Notes From Underground (12 page)

He looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Ah, Betka. Yes, she knows about these things.”

And he promptly changed the subject, describing his own time in prison, the difficulty of celebrating Mass, and how, for the Eucharist, it had been necessary to beg a few raisins from the cook, to steep them in water, and to offer tiny sips of the turbid bubbling mixture to the communicants. Mass took place in a corner of the workshop where the prisoners spent their days making wooden pallets. He described how it was, to raise the cracked cup in hands swollen with splinters, to pronounce the sacred words, and then to minister to the bowed-down forms of his fellow criminals.

“And yet, you see, miracles were our daily diet, and especially in this place did we know that we were drinking the blood of our Redeemer.”

The Church had been wrong, Father Pavel said, to condemn Jan Hus for offering the sacrament in both kinds—
sub utraque specie
—and
the persecution of the Utraquists should be forever remembered as a crime. The sacramental wine, he said, was the right of every sinner who prepared for it: “for the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.” Even in this consecrated space, those words (which I later discovered in the Book of Revelation) sounded extravagant. They would be heard in the street outside only as the mutterings of a madman.

Living now in a country of religious maniacs, I hold onto my Czech skepticism as a badge of sanity. But I spontaneously resonated to Father Pavel's message. He described the supernatural as an everyday presence, folded into the scheme of things like the lining of a coat. The Christian religion, he said, is not refuted by suffering, but uses suffering to make sense of the world. And he added a thought that surprised me, not because it was at odds with what I knew, but because it fitted my experience so exactly. God, he said, could be present among us only if He first divests himself of power. To enter this world dressed in the power that created it would be to threaten us all with destruction. Hence God enters in secret. He is the truly powerless one, whose role is to suffer and forgive. That is the meaning of the sacrifice, in which the body and blood of the Redeemer are shared among his killers.

Those thoughts astonished me, not because they led me to adopt Father Pavel's faith, but because they wrapped all that had happened to me—Dad, Mother, my life underground, and Betka too—in a single idea, the very idea that Mother had chosen as the name of her press. And it is this that I appreciated most in Father Pavel—that his religion was not an escape from suffering but a way of accepting it. The supermarket heavens of my new neighbors, which draw a veil over suffering and therefore make no sense of it or of anything else, take me back to those beautiful, terrible days, when our dear city turned in its sleep and its dreams were dreams of a crucified God.

As we left the little church, I asked Father Pavel whether he had suffered much in prison.

“Oh no,” he said, “those were happy times. When you lose your worldly power you gain power of another kind. Those who have only worldly power are truly the powerless ones.”

I shrugged my shoulders at this but, as we walked away from the church towards the Main Station, where he had a train to catch, Father Pavel spoke about his time in prison. His conversation moved quietly and with great calm strides above the mountaintops, touching on faith, sacrifice, and freedom, never mentioning those great things by name, but simply lifting my eyes to them, as they are lifted by the dawn. In prison he had lived among common criminals; but he had also found himself working side by side with a few of our nation's best, people who had been placed there for their virtues and not for their sins. It had been a university of the heart, and around him were people who had been seeking what he had found, and who had the knowledge and will to convey it. I came away from this conversation in a state of astonishment, and each evening thereafter I would read in Mother's Bible, trying to reconstruct the person who had written in its margins.

Apart from the Psalms and the book of Proverbs, Mother had left the Old Testament alone, and I did not blame her. The genealogies, sieges, and slaughters, the unforgiving genocides, the piling of bones upon bones, reminded me of our old Jewish cemetery, a compressed nugget of memory whose only message was death. My eyes could not rest on those pages for long.

