Notes From Underground (22 page)

His eyes, which had roamed instinctively in Betka's direction, wavered and then lowered as though sensing a rebuke. Father Pavel leaned forward with a serious expression, waving back his lock of
stray hair and looking intently at the speaker. Women, Gunther told us, are an oppressed class, whose reproductive nature has been stolen from them by patriarchal structures installed for the benefit of men. A woman's right to control her own body has been ignored by a system of government that forces her to carry an unwanted fetus and by a culture which encourages violence against doctors who terminate her pregnancy. The discourse had become concrete, and we were plummeting to earth under the weight of a novel kind of Newspeak. A woman, in Gunther's view, should be seen as the victim of her pregnancy; her unborn child not as a human being but as a fetus, a medical condition in search of a remedy. He discussed a famous case before the American Supreme Court, in which it was definitively proven that this fetus has no rights under the Constitution. And so, with a friendly gesture of shared triumph, he concluded his talk, arguing that, however much we Czechs may suffer from the unjust restriction of our human rights, so too did women suffer in America.

It took us a little while to grasp the argument; but one thing was certain: we had landed back with a bump in Absurdistan. Rudolf was stuttering out a commentary, and I felt a stab of pity as he tried to claim familiarity with the works to which Gunther had referred, and to show himself
au fait
with current Western discussions. Father Pavel's face glowed with defiance, and he was leaning forward, ready to speak. But it was Betka's voice, speaking in English from her place of concealment, that captured our visitor's attention.

“I have a question. When you say this to your students in America, do they report on you? Are you putting your life in the balance? And another question. Suppose you were one of us, born here, confined here, unable to move without permission. Would you worry that it was all too easy for you, an intellectual, to speak like you do, knowing that out there somewhere, someone will pick up your signal and broadcast it, and that you would become a celebrity of sorts like our famous dissidents?”

I was taken aback by her tone, which revealed depths of anger and frustration that I had never previously suspected. And there was something personal too, as though she were singling out Martin Gunther as someone who henceforth must be accountable to
her
. He responded at once, confessing to faults that he eagerly described as though each one were a gift for Betka. Yes, he was a comfortable middle-class person, whose defense of human rights was a defense of his own peculiar privilege. Yes, it needed no courage to speak in America as he had spoken in this room. Yes, he belonged to the class that was in any case rewarded for such courage as it showed by the general endorsement of the culture. He thanked the young lady for making this so clear to him, and hoped that it did not adversely affect the reasonableness of what he had said.

“But it does,” said Father Pavel, who spoke through the fluttering veil of Lukáš's English. “These rights of which you speak—you admit it yourself—are the privileges of comfortable people. According to you, the professional woman has the right to kill the child who hampers her career, while the child has no right to her protection. Maybe your subtle philosophers and judges have impeccable arguments for thinking that the unborn can be disposed of according to our convenience. But for us the word
právo
means right and also justice, and it is one part of
pravda
, meaning truth. I am the way, the truth, and the life, said our Savior, and he gave his life so that we should live. In the catacombs we make use of this word “right,” not because we have those subtle arguments, but because it expresses the thing that they cannot steal from us, which is our humanity. It tells us to protect those who have done no harm and who come into the world without offending it. But you tell us that such people have no rights.”

Thus began a collective outburst of a kind that I had never witnessed at Rudolf's seminar. Several people had raised their hands, and Rudolf, whose face wore an unfamiliar expression of
bewilderment, allowed them the floor. Two of the girls objected to Father Pavel, arguing that atheists and agnostics also need guidance in this matter, and if we do not invoke the idea of rights, whence could guidance come? The poet Z.D. suggested that the whole question was inappropriate to our discussions, since it concerned individual choices and not our identity as a nation. Mr. and Mrs.
Č
erný, who always advanced a joint opinion assembled from phrases provided separately by each of them, expressed their concern that, in the land of freedom, the unborn are so entirely at the mercy of the living. And Lukáš, citing John Lennon's famous song, invited us to imagine a better world, where children would no longer be unwanted.

What struck me in this was not the vigorous nature of the argument, unusual though that was, but the fact that it really
was
an argument, about a concrete matter concerning which modern people ought surely to make up their minds. And this cast a new and disturbing light on our previous discussions. We had stepped out of the world of ponderous abstractions, metaphysical grievances, and noble ideals to which Rudolf always invited us, and where we had been at one. We had entered a rough terrain of conflict, where we were divided against each other, as individuals making our separate ways. We had been attending the seminar in search of the faith with which to fortify our shared isolation, and our weekly discussions had been bids for agreement. The questions we had been used to considering were questions that could be settled in any way we chose, without altering in one particular how we set about our business next morning, in the cold light of day. Somehow, Gunther had brought the “air from other planets” of which Betka once spoke. We were discussing things as though preparing to make real choices, laying down paths into the future that would be many and divergent when the time for action came.
We were shaping ourselves, for the first time, as the free citizens we would one day need to be.

Of course, the contest was not equal. Father Pavel had no intellectual resources beyond his priestly intuitions and the dogma of his church, while Gunther was full of subtleties, calling on a wealth of experience that was more or less unknown to us—the experience of professional women in the Western city, of the workings of American courts, and of the discussions in academic journals devoted to issues of life and death. My sympathies, however, were with Father Pavel. He lost the argument, but he called upon some personal emotion beyond the tranquil commitment of his faith. He seemed to speak with the authority of suffering, and I knew that this suffering concerned me in ways I could only guess. At one point, Betka intervened. The discussion merely showed, she said, that this idea of human rights is too malleable to settle our deepest moral questions. It is a notion that puts nothing to the test. And Gunther leapt at this opportunity to bring peace to the room.

