Notes From Underground Read Online Free

he deceived himself thus. And then came the stale sense of alienation which, like some cheap restaurant gravy, made every experience taste the same.
    Gradually, the underground people responded to my unobserved observing, like seeds sprouting under a laboratory sunlamp. I entered the Metro at the end of my shift around midday to take up a seat beside the doors, where I would read one of Dad’s books, over-scoring his pencil marks with marks of my own. Between midday and two o’clock, the trains were comparatively empty, and I had my best chance to warm those silent faces into life. With some of them I became intimate, listening to their imagined confessions and adding confessions and plans of my own. With others I kept my distance,inventing lives armor-plated against sympathy, which repelled my unmeant offers of assistance. Of course, the faces changed continually, and sometimes I had no more than a minute or two to attach a life to them. But there were regulars, too: people who would get on at a certain time and a certain stop, and travel to a fixed destination. With several of these, I would renew the conversation each day, and especially with those who were in some way marked out from the crowd—say, by a Bible hidden in paper wrappings, which only I had noticed, or by a pair of hand-knitted gloves, in which I could discern the record of a very private affection.
    Relationships sprang up all around me, and I was a part of them, as I was part of the intrigues and angers that had closed these faces against the world. And among those guarded faces I looked everywhere for the one who might have been Dad, had his life been permitted. The one in the greasy yellow Mackintosh, who holds a crumpled trilby on his knees and looks fixedly ahead as though for an official photograph: is that he? Or the one in the corduroy trousers with a stick, who staggers slightly because he carries a large packet wrapped in brown paper under his spare arm, and who wears on his round sallow face an expression of innocent bewilderment reminiscent of a Č apek drawing: could that be what Dad has come to?
    I watch this man for a while, noting that no one surrenders a seat to him and all stare past him as though embarrassed by his presence. The parcel constantly slips from his armpit and must be hoisted up, sometimes by the hand that grips the stick, so rendering the whole body unstable. At one point he falls backwards against the knees of a girl in an expensive-looking woolen dress, who brushes him away disgustedly. Inside the parcel I imagine precious texts—Chekhov’s stories, Nezval’s poems, and yes, Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
—which he had lent to some other member of his reading circle and is now returning to the trunk back home. But Dad would not have faced the world with so defeated a look, would not haveaccepted, as this poor creature accepts, being kicked about like a helpless animal. And, thinking of this, I am once again overcome by that choking feeling, which causes me to withdraw from all thinking and stare at the carriage floor.
    In the underground there was sadness and longing; there was self-interest and suspicion. There was also sex: sex that drove on fiercely to its imagined goal. Don’t get me wrong. I am not the kind of pervert who works himself into a lather over a girl who has no idea that he is watching her, and whom he treats merely as a prop in his own games of fantasy. I had hung out with girls after school, snatched kisses and sometimes more. But those whispered encounters on the edge of things were furtive and uncertain, as though at any moment a door would open and we would be hauled away in chains. Desire was something else, something that grows in solitude. I wanted my women to live in the same solitude that I did. And I wanted to invite them to beat against the wall of that solitude, breaking at last into a place that was fully imagined, and recklessly shared.
    For instance,