Free Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton

obligatory, and it was a path of no return. He advised me always to carry the equipment, such as soap and toothbrush, that I would need in jail.
    â€œThey can keep us for forty-eight hours,” he said, “and from time to time it strikes them as the right thing to do.”
    I turned to Betka, who was sitting now in one of the armchairs.
    â€œHas it happened to you?” I asked, and she shook her head as though ridding herself of the question.
    â€œAlžb ě ta is our guardian angel,” said Rudolf. “We are safe when she is here.”
    After a while, the visitors—
moji žáci
, my pupils, as Rudolf described them—began to arrive. Someone had left the door ajar, so they entered quietly, discarding their shoes, leaving their coats in a pile by the door, and whispering their greetings as though assembling for some dangerous adventure. A few were young, the boys with long hair and shabby clothes like Western pop stars, the girls neatly dressed, one or two wearing a cross on a gold or silver chain. Some were middle-aged—scholarly men with waistcoats and beards, matronly women in long woolen skirts, an elderly couple who entered hand in hand, stumbling slightly, and a few ill-dressed men who seemed to have been brought in off the street, with shifty gestures and blank faces suggesting they had been recruited against their will. A tall man of a certain age, with finely chiseled features and a shock of white hair, bent beneath the lintel as he entered the room, looking deferentially from side to side like a once-proud nobleman who had lost everything, and was now the debtor of those who used to serve him. I learned that he was the poet Z. D., famous in his day but long since deprived of the right to publish. Other faces, too, werefamiliar, though I could not put a name to them. One in particular stood out: a man of about thirty-five in a greasy mechanic’s outfit, who wore a wooden cross on a leather thong around his neck and whose pale face and slow-moving brown eyes were suffused with a strange softness. He sat down on the floor next to Betka and smiled at her; returning his smile, she leaned forward to stroke his arm.
    This was my first experience of a social gathering, and I was overwhelmed by it. I had known imaginary friendships and invented love affairs; but real love and friendship are learned by example, and—except for Dad who betrayed me and Mother whom I betrayed—the examples had never come my way. Of course there was Ivana; but observing this room of drop-outs and criminals, I imagined the shudder of disdain with which she would instinctively shield herself from entering it. Here, littered across the carpet like the aftermath of battle, were the remains of our true society: people who had declared their solidarity, and whose need for each other was revealed in the tenderness with which they wove their whispered greetings from filaments of air. I was seized with a burning desire to be part of what I saw, and I took my place on the floor beside Betka, my heart pounding with excitement. And yet she seemed so cool, so calm, as though this gathering were one form of life among many, and nothing special for her. She looked on the people who greeted her as though from a place of safety, a guardian angel, just as Rudolf said.
    Rudolf took up position behind his desk, on which stood a large lamp of frosted glass, borne aloft by a naked nymph in bronze. He stood, slightly leaning on the desk, and began to talk, his white hands circling in the air, his lips moving from side to side as though printing the words, the words themselves dark and serious, since all smiles had been sucked from them. I saw that Rudolf’s standing in his world was as high as any to be achieved in the official life outside. Here was authority, visible, tangible, the power of the powerless in awiry torso. Whatever privations he had suffered, they were the price of a far greater freedom, which was