Yes, you are right, he said, with a sequence of nods. We liberals have a habit of making things too easy for ourselves. We live in a world where we are not put to the test, as you are put to the test. Every expansion of our rights is a cost to someone else, and yes the notion of human rights is not adequate to this problem. His reasoning spiraled away into the stratosphere of concepts: person, freedom, individuality, identity—all of which elicited from Father Pavel only a frown and a shake of the head. Someone mentioned Pope John Paul II, who had inspired our makeshift rebellion; Rudolf formed a question, his dingy wife appeared with
chlebí
č
ky,
and we were back at last with the solidarity of the shattered. Betka came from her corner with intent and inscrutable features, looking at no one in particular but attracting the intermittent gaze of Martin Gunther. At one point she gently touched Father Pavel on the sleeve,
but she looked past me as though we had ceased to be lovers. After a while I made an excuse to Rudolf and fled into the street. A police car was parked on the corner, with two dark figures inside. But they made no attempt to intercept me, and I walked on amid clouds of loneliness.

AT FIRST I
went towards the metro at Vltavská. But then I veered away, descended to the river and walked west along the embankment. Occasional automobiles tore the silence. The bridge that bore the name of Svatopluk
Č
ech strode on its strong pontoons from road to road, bearing nothing besides a small thin man beneath a crumpled hat. Tucked into the bridge's shoulder by the bank stood the little chapel of the Magdalene, like an octagonal dish cover. Beneath that cover I conjured the breath of the saint. Then I noticed that a group of people were whispering there; a police car, appearing suddenly from under the bridge, stopped to question them. I hurried on, keeping to the river as the road descended into Malá Strana. I saw no one in the street, heard nothing save the creaking of windows and the closing of doors. Then a late tram shrieked in the square, and spots of rain began to tarnish the cobbles.

In the Újezd I recalled Schubert's
Winterreise
, and the song about the road once taken by which none returns. I had put my feet on that road, and they moved forward without my will. Betka had described
Winterreise
as lying beyond enjoyment, beyond music even,
in a sacred, untouchable place of its own. Only rarely, she said, could we mortals enter that place, and only through penitence. Everything within me, all memories, images, melodies, and thoughts, led back to her. Behind every word that I inwardly spoke to myself were
her
words, and behind those words her face, her presence, her music, her lovemaking. I stood in the rain by the door of her courtyard, waiting for Betka to appear. The raindrops on my face and in my hair were tears of love and jealousy. Soon I was wet to the skin. And when it became clear to me that she would not be returning, I was seized by a fit of trembling.

It was three o'clock when I arrived home. The next day was Saturday and I lay all day in bed, sometimes reading in Mother's Bible, and once or twice getting up to stare down into the street, where a police car was stationed. I could not understand their game, and in any case regarded it with indifference. Whether they arrested me or merely watched me, what did it matter? My stomach was empty, but with the kind of despairing emptiness that refuses food since it can take comfort in nothing.

On Sunday, I ventured out. I went to Father Pavel's garage, but there was no one there. The Church of Svatá Alžb
ě
ta was locked, and boards had been nailed to the windows. Notwithstanding Karel's prohibition, I visited his boiler room, but was greeted there by an old man with a clotted beard who smelled of vodka, and who identified himself as Karel's weekend substitute. And then, for long hours, I sat on the St
ř
elecký Island, debating whether to call at Betka's room, and eventually turning for home with no intention of arriving there. How much clearer things had been underground, and for a moment I regretted the steps that I had taken towards a life in truth—steps from the Metro to a bus stop, and from a bus into the realm of Queen Šárka. It seemed then that I had been following some tempting spirit, a will o' the wisp or
bludi
č
ka
, sent from the lower world to mislead me. It seems now—as I look back across
twenty years—that those thoughts belong with the aura of those times, when only books could be trusted, and truth was nowhere to be found, except between their covers.

The next day I went to her after work, as she had commanded. When she opened the door she did not step back with that little flourish. She did not welcome me with a smile as her big mistake and then lead me by the hand to her bed. Instead, she stood before me in silence, tears running down her cheeks and her eyes red from weeping. Then she leaned forward, slowly closing the door behind me and whispering my name. Never before had I seen Betka like this: meek, vulnerable, beseeching. I asked her the cause and she gave no answer save a shake of the head as she pressed against me. Behind her the room seemed to have changed. The pile of samizdat was there beneath the window. The pictures and candlesticks were in their usual place. The theorbo stood in its case by the wall, the briefcase full of music leaning against it. The books were arranged in the bookcase in their usual order, and the notebook lay open on the desk. But it was all just a fraction neater than usual, as though she had lifted each object and flicked off the dust before replacing it.

The blue and brown Ukrainian kilim that covered Betka's bed had been folded back, and the
pe
ř
ina
, the feather-bed, too was folded. Beneath the bed was a suitcase, which I was seeing for the first time, since the bedclothes normally concealed it. Visible too was a cardboard box, with the name Olga in black marker ink on its side. For some reason the room had acquired a provisional air, and the neatness and good taste with which Betka subdued and ordered her surroundings seemed like a temporary veneer.

“Don't be angry with me,
milá
č
ku
,” she said. “I couldn't speak to you on Friday. I couldn't speak to anyone.”

“But why?” I asked.

“So many reasons,” she replied, “and also none. Didn't you think he was awful?”

“Who?”

“That American, Professor Gunther. Come to see the exotic creatures in their zoo and add another star to his curriculum vitae.”

“He certainly was impressed by
you
,” I said.

She made a grimace as she pulled away from me. She was no longer crying, but there was a weariness in her features and she made love with a kind of joyless hunger. It was as if she were the victim of her desire and not, as she had always been before, delightedly in charge of it. We lay without speaking until she suddenly rose from the bed and went across to the theorbo and took it from its case. She sang a piece by Dowland: