Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else

by Daniela Fischerova

  The plan that emerged from the detritus of many other plans was simple. Tomorrow she would set out for Mr. Šefl’s in Malšov. She would fall on her knees before him, metaphorically of course, but she must be careful not to reason with him. No fancy talk with Mr. Šefl. What got to him was emotion.

  She imagined herself bursting into tears and saying: “Mr. Šefl, you’re my only hope! Please consider my father’s heart!” (No, even better: “Save my dad!”) “If you go ahead with Malšov, it will be on your conscience. Think of an excuse. Your back’s acting up, for instance. Or you can’t get the wood. Whatever, for God’s sake, Dad won’t start without you.”

  She hoped she’d be able to cry for real. Her mother would manage it easily. Once Eva had asked her how she was able to cry at will. Her mother had said: “You know, child, it’s not that hard. You just have to throw yourself into it.”

  The second part of the plan, of course, was to convince Mr. Šefl not to breathe a word to her mother. This was the hard part, for Mr. Šefl — like all men, incidentally — thought her mother was a very pleasant lady. If her mother followed Eva’s tracks and tried to pooh-pooh her concerns, she’d wrap Šefl around her little finger and Eva’s guerilla tactics would come to nothing.

  Oddly, the knowledge that at forty she was going behind her mother’s back for the first time both disheartened and exhilarated her. She had built her life on a tactlessness bordering on the passionate. Having pledged herself to a life of virtue and confrontation, here she was, plotting this naive intrigue.

  I have the right, she said to herself. I have the right and the responsibility. Forty years of subservience is enough. It is time to change the guard, it occurred to her, and she instantly fell into a vivid dream.

  She was nineteen and chasing Iša around Malšov. She wanted to protect him, although she wasn’t exactly sure from what. “Run away, you chicken! Go on, run! Why did you come back, chicken!” she shouted at him, just like she used to. Suddenly her brother turned to her. The expression on his face amazed her. He was happy: deliriously, magnificently happy, as she had never been.

  There was no direct connection to Malšov, so she had to change buses three times, reaching the village at nine that evening. Sleepy, battered, with the taste of some revolting cookie in her mouth, she pounded on the window.

  But the moment she entered, she wanted to take to her heels. The Šefls’ kitchen was full. A wheezy woman was mixing dough, three fellows were guzzling caraway brandy, and a fat, unfamiliar child was sitting on the floor, shaving bits of colored pencil right onto the floor.

  Eva wilted. In her nighttime fantasies she had spoken with Mr. Šefl alone; her heartrending outburst was directed only at him. It had not occurred to her that half of Malšov would be present. And she knew no one would leave. There was no room for intrigues in the village; people here lived openly and out loud. This was, incidentally, what she had always dreamed of. Two of her marriages foundered on her attempt to turn their home into a brightly lit stage.

  “Well I’ll be! Young lady!” Mr. Šefl hollered. Eva could smell his brandy across the room. “What in God’s name brings you here?”

  The noise in the kitchen stopped instantly. Everyone turned toward Eva. She had to summon all her strength even to cross the threshold.

  “Got something nice for us, young lady?”

  The woman with the bowl of dough was breathing heavily. The child ran its pencil over Eva’s ankle. The other five people looked her over with undisguised interest. The muscles around Eva’s mouth tightened.

  “I see I’ve come at a bad time,” she said too rapidly and, for some reason, a bit defensively. A speck of dirt had gotten behind her contact lens and now was not a good time to take it out. Just get it over with, she advised herself, and continued even more curtly.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t mean to bother you. I’m here on account of my father. You couldn’t have known, but he’s in serious shape. In the first place, he’s seventy, and in the second, he’s just had another heart attack.”

  I’m reasoning with him, I’m reasoning again! She felt a wave of despair. I sound like a Martian. I wanted to be simple and touching, I wanted to cry. The dust speck behind her lens made her scrunch her eyelid curiously. Her eye was suffering, like an oyster making a pearl. Eva took a deep breath.

