Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton

her the next day on the St ř elecký Island. Her light touch in the street, as she looked in my eyes and said “You go that way,” and then promptly turned in the oppositedirection, was a promise, an assurance that life had already changed for us, and that we had no need to make a display. I walked down to the river, imagining her on the bus to Divoká Šárka, neatly bundled against the window, showing tissue-paper eyelids as she looked down on her book. And behind those eyes as I imagined them was the thought of me.

CHAPTER 8
    I DID NOT take the Metro, but decided to walk to Gottwaldova instead. The snow was settling in the streets and the silence was broken only by the occasional squeal of a tram. I walked down, with wet shoes and a light heart, into Malá Strana, the Little Side, hemmed in between the hill and the river. This part of our city was not ours at all: created by Italians for our Habsburg masters, it had been carefully dropped onto our soil like a fairyland of icing onto a battered old cake. The Church of St. Nicholas took 150 years to build and was to testify to the Jesuit Order as spiritual owner of the land beneath it and of the soul and the soil all around. Just two years after the church was completed, the Order and its claim to ownership were both dissolved. Yet from the scaffolding erected by such dead ambitions, the worn façades still hung, glinting with their jewels of snow like dew-spangled cobwebs. I looked on it all with a new wonder, as though this place that belonged to no one belonged in another way to me.
    Each building seemed to embrace its neighbor, gable touching gable, curlicue wrapped in curlicue, roof sloping into roof. The linesof window frames and moldings were picked out by the snow; cornices and stringcourses seemed to shoot sideways, rush together like hectic streams, and lose themselves in foreign windowsills. Turrets and pediments poked through the white blanket, and the crumbling wall of a palace, propped on scaffolding, was like the face of a dying person, desperately sucking the snowflakes in his thirst. The wedge-capped towers of gates and bridges, the spikes of onion domes, the gesticulating statues on the parapets, barely arrested in the architectural whirlwind, like flimsy ballerinas on a surging sea of stucco—this superfluity of form and detail was thrown into drastic relief by the snow and the decay. Things seemed to be standing only by a miracle, each building propped against its neighbor, reduced to a flaking shell. One breath and the whole contraption would collapse, and I felt the quiet streets vibrating to either side of me as my wet shoes shoveled through the slush.
    I crossed the river at the St ř elecký Island and made my way towards Nusle. Everything appeared to me as though newly revealed, as though I came from some distant land and was seeing the truth that was hidden from those who lived in the untended graveyard of my city. At one point, I passed an Agitation Center, the place where some local branch of the Party rehearsed its immutable decrees. Behind glass that had never been cleaned, in a window that had never been dusted, a sloping board of posters proclaimed the socialist cause: Nazi-faced American GIs thrust their bayonets into Vietnamese babies, fat capitalists with bulging cigars stood on the heads of helpless workers, and huge missiles, decorated with the stars and stripes, flew in regimented flocks over the cowering cities of Europe. Dusty photographs showed weary communist potentates in grey alpaca suits, signing with fat old hands the bits of paper set before them on modernist desks, while Marx and Lenin stared across their porcine bodies into the future. Notices were pinned to a screen of cork behind the window: more slogans,written in a shaky old hand, composed in the same impersonal syntax, and with the same impenetrable vagueness: “Forward with the Party to a Socialist Future!!” “Long live our