Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton

where each morning I collected my broom, dustpan, and orange street-sweeper’s jacket from Mr. Krutský. He raised his dumpling-colored face and laid big hands on the desk, vainly trying to focus his watery grey eyes. Never in all my dealings with him had Mr. Krutský fixed his look on me. Always, his eyes seemed to stray from side to side, as though he feared a door would open somewhere and a hand reach out for his throat.
    â€œThe StB were here yesterday,” he said, “asking for you. That means trouble.”
    â€œMy trouble, not yours. And anyway, you can’t fire me. I am at the bottom of the ladder. There’s nowhere down from here.”
    â€œBut where were you when they came?”
    â€œI had a headache. I’m sorry. I will work late.”
    â€œAnd now I have to report on you,” said Mr. Krutský, with a weary sigh.
    â€œIs that what they told you?”
    â€œOnce a week, to be collected.”
    I shrugged.
    â€œShouldn’t be too difficult. I’ll write it for you.”
    Taking my broom and dustpan from the rack, and my bright orange jacket from the peg, I left for the Husovy sady. I spent the rest of that morning in a state of euphoria. It hurts to confess this. It hurts to confess that I was glad of Mother’s arrest, glad of the misfortune that had befallen us, glad that I was officially a non-person. I had come up from underground. I was breathing real air, the air that Betka breathed, and I was going to live in another way, in a space that we shared. Side by side with Betka I would live in truth. What a cliché! And what a lie! But I am coming to that.
    I telephoned Ivana from the public phone at M ů stek. She lived with a woman whose old townhouse in Brandýs had been taken by the Party in exchange for a couple of rooms in a new block of apartments. The old woman was worn down enough to be indifferent to her lodger’s history. But when I told my sister of Mother’s arrest, she said “hush” as though refusing to be implicated in a crime. By speaking in whispers I reshaped the story as a legend. Ivana was tense, scant, and embarrassed, reluctant to be dragged beyond the confines of her world. She had opted for a clean life within the system, and wanted nothing more to do with crime. I was not surprised when she hung up on me.
    I went that afternoon to the central police station, which occupies one side of Bartolom ě jská street: a warren of offices and cells behind old facades, punctured at one point by a window of small square panes, stretching over five floors. I entered by the old head-quarters building from the First Republic, which looks as though sculpted from a single piece of coarse red sandstone. Formalized bas-reliefs of workers, miners, and peasants remind the passer-by of what is needed in the life-long business of avoiding arrest. I waited in a dirty room with a window in one wall, behind which an official face appeared, seldom the same face and always staring blankly atmy request for news of Mrs. Reichlová. Uniformed figures moved purposefully in and out of the room, ignoring me. A woman entered with a shopping bag of groceries, crowned by a bunch of flowers. She went through a door to the other side of the window, nodding as she passed.
    I began to notice a strange humming in the room, as though an insect were trapped somewhere and uselessly beating its wings. After a while it seemed as though the humming were coming from inside me. I felt an overwhelming urge to sit down, but there were no chairs, only a kind of ledge around the wall on which you could briefly lodge your thighs.
    I propped myself up as best I could. Faces floated past, melting and then hardening as they drifted away. Perhaps an hour passed before one of them fixed itself in front of me, and the humming crystallized as words. The officer’s thin grey face seemed to have been sharpened to an edge, as though to cut through whatever pretenses