Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else

by Daniela Fischerova

  “What are you doing here?” Dr. M. replied evasively. He sounded strange: as if he were carrying a tray of delicate, long-stemmed wineglasses, putting one foot carefully in front of the other. “I thought you weren’t here. You promised you’d be gone.”

  “I was waiting for my tram on Peace Square. I was just about to get on when the Holy Spirit stepped on my foot. So I guess I’m supposed to be right here. I told you, I let myself be guided.”

  “What do you mean, on Peace Square? You were supposed to be out in the bush long ago.”

  “Guess not, if I’m here.”

  Again he gave me a conspiratorial smile. “He doesn’t believe I’m guided. Still doesn’t want to believe me. I’m always in the right place. Exactly where he needs me at that very moment. Like those avalanche dogs.”

  “Look, we’re in a bit of a hurry.”

  We were not in a hurry. All three of us knew that no one was in a hurry. The kid did not have the generosity to let it pass, and gave a grimace of indulgent disbelief.

  “He’s lying,” he pointed out chummily to me, “and he has no reason to. He couldn’t even explain why he’s lying. He thinks I’m his adversary, some sort of antipodean. But he’s the antipodean. Except he doesn’t want to admit it. It’s the anesthesia, I think. Most of the time he’s under anesthesia. Right?”

  Ropes of steam, imbued with their own independent lives, flowed from their mouths and twined about each other long after the sound of their words had died away. Dr. M. grew more and more nervous. Through the layers of our sleeves I felt his arm instinctively pulling me away, but his feet stood obstinately still as if this odd conversation would last into the night. The boy suddenly pulled out a crumpled band with a door key hanging from it.

  “I’ll take your measure.” He glanced at me encouragingly, as if he were promising me some sort of fun. “I’ll measure your writer,” he informed Dr. M. “You know I’m never wrong.”

  It was like a dream. An archetypal setting: the deepening darkness and the deepening whiteness of the snow, the hot clump of violets in the frost, the illusion of isolation on an island, while around its borders anonymous shadows glided past — all of this gave the episode a sort of latent, cryptogamous meaning, a plot invested for future interest. Violets: the boy had a woven sachet of herbs around his bare neck. Snowflakes melted on his rusty curls. He approached me, took my hand unaffectedly, turned it palm up, and started to swing the key above it.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said sweetly. “The Holy Spirit guides me. I don’t hurt anyone.”

  The key, suspended from between his pinky and thumb, slowly began to sway. Transfixed, I watched the gradually increasing motion, which truly seemed to flow from some source outside the youth’s will. Not even his fingers moved, but the key gyrated ever more wildly, till it was whirling like a dervish in ecstasy.

  “She’s okay,” the boy pronounced confidently. He licked the key on both sides and then squeezed it between his palms. “With time she’ll get better. But not for you.”

  “That’s enough,” Dr. M. answered in a level, expressionless tone. “We have to go.”

  The boy simply ignored this news. Again his fingers lowered the key; it came to life and fidgeted restlessly, like a horse pawing with its hoof.

  “Release her!” he ordered sharply. M.’s arm grudgingly loosened. The key flew here and there for a while and then — as if it had found its trajectory — began to swing sharply between us like a pendulum.

  “You see?” the youth said amiably. “Tuck in your fore-wings. This writer isn’t for you.”

  He stopped the key and turned my way, looking me right in the eye, the way most people never do. Despite the absurdity and disjointedness of the whole situation, he was so nonchalant that he did not come across as frightening or intrusive.

  “He’s not the one,” he announced confidentially. He unbuttoned the doctor’s coat and cheerfully tapped a finger against the man’s chest.

  “Anyone there?”

  M. just stared past his shoulder. The streetlamps flared to life and a cone of light fell down on us as on a stage.

  “You see?” the boy said. “He’s not there. But where is he? He’s afraid of what’s inside, because he has an evil sprite in his heart. He’s fine, really, but the sprite keeps giving him bad advice. My advice is good, but what can I do when he’s not here? And when he is, he’s under anesthesia. That’s so he can pretend he doesn’t hear me.”

