“The main thing is to start soon,” Aunt Marie insists. “There are whiz-kids everywhere these days. You mustn’t delay!”
She pounds an earwig into the vegetable bed with a tool handle, and an s-shaped curl falls over her forehead. I have a curl like that too, but it’s not as pretty yet. My mother is silly for cutting my hair like a boy’s.
“You know about Cornelia, don’t you? That famous five-year-old German singer? Who bought her mother a house with what they paid her for that song about the satin dress?”
I too have a pink satin dress; Aunt Marie made it for me. She wears long flounced skirts and every morning curls her short fountain of hair into “snail spirals.” They bounce up and down across her forehead. She says that it’s details like this that give us women our appeal. What is a “detail”? We often put snail spirals into our studies.
“You have to catch people’s eyes!” Auntie insists angrily, thumping her hoe into the kohlrabi. “You’ve got to look pretty, even at your age! Does your mother think you’re a little monkey? Is that what they call style in Prague? If you were mine, I’d have done things differently from the start!”
If you were mine: the other inexhaustible theme of our conversations. I’m already half hers anyway. A luminous twilight swallows the vegetable bed, the watered earth breathes around us, we pledge our troth to a secret life.
“I’d make you into a little princess!” says Auntie, plucking weeds. “I wouldn’t leave you to rot in that darned Czechoslovakia of yours. We’d escape to Germany, find Franz, and he’d take care of us his way!”
When I live in Germany (with Auntie and Franz), I’m not called Dana like I am here. It’s a silly name and it upsets my aunt. I have an old Germanic name: Saussika. I wear long flounced dresses. I have snail spirals, watercolors, a pallet and brushes — that’s so I can learn to paint. I don’t have to learn to write. Writing is from God. Neither Auntie nor I have any doubt that God is teaching me to write, today and every day.
“Once you’re a little older,” Auntie says, “you’ll write something about me. You’ll write my life as a novel. If I’m still breathing, if our good Lord hasn’t released me from this scabby old world, then I’ll illustrate it for you. And your novel will clear my name.”
How old is Aunt Marie? To me she seems much younger than my mother (she is five years older); she’s on a parallel track with me, a joyous geyser of the present gushing back into itself.
“You’ll write my whole life in it. How Franz and me loved each other and how those pigs here stoned me. I’ll give you a title for it. It’ll be called Meine Gespräche mit Tante Mitzi. That means ‘My Conversations with Aunt Mitzi.’ It’s a real good title for a book.”
The sun sinks below the horizon and summer’s freshness wafts in off the fields. We take the watering cans — I have the smaller one — and make beautiful dark stripes between the tomatoes.
“Just don’t waste time! Every day matters. The earlier you make your mark, the better. We’ll start right away. I’ll tell you my whole story and you’ll put the truth of it on paper, nice and pretty.”
She gives me a penetrating look, silently counting something.
“How much longer till you learn to type? You’re a clever girl. Maybe a year!”
At the moment I can hardly write three lines a day. No one could expect me to become a writer just like that. I can’t be like Cornelia — a miracle at five. But people understand. After all, singing is different from writing.
“Another good title would be Die Liebe ist ewig, ‘Love Is Eternal,’ don’t you think? Maybe not. They wouldn’t believe you thought it up yourself. Too bad, because it’s a pretty title. But everyone would say I gave it to you.”
The subtitle will be “Through a Child’s Eyes.” What should I do? For now just listen and, most importantly, not close off my soul. God will take care of the rest.
“But will you promise not to betray me like everyone else? Do you swear cross your heart that you’ll write about me?” Auntie asks doubtfully. “Will you promise? Nonsense! Promises, promises. Don’t promise me anything.”
Why not? I’ll promise everything. The omnipresence of time, the everpresentness of my future guarantees that I will not be unfaithful. And do I truly believe in God? Of course. So I’ll promise Him, not Auntie. Then it can never be taken back. I learn what an oath is.
“Raise your right hand! Two fingers together: like you and our good Lord. Repeat after me!”
We kneel in the beds of lettuce and bitter-smelling tomatoes. We rinse our hands, so as not to offer Our Lord our dirty fingers. Then both of us raise our hands at once to the heavens; Aunt Marie’s voice shakes.
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven, I swear to You…”
I swear that I will be (that I am) a writer. I swear that I will write about my aunt, Meine Gespräche mit Tante Mitzi — My Conversations with Aunt Marie. No one, nothing will deter me from this, I swear.
Enter Grandma, coming down the watered path. She sees us, red with excitement, kneeling in the vegetable beds, but (as always) does not dare ask. We do not inform her of our oath. As if nothing has happened we pick up the watering cans and Auntie calls in a voice full of tears and triumph:
“Na komm, komm, Saussika, komm!”
I understand her, even though I have not yet learned this sentence. Komm means “come” and Saussika — that’s me. I go into the house, cool in the evening shadows, and I burn with happiness and pride, as if it is not I who has just promised something to God, but God who has promised something to me. My entire future is in me. The tall, timeless pillar of omnipotence rises straight through me. I am my own time.
Then fragments I should remember, the seeds of my writerhood. Foremost is the story “About Franz,” albeit sullied by thousands of asides, by the textual criticism of adulthood. I no longer live at the source, and alone I cannot see that original kernel of our Talks.
It is wartime and a German detachment has settled in her Sudeten village (what does “Sudeten” mean?). A young soldier, Franz, falls in love with my Aunt Mitzi. My Aunt Mitzi falls in love with Franz. (An aside, defiling the original source: a proud old maid, she was thirty-two at the time.) It is a great love, infinite, eternal, and like everything that is truly great, it is beyond time’s grasp. Franz is here for three weeks. When the detachment is ordered elsewhere, Franz swears an oath that after the war he will return for my aunt, and now I understand what an oath is. He gives her ten yards of yellow ribbon and ten yards of crimson. Yellow means jealousy and crimson — love. And then what?
Nothing. Still nothing. Nothing: room for a novel. Nine and a half years after the war, no news of Franz has ever come. Did he fall? No. Aunt Marie feels sure. If he had fallen, her heart would have told her, but her heart has said nothing of the sort. Franz therefore lives, in Germany, but because “shameful politics” rules the world, he cannot come for us and take us back with him forever.
Auntie knows that Franz still waits for her. Every once in a while he has German Radio play her a song. Anonymously, of course, because shameful politics would try to spoil even her last joy in life, if it (shameful politics) knew. The song is “Abend, oh Abend.” That means: “Evening, Oh Evening.” Franz would play it for my aunt on his harmonica as he stood beneath her window.
The second story, “About the Stoning,” is much harder to make out. My aunt had cursed shameful politics out loud. It was in the village, in broad daylight. When they expelled the Germans (I see in my mind’s eye how they were expelled, propelled through the village on a conveyor belt; I even see, hazily, a man giving them the final push), my aunt swore to take revenge on that man. I cannot know his name; I am still too young for that. I leave it for later; I do not insist on understanding my own novel all at once.
Auntie went to the village green, she stood there in broad daylight and said things for which “you get a rope around your neck” (do you have to wear it then?), but she, my Aunt Mitzi, was only stoned. Screaming, she fled, her hand
s covering her scalp, home to her house and there — here! she pounded her fist on the floor — she swore an oath never to set foot in the village again. A third oath! My novel will have sharp edges. It has been eight years since my aunt last set foot outside the gate.
And now my own story, a link of authenticity. Vaccination, the summer I am there: “A Story about Vaccination.” A loudspeaker circles the house like a gadfly: “All citizens are required to report for vaccinations!” My aunt and I stand hidden behind the hedge, and she urges me on:
“Saussika! Throw that rotten potato at them! You’re just a kid, nothing will happen to you!”
Whenever the car goes by, she picks me up enough for me to see over the hedge and I heave a potato after the car. I only hit them twice. Auntie kisses me affectionately and enthusiastically; squatting beneath a sky of Jericho roses, we hug each other and laugh out loud, insanely, in a fabulous intimacy.
