girl who had disinterred me. I hardly thought of Mother: she was like a numb spot in my consciousness from which my thoughts rebounded to another place, the place where Betka stood. And that was why Betka so astonished me. Here was a girl who did not whisper, as Mother did; who did not look at me askance who did not seem shifty, uncertain, and as though haunted by some unconfessed failing as she tried out her repertoire of permitted words. Here was a girl with the frank manner, the ironical glances, and the occasional bursts of laughter that I remembered from a week of Westerns inexplicably shown at the cinema next to Dad's school. This manner has become so familiar to me now, after fourteen years in an American university, that I no longer take note of it. But then it could only amaze me. Her

unfathomable self-assurance: how and from whom had she acquired it? Her easy smile and untroubled sympathy: what sun of love had warmed these seeds in her?

Her image filled my thoughts as I swept my little patch of street, and as I walked on the Pet
ř
ín hill after work. It was snowing now, and my worn-out shoes gave little protection against the cold. But I did not mind: my frozen toes reminded me that I was walking aboveground, that I had emerged into a colder and clearer world. I saw before me her eyes set wide apart, her high Slavic cheeks with their faint sheen where the bone showed, her pale lips that lay sleepily against each other beneath her opal nose, her brown hair tied in a bun. Always she appeared to me as I had first encountered her, the delicate neck in a barely visible foulard of pink cotton, and a coat of white felt from the sleeves of which pale hands emerged, busying themselves with a notebook in which her inner life was written down. And when, from time to time, I put her image back in the box from which I had lifted it, it was into the little farmhouse trapped between housing blocks in Divoká Šárka.

Rudolf's apartment was situated in a street of nineteenth-century houses on the hill of Letná. Wooden scaffold had been fixed to the façade to protect against falling stucco, and Betka was waiting for me, leaning against one of the posts, and wrapped like a child against the cold. She smiled softly at my approach but turned away from my attempted kiss and led me quickly into the cold grey foyer of the house. By the bank of letter boxes, she turned to me.

“They can know that I know you,” she said. “But nothing more.”

And she walked quickly towards the stone stairs.

Always they were present, watching her. And always she shrugged them off, reminding me, as though from a sense of duty, of the unseen eyes that followed us. She pressed a bell on the second floor and the door opened at once with a whispered greeting from an unseen face. We left our shoes in the hallway and were bundled silently into a
large room lined with bookshelves that climbed the walls right up to the high rococo cornices.

Rudolf was thin, bald, wiry, with a firm, square jaw set in his face like a piece of steel machinery. His cheeks seemed clamped against his nose like metal plates, and his grey eyes stared intently from beneath eyebrows that resembled thick wire brushes. His movements were jerky, almost robotic, and he had about him an air of defiance, as though fighting in a corner from his last reserve of strength. Betka introduced me as Paní Reichlová's son, and it was apparent that already Mother's case was well known in Rudolf's circle. He wanted to hear exactly what had happened, how the StB had discovered her work, and what books she had been working on. I answered as best I could. But Rudolf did not listen as one person listens to another. Rather, he gathered up my words and weighed them, as though assessing their worth. And all the while those eyes were watching, not blinking, not moving, but unnaturally alert as though instructed by some homunculus deep in Rudolf's skull.

Among the few people I had met, Rudolf was without exception the most disconcerting, and standing in his gaze I felt like an impostor, as though I were making unjustified and presumptuous use of Mother's affliction in order to claim a parity of heroism that I in no way deserved. Everything I said to him, about Mother, about my reading, even about Dad, seemed somehow false and inauthentic. And he listened as though it seemed that way also to him, as though he had heard it all before and as though I were cribbing from a standard text that all his young visitors would parrot. Looking around at his book-lined room, I felt a despair at my lack of education, even a certain bitterness, thinking that it would have been worthwhile losing whatever Rudolf had lost in order to have gained the knowledge for which they had punished him.