“So?”
We sit, swinging our legs, on the edge of a basin full of wet branches. Sasha brushes lightly against my ankle.
“Are we going to play?”
“Play what?”
“The usual.”
The sun makes a burning cap on my head. I twist my ankle around my other leg.
“I can’t today.”
“Why not?”
“I have a vacation assignment to do.”
“An assignment? Over the summer?”
“Only the best students have to do them. Like me and my friend Hana.”
Sasha kicks at the basin wall. A yellow powder drifts down from the crack.
“We both write pretty well. We wrote to President Eisenhower together.”
“So then will you come down?”
“And we also wrote to the American government. To make sure there isn’t a war. My friend has the prettiest handwriting in the whole class. And I do the best essays.”
Sasha falls silent. Mr. Zámsky comes trudging down the path. As soon as he spots us, he heads off. Suddenly a black spark of hatred flashes through me.
“Why do you keep kicking our wall?” I say. “You’re going to wreck it!”
Sasha jumps down off the rim. I deliberately take my time picking bits of gravel out of the grass, but she doesn’t turn around. I have to go home for lunch anyway.
Sasha left Prague two days later. We said a listless good-bye. Mr. Zámsky left with her. I never sent the letter to Hana. I carried it around with me for a few days and then left it in the pocket of my windbreaker.
As for the Mountain of Mountains, Mount Everest got the furthest, but even he never made it to the summit. His transmitter went dead. He must have wiped away the snow and covered the frozen girl with his own body. Somewhere up there the trail disappears. No one has ever conquered the Mountain of Mountains.
In September Hana and I sit next to each other, but it’s awkward and futile. The wheel of friendship doesn’t spin round again. Fifth grade languidly and painlessly draws us apart.
One day I’m rushing down the hallway at school. There’s a bulletin board there for the Young Communist Pioneers council. Suddenly something stops me in my tracks. “Dear President Eisenhower!” a tiny, familiar hand has written.
For a while I can’t believe my eyes. Our letter has been in America for ages! After all, it was for President Eisenhower! Then finally the jolt hits me and in a flash I understand it all.
That letter was never intended to be sent. There was no hope it would reach its addressee; it was just pretend. It too was a gesture that missed its mark — a finger that might point somewhere, but somewhere it will never touch.
Boarskin Dances Down the Tables
The uneasy spirit of storytelling is forever glancing over its shoulder to see which slug-track, still slightly moist, we took to get where we are now. When I was sixteen, life brought me briefly into contact with a woman who could be my mother-in-law today, had that track led elsewhere. I had just run away from home after a major emotional storm and now I teetered at the very edge of my desire to survive it: I can still feel that almost intriguing sensation of vertigo. A fellow student offered me temporary asylum. Our relationship was unimportant. It was one of those brief, hazy bonds that leave behind only a shallow imprint, while what is essential (that segment of memory where the tidal wave incessantly pounds) is close at hand: in this instance, a spring morning when I’m weeding tulips with his mother. But more on that later.
I hesitate to mention the causes of that storm, lest I divert my attention from the matter at hand. So, just briefly: at home we had had what in espionage is called a breach — a sudden flood of information from a carefully guarded reservoir of knowledge. It happened when we breached my father’s double life, which came complete with two apartments and two wives. He collapsed, sobbing piteously that he “couldn’t have done otherwise, it was stronger” than him. My shocked heart had to choose. I could either judge him responsible and hate him — or accept that he truly could not have done otherwise, that life is always stronger than us and that all our plans are battles lost in advance. I plumped for the second version, threw my keys in the mailbox and ran away from home. But the spirit of storytelling lost interest in this a long time ago. What is this tale about, then? Well, for a start, it’s about the word “taste.”
My classmate’s mother said I could call her Milada, but I never used her name and still think of her as Mrs. P.
