The times themselves changed markedly. The word “taste” faded and retreated to the twilight of speech: the era of its supremacy is past. I must say that I regret this a little, but the dogma of those I share my life with says that taste is a haughty hoax. The buoys that warned swimmers have long since been dashed against the cliff.
At sixteen I voted defiantly for chaos. As I grow older, I long for an orderly foundation to cling to; I pray for an easy repose and I simplify my life as much as I can. Sometimes I dream of that classroom from my childhood, but I am no longer prancing down the runway like a freak; I am sitting in the anonymous pack below, roaring with laughter like the others, falling in a heap from our chairs. We are inside, laughing without rancor at those on the outside: crazy accountants, Boarskins, traitorous fathers. Outside, I know, is the abyss — and for almost half a century I have lived so adroitly that I have not ended up in it.
It was half coincidence that led me back to Mrs. P. thirty years later, and half the gravitational pull of my own tracks. Mrs. P. had hardly changed at all: I found her perfectly coiffed and the apartment spotless, as if I’d left only yesterday. She remembered who I was, and took me into the salon, which was just the same as before.
“You look good,” she offered — for my Boarskin days were behind me. Now my main ambition is to blend into the background.
“Thank you,” I answered. “I hear you have a famous son. You must be glad he’s done so well.”
Mrs. P. looked straight at me. “I have no son,” she said firmly. I did not understand. I had seen him that very day on television; he had been chairing a conference. I recognized him mostly by his resemblance to his mother, not because he had stuck so firmly in my memory.
“For me, my son has ceased to exist,” she continued without a quiver, “because he’s rejected me. He has his own life, and there is no room for me in it, because he doesn’t need me anymore. But I’ve forgotten about him too. Supposedly he has children — I don’t know, that’s what people have told me. He moved out and I’m not interested in where he’s living now. Let’s not talk about him anymore. I’ll make you some tea.”
And in fact we did not talk about him again. We exchanged banalities, and her unflappability fascinated me as deeply as before. Nothing, not a hair, not a speck of dust on the table, betrayed what a terrible trick life had played on her. I could only admire her: she had survived the defeat of her own will, her greatest plan had failed completely — but she did not let herself be defeated. She did not permit her doubts to gnaw at her. At eighty she was even more steadfast than before.
When Mrs. P. went to cut us some strudel, I absent-mindedly walked over to the window. What I saw took my breath away.
It was the height of spring; the tulips were in their full glory. In the middle of them, right in the middle of the flowers, swayed a pair of plastic bags with tomato plants in them. The tulip bed had resembled concentric circles. Now a sparse potato patch spilled into them, and from beneath its plants spurted an overgrown caraway, burnt by the sun. Beans wound their way up rusty pipes. There were no plots or rows, just the painfully offensive chaos of plants strangling one another.
At first I thought it might be a mistake; it was far too impossible. Certain things simply are not done, not even in this strange time, when no one asks what’s allowed. The dogma has fallen, water has covered the weir of taste — but still it was hard to imagine what impulse could possibly induce anyone to plant potatoes next to tulips! It wasn’t for lack of space — all around were swards of grass large enough for all her vegetables. It looked grotesque. Only madness itself could reject all limits this way. It was a breach. Beyond the fence lay a motley bed of despair.
Mrs. P. came in with a tray. I quickly averted my eyes from the window. We then had a smooth conversation about nothing.
“By the way, what happened to that lady, you know, the one who kept rechecking figures?” I asked in the vestibule, with one foot already out the door. Mrs. P. wrinkled her forehead.
“One moment,” she said, recollecting. “Aha, I know. She slit her wrists,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. She handed me my coat. She did not invite me back and I did not say I’d come again.
I was on my way out when Mrs. P. suddenly smiled.
“I just remembered something!”
The pleasant memory made her face grow younger.
“You know, she was here once. She fell in love with my tulips. Couldn’t get enough of them. She was an exceedingly strange woman, but she did have taste.”
Far and Near
I switched on the television and instantly we were face to face again. A man I had not seen in twice-seven biblical years stared straight into my eyes and spoke to me urgently. Between us was the screen’s one-way mirror, which shielded me perfectly. For a moment there was no sound and I could not understand his words. It was perfect déjà vu.
The show was some sort of panel discussion about science fiction, and my long-lost friend — a literary critic, incidentally — was speaking about the leitmotif of “far and near” and about various resolutions of it which this genre had offered. Distance, he opined, is not a physical fact, but primarily a state of mind.
“If I have the gate key,” he said in the same deep but flat voice that had once instructed me, “then only an insignificant layer of wire mesh separates me from the garden. If I do not have it, I have to go around to the back of the house, cross the construction site, slip past the shed, and go down the steps.”
This example was especially apt, because I knew exactly which gate (site, shed, steps) he meant. It was my gate, my garden.
It was a large television screen and they had zoomed in on his face. We were just as close as we’d been before.
This will be a story about the far and the near. It is not science fiction and will offer no new resolutions.
When I was twenty-two, a serious young man appeared in my life. He was probably thirty — I don’t know, I didn’t ask. At the time, he was a columnist for one of the cultural reviews and had read my stories somewhere. We met in a café.
