Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else

by Daniela Fischerova

  The durgas, being clever to a fault, usually racked up points, took a day out, and never returned. They did not often become princess (if he could prevent it), for they felt no loyalty either to him or to the ladies. In a week they could turn the group’s morale upside down. Childless and completely unmaternal, they were usually ravaged by countless abortions.

  Durgas have narrow eyes, scrawny, foxlike snouts, and a curious oil-free, powdery filth. The votive abstraction of their faces reveals virgin martyrs rejoicing on their fiery beds, especially when they have secured a source of drugs. Often they are educated and very sharp, but they use their cleverness like snakes use their poison fangs. A black moon shines from their eyes. He imagined them to have a winelike flavor. Their speech could be wily and quick. Yet they were as bitterly beautiful and neglected as an October grave.

  He subjected himself to a similarly demanding discipline and a decidedly stricter point system. The system came from a book fate had sent his way at sixteen, which had influenced his life forever after. It was American and was called Yoga in a Hundred Days. (The titles Italian in a Hundred Days, Chess in a Hundred Days, and a score of others had been published in the same series, a fact he was of course unaware of.) The book laid out its exercise program with American thoroughness and an exalted faith in systems. Each activity was scored according to its difficulty. Bonus points were awarded for additional holding time.

  It was then he began keeping daily score of the points he achieved. He had been doing it for nineteen years now, non-stop. Later he added positions the book did not contain, and plotted their points using coordinates: x-axis for the number of minutes practiced, y-axis for difficulty. He had a notepad where he would write his totals out each evening. It was the most intimate part of his existence, at least in the material world. He never showed it to anyone. He never spoke of it to anyone.

  At sixteen he longed to go to India. At seventeen he promised himself firmly that one day he would.

  Actually, his first inspiration was not yoga, but pure, bone-chilling Buddhism. To escape the snares of cause and effect, to evaporate into the pure void. Nothing less than the absolute itself was worthy of acceptance.

  He shocked his parents, both tepid Christians, when he stopped eating meat (fleeing his mother’s cooking and her fat, smothering love) and shaved his head bare. It was small and round like a beggar’s bowl. He decided to live as a Buddhist monk.

  All he achieved was to suddenly look thirteen again. There was a constant draft on his bare head. He felt his brain was freezing over. Twice that winter they pricked his eardrums. It didn’t even help his spirituality.

  He let his hair grow back and never shaved off his beard, which had just started to sprout, somewhat late. But he did trim it into a tidy goatee. Meat was still out of the question, to the great regret of his mother, for whom cooking was an abundant, meaty source of joy.

  Even today he can visualize his shivering bare head, and the memory of it causes him especial disappointment. His sacrifice did not help him attain Nirvana. He abandoned Buddhism and chose the way of yoga, that flowered path full of symbols. Ever since, he has preferred to keep his head warm, and from October onward will not go out bareheaded. He wears hats.

  On that shining path, full of Lotuses and Lights, mythical beasts, nymphs, and miracle-workers, the Durga represents the frightening aspect of motherhood. She renounces and devours her children, despises the world of phenomena, and catapults out of reality like a pilot out of a burning plane. She is mischievous, capricious, and duplicitous by turns, and never lets herself be hoodwinked. Blood, raw meat, intoxicating drinks, and goats are sacrificed to her. She can be appeased by ritual suicide. Her laughter shakes the bones of the dead; no one can hear it without losing all certitude. A long, black tongue hangs from her mouth. Sparks of nothingness illuminate her in the darkness. Her mantra is dhum.

  The time and country in which his plan took shape were not at all conducive to its success. He gave over half his life to it. It demanded sacrifices — like every properly accredited spiritual goal, incidentally. The energy he expended overcoming the obstacles in his path would have powered a small factory. He has sacrificed his vacation from last year, this year, and part of next year as well. He has sacrificed practically all his savings.

  At thirty-five, he has succeeded. He has an exit visa, a plane ticket, and an invitation to a “Yoga Centre” somewhere in the south of India. Even a replacement — the weakest point in his program, which had threatened to wreck the entire plan — has now been secured: Hartl. His spartan rucksack is packed, with a precious five hundred U.S. dollars sewn into an inner pocket. Tomorrow is the day he departs.

  His mother is small and is constantly laughing. She finishes her sentences with laughter even when there is nothing laughable about them. Wiping her teary eyes with the back of her hand, she says apologetically, “Why do I find everything so funny!”

  He inherited his small stature from her, and a vigilantly guarded tendency toward plumpness, which has no chance against the hundreds of points he racks up daily. He inherited neither the lively briskness of chubby sprites nor their laughter.

  His father was absent, so to speak. The man had spent most of his time in his room. Although he owned a hearing aid, he usually carried it in his pocket. He never heard when they knocked on his door. Not long ago he had died, leaving no visible trace. If he had inherited anything from his father, he did not know what it was.

  “How about a baby, sonny?” his mother would ask regularly, breaking into loud laughter immediately afterward. “I know you’re a terribly busy man, no time to get married, but don’t worry, I’ll bring him up for you!” She seemed blissfully oblivious to any role the prospective other parent might play. “Don’t forget to come back from that Shangri-La of yours. And don’t pull your long faces at people there, they won’t like it!”

  She would often rub the bridge of his nose with her thumb, right where his wrinkles met, “so you won’t be such a sour-puss.” The place would itch long after.

  “Watch out you don’t overeat, Mom. You know what I told you about those varicose veins!”

  “Oh please! What do I have left in the world besides those few miserable goodies?” she would say, exploding in mournful laughter. The problem of dependency and overcoming it.

  A durga in ward seventeen means failure. Mostly they constitute that unfortunate percent or two in the column labeled Treatment Interrupted. They escape from the wards and often take drugs during their therapy. Their eyes shine too brightly in their scrawny, foxlike snouts.

  This last one had even studied medicine before pervitin, a homemade amphetamine known in underworld slang as “nerve whip,” put an end to that. Her three years of study had left her with some jargon and a skepticism of psychiatry bordering on hatred.

  “I’ll tell you what you are: voyeurs with prescription glasses. And still you don’t see fuck-all, ‘cause you’re totally out of it! You take away the one thing we have and give us absolutely nothing in return.”

  “Don’t forget that sometimes in doing so we save your life.”

  “Know where you can put that sorta life?”

  A banal conversation he had had a hundred times. Only

  now a bony regret grabbed at him, probably an inevitable mark of his final day.

  “I don’t expect us to share the same scale of values; otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here together.”

  What he wanted to say was: we’d be sitting together somewhere else, but he knew it wasn’t true. With durgas it was here or nowhere. Dhum!

  “But I took the Hippocratic oath and that requires me to save your life first, and only later ask what sense there is in it.”

  Unselfconsciously she peeled a layer of skin from her chapped lips, examined it carefully, and then began to pulverize it between teeth that had not seen a dentist in ages.

  “You ever try it?” she said.

  “I assume you mean drugs. I drank wine when I was a student, and
other than that just black coffee.”

  “Lucky you!” was her provocative retort. “Only someone completely out of touch would do a crappy job like this.”

  One durga, whom he thought he had parted with on good terms (she hadn’t run away but had discontinued treatment for a kidney operation) had sent him a letter. Over the address it said: Sadist Fascist Onanist and the text ran: “You don’t know shit about BLISS!!!”

  He wanted to believe she’d written it under the influence of a volatile combination of hashish and beer, even though as a doctor he should not have wanted that. No, he expected no satisfaction from his work. He had been soberly aware of that when he began.

  He was already at the door, with one foot in southern India, and she was about to make her escape, and yet she added:

  “You still think you can change us. We all make fun of you. Your whole life is a mistake. No one changes, not ever, even if they stand on their head.”

  Two durgas were already dead. They had found one of them about a month ago in the boiler room of ward seventeen. She had a plastic shopping bag over her head, still reeking from alcohol and tied firmly beneath her chin with panty hose.

  “Well, you’re the logical one,” Hartl announced. There was an implicit sneer in it: you’re just one of those reductionist western types.

  Yes, but beneath that was a deeper layer and, as he firmly believed, a more authentic one. An austere, insistent yearning for the Holy Spirit, which had taken the form of Indian spirituality, coupled with the awareness that this was only one of its many veils.

  He spent hours in his meditation bubble. There would be a firm silence around him, a pair of parentheses in the midst of a passionate sentence, a membrane rigid as a fetal sac. His striving was deep and genuine, confirmed day after day. Sometimes, rarely, he had the feeling he was close to his goal. But he knew that he was not yet ripe, because he still lacked a Teacher.

  “When the pupil is ready, the guru comes,” that American book had told him, at the age when such striking slogans comfort us. He believed it. It was an anchor of hope, lodged in the deepest sea-bed of the End. But how many more points? What did it mean to be ready?

  He did not hurry. He was exceedingly patient. (Hartl: “Fantastic stuff, yoga. I did a course last summer!”) If need be, he would wait till he dropped. His belief in the karmic logic of crime and punishment, merit and reward, was unflagging. It was what he found most captivating about yoga: the colossal point system of karma. The clear, inexorable equity of a Spirit incapable of judicial error.

  The deepest dream beneath the lid of his daily reverie: he enters a room lit so sparsely that the dream is not set against any specific background. In the middle of the room sits the Teacher. From the first moment it is obvious. They recognize each other, confidently, completely. “How long I have waited for you!” both say in their wordless tongue. There is nothing left but to bow.

  Of course, his ladies were inclined to tout their trips there and back as enticingly as they could: gushes of never-seen colors and incandescent spits turning between ecstasy and torture. He did not enjoy hearing about them, especially in public conversations; it retarded the healing process, he claimed. The truth was that it disturbed him. He neither needed nor wanted this sort of psychedelicizing. His pillar of firmament was narrow and bare. A rigid bubble of silence, the eye of the hurricane — this is what he wanted.

  True, sometimes it even happened to him — very fleetingly and rarely — that the flares of consciousness inside him were garbed in blissful colors, an irrepressible rapture surged two or three decimeters up his spine, the eye of the hurricane threatened to yield to a whirlwind and tear his membrane apart. The membrane pulsated and grew hot, swelling like a blood-filled sac; IT was almost close enough to touch. One barely perceptible movement, and IT WOULD HAPPEN.

  The membrane always remained intact. At the last moment anxiety would course through him, and the condition would dissipate as quickly as it arose, leaving him on the bare plain of his own emptiness.

  Recently the first signs of aging had begun to trouble him: an as of yet insignificant delay when urinating and unpleasant nighttime awakenings with burning pins and needles. It was time, high time to depart, to go where — as it said, word for word, in the invitation letter — they were all awaiting him with love.

  The night before his departure he slept rather uneasily. Before awakening he had a dream: he is on his way, but at the last minute remembers that he has left his hat at home. He returns, hastily opens his wardrobe, and finds his father sitting in it, naked. He closes the wardrobe just as hastily, pretending not to have noticed anything. I will have to make do without my hat, is the last thought he wakes with, as he runs in his dream out onto the sidewalk.

  The plane trip still had European features. The stewardesses, although dressed in saris, spoke perfect English. The tiny drink bottles, practically unspillable, were strange, but in a Western way. From the moment he stepped onto the hot Indian soil, though, he found himself in another world. The last word he could read was the EXIT at the airport gate.

  A train bore him through the night like a time machine, carrying him back into childhood illiteracy. All the schools he had passed through, his doctorate, two higher qualifications, all for naught. He did not understand a word; the station signs said nothing to him.