Mrs. P. was over fifty and was a manager at a large savings bank. Her position carried significant responsibilities. Once I asked her what she did, and she said, “I work out savings plans for the following six-month period.” I didn’t understand this at all: was it really possible to plan an activity as random and absurdly capricious as the savings of thousands of unknown people? She smiled and said that it was.
Mr. P. was absent: the couple had divorced long ago and the husband had fled to parts unknown.
The son was predestined to devote his life to archaeology, which is what in fact happened. This plan too had been worked out by his mother. What lay behind it was not a romantic interest in the past, but rather an interest in the future, based on the annual reports of Charles University. The plan took into account a certain exclusivity (places were available only once every five years), the surprisingly low level of competition, and the field’s considerable social prestige. When the boy was six, she started taking him to excavations instead of the zoo. He toddled along behind the archaeologists with a little shovel in his hand and an elegant mother at his side. In no time at all he became a sort of team mascot: a delightfully precocious little boy who was permitted to look at things up close and to document the day’s finds with his bakelite camera.
Five years later Mrs. P.’s attention was caught by the neglected, empty display cases in the hallway of her son’s school (she ran the Parents’ Association). Through the boy, she arranged in them a quite decent exhibit on the history of Prague; there were even contributions from the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, where mother and son were on friendly terms with a number of scholars. Mrs. P. alerted a television crew. Two representatives of the school spoke on the program: the principal and the boy. —Am I making myself clear? Need I add anything further to emphasize the theme that the spirit of storytelling has been moving toward all this time, a theme now manifest beneath the morass of facts? To the word “taste” I add the word “plan.”
At the time I am speaking of, the mother concluded that to say “archaeology” was to say “Egypt” (we are on the threshold of the sixties; Mrs. P. knows what she is doing) and that acolytes familiar with Arabic would have a leg up. Through acquaintances she found an Arab dandy, a pudgy boy from an embassy, to converse with her son for an honorarium. Every other day, the room she had allotted me (they called it the “small salon”) became a gateway to language. I refused to study Arabic, even though it was offered to me, and instead spent the time moping around pubs and indulging in feelings of futility.
It was precisely this volatile scent of futility that temporarily attracted the class nerd to me. For him, I had the sex appeal of heresy — which was, in truth, the only sex appeal I could muster. I was skinny, unkempt, pathetic. I was Boarskin. (We’ll get to Boarskin shortly!) I was one of those girls to whom people say, “You know, you could look quite pretty if you only wanted to.” Boarskin did not want to.
The sole thing keeping me alive was the strength of my resignation. I believed I wanted nothing from the world. A sullen prescience accompanied me, sensing breaches everywhere. Effort is pointless, the soul bereft. Something is forever lurking behind us, something stronger than our will; one day, all our plans will founder. And wanting to resist it is futile: underneath is an abyss of nothingness.
(A doodle in the margin: from the time he was a child, the boy had a sign hanging on the wall, which his mother had stenciled for him on drawing paper. It said: Where there’s a will, there’s a way! Durin
g puberty he had, in a moment of inspired insubordination, added a cartoon figure and the words: Where there’s a wind, watch which way you piss! Both these contributions to the philosophy of will remained in place.)
The little man peeing into the wind and I: we were the only two escape attempts this exemplary boy ever made. The odds were about equal, that is, zero.
Mrs. P. had a hobby that took up a great deal of her time: Dutch tulips. She had a garden next to the house and, thanks to certain contacts abroad, a constant supply of the best quality bulbs. They came by express mail, in attractive plywood cartons, and were really from Holland.
The flower bed was enormous and planting it involved assiduous preparation. Every year Mrs. P. drew up new designs that resembled aerial maps. The blossoms bloomed according to plan and formed complicated ornaments, arranged with an eye to harmony of color and to the overall effect from both the windows and the street. The results were flawless, and she was rightfully proud of them. This hobby fit her perfectly: it was luxurious, but not provocatively so, it took effort (tulips were a lot of work) and, most of all, it was tasteful. And now it is time to shed light on the two words “Boarskin” and “taste.”
Every day Mrs. P. — beige, calm, in practical low heels — walks through the “small salon” because there is no other way out of the house. I lie in bed in my tattered t-shirt, my dirty socks sticking out from under the pillow. I pretend to sleep and she quietly goes out. This moment completely saps my will to get up. The sixties are beginning and the word “taste” has a very special ring to it.
It is heard everywhere, it is the staunch protector of my childhood. You can dress tastefully or tastelessly. You dine tastefully, and entertain and decorate your home tastefully. Even art is primarily a matter of taste. Van Gogh is no longer crazy, but tasteful: he hangs in offices and dentists’ waiting rooms, sanctified by the genial spirit of the times as an appropriate accessory. It is an era when my country has renounced religion and has adopted a notably nebulous moral codex. Taste is not a personal matter, it is a universal, a dogma, and certain forbidden combinations of colors (for example, “crazy to be seen in blue and green”) have the taint of sin. It is as fixed as a nation’s borders and as binding as grammar. There is taste and tastelessness: mixed states are rare, and decisions are quick as to whether the case in question (at this time, for example, the Beatles) belongs here, or there. There are people who are dependable in these matters, and Mrs. P. belongs among these elect few.
She fascinates me, and I cannot stand her. I flee from her any way I can. I roam aimlessly through empty Sundays, while she vacuums up the crumbs under my bed. A few times we clash in a fruitless debate and then steer clear of each other. Occasionally, when she is out, I walk through the apartment in envious indignation: everything in it harmonizes, like the music of the spheres. I have no taste; I cannot hear the secret voices that draw one thing to another. What’s worse, I reject them. I proclaim chaos and nothingness, I say silly things, I bite my nails, even at the table, and loudly insist that taste is the jackboot of arrogant mediocrity. And beauty? No, I don’t believe in beauty at all.
And now for the word “Boarskin.”
A long time ago my school organized a children’s fashion show aimed at developing our taste. For our edification and amusement (even humor was — in a certain restrained form — tasteful) they also offered an example to avoid. I was chosen for this heretical role: through the hazy layers of time I can see myself in stiletto heels swaying down the tables pushed together like a runway. I am in jeans and have a lacy jabot on my blouse, embodying what must be lunacy itself: after all, it is an unthinkable blunder, merely a cautionary exaggeration. In a few years this outfit will be commonplace, but today my classmates howl gleefully with laughter. There is music playing. I hop mink-like along the tables to its cha-cha rhythm, a stupid, saucy expression plastered deliberately across my face to emphasize the danger of my heresy. I am utterly intoxicated with my success. I still belong to the community of mankind. I am clear in my understanding of good and evil; the dogma is straightforward and transparent. What a simple spell! I am eleven.
A memory: I am six and the fairy tale about Boarskin is on the radio. Strangely uneasy, I bang my ruler against the table as I listen intently to the voice I am trying in vain to drown out. In that version she had a softer name: Mouse-Fur. I know her by other names, too: Donkey-Skin, Rag-Girl, Cap-o-Rushes, Leather-Dress, Catskin — but I usually think of her as Boarskin. Why? Of all the names, it is the nastiest.
In all these fairy tales a young girl, a princess, is so frightened by impending courtship that she flees her home. (Sometimes the theme is spiced with an incestual element: it is her own father who is courting her.) In a foreign land she conceals her beauty under an animal skin, blackens her face with ashes, and combs grease into her hair. Under the name Boarskin she takes shelter in the role of a mute farm-girl.
My stay at Mrs. P.’s marked the most extreme point of my Boarskin phase. I still instinctively avoid pictures of myself from that time, because my affliction was dirty and repulsive. My tattered and utterly unpoetic rags hung on me with none of the provocative charm of the hippies, who were to make their entrance later. I am not a flower child, I am a dirt child. I am a picture of a powerlessness that is not at all touching, of a resignation that healthy spirits avoid, and of a futility that is truly futile. There is no dirt under my nails, but only because I have bitten them to the quick.
