Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton Page B

daylight so as to watch me blink? What was she planning—for that she was planning something I did not doubt. They were still talking among themselves when, without deciding to do any such thing, I got up and went towards the door.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” the interrogator cried.
    â€œI assumed you didn’t want me anymore.”
    â€œJust wait there.”
    The interrogator left for the adjoining room, and returned after a while with two sheets of paper, on which questions and answers had been typed.
    â€œRead it,” he said. “And when you have read it, sign.”
    The rough grey paper rubbed against my fingers like a file. Some of the words had been typed over with x’s; others were fragments of communist jargon that I could not possibly have used. I had apparently denied all knowledge of my mother’s reactionary beliefs and counter-revolutionary actions, and the words—
zpáte č nický
and
kontrarevolu č ní
—were like pieces of an old jigsaw forced into the unfilled places of a puzzle to which they did not belong.
    â€œWhat if I don’t agree?”
    â€œSign it, I said.”
    I must have signed; I don’t remember. Afterwards I went back to Gottwaldova. I did not return to my life underground. I had emerged from the catacombs into a wholly new kind of loneliness, an assuageable loneliness that came from wanting what was real. When I left work the next day I wandered along the banks of the river for an hour. It was a raw December day, and a thin sunlight placed golden crowns on all the houses. I remember one of them, a plain white house which still retained its stucco, with an attic story where stone nymphs punctuated a balustrade. I remember it because of an unusual feature, which was the figure of a woman leaning from the attic window and looking down on the Smetana embankment. People didn’t lean much out of windows in those days, and certainly not in places where they could be so easily seen. She was young, dark, with strangely lopsided features, as though one side of her face had been assembled without reference to the other. She seemed to be watching me, and I did something unpremeditated and foolhardy: I waved at her. She looked back at me with a puzzled expression, and then promptly closed the window. Recalled now, the experience has the character of a premonition. The world was full of warnings, and I rejoiced in ignoring them.
    Betka was sitting in a window of the Slavia, at one of the marble tables that have since been modernized away. I should have been intimidated by this place frequented by intellectuals and spies. I had heard that a circle of dissidents, who had gathered around the poet Ji ř í Kolá ř before his emigration in 1980, still met from time to time at his favorite table. And surely the man filling in the
Mladá fronta
crossword, whose table commanded a view of the whole interior, was the resident corner-cop. It surprised me that Betka was sitting there,calmly immersed in a book, one finger in the handle of a cup that she had just put down.
    The Slavia had maintained some memory of its past, as the place where the cheerful believers in our nation had drunk together while the band played dumkas and polkas from the dais. The few tired waiters wore the shreds of old uniforms, with white collars and black bow ties; the tables and chairs were unchanged from the Jugendstil pattern acquired in the last days of Austro-Hungary, and against the wall of the dais, next to an upright piano, a double bass leaned as though exhausted from its labors. A few tidily-dressed men sat at one table, staring silently into glasses of wine. Two women whispered in a corner, one of them toying with a necklace of imitation pearls, as though debating whether the time had come to strangle herself. The place was another warning, and Betka was inviting me to ignore it.
    She had tied up her hair in a chignon, and the sight of her pale neck