  In the middle of the night, in a light half-sleep, he heard a piercing cry. The compartment emptied out, a host of people trundled down the corridor, and the train stopped in the thick, exotic darkness. He had no idea what had happened. An accident? A crime? Was his life in danger? He sat, forgotten, in the empty compartment, his heart thudding in his head, and large mosquitoes, whining ampules of his blood, criss-crossed the stifling space.

  Suddenly the train started again and the compartment filled. He never found out what had happened. This day was the first in more than fifteen years that he could not give himself even a single point.

  (Fifteen years before, in a rebellious “dark night of the soul,” he had drunk himself practically into oblivion. He had been rejected quite roughly by a girl, a weak shadow of a durga in the still childish face of an exemplary student. He felt so awful he could have died. From that moment on he never drank and had never been rejected.)

  The letter he had received from India bore the signature of the center’s director, his guru. The signature was large, labored, and full of decorative strokes; it betrayed a lack of familiarity with western penmanship. Underneath it was a stamp: Swami Devananda Paramahamsa, Chief of Yoga Centre. Paramahamsa means “Highest Soul” and it is an honorific title, a registered trademark for complete enlightenment.

  With the letter came a flier containing a short biography of the swami. He was sixty-nine and since twenty-two had performed “multiples miracles.” At the top was his likeness, but the colors had run astrally together, so that the swami’s face, just as in his dream, was merely a cipher, fertile in its mysteriousness.

  After more than thirty hours’ travel, he finally arrived in the full sun of midday. Thirsty, dirty, the t-shirt he had put on that morning at the train station already dripping with sweat, but there, at last.

  A taxi took him around the city’s perimeter and rode for a long while down dusty roads. Then it stopped, the driver pointed majestically — we are here! — and the pilgrim was standing on the threshold of the ashram.

  He was too tired to feel surprise. Just a certain dull wonder that the ashram looked like a modern apartment building in Prague. Four floors, a bare rectangle, peeling paint. Two elevators, one out of order. Everywhere English signs and arrows: Meditation Hall, Club, Rooms.

  At the reception office a bespectacled Indian woman took his passport. She looked him over and picked up the telephone. As she spoke into the receiver in breakneck Hindi, she began to gesture for him to leave the room. Confused, he obeyed, made his exit, and found himself in a corridor.

  A tiny, lively Indian man came running down the dark hallway crosshatched with sunlight
from the narrow windows. As he trotted past the sharp bands of light, he seemed like a runner leaping hurdles. He could have been twenty-five, thirty at the most. He wore a saffron robe and a green knit ski-hat.

  “My name is Swami Garudananda,” he said to the visitor in English, his eyes suggestive of a clever monkey. He had a strong Indian accent, but put out his hand like a European. “At the moment, I run the Yoga Centre for Swami Devananda, who travels and will be gone for half a year. I am infinitely happy that you are here. How long I expect you!”

  There are times when fate turns gradually around on its axis to show us a different projection against the backdrop, another shadow of the same shape. Now was such a time.

  He was still too worn out to notice the bitter freshness of disappointment. In the way that a fabric’s bright colors fade over time, he slowly realized that his guru was not there. He had come in the off-season. He had jeopardized a department fifteen years in the making with a risky replacement of dubious quality, so he could put his closely guarded spirituality into the hands of this little boy, some sort of vice-guru, this square root of his secret hopes. With that fascinating inexactitude that marks the fulfillment of prophecies and yearnings, he had reached the threshold of his goal: the initial sentence had been uttered.

  “A problem is developed,” the Indian continued as he scurried through the building. “A compatriot of yours — a Serb woman — causes a certain problem. Unfortunately she speaks only Serbian. You surely will understand her.”

  He let the factual mistake pass, for he did not want his first contact with his Teacher — even such a spurious one as this — to be a correction or qualification. Calling the Czech lands part of Serbia (or vice versa) was a mistake commonly made even by foreigners considerably closer to both countries.