Then, the next day, a man with a scar is standing at the gate. He is shouting and Auntie is shouting too. An ambulance is parked in front of the house all morning. The man chases my aunt around the kitchen; she hangs on to the curtains, white-fingered. Will they take her away? Will they stone her? Grandma, weeping, boils water. The man ties my aunt to a chair with his belt. A woman pricks a needle into Auntie’s skinny forearm, into its gelatinous, aging flesh. Then my aunt lies down until evening, just staring at the low ceiling. “Saussika, never forgive anyone for anything!”
And meanwhile, during, before, afterward, a hot July. The glowing, rolling wave of a child’s summer, a fount of eternity, time from nowhere to nowhere. Franz loves my aunt, Grandma was born old, I am a writer.
The last story entrusted to my pen: a man “courted” my aunt. A scene of them walking together across cornfields. He picks her some wild red poppies. “My beautiful Marie, I should have looked more closely. What’s done is done, I pointed at the wrong one.” I realize — but only very hazily — that this man is probably my father, but my aunt will not be more specific and I do not ask. In the end, all writerhood is half-light and speculation. And again the summer, summer, summer surging past, back and forth.
Then one day I run in from the garden with an egg in my hands. I have found it lying by the fence. I am in the hallway when a loud whisper from inside takes me by surprise. I peer into the kitchen: my mother is sitting there, angrily whispering to my grandma. My aunt is sleeping next door in the sitting room, as she does every day. It is midday, filtered gray through the brown curtains; no one has seen me yet.
“No!” my mother shouts in a whisper. “I’ve heard quite enough already! And I want my child left out of it!”
She sits bent almost double, her fingers darting out from her palms, one after the other. (An aside: my mother’s age-old habit of supporting her words by toting up individual points, even when there are no points and nothing anywhere in her speech that can be counted.)
“A complete crackpot!” She shakes her thumb at Grandma. “Raving mad. For Christ’s sake, the kid isn’t even five yet!”
My mother is different from us. She’s Praguified. She has an actress’s clear diction, which carries, even in a whisper, across the hall.
“But … but you know how she is, hon…” Grandma sighs.
“So she’s bats, fine, but I won’t have her playing around with my daughter’s mind! Come on, do you know who they pray for together? For the Germans we expelled in ‘46! For collaborators! She may be the official village idiot, but this could cause a real mess in Prague! And who’ll pay for it? Her? Not likely. It’ll be me, as always!”
Grandma tilts her head. “You know how it is … you know…” “How old is she?” Mother’s index finger shoots out. “Has her watch stopped or something?”
A golden fly has settled on my shoe. My impulsive mother is shaking all her fingers at once.
“What’s she waiting for? What? For that ladykiller to come back for her? That slick Kraut? She’s past forty! Time to have a look at the calendar!”
Grandma is wringing her fingers.
“Still … how can you take it away from her? How can you?”
“So we’re just supposed to keep acting in her little play, pretending time doesn’t exist? That it’s stopped, for her sake? Time marches on! Time flies! No carriage waits forever! My child can’t stay here, not another day!”
I stand and I hear. I feel nothing and I think of nothing else. Perhaps God is writing inside me in his special script, who knows; I see, I hear, the sitting room door opens.
“No! I won’t let you take her away from me! Not her!”
Like oil on water Aunt Mitzi, in her nightgown, steps out of the half-light.
“I won’t let you! I won’t! Don’t take her away from me!”
Her hair is unkempt and she is shouting like when they came to give her the injection.
“You want to take away everything I have, everything! Why can you always do everything, and I can’t do anything? Except follow you around and pick up what you drop. How come you get to be a little lady from the city while I just rot here like a dead dog?”
My mother the Praguer, my coiffed city dweller, snaps back immediately.
“Then you should have had your own child, instead of messing up mine! Whose fault is it anyway that you’ve got soup for brains!”
“Girls! Girls! For the love of God!” Grandma sobs. Then my aunt notices me standing in the dim hallway, and in a single jump she has me in her arms.
“I love her!” she shrieks in a thin voice. “I love her more than all of them do! I got nothing else left, nothing in the whole world!”
“Look, an egg!” I’m shrieking too, and I hold it up in one hand, so my aunt won’t crush it. “An egg!”
