Notes From Underground (26 page)

Mr. Machá
č
ek interrupted himself to gesture from the window towards a featureless collective farm, vaguely outlined in the darkness like the unlit side of the moon. I recalled the song by Pink Floyd. Betka had purchased the album out of curiosity, from a girl who sold smuggled Western records each Saturday morning in a wood outside Prague. I stared into the darkness, and I recalled Betka's face, screwed up in distaste, as the sound of Pink Floyd burst from the record player under the desk in Smíchov.

“In those days, nobody was threatened by books: the romantic tale of Babi
č
ka, the stories of Malá Strana, the tales of that observant little court-mouse Ignát Hermann, all the ways in which we Czechs wrapped up our homeland in comforting words—these helped to make it seem as though we belong here, as though this country is ours.

“But we were forgetting the crucial fact, Mr. Reichl. We were forgetting that for us there is no reality outside books. Ours is a nation made by books. We came into being with the Kramerius Publishing House in 1795, designed to shape the new nation as a nation of readers. It was a book, Jungmann's Dictionary, that rescued our language from oblivion. Our national rebirth was planned and accomplished through books and when people decided that we needed a history, Palacký and Peka
ř
rushed to provide us with books, and nobody knows which version to prefer since neither version has any reality beyond the covers that contain it. It was Josef Kajetán Tyl, a literary man and a man of the theater, who wrote our national anthem. And only a man immersed in books would compose a nation's declaration of its right to exist in the form of a question: ‘
Kde domov m
ů
j?'
—where is my homeland? And the answer is obvious: in books.

“Our conflicts have been fought out in books, and our contribution to the wars of the twentieth century has been the books that document their stupidity. Czechoslovakia exists because books had been written to prove that it should, and its first President, who was appointed on account of the books he had written, went on to write more books to prove that the country must go on. The modern Czech, the ordinary man with his dog, his allotment, and his pub, stepped out of the books of
Č
apek and Hašek. While President Masaryk was churning out his high school philosophy, the communist poets entered the literary scene with their surrealist books about the future. What was it that one of them said? ‘I pause before
Prague as before a violin, and gently brush its strings as though to tune it.' Nezval, I think it was. There you have it: a beautiful image, and a fair account of what those early communists intended. Not to change reality but simply to brush it a bit with words. And when at last people made clear that they didn't like being brushed in this way it was because there were books that told them so. Nothing happens in this place save books, and the most influential book ever written here tells us that nothing happens in any case, except the narrative that tells us that nothing happens. That, it seems to me, is how we should interpret Kafka's
Castle
, would you not agree, Mr. Reichl?”

I stuttered a few words and then shrugged my shoulders in embarrassment. He resumed his speech as though I were merely an observer, sometimes rolling his eyes in my direction and once or twice, after some particularly acerbic paradox, settling back with a triumphant smile, striking a studied pose like an actor.

“The dissidents resisted us with books, and we responded by forbidding those books—that is how stupid it has all become. We even started commandeering books and pulping them. And all this culminated in that ‘too loud solitude' described by Hrabal, whose hero's one delight in life is to seize from the maw of his hydraulic waste-paper press the books whose fine bindings and fine ideas cry out for rescue and which end up piled to the ceiling on his shelves, with no other use save to remind a powerless person that, whatever power might be, you don't get it from books. Your mother understood the point perfectly when she described her own flirtation with books as the Powerless Press.

“And it is worth pointing out, Mr. Reichl, no, please don't interrupt me, the point is of great importance to you, that Mr. Hrabal owes his success to us. We gave him a challenge. Become an activist, we said, exchange harmless books for futile actions, like Mr. Havel and Mr. Vaculík, and you will become a non-person like them. Stay with your books and your dreams in your forest village, and you will
be known and loved all across the world, known precisely as a Czech, a visitor from the land of books, the land that wrote itself into being. We were aware, of course, that those good-for-nothings were pressing him to sign their document, their death sentence against the written word. And we gave him a choice: sign and that great book of yours, the book about books, of which 80,000 copies were printed, bound and stacked on pallets in the printing works in Plze
ň
, will go the way of the other books described in it, pressed into blocks and pulped. Don't sign and you will continue to be what you are and what we all appreciate you for being, the prophet of our nation, the person who reveals the latest way of deducing, from the premise that we Czechs exist in books, the conclusion that we exist too in reality.”

Machá
č
ek continued in this vein for some minutes. At one point he allowed himself to raise his voice, speaking dismissively about the “underground kafkologists” who imagine that our system of government is not just stupid—about which we can all agree—but somehow sinister in the way of those endless corridors frequented by unexplained participants in an unexplained drama.

“In Kafka,” he said, with a dismissive gesture, “judgment cannot be avoided, since innocence is proof of a deeper guilt. That is just a comfortable bourgeois clerk's attempt to deal with the oppressive mental presence of his father. And the result is not truth but literature. You should give us more credit than you do, Mr. Reichl. All our efforts—and they are expensive efforts as you see—are designed to spare the innocent, to warn the guilty, and if necessary to correct the guilty, though only, as you must admit, with the mildest of punishments.”

I record here the words of this curious character, since they struck a chord in me, just as Father Pavel's words had done in the Church of Svatá Alžb
ě
ta. In pursuit of truth I had entered a labyrinth of fictions. Even the mysterious Other, the collective “they” of our panoptical prison, turned out to be a fiction, playing an improvised part in
a drama that none of us understood. When the car stopped in a dark wood, some twenty-five kilometers out of Prague, and the young man who had been taking notes got out to open the door for me, Mr. Machá
č
ek held out his hand. I hesitated, and then took it with a shudder of distaste. It lay for a moment in my palm, like a wet fish.

“You will find your way easily back from here,” he said. “And count yourself lucky.”

