Notes From Underground (11 page)

“Why hope?”

To me, looking back on it, my stories sprang from despair, though a despair that I had now miraculously discarded.

“They are not dead, you see, only sleeping. And all of them are purified by grief.”

I was intrigued by his words and because we were walking past a pub, I suggested we enter. We found ourselves in a dark corner, two tall glasses of beer on the table between us, and no other company apart from three workmen at the bar who from time to time broke the silence with loud shouts about football.

“There is something very Christian in your vision,” Father Pavel said. “I assume you were brought up in the faith?”

“No,” I replied. “Ours was a modern family. We had no faith, only doubts.”

“But doubt can be faith. You knock on doors, and at last someone opens. To your surprise, you already know his face.”

His words touched something in me and I asked him to explain. He leaned back and studied me for a moment. A lock of dark hair fell across his brow, and he swept it aside with his hand, which was large, rough, and blackened with grease. His brown eyes fixed me with a calm, even gaze. The taut lower folds of his cheeks stretched across the edges of his mouth like the flanges of a helmet, and his nose was strong, slightly arched, with a notch dividing the gaze. I had seen faces like that carved from limewood in a book about German altarpieces that stood on the shelf over Mother's bed. Father Pavel drew in his breath before speaking, like a child repeating something from memory.

“Mine was a modern family, too. My father was a Party member, manager of a collective farm near Olomouc and also big in the local committee; my mother was raised as a believing communist in a family of peasants. They had a fit when I converted, but that was back in 1968, in the days of ‘socialism with a human face,' and they couldn't stop me entering the seminary. I pray for them now each day.”

“Then they are dead?”

“No: you can pray for the living, too. But for them I am dead, because I have changed my life. I have learned to accept the void without throwing myself into it as they did.”

“But isn't it hard for you now, to be a priest, when nobody believes?”

“You really think that nobody believes?”

I hesitated. His eyes seemed to reach into me, shining their light on unacknowledged regions of my soul.

“Well,
I
don't believe. Nor can I.”

“You are wrong about that. The gift is offered to everyone. I read your stories and they are like a question, forever repeated. Simone Weil writes that when we cry out for an answer and it is not given to us, it is then that we touch the silence of God. I find that silence in your stories. And I know it in my life.”

“But if there is no God?”

“God has withdrawn from the world: that we know, and we Czechs perhaps know it more vividly than others. Our world contains an absence, and we must love that absence, for that is the way to love God.”

“But how can you love an absence?”

He gave me a look of indescribable sweetness, as though I had touched on what was dearest in his life.

“I was called to this love, and at first I did not find it. During my early years as a priest, I felt powerless to help. People came to me as a refuge from the system, laying their problems at my door, asking for the proofs of another and a better world than this one. And I had no proofs. As a refuge from the system I was also part of the system, an improved version of the slavery they knew. I thought all the time of my failure to be what they wanted, which was an alternative. And if you spend your days obsessed with your powerlessness, then every good and beautiful thing is like an insult. It was only when I was thrown out of the official church that I understood what was being
asked of me. I was abandoned among the abandoned, and I had to love them for what they lacked. Quite suddenly, my life as a priest was full of joy. My flock still came to me, for they had witnessed the cloven hoof under my successor's cassock. But they did not come for refuge. They came for prayer, for stillness, for the life of the imagination to which the gospel so beautifully speaks. I would kneel beside them and we would become nothing together, because in our nothingness we could encounter the love of God. Perhaps that sounds strange to you?”

It did not sound strange at all. Father Pavel's words came from a place that I had never known and that I was suddenly eager to enter. His liquid accent sounded in my ears like a pure stream in a dark gully, welling up from some underground region unpolluted by the poison in the air above. His soft brown eyes, moving slowly from side to side as he spoke, seemed to take in his surroundings with a look that was both blessing and forgiveness. And his shabby cotton clothes, stained with the oil and grease of the garage, were like the rags of a pilgrim, worn thin on a journey that stretched from shrine to shrine the whole length of a life.