  “Mr. Šefl, you’re supposed to do that roof for my father.”

  She caught sight of his wife, a pair of chicken shears in her hand, listening inhospitably. The child was poking her in the leg with the pencil point.

  “Mr. Šefl, it’s out of the question. Absolutely out of the question. I have to ask you not to take the job.”

  The silence in the room thickened. Everyone, even the child with the pencil, was staring at her blankly. Unintentionally she tensed her calves and fell to her knees. She had the unhappy feeling that it was a losing cause.

  “But young lady,” Mr. Šefl said with surprise in his voice, “it’s all worked out, isn’t it? I thought you knew. Your mother was here about two weeks ago, and asked me to beg off the roof. She cried, the poor thing, did she ever cry! She was afraid your dad wasn’t up to the work. That he’d insist on helping us and that it might kill him.”

  It was almost midnight when Eva finally settled into a hot bath and poured herself a large glass of vodka. For a while she hesitated about calling her brother, but then the vodka took matters in hand, and Eva picked up the receiver right in the tub.

  “Listen up, brother,” she said without greeting him, “Malšov’s off our necks. He’s not going up on the roof this year. No way.”

  She took a swig. “Surprise, surprise. Mr. Šefl doesn’t have the wood. What a coincidence. And know who made this magic happen? Guess!”

  “Well?” came his expressionless voice from afar. It did not have not much interest in it.

  “We’re greenhorns, Iša. Two babbling bunglers. It’s useless, we can’t compete.”

  “What are you talking about, Eva?”

  “What? Don’t you mean who?”

  She poured herself some more vodka and turned the hot water on. She had to raise her voice to drown out the noise from the faucet.

  “Our omniscient mother, of course. She’s got our number, don’t you think?”

  “Eva, can’t we talk about this another time? It’s midnight.”

  “As if I don’t know what time it is! I’ve been on the road from stupid Malšov for ages! And know what the funniest part of it is? That Dad thinks Mother is on his side. As always. So I’m the pesky troublemaker again.”

  “You know, it’s—”

  “‘You know’? What’s that supposed to mean: ‘you know’?”

  The bathroom was full of steam. Eva waved her hands violently so she could at least see the wall.

  “You know how to make a duck perform, Iša? I do. But unfortunately I learned a bit too late. It’s the secret of our family. The clown on stage says: Fly, duck! And presto, the duck actually flies! Then the clown growls: Sit, duck! And bonk, at that moment the duck sits right on its bottom.”

  She could hear her brother yawn. It irritated her.

  “The trick is that the duck simply does what it wants. The clown observes every movement it makes and a fraction of a second later gives it the appropriate command. It’s not the clown making the duck perform, but the other way around!”

  “So what?”

  “So, our mother is the duck. Dad’s the performing clown.”

  “Eva, I get up at four-thirty.”

  “The joke is that they’re a blissfully happy couple. But they didn’t pass their magic down to us. I’ve had three divorces, and your marriage is a bucket of tepid water.”

  “Look, do we have to discuss this tonight?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  The mixture of relief and annoyance at today’s absurd pilgrimage flooded into Eva’s blood like some weird sort of fuel.

  “In our house we don’t discuss anything. Night or day. In our house everyone
sees only what he wants to see. For Christ’s sake, don’t be blind! Remember how you ran away from home?”

  She knew she was heading for trouble, but it was too late to apply the brakes. What she was doing was disgraceful — one of her many disgracefully truthful deeds — but rage got the better of her.

  “We didn’t discuss that either, did we. Why waste words on it. So listen, brave brother of mine: you ran away in a taxi. The driver who picked you up — Mother paid him in advance. She knew you were going to run for it. She wasn’t stupid enough to try to keep you home. That truck had been waiting for you for over an hour, behind the beech tree.”

  The water was too hot. She turned it off, but did not lower her voice.

  “And that’s not all, Iša. Mother set things up with the shepherd too. No, she certainly doesn’t leave anything to chance! The man who took you to that hut had breakfast at our place. He roared with laughter at what an utter fool you were. ‘Madam, I take my hat off to you! You’re a regular fox! Madam, know what I told that idiot boy of yours? Sure, kid, I said, run off, at your age a boy can’t worry about his momma!’ So that’s how a duck performs, see?”

  There was quiet at the other end. Then Iša said calmly, “I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “Well … everything.”

  Eva’s tongue suddenly felt dry in her mouth.

  “Just one second: I won’t fall for that. You’re bluffing. How long have you known?”

  “I knew it even then, that morning. You think I’d have left Mom for a month without letting her know where I was? She’d have gone crazy with worry!”

  Eva sat there, motionless. The bath water was quickly growing cold. It’s not true, it can’t be true. If it is, I’ve had it wrong my entire life. Since that long-ago morning she’d despised her brother for falling for such an obvious trick, and despised her mother for stooping to it. And he’d known everything all along. Mother knew that he knew, just as brother knew what she knew, and the bond of considerate deception protected them like secret laughter. Suddenly she had an awful vision: what if that’s how it had always been? What if they’d all been perfectly happy: father with mother, mother with brother, and it was only me, my eyes securely blindfolded, what if I was the only one thrust out of the circle?

  “So why didn’t she tell me it was all arranged?” she banged her fist on the corner of the tub. “Why did I have to go to that silly Malšov?”

  “Well, you know …” her brother shrugged from a distance, “when you’re old you need to feel that you’re deciding things for yourself. You want to have the impression that you can still manage. As soon as you start to feel written off, then you won’t let yourself be talked into things.”

  It was so frightfully simple that regret and compassion caught sharply in her throat. She remembered her father waking up. He stood in the doorway like a sleepy child. Like a large, flaccid bear full of fear.

  “OK, you’re right,” she admitted, abashed, and her tears dripped into the cooling bath. A molting bear filled with anxiety.

  Yes, he was afraid they were making decisions about him while he was asleep. That his daughter would get up and fling the bitter truth in his face: that he wasn’t up to Malšov anymore. That he’d never live to tear down the roof. To plaster or skim the walls. That he’d never even pick up the garbage can again.

  “I’m not going to meddle anymore. I won’t try to talk him into anything.”

  She hated herself for not having realized this on her own. For one wild second she hated virtue and truth.

  “Dad’s got to feel he’s important.”

  “Yeah,” her brother said, a bit taken aback, “but I wasn’t talking about Dad. I was talking about Mother.”

  Dhum

  “Don’t have any illusions,” the durga said maliciously. “Don’t have any illusions at all!”

  It was as if his final day were punishing him for daring to leave.

  “What specifically do you mean?” he asked as calmly as possible.

  “Like don’t think you’ll find me here when you get back. I’ll be gone as soon as you’re through that door.”

  “I’m not worried. Dr. Hartl will keep an eye on you.”

  “Hartl? The fearless phallus who was hanging around yesterday? Hey, that might be fun. He’ll shake things up around here!”

  Fearless phallus? Inwardly he shook his head at this expression. All durgas have caustic tongues.

  “What a unique vocabulary you have. Do you have an expression for me too?” he asked, aware of the risk. Maybe it really was his final day.

  She looked at him from beneath half-closed eyelids.

  “You?” she said with contempt, shoving a bony finger against his breastbone. “You’re a bearded fifth-grader.”

  The phallus was waiting for him. It sat in front of the one-way mirror as if it were a video. Nothing scandalous was happening in the waiting room — a patient was vacuuming — but Hartl was watching with an unpleasantly amused expression.

  “Good peep-show.”

  He let it go. Hartl was not the person he would have wanted, but there was no one else to be had. His colleagues had not exactly jumped at the chance to run number seventeen (Pavilion 17, A&T: alcoholism and toxicomania, women’s inpatient division) for a full three months.