I WALKED ALL
night. As I entered the suburbs it began to rain, and in the early hours, wet through and with broken heels, I boarded the first Metro from Holešovice. My thoughts were of Father Pavel. I reasoned that quite possibly he had known what would happen if he took me to the Municipal House, known even that those particular men were waiting for him. But it was also inconceivable that he, who had given everything to the dissident cause, should also be a part of their network. I concluded that it was therefore not I but he whom they had been tracking, and I was merely a diversion, to be got out of the way as efficiently as possible. By keeping me close, Father Pavel had delayed his arrest, and also secured a witness to it. If I kept quiet he could be murdered in secret, as had happened to several underground priests in recent times. If I broadcast the news of his arrest he would have to be brought to trial. And his trial would be a
cause célèbre
, which would embarrass the fools who had arrested him. I therefore resolved to make contact as soon as possible with Professor Gunther, before he left for New York.

I was able to change my clothes and rest for a while before ringing Mr. Krutský from the Gottwaldova Metro station to tell him that I was ill and could not report for work. He told me that “they” had been round again, that he did not like it and that I should look for another job. I hung up without responding to the suggestion. And then I took the Metro to Vltavská, and set out for Rudolf's apartment. As I turned the corner of his street, I saw that the building had been cordoned off. Two policemen stood outside checking the identities of residents and visitors. A police car was parked opposite, and officers were carrying files, papers, and books across to it. I walked on briskly, hoping not to attract their attention.

Nowadays, and especially here in America, news does not spread slowly through a community, nor does it travel fast. It does not travel at all. The air-waves are instantly replete with every happening, the now is a universal presence, and—while this leads to an undeniable lack of understanding, since the present is meaningful only in relation to the past, which is instantly drowned by the flood of new information—the result is that there is no news. We are instantly aware of every event that affects us. Then, and especially in those countries where information was a precious commodity, to be hidden by those whom it enriched, and confiscated by those whom it threatened, news still existed, and percolated slowly through hidden channels. I bought a copy of
Rudé právo,
in the slight hope that it would contain some hints of what had happened. But it contained only the usual stuff: cheerful statistics about the wheat harvest, news of a trade delegation from Mongolia, the award of an honorary degree to a French communist, a treaty of friendship with Ethiopia.

I called on Igor, who informed me that Rudolf's seminar had been raided, and everyone—Professor Gunther included—taken into custody. Although it was possible that they would all be freed after the statutory forty-eight hours, it was being officially rumored,
according to Lukáš, whom they had already released, that Gunther was a Zionist agent in the pay of imperialist powers.

I went straight to Betka's hideaway in Smíchov. I let the metal door slam shut behind me and for a moment stared at the courtyard. In the far corner two skull capped jackdaws were debating some intricate question of theology. Somehow their presence suggested that the place had been shut off from life. I bounded up the stairs, determined to speak to her, whomsoever she was with and however angry she might be at the disturbance. But the door was wide open, and inside the room was bare, like a stage at the end of a run of performances, when all the sets have gone. I stood on the threshold, practicing my gymnastics of attention on the eloquent nothingness before me. The bookcase which had held her precious collection of samizdat: empty. The desk: swept clean. The still-life painting in over-ripe colors: gone. The candlesticks and the little Russian icon: vanished. The bed: stripped bare. The case beneath it and the box marked Olga: both gone. I became aware of a presence behind me.

“You see,” spoke a deep male voice, “it got cleaned after all. She was too quick for me.”

I turned to discover the man with jug-handle ears, who fixed me from his deep black eyes with a round, expressionless, bird-like stare.

“You must be Vilém,” I said.

He said nothing but pushed past me into the room, swearing beneath his breath. His presence in that room was a line drawn through a story that had started brilliantly, and then wandered into obscurity and doubt. His profile was handsome, despite the ears, with a fine chiseled nose and a clear intelligent brow. Only the leather jacket and trainers, signs of wealth and Western connections, belied his bookish and bohemian air. He spoke rapidly, directing his stare into the corners of the room, his top lip glossy with phlegm.

“If it had just been you I could have dealt with it. But now this American who offers her everything—
everything
. You can see it in
her face when they are talking: a scholarship, a doctorate, publications, a career in some American university, and of course a certificate of marriage, which has ‘exit' embossed in gold. There was a moment when I could have killed you—she so infatuated with a mere boy, who couldn't believe his luck to be taken up by a woman with looks and brains. But I knew it couldn't last. Forgive me, but you are just not one of us. There are two kinds of people in this world: those going somewhere, like me and Alžb
ě
ta, and those going nowhere, like you. If I stuck to it, she was bound to come back to me. I could wait. Yes, I kept track of you. It was my right. You'd do the same if you were me. She was mine, see, mine. That was the truth, no matter what she may have said. We were going to the top, both of us, and that's where we would be together.”

He continued in this vein for some time, turning every now and then to stare right through me at the wall so as to prove that I did not exist.

“Whatever was normal in her life I provided, see? I was security and culture, money and music both. I had contacts, friends, a way around the system. We could have set up house together, I was prepared to leave wife, family, everything. And then you came along. How the hell did she discover you? I mean, from what miserable corner of our world did you emerge? I don't get it.”

His words were full of venom, but his tone had become hesitant and beseeching, as though surreptitiously begging my permission to abuse me and begging me too to agree with the conclusion that I didn't really exist. He described her evasiveness, her constant shifts from warm to cold and back again, her openness to the world and her flight from it, as though prompting me to discuss the point, to reassure him that perhaps it wasn't true, or that the good outweighed the bad, and we should both attempt to forgive her. I let him continue and stared at the blank room where no vestige of my Betka
remained. She had become a figment, a vapor lingering above the marsh of suspicion in which Vilém's life was stuck.