He talked to me in this vein for an hour or more, pausing every now and then to sweep back the lock of dark hair that fell across his brow, and for a moment looking at me quietly before resuming his narrative. I asked him how it was to be in holy orders secretly.

“Oh, there is no secret about it,” he responded, holding out the cross at his neck. “I am there for whoever needs me, and I have nothing to hide. They sent me to prison for a while, so now they can assume that my case is closed.”

At that moment, however, one of the workmen who had been leaning against the bar with his companions turned in our direction, and Father Pavel lowered his voice.

“If you want to know how it is,” he went on, “then come to me at the garage after work, and I will show you.”

He told me the address of the garage, near the Olšanský cemetery, and we arranged to meet on the following Tuesday. I rode the Metro to Gottwaldova in a state of high excitement. To have met, in the space of weeks, three people such as Betka, Rudolf, and Father Pavel, to have acquired in one bewildering sequence a capacity for love, a need for friendship, an awareness of the mystery in which we lived, and a glimpse of the key that would unlock that mystery—all this went to my head, and caused me to look forward impatiently to the next day, a Saturday, when Betka and I were to spend the afternoon together.

On the shelf above Mother's bed, where she had kept her small collection of art books and which I had put back together as best I could, there was an old Kralice Bible which I had never seen her read. Late on that Friday night, arriving in our vandalized cupboard, I took it down. It was full of pencil marks—underlinings, multiple exclamation marks, marginal notes—in a hand that was clearly hers. On the flyleaf was written, “To Helena KoÅ¡ková, from her parents, Easter 1952.” KoÅ¡ková was Mother's maiden name, and this book, given to her when she was ten years old, at the height of the communist terror, and with the reference to a forbidden festival, told me much. I knew that she had been brought up in the Protestant church; but I assumed that faith had never been more than skin-deep in her, and that she, like Dad, had accepted agnosticism as the best way to negotiate our life—certainly the best way to bring up children. Reading her cramped marginalia, however, I knew that I was observing another personality, one that she had hidden not because she was ashamed of it but because she knew that to reveal things did no good. Her pencil marks spoke to me now of feelings that had been locked within her, and of a hundred silent sacrifices. I saw that I must make her part of the new life that was to be mine, and so pay the debt that I owed for all that she had suffered, on Dad's account, and on mine. For she, too, had glimpsed this “life in truth,” and tried, at some period long past, to follow it.

Some of her marginalia referred to a “he” whom they did not name. At first I assumed this to be Christ. Verse 8 of the first epistle of John reads, “If we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” She had underlined the last phrase twice:
a pravda v nás není.
And next to it she had written “but it
is in him
.” And the words of Christ to Thomas in St, John's gospel, so famous that even I, even in those days of official atheism, had heard them spoken—“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”—had been given three underscorings, with the words “truth” linked to the margin, in which she had written “Your truth
is in him
—let him believe!!” I knew then that she was not referring to Christ and closed the book sadly; for I had uncovered her love for Dad, still warm and bleeding in the place where she had hidden it. And it is especially significant to me now that she had hidden her love in a book.

FATHER PAVEL'S GARAGE
lay on a backstreet among featureless buildings of concrete. It consisted of a courtyard that was also a scrap heap and a sheltered area at the back where two or three vehicles stood awaiting repair, official vehicles with Hlavní M
ě
sto Praha—the capital city of Prague—stenciled on their doors. Behind them was a workshop with a line of windows in wooden frames. Father Pavel was the only person there when I called, and I found him standing by a blue Avia truck that had been squeezed into the recess, notwithstanding a broken rear axle. He was wiping his hands on a cloth and staring at the damaged vehicle with his mild expression, as though he pitied it. Only when I greeted him did he acknowledge that I was there.

“Jan, thank you,” he said, “I am so glad you came.”

“But how would I not?”

He brushed the hair from his eyes and looked at me.

“I spoke about intimate things, and those things hurt.”