  He glanced at the key, placed it on his palm, and stuck out his hand. The way people give presents to small children. For a moment time stopped or, at least, slowed to an imperceptible crawl. Everything stood stock still, the snow paused in its fall. Then M. took the key and put it in his pocket. The pink band on his forehead sparkled with frost. The boy laughed softly and ran off down the street. The rusty tuft of hair quickly dissolved into the snowy darkness.

  Invisible violets, a dancing key, an evil sprite in his heart. Mythical elements in the logic of fact. This is the logic of fact, at least the logic of biased memory.

  When the youth left us, we walked off quickly, without a word. We no longer walked arm in arm. Since we often did not talk on our strolls, today we could easily conceal what we were so stubbornly silent about. Cold and confusion were battling within me. A fit of shivering came over me, and I wanted to be home as soon as possible. The moment of twilight had passed, the snow had stopped falling, and a bare winter darkness had descended.

  At the gate I found I did not have my keys. There was no point in ringing the bell of an empty house, but there was the aforementioned route past the construction site.

  “Just so I know you’re home safe,” he mumbled, and we stumbled through the dark over the frozen planks, the tattered cardboard, and the frozen, desolate disorder of the abandoned lot. I clenched my teeth firmly so they wouldn’t chatter, and my face hardened into an obdurate expression of defiance and pique.

  We ended up at the cellar door. I had my hand on the icy doorknob.

  “You wouldn’t marry me,” he said suddenly, without a question mark, rhythmless, in the flat tone of an inconsequential statement. I was cold. I didn’t want to know anything, didn’t want to make any decisions. My bubble stiffened with frost and would not let the news inside.

  “No,” I said, just as unemphatically. It was a reaction right from my spinal cord, a simple reflexive arc that bypassed my brain. I did not know why I said it. It was not a genuine question, nor a genuine answer.

  M. nodded slightly, then symbolically raised a finger to his cap and left. I did not wait for him to disappear from view. Inside I found the gate key fallen into a fold in my bag.

  That night I had a dream, I believe the first one that had ever featured M. I am at the railway station in Budapest. The dream, as if focusing in on its core, rushes through several episodes until suddenly I see the empty trackyard. Dr. M. is walking along a track, tie after tie, on his hands. He has an ecstatic expression, one I’ve never seen on him, and in his eyes is the dull gleam of madness. He says something, implores me deeply, with a visionary’s emphasis on every word, except that I understand nothing. I run along the track, trying with all my strength to understand, but in vain: I hear his voice and his words make no sense. Then a train emerges from beneath the horizon.

  With this the dream takes on a tinge of terror, and of terribly ruinous responsibility. The train comes nearer, M. is still unaware of it and continues speaking in a feverish rapture. Rising through me is a sheer, violent whirlwind of horror and love, a jet from the bottomless absolute, beyond all imagination; destruction hurtles closer and closer until in a panic I shout out two words. The words are: “I know!”

  I don’t know what I know. I don’t know in my dreams, nor when I’m awake, but I must say it because it is the only way I can avert the catastrophe: everything depends on my knowing something. Except it’s too late, or my knowledge is too weak: the dream answers with a dreadful clash of matter. My own scream awakens me, I am gripped by
a raging fever and an all-engulfing sense of powerlessness.

  Since that moment twice-seven years have passed. I am thirty-seven, married for the second time. I am sure that my life never had and will never again have a greater intensity than at the moment of that scream. No bliss or distress has ever seized me that way. In concentric and ever widening circles various bliss-tresses revolve around me, but they weigh less. No one has ever been nearer to me.

  Dr. M. never called again. I did not understand. I did not know what had happened to him; I was utterly perplexed. For some reason I couldn’t feel any pain; it was more a loss of the earth beneath my feet, a vacuum devoid of all coordinates. I wasn’t lonely, I didn’t miss him, but I could not get rid of him. His absence was just a different sort of presence, like when you know that an uninvited guest has fallen asleep outside your door. I did not search for him. There or not, he became an oppressive phantom, pushing against my bubble from the outside.