From the very first moment, I was struck by a certain contradiction. He was reserved and abstract like no man I had ever known. He seemed absolutely unapproachable. And yet he sat closer to me than even the liveliest of them. He did not touch me. Not once that evening did he even try for a single accidental contact as he explained things in a slow, earnest manner with his face right up next to mine.
I listened with only half an ear, because he made me feel strangely insecure. I cannot remember anything from that first meeting besides the awkward feeling that he was making a detailed, mirthless examination of my wrinkles and pores, of my irregular blotch of rouge, speaking all the while with languid fervor about sentence structure in the postwar short story.
Through the windows Prague swam in a murky twilight. A dark pink band hung over the horizon like a scarf carried skyward.
“The short stories I like best are those I understand least,” he said. “And of those, I prefer the ones I don’t get till years after I read them.”
He didn’t mention any by name, but he was not talking about mine, which tried to be enigmatic, but were as transparent as an aquarium and nearly as deep.
The duality of his signals perplexed me. This man, as psychotherapy would say, entered other people’s bubbles. He did not respect that invisible membrane — noli me tangere, the circle drawn round us with consecrated chalk. The space freezes. Only a whirling tremble divides us, one that knows full well what it is doing. It admits only love and aggression. When lovers and brawlers embrace, it opens wide like a door on a sensor, letting the intruder inside. Everyone’s bubble is a different size. Mine is just big enough. I can’t stand claps on the shoulder, indiscriminate familiarity, or confidences. I sit in my bubble — rather satisfied, a little hostile, and self-possessed.
Dr. M., as I called him, also seemed rather satisfied, a little hostile, and most of al
l self-possessed. His self-possession was as rigid as an inflated plastic bag. It was remarkably rare to see him smile. He never confided anything. I remember well his personal scent: he smelled like toothpaste. Dr. M. was always meticulously clean; the only thing disturbing the impression that he had just rolled out of a car wash was the dark pink band across his forehead, some sort of birthmark.
For one brief moment we reached the threshold of love, but it brought us no closer. We never dropped the formalities. He did not have the key to my garden.
After that first time, we began to meet sporadically and — as I would call it today — exchange brain outputs. We were two reviewers conversing. No one reading a stenographic record of our meetings would see in them a young man and woman. His indifference would have suited me perfectly (at a time when I was strangely deaf to the world of emotions, when my immature and unengaged heart felt as tough as a turnip), were it not for that violent familiarity perpetrated on my bubble.
Boundaries create plotlines. Border skirmishes and balk plowing provide the fuel of history. Limits in space and time are literary stimuli.
“Today’s prose is nothing but monologue,” he was saying. “Its growing incomprehensibility springs not from any formal characteristics, but rather from a fundamental resignation to its failure to be understood. The author does not want to be understood, because he does not even understand himself. He is showing us that comprehension is impossible. The omniscient author is passé. This century has realized that knowledge always comes too late. It resolves nothing and does not protect mankind from anything.”
As he spoke, he leaned over so close that my bubble, in a panicky defense, shot off an electrostatic charge, arced across and clung to his face like a death mask made of freezer wrap.
“We’re wrong,” he said with unusual gravity. “We’re not ourselves, we’re not in ourselves, and we’re never where we ought to be.”
I’d already ruled out the possibility that he was hard of hearing. On the contrary, he had sensitive hi-fi ears, and more than once we exchanged a noisy pub for a cocoon of quiet, for the empty corners of exceedingly vile bistros, and there conducted our lethargic, wobbly, pointless conversations, at a safe distance from anything that could touch us. What did we talk about? About “archetypal natural settings.” About “mythical elements of reality.” About “the profanization of the leitmotif of coincidence and of any defining moment.” About things that exist and do not exist, and whose pale veins teem with paper blood.
It was — it should have, would have, could have been — a happy sexless nothing. Two hermaphroditic brains floated in a solution of irresponsibility: ageless, outside reality, without a future. If only we had not been so tinglingly close to each other that our auras’ furs bristled with crackling violet sparks.
He had the unmistakable imago of a bachelor: a narrow-gauge intellectual sense of humor, his screws sunk tight. He was married but never spoke of his wife, except in passing (“I’ll be away, but my wife will send it to me.”). I learned somewhere that she was an anesthesiologist, substantially older than him, and apparently very beautiful. I didn’t think about her, beautiful or not.
We met more and more often, practically every day. He began to walk me home (garden, site, shed, steps), but otherwise our meetings were no different from before, except maybe for a certain facility. We skipped a step in our development. In half a year we were an aging married couple, with his indifferent faithfulness and weary sensuality. He would wait for me at the university. We would go to movies or exhibits. Everyone believed we were lovers, but we only listened to each other with half an ear and were no closer than two stuffed lizards.
Sometimes it seemed to me that everything was already behind us: sobs of passion, rampages, dragging each other by the hair. That it had happened long ago, in some other time that we had already forgotten. We were an old couple on a look-out tower. The world lay far below us; the bare, distant trees stuck up from the horizon like spikelets on a blade of wheat.