Of course, our Jews had suffered terribly, far more than the rest of us. But what credibility did that bestow on these life-negating chapters, in which savages hacked each other to death for the sake of a God who seemed bent on nothing save revenge against his own creation? What had this to do with the hopes of Mother or with the powerless God of Father Pavel? Each evening, however, in the Epistles or the Gospels, I would find some marked passage that opened a little more of Mother's soul to me, and brought a
kind of comfort. And when I came across these words of St. Paul, underscored and commented with an emphatic “yes!” I felt that Mother had walked the path that I was walking and perhaps seen, as I did, that it led always back to the present: “Look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

I would often call on Father Pavel at the end of his day, to take him to the Hospoda na vandru, where he was welcomed by the pious manager, a large man with a neatly tonsured beard and sideburns. In the manager's watery grey eyes there swam a kind of fearful compassion as he greeted the person who I realized must be his priest. Father Pavel's thoughts always began from some paradox, and he would frequently quote Kierkegaard's remark, that a thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. But, he added, we must love what doesn't exist: nothing else is worthy of love. He frequently referred to the absence of God: the world, as he put it, is empty of God, and that
is
God. The purpose of these paradoxes was not to tie me in intellectual knots, but to persuade me to see the world in another way, or rather to see through to its other side, on which the light of eternity was shining. I had to practice what he called “a gymnastics of attention,” always detaching things from their circumstances so as to overcome their randomness. The tree, the bowl, the desk; the car, the book, the window—all ask, he said, to be rescued, to be pried free from the flow of mere events and raised to the dignity of being. He confided in me that this was his spiritual exercise, and that by means of it he had driven from his soul all resentment at what
they
had done—not to him only, but to our country, to those woods and fields that smile in the music of Dvo
ř
ák, to those garlands of wildflowers woven into words by Erben, to the old legends of what we are, which are not legends at all but ideals to live up to.

“Purity,” he once said, “is the power to contemplate defilement. Our world must be redeemed from its circumstances piece by piece, place by place, time by time. It is up to us to lift things from the muck, and to polish off the taint of their misuse.”

Those words seemed to describe my new way of living, and I was grateful for them, as I was grateful for our walks and drinks together during those months of happiness. Father Pavel introduced me to the spiritual literature that had strengthened him through his trials—to St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, as well as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil. It was a remark of Pascal's that he applied to my situation: “You would not have looked for me, if you had not already found me.” And he asked me to reflect on those words, which had guided him in times of darkness.

He would bring the books that he wished me to read, wrapped in coarse paper, to the garage, and he allowed me to take them away, provided I surrendered at the same time the last ones I had borrowed. He had a keen enjoyment of our conversations, which offered him the rare opportunity to pass on his knowledge and experience to a young person whose mind had not been polluted by the thing called education. Of course, his knowledge was one-sided and incomplete, since he had retained only those fragments that were needed for survival in the threatened regions where he roamed. But it was a knowledge full of beauties, decked out with ornaments lifted from the wayside, as he made his pilgrimage through.

He knew every church, every palace, and every garden in our city, and walking with him I felt the veil of negation being lifted from the things we passed. I had known the city only as a kind of figment, the stage-set for a drama that had finished long ago, a place where people fled underground and were observable only as they hugged the walls of their private catacombs. In truth, however, as Father Pavel taught me, Prague was the spiritual center of Europe and the only city to have rescued itself from those sacrificial wars invoked by
Pato
č
ka; it was not a remnant, but a place where religion, culture, style, and manners had triumphed over the innate disorder of mankind. We entered the churches, and stood side by side in wonder at the wrestling pulpits and aspiring saints that had been lowered into our city from regions long since obscured by the rising mist of apprehension. We walked through the orchards below the Strahov Monastery and behind the Lobkowicz Palace, which housed the West German embassy; we got to know all the paths on the Pet
ř
ín hill, and the unvisited corners and mysterious cul-de-sacs which are the edges of real history.

One such cul-de-sac encloses the West façade of St. Thomas in Malá Strana. We stood there on one wet afternoon, Father Pavel holding an umbrella high above me and tracing with outstretched finger the dripping protrusions on Dientzenhofer's façade. His voice trembled slightly as he spoke. I was not to see this church as a creamy concoction in stucco, a fanciful attempt to build a dream in the clouds. I was to see it as a visitation from a sphere where the forms imagined by people are transfigured into their eternal replicas. Those swelling cornices, broken pediments, and whirling scrolls are not some Catholic veneer sprayed onto Protestant stone by Mr. Dientzenhofer. They are representations in eternity of the attempt to build here and now. To make a home, Father Pavel said, we must settle among eternal things, and therefore we must bring the eternal to earth. Those moldings which swell around the pilasters as though drawing them together in a dance are not made of stucco or stone but of light, and in the shade of their chiseled parallels angels are always resting, even on a day like this when the light is pale and the shadows weary. In such façades we find the meaning of our twofold city: every building wears a face, and looks down on us from the elsewhere of salvation.

Father Pavel's words enchanted our city, but only by forbidding the present tense. His vision was tenseless, like logic or mathematics or theology. The power that haunted our streets would have been
unimaginable to Mr. Dientzenhofer, and the lovely invocations that I read in Zden
ě
k Kalista were of a city that had since been captured and hollowed out by fear.

I asked Father Pavel where he lived, and he replied that he would take me there one day. Like Betka, he did not wish to be entirely known, not even to those he trusted. And I respected this, for it conveyed an experience of the world that had the authenticity of suffering.

I had another reason to be glad of those walks around our city, besides the poignant glimpses that they afforded. For Betka often hesitated to be seen with me, so that I could not walk with her placidly and easily in the land of truth.

ON THE SATURDAY
after that first meeting with Father Pavel, I called, as we had agreed, at Betka's room. I was thinking of Mother, and of the religion that she had cast like a lifeline into the sea of lies, hoping to rescue Dad but instead landing his corpse in a tangle of driftwood. I did not despair of Mother's case; side by side with Betka, I would surely make headway against
them
. And when she opened the door with that ballerina flourish, shone her eyes on me, and took me silently to bed, my resolve grew strong and firm.

The days were longer now, and it was still light in the little courtyard when we began to talk. I poured out to Betka all my newfound interest in the world aboveground—in the history and culture of our homeland, in the architecture of our city, in the hidden meaning of that literature of the Austrian twilight that I had unearthed from Dad's trunk, which was all that we had for him by way of a tomb. She corrected me from time to time, with careful didactic remarks that both revealed and concealed her store of knowledge. And, with quiet words, mentally holding me by the hand, she brought the topic back to Mother.

It was like this with Betka: I walked beside her in a landscape strewn with flowers. And beneath the flowers, concealed by their very abundance, were chasms that I saw only when they opened beneath my feet, and her hand reached out to protect me. She who led me could also save me, and so it was now, when she mentioned Mother. I leaned forward at her desk and dropped my head into my hands. Through my spread fingers I could catch the pure look of interrogation from those steady eyes, and the glow of young life from that naked body. And I was overwhelmed by a sense of mystery—the inexplicable fact of being there, in that room which belonged to no one, beneath the searing light of truth, while somewhere belowground the shy sad author of
Rumors
still shunted his futile guilt along rails leading nowhere.

Betka told me of someone she knew at the American Embassy, Bob Heilbronn, who was charged with relations with the press. He would ensure that Mother's case became a
cause célèbre
in the West, so raising her status from ordinary person who stumbled to dissident who dared. Betka's tone was ironical. For she never ceased to remind me that the world of marginal people had its rewards and its charms; that there were ways of playing the cards of dissidence that brought more benefits than costs. Sure, there were the real heroes like Havel, Kant
ů
rková, Vaculík, people who had lost the arena in which they could have shone as public figures. But such people belonged to the heroic past, and now we had to deal with the remainders, the failed writers, failed philosophers, failed artists, journalists, composers, and performers who, by donning the mantle of dissent, dressed up in the borrowed costumes of the heroes. Real people should be carefully distinguished from fakes, she argued, and the difference between them is as great as that between the line of verse that changes the world and the sprawl of words on a sheet of paper.