It must be said that Mrs. P. accepted me quite generously as a “girl who’ll grow out of it.” She called my parents and told them I would be staying with her for a while and that it was all above board and respectable; she would not accept my meager savings. She tried at first to give me advice, but met with such obstinate resistance that she lapsed, relieved, into indifference — probably the truest feeling she had for me. I was there for just under three weeks; sometimes I cuddled passionlessly with her son, but I think that if anyone were to ask him today what he did that memorable spring, he would say, “I studied Arabic.”
It is a hot, sunny morning in late April. The boy is having his lesson inside and we women are outside in the garden; in this sunshine I don’t have the strength to wander the city alone. We are kneeling on the lawn, weeding the tulip bed: concentric circles of warm colors wave at the heavens. For once, there is no tension between us.
We chatter freely like women who till the soil, and Mrs. P. starts to open up. A certain colleague of hers at work, an older lady, has begun to act “oddly.” Suddenly she does things that she never did before, that no one ever does. She rechecks figures — not only hers, but everyone else’s too, which is not her responsibility; she is overstepping her authority, slowing the work down and, what’s more, offending everyone. This comes at the expense of her own free time: she stays late at work, past dark, into the night, till midnight, and by now even twenty-four hours aren’t enough for her utterly senseless tasks. Horrified at the thought that she might have overlooked a mistake somewhere, she takes taxis halfway across Prague to sit in the bank rechecking figures she had gone over earlier that day. She has begun to neglect herself: there is no time to change her clothes. Colleagues complain that she smells. One morning the custodian found her sobbing over a heap of scribbled papers, because all night long she hadn’t been able to get the right results.
“If she won’t give us some peace I’ll have to reprimand her,” Mrs. P. said, skillfully snipping a weed. “I hate to do it, but she’s causing bad blood in the office.”
“Reprimand her? When it’s not her fault? After all, it’s stronger than her!” I snap back, more loudly than I had intended. To my surprise, my throat constricts: from somewhere in that story the abyss looms up at me. I sense it and the weeder quivers in my fingers. Mrs. P. looks over, slightly startled, but with a firm hand immediately turns the clay over again.
“You think so?” she says evenly. “You know, I believe she’s doing it on purpose. With a bit of effort, she wouldn’t do such s
illy things. After all, any reasonable person can see she’s being silly, don’t you think?”
For a moment I am motionless, but the weeder still shivers. I almost can’t believe my ears: for the next thirty years I will hear those words float through the warm morning, how peaceful they sound in the spring breeze.
Before me is a woman who has lived more than half a century. She has raised a son, managed a bank. She has proved her prowess at living and surviving; she is among those who determine the world’s tastes. And yet to her, madness is deliberate silliness, peeing impudently into the wind. Just “a bit of effort” and you can change your ways.
I dig my fingers into the soil and close my eyes. My tongue clings to my mouth like a stuck zipper. Hot, dense anger rises inside me; it washes over me like blinding sea-spray. In that sentence is everything I am trying to escape: the godlike arrogance of people with no doubts. The joviality of eyewitnesses to a catastrophe, the unfeeling righteousness of those who are sure of their figures, and that eternal, smoothly ironed serenity! Must I admit that at the root of my grumbling is envy? My entire will to tell stories springs from it — and it’s now been (alas!) thirty years.
Finally I open my eyes and Mrs. P. glances at me encouragingly. The soft spring air floats on the breeze. And as sometimes happens to that scale inside us, the cramp of anger slackens and is replaced by sorrow, until it melts my bones and there is nothing in my field of vision but flowers. The morning sun shines through the tulips, its light gushes through the living tissue of petals. It is like an unexpected blow; I have no chance to resist their beauty. I burst into tears (for the first time since the breach) and flee headlong from yet another home.
And so I ended my strange visit, and the life of Mrs. P. and her son went on without me for another thirty years.
Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Page 5
