Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else

by Daniela Fischerova

  “Yoo-hoo! Where are you?” my aunt calls. The hem flaps over by the bushes. She must be checking all the hiding places we’ve used, but because the garden is practically all within arm’s reach, there are only a handful of them. I quiver with laughter. The hem runs off again.

  “Saussika! Saussika!”

  I don’t answer. A small chicken walks solemnly past me. At eye height I see her taloned feet. My aunt is so close I could almost touch her.

  “Come on! Where are you? Hey, answer me!”

  Perish the thought. This is the first time I’ve won a game. I’m bewitched, an egg hard-boiled.

  “I’m done playing! You hear me? Come out right now!”

  A car roars through the village. Two lights fly through the earthy twilight, lick my burrow, and fly away again.

  “Dana! Dana! Where are you?”

  This evening, dim and distant, is the horizon of my remembering. Only since then has my time taken on the illusion of direction. Everything lying below it is a featureless confusion.

  “Help! Hey! Help! Someone, help me!”

  I am lying on my stomach. A stick of wood presses into my rear. My aunt’s somewhat indistinct voice now sounds far away. Another car roars by. I have no intention of coming out until I’m properly found. I have always been found, up till now.

  “Help! Help!”

  I hear the gate creak. I haven’t seen the flounces in a long time. Everything is silent.

  It’s dusk already. Sparks of cold rise from the nearby stream. The lengthening shadows of the beanpoles crawl into the wood-house, and then suddenly everything goes out — curls up and goes out …. I sleep.

  When I wake up, a bright light is shining, piercing through my tightly closed eyelids down to my throat. Something rudely invades my hiding place: a man’s scarred hands. A big man in overalls grabs me and pulls me out by the neck like a lizard.

  “Here you go, here’s your ‘kidnapped girl’! ‘Kidnapped’! Ha!”

  The man grabs me by the shoulders without any of the tenderness I’m used to, picks me up, and roughly shakes me in the air.

  “This time keep an eye on her, you silly goat! Because of you I had to stop the winnower! Know what that’ll cost me? Do you?”

  I start to sniffle a bit from the shock. In the light of the huge flashlight I finally find my aunt, but she’s not looking at me. Both her palms are covering her face and her shoulders are shaking. A wilted s-curl hangs across her skinny fingers. Suddenly, with a mighty swing, the man swats me across the behind.

  “You both deserve a swift kick in the ass!” he sniggers. “I’d whip this little brat till she couldn’t sit for a week. But your daddy’s too classy for that, right?”

  He sniggers again, lights a cigarette, and looks us over in disbelief.

  “Jesus, where did you think you were going in those clothes? To a ball? You look like a couple old ladies!”

  The dark and cold make me tremble. I’m bawling loudly. The man picks up his flashlight, spits into the aster bed, and swaggers off toward the gate. He jumps on his tractor, the engine barks, and the man leans out of its clamor for one last word:

  “And if you don’t come for your next vaccination, then I’ll vaccinate you myself with a dung pitchfork! Don’t forget!”

  Then he leaves us in the darkness. I sob and stumble as my aunt drags me into the house.

  What next? What now? What’s about to happen to me? My aunt silently removes my satin dress, silently combs the wood shavings from my hair. I sit in the empty wash-tub and wait for my aunt to pour the water. Why is it different today? Other times my aunt pours the water down the side of the tub and only then, with a huge laugh, throws my naked, wriggling body in. Something is happening, I know it — like a cat I can feel the earthquake coming, I am walking across a bridge with no foundations, and then suddenly, impulsively, from the empty washtub I say:

  “There was a goat in our garden today!”

  It isn’t true. What would a goat have been doing in the garden? It is a baldfaced lie.

  Without looking at me or saying a word, my aunt scrubs my back as if she were washing the floor. To my amazement, I hear myself spouting meaningless sentences about the goat. I mix together memories from another time, a fairytale, and labored lying; my imagination struggles mightily, I swim against the current without knowing why. Why am I spinning this tall tale, which has no rhyme or reason? My aunt isn’t even listening; she is scrubbing, lips pursed, letting me pile lie upon lie.