Twice in my life there have been times when the whole world of feelings, with its demonic dankness, has seemed incomprehensibly foreign to me, artificial to its very core, affected and cloying. The first time, I was ten: romance novels enticed me into an exuberant arrogance and a know-it-all cheerfulness. The second was now: without knowing why, I had escaped the force field of love for a year or two, and its vibrations did not pass through me. Maybe a third will soon be upon me, and this time it will last. Certainly our friendship, if you can call it that, was the best thing I could have wished for. It freed me from the opprobrious stigma of solitude. Concepts and phrases formed a haze around us. Thanks to them, I was at peace, and I did not have to dance the tortuous courtship dances of my age. Only I never did see how Dr. M. profited from this strange relationship.
Before Christmas we casually said our good-byes, exchanged presents (books for books, of course), and set a meeting for January. We were such strangers to each other that neither thought to ask how the other was spending the holidays. I stayed at home with my parents and then set off to Budapest for a New Year’s Eve concert.
The train chugged across a flat, charmless landscape; heaps of thawing snow dotted the fields like sour cream. I dozed for part of the night, and woke to the slanted rays of the early morning sun. The train cars were divided into rows with two seats each. In the sharp, immature light of daybreak I saw a singular woman sitting across the aisle from me. I hadn’t noticed her before.
She had the classic profile and indeterminate age of a beauty bred in the bone; she could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. A knot of hair, jet black, and a guarded face too carefully made up. She gave the impression she had not slept at all, but had kept watch all night, staring intently into the dark. Directors classify all female roles as blondes or brunettes. And they don’t mean hair color. Everyone understands what they mean. Ophelia is blonde, like vanilla pudding. Lady Macbeth is nothing if not brunette.
I took her for a Hungarian. Not only because of her hair — it was more her air of foreignness: addressing her in Czech was out of the question. Addressing her at all was out of the question. Her bubble was like a concrete shelter.
When I spotted her, she had just begun to remove the rings on her long, pale fingers. She had advertising hands; her nails were traffic-light red. Slowly, with single-minded attentiveness, she took off ring after ring (there were seven of them, one a wedding band), carefully laid them aside on the fold-down tray, and then slowly and thoroughly began to rub an expensive, artificial-smelling cream into her hands. The procedure was an unusually long one, and the woman stared at her hands the whole time like a surgeon during an operation.
This spectacle fascinated me. By itself it was ordinary: there was nothing special about a woman putting lotion on her hands in the morning. But there was something strange in her tenacity. She set the cream aside and put the seven rings back on. She did not look around or glance out the window. For a while she sat and stretched her fingers. Then she removed her rings again, this time in anxious haste, set them on the tray and applied another dose. She rubbed in the cream, grinding one hand against the other. Her knuckles were white. Her face remained impassive as she wrung her hands in a gesture of utmost despair.
Suddenly the man next to her stood up; I had not noticed him before over the high divider between their seats. He stepped over her legs without a word, and because the tray further narrowed the already impassable gap between her and the seatback in front, he had to press his whole body against her. He did not look at her, nor she at him. She did not even symbolically move her legs aside to show that she wanted to make way for him, and he did not make the slightest effort to pass more considerately. There was no apology for entering each other’s bubbles. He overcame her like a geographical obstacle; she went on moisturizing her hands. They were from different universes where different laws applied. It looked terribly rude, even though nothing had happened. But there was a warning of sorts in that mutual disregard. It
was a banal moment, but a defining one as well; there was a mute, lurking evil about it. The man worked his way through to the aisle and walked quickly toward the dining car. He did not notice me. It was Dr. M.
The woman’s face gave nothing away. She recapped the cream and put on her seven lures of beauty. The wedding band was the one I knew from his hand. I vanished, resettling three cars down, and once in Budapest I took great care not to meet them, even by accident.
In January we met as usual. The incident on the train had taken root in my mind. I did not understand it, nor did I want to. I wanted to have a companion to protect me from the outside world, but one without any rights — like a folding screen.
Prague was completely socked in that winter. It was pretty side up; the tattered, dirty obverse stayed face down. We were returning from a movie, walking quite exceptionally arm in arm across the expanse of snow. It was that twilight hour, when everything is suspended. The snow had the crunch of a freshly created world. Suddenly, unbelievably, from out of nowhere came the smell of violets.
Mythical elements of reality! Archetypal natural settings! We cannot escape them; there is no way out. The emotion at the heart of those twilight winter moments: the lively hush of whirling snow, the nearness of a warm, foreign body. A lyrical drumstroke, when amid the frost and the dwindling light, the scent of spring flickers past like a flying carpet.
The veil of snowflakes parted; a lanky boy stood in front of us in a rather flimsy coat for such a cold winter, a thicket of tangled, rust-colored curls hanging down past his ears.
“Hi!” he said to me, and then smiled radiantly. We had never seen each other before. M. pressed me a bit closer to himself.
“So this is her?” the youth continued, this time to M., but without taking his eyes off me. “The writer?”
Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Page 6