  Shortly thereafter I met my first husband, we emigrated, and time — for a time — took on a different theme. I heard nothing of M. I married again, had two children. I returned to Bohemia. The wind erased my tracks. Fourteen years on, I flew off to Brisbane, in Australia, to a congress on contemporary literature.

  Fresh jet lag raged within me: two giant airplanes had overtaken time by nine hours. They had thrown me into the near future: in Brisbane it was a summer afternoon, while in me the Czech winter night rushed toward morning. I wasn’t sick, the way they had warned me, but I had the confused feeling that I wasn’t here. My wakefulness was uneasy and my body slept a narcotic sleep. I had to watch where my hand was and direct it with my sight, as if by remote control; otherwise I would miss my sleeve. As if I were not where I was.

  At the hotel I took a shower and walked into the bedroom. My roommate, a Czech emigré, was sitting on the desk, shaving her legs. So as not to watch, I switched on the television — and instantly we were face to face again. He stared at me from the screen. He was here and not here, as always. The sound was on low and he was speaking English. For a moment I couldn’t understand a word. He was lecturing on the far and the near. He mentioned a “wicket,” but he meant a gate, my gate, my garden.

  “What program is this?” I asked the girl.

  “It’s a video from last year’s conference. It’s on in all the rooms.”

  She looked over: “That guy’s Czech, coincidentally. He caused a real scene here a few years back.”

  She mowed one of her strong calves with her razor.

  “Supposedly he’d been cheating on his wife back in Prague. The lady hopped on the first plane, gun in hand. She got into the hotel, then somehow snuck into his room and — splat! Except clearly she couldn’t even see straight. Her traitor wasn’t in. An unfortunate coincidence, she’d shot someone else … but who?”

  Buzzing razor in hand, she stared off into the distance.

  “Yeah! The hotel waiter, that red-headed klutz. Poor guy, just walked blindly into it. Well, there are people like that: always in the wrong place.”

  Disparagingly, she tapped the razor against her forehead.

  “And then she turned and shot herself. Must have been nuts.”

  That news had been looking for me for fourteen years. It found me in Brisbane, Australia, on the top floor of the Space Hotel. Its traveling speed was four kilometers a day. Straggling like a blind turtle toward the intersection of time and space, it was fourteen years late and nine hours ahead. So now I knew, and what use was it to me? It didn’t concern me yet — or anymore. Two times passed each other inside me like overlapping transparencies on a screen.

  “What’s wrong? Jet lag?” said the antipodean with good-humored sympathy, buzzing her razor past my nose. “Do I ever know! I’m always flying somewhere and it totally messes me up. It’s like you’re not here,” she pointed to her chest, “you don’t care about anything. People speak, I hear them, but I still don’t know what they’re saying.”

  “I know,” I said mechanically. And then once more: “I know.”

  Two Revolts in One Family

  The son, Jan — for unknown reasons called Iša at home — rebelled against his mother’s omnipotence only once, when he was sixteen. He spent a week planning his escape from home. In the gray of early morning he snuck out to the highway to hitch a ride. His luck was unprecedented. The third vehicle to come along picked him up and took him to a remarkable place, Paseky: with its deserted mountain meadows, it was the ideal hideout for a runaway. The driver, a chatty, jolly butterball of a man, even pointed him to a wooden hut, where they let him stay in return for a bit of work. It was a fabulous success. Iša spent August at the old shepherd’s, becoming quite decent with a scythe and as bronzed as an Indian.

  When he returned home a day before the end of the holidays, all his mother said was: “Hello.” And after a pause: “Your messages are on your door.” Iša went to read his messages, which she had been taking all month with the precision of a perfect secretary, and from that moment on he never rebelled again.

  The daughter, Eva, three years older, spent her entire life rebelling against her mother. She turned her adolescence into an unending diatribe against this and that, constantly reasoning with her mother: in the first place, the second, the third, the fourth. Eva was almost always right. But in the end things went the way her mother wanted.