  “It was bleating like this: meh, meh!” I run, wet and naked, around the sitting-room, poking my imaginary horns into the darkness and bleating at the top of my lungs, “Meh!”

  Is this the gift of words? Why do I suddenly sound different? I stuff my imagination’s phantom with words, wrapping the goat in the fur of speech; with growing anxiety and unexpected drudgery I spin my first independent text. Is writerhood really so arduous? So oppressive, so precarious? Distressed, I drown out the silence, which confuses me; in his trained hand, God writes me a message from the future, the promise’s knot tightens ever so slightly, but still my aunt does not answer.

  Finally, numb and worn out with fibbing, I fall into the featherbed, burrowing into it like a den. Now comes “Abend, oh Abend,” like every day. When we say our prayers together I will be cleansed of the imaginary goat and will fall asleep ever so quickly. But Aunt Marie does not sit down by my side. She stands erect over the bed, a lit candle in her hands, like a prophet, and for the first time that evening she speaks to me.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” she says slowly, raising the candle a bit. “I can’t love you ever again. I won’t tell anyone what you did to me. I’ll be like always. I’ll cook for you, sew for you … but I can never, ever love you like I did before.”

  Then she turns and disappears back into the darkness. The small candle stands next to the chamber-pot, so I won’t be afraid to use it in the night. In the night: how to describe the chilling draft of the night across my entire body? Grandma’s bed is empty; Grandma is at the fair in Jevícko. Everpresent eternity has ended forever.

  In the morning my mother and grandmother return from Jevícko, tanned and happy. The car is loaded to the roof with watermelons. They feel a bit guilty for having left us “alone” for so long, but, warmed by the zephyrs of other worlds, they are packed with news and very cheerful. My mother flashes with all her fingers, crams the car full of vegetables, throws my things into it any which way, and cuts an unbelievably large bouquet of dahlias. Her short hair whips around her head with each exclamation.

  Then there is much kissing: Grandma kisses me, Aunt Marie kisses me, I kiss both of them, they kiss my mother, thank you so much! for taking such good care of me! I haven’t been a nuisance? of course not! and we jump into the car, but I forgot my doggy, so quickly back, until my mother steps whole-heartedly on the gas and the car ecstatically carries us away.

  Can we truly bear the memory of love’s finiteness and still preserve our identity, that vertical current of eternity, a pemmican that resists cold and time, the heart of a divine game? The car carries me off through the hot, dusty September; like a rally driver, my mother barrels between the sleeping granaries and I am no longer myself. I am not suffering from the woes of love — the depths of my young ego are still too centripetal for love to be possible. I am suffering from surprise. The happy time of temporal weightlessness, swimming while standing on my head, is irretrievably gone. Flung from my orbit, I fly off sharply on my own. As I take on direction, the overload grows. My past detaches from me with a rumble and shoots off into the clouds; the stages fall away and instantly burn up, my body bursts through into the formless future, into today, furrows behind me, swirling fog before me; the lights in the distance are fiery streaks behind my back, nothing lasts even a moment, and yet my speed is still increasing.

  “Aunt Marie doesn’t love me anymore,” I say suddenly, just as the car flies into a curve. A truck whizzes past us like a hornet. My mother turns the wh
eel sharply, leans out the window, and shouts, pointlessly, at the clattering back of the truck, which is already disappearing down the road:

  “You idiot!” she calls out. “I hope you kill yourself!”

  Then she starts the car again and, before her wrath fades, she exclaims:

  “I’m never taking you there again! She’s really messed you up!”

  She never did take me there again. I never saw Aunt Marie after that. She is still alive. I am thirty, she is almost seventy, and Cornelia, if she is still among us, is swimming toward the eddies of old age. Twenty-six years have elapsed since I passed the starting line that night.

