Notes From Underground Read Online Free Page B

the name Edice Bez moci—The Powerless Press, after an essay by Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” which everyone was reading in editions smuggled in from the West. She could type a short book of a hundred A4 pages in a week, and when she had finished, she would staple the pages into an elegant
papier mâché
binding, the boards of which were another gift from the under-manager. Mother met her authors at the back door of the paper factory and she described them to me: long-haired young men with Habsburg beards, often flam-boyantly but shabbily dressed in the dissident manner, with loose kerchiefs and long coats of navy or bottle-green velvet, retrieved fromthe wardrobes of the dead. Often they would be carrying letters of recommendation from political convicts, or from students and colleagues of Professor Pato č ka, first spokesman of Charter 77, whom I was told the police had murdered eight years before.
    Mother told me about this in a quiet whisper, knowing that it was never safe to speak too loudly in a place where criminals were housed. Why this little circle of dissident authors had picked on Mother she did not explain. They were simply a part of the unassuming life—the life in defeat—that she had made her own. But she spoke with pride of her new contacts, and of the work that she performed on their behalf. She had discovered her own subterranean path to the really real. Her authors would collect the finished product from the back door of the paper factory; but if she liked what she had typed she would keep a copy for herself, so that within a year we had a 30-volume library of samizdat beneath her bed: works of philosophy, translations of Western authors and Russian dissidents, and even a volume or two of fiction.
    Dad had never permitted television, describing it as a
kreténská bedna
, a box for morons. On moving to Prague, however, and coming face to face with our isolation, we had succumbed. Like everyone, we had followed the Sunday sitcom,
Hospital at the City’s End
, by Jaroslav Dietl, which showed ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as though the world of Karel Č apek were with us still, and those chess pieces had not been swept from the table. One of the first acts of Mother’s new occupation was to push the TV into a corner of the room, beneath a pile of wafer-thin A4 paper on which a stapling machine—another gift from the factory—stood like a crown. The TV had been telling us to renounce our futile resistance and to join the normal world. And in turning its face to the wall and our backs to temptation, we knew that we were doing this for Dad.
    Mother had by now abandoned her hopes of becoming a respectable citizen with a proper home and a right to travel. She becameactive in ways that she had never been when Dad was alive—allowing people even to come to our door in order to borrow one of the volumes from our not-so-secret library. It was thus that I met Betka—but I will come to that. Like Mother, I brought the underground each evening to our little room. While she was typing, I would sit across from her at our improvised table and write out the stories that I had divined in those sightless eyes. And I left the stories for my mother to read. One day I discovered that she had typed them and bound them: I was the owner of nine copies of
Pov ě sti—Rumors
—by Soudruh Androš, the name I had written on the title page. And I asked her to show them to her friends.
    This was a mistake. I should have kept those stories to myself, refused the feeble chance of fame that my mother held out to me. I should have stayed belowground, and not allowed my dreams to escape so easily into the daylight, to become those “fried wings, cut from Mercury’s ankles,” of which Vladimír Holan wrote. And there was another mistake, too, though one whose significance I would understand only very much later. The quantities of