  The fact was, her mother was “very good with people.” Throughout Eva’s childhood her mother told her: “You have to know what works with whom. Let people be right, and then do things your own way.” Her daughter swore that she would never take after her mother. She would not scheme, she would be true and brutal and straightforward: at forty Eva had three divorces behind her. “Love without absolute openness is deception!” she would argue. Her mother would just smile slightly: “Of course, Eva darling.”

  Now they were all sitting at the table, because Eva had insisted on a family meeting. The problem was that Father, who at seventy had just survived a second heart attack, had decided to “rip down Malšov” over the summer; that is, to renovate their holiday cottage in the village of Malšov, which meant getting rid of the old roof, putting up a new one, and then replastering the entire place.

  “It’s ludicrous!” Eva shouted, but she shouted quietly, because Father was sleeping in the next room; the shout sounded like it was out of a radio play. “Dad shouldn’t even pick up a garbage can! Do you understand what a second heart attack is? Do you have any idea what it means to have a heart attack? And in less than a month you’re sending him to rip down a house!”

  “But Eva darling,” her mother said soothingly, “Dad’s a reasonable fellow. He won’t be ripping anything down. He’ll find himself a nice comfy seat in the shade and direct the Šefl boys. He won’t have to lift a finger.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mom, open your eyes! Come on, Iša! Don’t just sit there like a pasty-faced statue! At least say something clever! As if Dad will stand by and watch other people work! An hour of that and he’ll be carting bricks and climbing around the roof like a monkey!”

  Iša, who had long since lost the muscles developed when he ran away, sat hunched over, with his thinning pate visible. He was carefully making a design out of matches on the tablecloth. His nails were short, as those of a child who bites them. The expression on his face was what Eva called “the unhappily married old young man.”

  “If Mother thinks Dad’s up to it, then he’s up to it,” he said, annoyed. Eva drummed her fingers on the table.

  “Then listen up, boy! In the first place! Dad’s doing Malšov for us, in case you hadn’t realized! For us, since we’re both so incompetent we can’t even pull out the bathtub stopper. He’s in a hurry. Know why? Because he’s afraid he’ll die, and that we’re such numbskulls we’ll let the cottage slowly collapse around us. He’s willing to kill himself for us! The doctor said—”

  “Doctors overdramatize things, Eva,” her mother’s voice unexpectedly broke in. “A bit of exercise in the fresh air
will only help him.”

  Eva groaned inside. It’s always the same, still the same old powerlessness, and not even twenty years and three marriages have made her any stronger. She’s banging her head against a wall. She’s right, it goes without saying, but her mother’s impervious affability wins the day again.

  “Mom!” she said beseechingly. “Don’t be blind! It’s suicide! Dad’s worked himself to death, he’s an old man, his heart has given out twice already, and I simply won’t permit—”

  At that moment the door opened and their father stood there, having only had twenty of his winks.

  “What’s the big discussion?” he said sleepily. He looked like a large, flaccid bear. His pyjamas hung on him like a flag on a still day. Mother smiled indulgently.

  “Eva’s just afraid Malšov will be too much for you. Except it won’t happen without you. You can’t leave Šefl alone with it. He’s a nice fellow, but you have to tell him everything twice. And he’s really not the builder you are.”

  Dad’s not a builder! Dad’s a retired foreman! God, is she slick! How did she give him the illusion he wore the pants in the family? Eva’s heart almost burst with tenderness for this easily deceived man. It was up to her. She was the only one with the courage to face the truth — the truth that this was a matter of life and death.

  Her father gave a weak but delighted smile.

  “Well, true. If I don’t take the roof down, it’ll come down on its own,” he said genially.

  The night after this family assembly was a filter, trapping all the defeats and losses of forty years. Eva would wake up, then fall back to sleep again. At a feverish clip she dreamed up plan after plan, each more hopeless than the last, including blowing the cottage to smithereens. Finally — on the narrow threshold of daybreak — she decided to revolt.

  Could no one see that her mother was losing her mind? Did her cobra-like will hypnotize them so completely? It wasn’t will, it was loss of judgment in old age! But no one in this clan sees anything they don’t want to see. In the weak light of dawn Eva sat on the bed, shaking her head over all these people hopelessly afflicted with blindness.