  What happened to the contract concluded in the tomato patch? God fulfilled his promise: I am a writer — but not even I can untie the knot of an oath. Twenty-six years later, I am discharging my debt and finishing these Gespräche mit Tante Mitzi, My Conversations with Aunt Marie. But I won’t let her know. It wouldn’t mean anything to her anymore. That narrow band of clear summer, when we lived together in a common time, has ended forever. Now we each have our own direction and speed, and when there is no common moment, there is no room for meaning. Only one thing remains, and it is always the same: the anxious call of love, which for a moment is eternal, an illegible letter tossed against the current that silently carries us away.

  A Letter for President Eisenhower

  Sometimes it seems that everything’s pretend. That it’s only a gesture that misses the mark. I am ten years old.

  It is the year synthetic materials hit Prague. A new store, Plastik, appeared on Wenceslas Square and there are lines in front of it every day. Everything still amazes us: parkas, nylon bags, statues made from PVC.

  One day my mother returns victoriously with plastic cutlery that looks like wood. The marvel is that the wood isn’t wood, just like the statues’ marble isn’t marble. It is a collective plastic attack that will soon pass — within a year, the cutlery will end up in the trash — but now we raise the strangely weightless knife up to the light, the knife tips upward like a finger pointing somewhere else and, marveling, we fall under the spell of its artifice.

  One morning Comrade Principal comes for me and for my best friend Hana. To the envy of all our classmates, she plucks us out of a test and leads us to her office in silence. Hana’s dark ponytail trembles. Hana is perpetually alarmed, always more exemplary than me.

  “Our school,” the principal says sternly, “has decided to write to President Eisenhower.”

  Small, bent, and wrinkled, she is sitting in her army jacket behind a large desk. To my horror I see that she is holding our notebooks. Hana’s are much more attractive than mine. Hana has terrific handwriting. She gets to write for the school bulletin board. Her handwriting is just like her: tiny, well formed. Always the same, tidy.

  “The West,” the principal continues, “is secretly preparing for war. They want to stab us in the back. But we won’t let anyone take peace away from us!”

  She picks up a composition I recognize, and the shock makes my heart leap in my chest. It is my contribution to the Young Writers competition, which won second prize in the Prague 10 district. It is called “A Merry Christmas Party.”

  “You,” the principal points her finger, “you will write the letter. And you: copy it over in your best handwriting. I want to see it before vacation. You have two weeks.”

  She opens a drawer and spends a long time looking for something. She seems to have forgotten about us. I don’t dare utter a word. Suddenly she stands up and stares me straight in the eye.

  “It’s high time the truth be told!” she shouts as if from a deep sleep. The tips of my fingers tingle with excitement. The principal hands me an outline.

  I fly home, riding the crest of the moment. Outline, point one: greeting. Dear President Eisenhower! Outline, point four. The horrors of war. Like in Soviet films. Signature: We, the children of Czechoslovakia. And it is I who was given this historic task!

  Fourth grade took something out of me. Just last year I swam through life like a fish through water. Now I’m a dry cork on the surface. I tread water and try to get down into it. Life’s everyday certainties are irrevocably gone.

  Everything is just pretend. Since I can still faithfully imitate the loud, pudgy little girl I was not so long ago, no one has caught on yet. For example, everyone believes I love writing essays, but actually it bores me to death. My “Merry Christmas Party” was made up out of thin air. About thin-air kids doing thin-air things. In spite of this, everyone believes I’m going to be a writer. I’m sentenced to fiction for life.

  It doesn’t bother me. I play laboriously at playing. Sometimes I sense adults’ fleeting anxiety that everything’s already happened. I secretly hope for a “jolt,” for a catapult of transformation, as if I were a larva that ravenous inertia drives forth from its cocoon.

  Is this my jolt? Presenting mankind’s credentials in a letter? It’s high time the truth be told! For ten days I write as if in a fever.

  First I describe rivers of blood. I awaken the conscience of the American government. I speak with Eisenhower as an equal, but then behind all mankind’s back I chew on my pen. I cross out whole mountains of pages, I don’t sleep, I fall exhausted at the foot of the White House steps. Hana’s mother says the whole thing is pretty stupid. Hana, of course, repeats this to me.

