Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (10 page)

“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 silly 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.

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.”

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.