I dismissed his worry with a wave of the hand.

We walked through the OlÅ¡anský cemetery, where the once proud families of our nation lay interred, though not at rest. The doors of their ornate sepulchres had been wrenched from their hinges, the vaults pried open, and pieces of broken marble scattered across the floors. “No full stop is allowed under communism,” Father Pavel said, “for even among the dead the wheel of Progress turns.” He seemed to me like a child, describing things as though encountering them for the first time. A little pile of phalanges and metacarpals had been thrown, stripped of their rings, by the ransacked tomb of the Bradatý family. “But one ring remains,” Father Pavel said, “which is the ring of truth.” And he made a sign over the bones that I took to be a blessing.

He led me through the streets of Žižkov, where crumbling apartment buildings, crammed side by side during the nineteenth century, propped each other up behind their scaffolds. In a little alley a long wall of brick, pierced by white-framed windows, led to an arch of stone, under which a heavy wooden door swung on creaking hinges. This, Father Pavel told me, was the church of St. Elizabeth, Svatá Alžb
ě
ta, whose name to me was the sweetest in the Roman calendar, but whose story I did not know. In the dark interior I discerned rows of battered chairs, a lectern and a plain wooden altar. Above the altar there was a large nineteenth-century painting in pastel shades, bordered by a simple wooden frame fixed with screws to the wall. It showed St. Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, welcoming the Virgin Mary to her house and garden.

Father Pavel explained that the church lacked a parish priest, and had remained open by neglect when plans to use it as a nursery fell through. It was here that Father Pavel came to say Mass, and where he would meet members of his old congregation. As he led me around that dark and somehow purified interior, with its dim bulbs hanging from the wooden slats of the ceiling, and its penitential smell of dust
and damp and snuffed-out candles, I felt the power of Father Pavel's presence, as though I walked with a spiritual being whose feet touched the earth more lightly than mine ever could. When he turned his eyes on a thing, and made that now familiar gesture of sweeping back his unruly forelock, the thing, however insignificant—a chair, a piece of rough cloth on which to kneel, a cracked porcelain cup which served as a chalice—was as though turned upon itself in some imaginary space, so as to disappear from the host of fallen things and reappear among the saved. Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side.

Under one of the chairs a canvas bag was strapped out of sight, and Father Pavel reached down to it, extracting a small sheaf of carbon copies.

“Remember this chair,” he said. “You will always find the latest edition here. But please put it back.”

He handed me the roughly stapled journal—
Informace o církvi
, information about the church. It described the activities of forbidden priests, announced times of Mass and calls to prayer, and explained the Gospel in naïve terms that reminded me of the words with which Jan Hus had described the pious old woman who added her bundle of sticks to the flames that martyred him:
sancta simplicitas
. Was I wrong to harbor those skeptical thoughts, as cheap in their way as an editorial from
Rudé právo
? I don't know: religion was new to me, and I had discovered an unusual guide to it, who seemed to change whatever he touched into its own eternal version. Turning the coarse pages, I encountered a list of people who needed our prayers, and there was Mother's name—Helena Reichlová, accused under Article 98 of the criminal code, and awaiting trial in Prague.

“So you knew about Mother?”

“Of course, we all knew. And if you want to talk about her, there is no better place than here.”

I looked at him for a moment, as he swept the hair from his brow and steadied his eyes on me. Of course I should talk to him, and no doubt he had brought me here for that purpose. I needed to confess, to atone, to be reconciled, and what better place than the Church of Saint Alžb
ě
ta, with Father Pavel as my confessor? But something in me said “no.” I was recovering my mother in fragments from the well of guilt, and what Father Pavel wanted was to show her entire. He would tell me how to reassemble her, not as she was in the world of lies, but as she would be and will be in the world of truth, the world that Mother herself had been striving to conjure in those sad annotations to her Bible. But I postponed the moment. Instead I told him that I had already spoken of the matter to Alžb
ě
ta Palková, who was giving me very useful advice.