  Finally the letter is ready. It contains the horrors of war, as depicted in films. It contains many, many exclamation points. It contains the sentence: “After all, I myself am still a child!” Hana contends that it is too long, but doesn’t put up a fight. She copies it perfectly, without a single mistake.

  That evening I find an excuse to go out, and I run over to Hana’s. My authorial pride goads me on. I long to see that beautifully copied letter again. I want to touch it before Eisenhower does. To weigh in my hands the paper confection in which my challenge to the White House will arrive.

  Hana awkwardly lets me in. Usually we run right to her room, but today we stand in the hallway, shifting from foot to foot, as if on a train. Suddenly, through the wall, I hear an explosion of laughter and the voice of Hana’s mother. She’s reading my letter to her guests. “We children are too weak; our hands cannot carry bombs,” she declaims in a flat, cadaverous voice. That’s how the TV comedian they call the Sad Man speaks. Hana doesn’t laugh, but her tidy, perfidious face makes it clear that she completely agrees with the antics on the other side of the wall.

  “My parents insist that the principal’s crazy,” she says defensively, looking straight at me with prim courage.

  “You’re the one who’s crazy! Just wait till there’s a war!”

  I turn on my heel and trot down the dark hallway. Hana quietly closes the door as waves of laughter billow forth. Blinded by my humiliation, I vanish into the darkness.

  For the three days left till the end of the year, we don’t speak to each other. On Friday, on the very brink of vacation, she stops me to say she’s not my friend anymore. Stunned, caught unawares, I say I don’t really care. It’s all over between us, she says. I say that’s fine. Hana heads home with an even stride, trailing straight A’s from her beribboned folders.

  I flee into the coatroom and cry a little. It’s my pride that hurts, not my heart. This year I have no heart. The principal meets me in front of the school and stops me with a stern gesture. She stares at me for a while, as if trying to remember who I could possibly be. Then she shakes her head with a strange horselike motion, strides off and, as she walks away, says forcefully: “The letter’s fine.”

  July is desolate. I wander listlessly around the garden with nothing to do. A dull film lies spread over everything; under its protective coating the summer fades like a chest beneath a plastic slipcover in a deserted room. I try to think about President Eisenhower, but since the incident with Hana a film has spread over him too. The chill gray days slide by.

  On Sunday evening someone rings the bell. The caretaker, Miss Zámsky, runs to the gate. Boredom keeps me ete
rnally draped out the window, and so I see a burly old man come in. He has a cane and keeps coughing. Behind him walks a sturdy, dark-skinned girl. She furrows the ground with her dark, indifferent eyes, and scowls.

  “Hello!” Miss Zámsky shouts, and she waves at me. “We’ve brought you a friend! She’s from Votice! Show yourself to the young lady, Sasha!”

  The next day they put us together. It is wet, and we’re wearing sweats and jackets. We wander here and there near the house. Sasha is glum.

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “Just turned thirteen.”

  Even under the jacket I can see that she has breasts. She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t look at anything. She just goes where the path takes her, with a heavy, uninterested tread.

  “Are you starting eighth grade?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? If you’re thirteen ….”

  We walk past the bench. Mr. Zámsky lets out a guffaw. He slaps Sasha on the rear and for about the fifth time says:

  “Thatta girl! And what a piece of girl she is, huh?”

  Mr. Zámsky gives me the jitters. His big head is continually shaking. His tongue hangs out of his mouth and his eyes look like they’re swimming in formaldehyde.

  “Is that your uncle? Is he nice to you?”

  Sasha just shrugs her shoulders. “He’s nuts.”

  My feet are killing me. I’d like to go home. I have no idea what to say, but the footpath pulls me onward like a tugboat.

  “What do you like to play?”

  “You won’t tell my aunt?”

  I raise two fingers, wet with my saliva. “Promise.”

  “Lovers,” Sasha says. I am dumbfounded.

  “But … how?” I ask. It begins to rain again. Sasha looks around.

  “Come over behind these trees,” she whispers. We step into cool, damp shadows. Rainwater drips down our necks. Sasha doesn’t hesitate. She bends over and kisses me on the lips. Her mouth is slippery with baby oil.