  “Here, I’ve written out the point system for you, but the nurses know it by heart. I would ask that you adhere to it strictly.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. Your system is legendary.”

  With a decided lack of interest, Hartl stuck the paper in his pocket.

  “I can’t say it’s my sort of thing. I’m more into Gestalt and, I mean, imagination interests me. I won’t trust old Makarenko twice.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to adapt to the traditions of number seventeen,” he interrupted Hartl a bit more peremptorily than he had wanted to. “I especially insist on the point system.”

  He was painfully aware he was wasting his breath. Hartl will shake things up, the durga had said. With the same sexually charged irresponsibility he displayed in taking on a completely unfamiliar department, Hartl would unleash a circus of spectacular chaos.

  “I’m not much of a believer in speculative methods,” he added in a flush of indignation toward Hartl. “Or in systemic treatment, by any means. Our work here is based on discipline.” The division would fall apart before he returned.

  “Oh yeah, where’s the can? The men’s, I mean.” Here was a topic that interested Hartl. The answer was: nowhere. The department was old, converted years back in slapdash fashion, and with only one man on two whole floors there was no justification for a men’s room. He shared with six nurses, one social worker, and two cleaning women. This minor detail had long since stopped bothering him.

  “And it hasn’t stopped you producing testosterone?” Hartl joked. “But then there’s something to be said for being shut up with thirty girls. I bet your balls get a good massage.”

  There was a shriek out in the hallway. Probably the new one being admitted, but the nurses could handle it. He ostentatiously snapped his briefcase shut.

  “So where exactly are you traveling to?” Hartl asked. “India, I know, but why? Yoga? Fantastic stuff, yoga. I did a course last summer, great for the imagination! So you aren’t against my doing some yoga with the girls?”

  Near his solar plexus a weak spasm of indignation was growing stronger, like a small fist squeezing shut.

  “I have nothing against physical exercise; I often run sessions that have elements of yoga in them, but there’s no evidence it’s good for anything else.”

  A bearded fifth-grader, she said? A bearded fifth-grader!

  There is a prevailing myth that each field is its own mirror, that a profession is a giant defense mechanism. At least the Hartls like to see it that way. Marriage counsellors are homosexuals and divorcés. For therapy, children go to the childless and to those who themselves are failed parents. The crude cloak of myth dismisses alcoho
l treatment as a carnival of secret lushes. It was nonsense. He had not touched alcohol for fifteen years and he had never taken drugs, even though all his colleagues had at least tried them.

  His magnum opus bore the title The Problem of Dependency and Overcoming It. The dry, methodical sheen of his style, as well as the mountains of collated data and statistics had made it the leading work in the field.

  As far as patients are concerned, Hartl was simply in error. He, on the other hand, was aware of the risks in his position. With patients he was always politely and strictly aloof. On principle he addressed them as “ladies,” even those going through the wild phase of detox where, swathed in cloth, they tossed and turned on a caged bed. Never did he mix with them or the nurses. He went carefully through life, like a cat on a picket fence. He was a confirmed bachelor and the few relationships he did have — which incidentally were none that pressing — were conducted as far as possible from the clinic walls.

  From time to time he would feel a strange and secret fascination for one of the ladies. It was always the same type of woman, within a noticeably narrow band of variation. She was a Durga, the ferocious mother of the gods. The goddess of violence, darkness, delirium, and depravity.

  The point system, which the nurses could recite in their sleep, was the result of ten years of effort. In detailed, logical, and equitable fashion he would dole out and then take away points for the patients’ trifling daily accomplishments and infractions. An example: a correct answer at evening quiz time (“List at least five benefits of abstinence!”) was worth three points. An unmade bed was the same — in demerits. Every week the patients’ council elected its own director, called the princess. If she did a good job of discharging her obligations, she got the largest possible reward: thirty points. Smoking outside the stated times and place (14:00-16:00, 20:00-20:30, hallway to the cloakroom) meant ten points off. Fifty points bought a day out.