And again: oblivion, the luscious rippling of time’s languid body, that day or any other, an egg — that one, or any other — is hard-boiled, and my aunt makes lines with it, shifts it behind her back, the egg disappears … aha! Where is it now? … like the moon I circle my aunt, laughing, my aunt runs round the sitting room and Grandma, happy to have peace in the house again, watches. The radio plays “Abend, oh Abend.” My aunt gazes knowingly at me over my mother’s bristly scalp. God is teaching me to write.
But in the end, my mother doesn’t take me away — no, she takes herself and Grandma away to the fair at Jevícko. It’s a tremendously lengthy trip: they won’t be back till tomorrow morning, but they have piled up provisions for us as if we were arctic explorers in winter. My mother starts the car with her whole body — she does everything with her whole body — she grips the wheel like reins, the car breaks into a gallop, and my grandma draws a large cross with her finger on the rear windshield.
No sooner has the car vanished around the curve than I begin to change completely and unhesitatingly into Saussika. Auntie and I throw open the wardrobes and play “dress up.” I choose a pink satin dress, sewn at the miraculous Cornelia’s behest, and my aunt tries to curl my hair, which has grown out nicely over the summer. The s-curl, which we have hidden from my mother and which my aunt combs out for me with a barrette, hangs down to my nose and tickles my forehead. Finally I am myself, we no longer have to hide the fact that I am a young German beauty and not an ugly little boy from Prague. “And that man, you know, the one I told you about … in the cornfield …”
Today my aunt is unusually confiding. She combs my hair and fills in details for my novel; they’ll certainly come in handy some day. I know who she means. The man who pointed at the wrong one.
“Know what I said to him? Guess! What would you say?”
I don’t know. “I don’t know,” I say. Now my aunt is brushing her own hair. I sniff it with delight: a scent of femininity and beauty wafts from it like from a prewar candy box.
“Then listen up, I’ll give you another bit for your pen. I took the bouquet of poppies from him, because a girl can always take a bouquet. But nothing more! Remember that! If they send you a jewel, then you have to write a card immediately, saying you’re honored but
it’s too great a present, and you’re returning it with thanks.”
Auntie has a lilac blouse with balloon sleeves. She has a skirt with flounces all the way to the floor. We’re each more beautiful than the other. We’re the most beautiful people on earth. Now we’ve become the studies.
“My boy, I tell him, don’t be disappointed with my answer, because I’m telling you it just can’t be. Do you know what Franz gave me as a good-bye present? Ten yards of yellow ribbon. And do you know what yellow stands for, my boy?”
“Jealousy,” I answer for my father in the corn. What does “jealousy” mean? My aunt nods.
“And crimson stands for love. You think that love can disappear, admit it, don’t you? Then you’re a poor thing indeed, my boy; I can’t even tell you how sorry I feel for you in my heart. Rubbish! True love is infinite. Love is eternal, my boy!”
Yes. How else could it be? How else, other than eternal? I find this notion more obvious than it would seem — thanks less to the concept of love than to the concept of eternity. I don’t trip on time’s protrusions. It carries me like an escalator: Whatever is, is. If something disappears, it’s gone from my sight and thoughts at once. I move onward, standing firm: I do not leave my step.
In the afternoon I sleep, we play Old Maid a thousand times in a row, we water the flowers, and finally it’s time for hide-and-seek. How do you play hide-and-seek with a child? I sneak behind a bush, my aunt pretends to look for me for a while, and when she finds me, we both happily let out a squeal. The sun rolls lazily down toward the fields. There will be cake for dinner.
“No standing near home base, or I won’t play! Yoo-hoo! Hide, quickly, Saussika!”
Suddenly it hits me that there’s a small hollow in the woodshed behind the logs. I know it because I look for eggs in there. It’s where a fat white hen does her laying. The thrill enlivens me, and while my aunt counts aloud I run into the woodshed and work my way underneath the wood.
“Nine and ten and ready or not, here I come!”
My hideout offers an exceptionally miserable view. All I can see is the flounces, the hem of my aunt’s skirt swishing and fluttering down the path.
Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Page 2
