Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (13 page)

Dr. M. never called again. I did not understand. I did not know what had happened to him; I was utterly perplexed. For some reason I couldn't feel any pain; it was more a loss of the earth beneath my feet, a vacuum devoid of all coordinates. I wasn't lonely, I didn't miss him, but I could not get rid of him. His absence was just a different sort of presence, like when you know that an uninvited guest has fallen asleep outside your door. I did not search for him. There or not, he became an oppressive phantom, pushing against my bubble from the outside.

Shortly thereafter I met my first husband, we emigrated, and time — for a time — took on a different theme. I heard nothing of M. I married again, had two children. I returned to Bohemia. The wind erased my tracks. Fourteen years on, I flew off to Brisbane, in Australia, to a congress on contemporary literature.

Fresh jet lag raged within me: two giant airplanes had overtaken time by nine hours. They had thrown me into the near future: in Brisbane it was a summer afternoon, while in me the Czech winter night rushed toward morning. I wasn't sick, the way they had warned me, but I had the confused feeling that I wasn't here. My wakefulness was uneasy and my body slept a narcotic sleep. I had to watch where my hand was and direct it with my sight, as if by remote control; otherwise I would miss my sleeve. As if I were not where I was.

At the hotel I took a shower and walked into the bedroom. My roommate, a Czech emigré, was sitting on the desk, shaving her legs. So as not to watch, I switched on the television — and
instantly we were face to face again. He stared at me from the screen. He was here and not here, as always. The sound was on low and he was speaking English. For a moment I couldn't understand a word. He was lecturing on the far and the near. He mentioned a “wicket,” but he meant a gate, my gate, my garden.

“What program is this?” I asked the girl.

“It's a video from last year's conference. It's on in all the rooms.”

She looked over: “That guy's Czech, coincidentally. He caused a real scene here a few years back.”

She mowed one of her strong calves with her razor.

“Supposedly he'd been cheating on his wife back in Prague. The lady hopped on the first plane, gun in hand. She got into the hotel, then somehow snuck into his room and — splat! Except clearly she couldn't even see straight. Her traitor wasn't in. An unfortunate coincidence, she'd shot someone else … but who?”

Buzzing razor in hand, she stared off into the distance.

“Yeah! The hotel waiter, that red-headed klutz. Poor guy, just walked blindly into it. Well, there are people like that: always in the wrong place.”

Disparagingly, she tapped the razor against her forehead.

“And then she turned and shot herself. Must have been nuts.”

That news had been looking for me for fourteen years. It found me in Brisbane, Australia, on the top floor of the Space Hotel. Its traveling speed was four kilometers a day. Straggling like a blind turtle toward the intersection of time and space, it was fourteen years late and nine hours ahead. So now I knew, and what use was it to me? It didn't concern me yet — or anymore. Two times passed each other inside me like overlapping transparencies on a screen.

“What's wrong? Jet lag?” said the antipodean with good-humored sympathy, buzzing her razor past my nose. “Do I ever know! I'm always flying somewhere and it totally messes me up. It's like you're not here,” she pointed to her chest, “you don't care
about anything. People speak, I hear them, but I still don't know what they're saying.”

“I know,” I said mechanically. And then once more: “I know.”

The son, Jan — for unknown reasons called Iša at home — rebelled against his mother's omnipotence only once, when he was sixteen. He spent a week planning his escape from home. In the gray of early morning he snuck out to the highway to hitch a ride. His luck was unprecedented. The third vehicle to come along picked him up and took him to a remarkable place, Paseky: with its deserted mountain meadows, it was the ideal hideout for a runaway. The driver, a chatty, jolly butterball of a man, even pointed him to a wooden hut, where they let him stay in return for a bit of work. It was a fabulous success. Iša spent August at the old shepherd's, becoming quite decent with a scythe and as bronzed as an Indian.

When he returned home a day before the end of the holidays, all his mother said was: “Hello.” And after a pause: “Your messages are on your door.” IÅ¡a went to read his messages, which she had been taking all month with the precision of a perfect secretary, and from that moment on he never rebelled again.

The daughter, Eva, three years older, spent her entire life rebelling against her mother. She turned her adolescence into an unending diatribe against this and that, constantly reasoning with her mother: in the first place, the second, the third, the fourth. Eva was almost always right. But in the end things went the way her mother wanted.

The fact was, her mother was “very good with people.” Throughout Eva's childhood her mother told her: “You have to know what works with whom. Let people be right, and then do things your own way.” Her daughter swore that she would never take after her mother. She would not scheme, she would be true and brutal and straightforward: at forty Eva had three divorces behind
her. “Love without absolute openness is deception!” she would argue. Her mother would just smile slightly: “Of course, Eva darling.”

Now they were all sitting at the table, because Eva had insisted on a family meeting. The problem was that Father, who at seventy had just survived a second heart attack, had decided to “rip down MalÅ¡ov” over the summer; that is, to renovate their holiday cottage in the village of MalÅ¡ov, which meant getting rid of the old roof, putting up a new one, and then replastering the entire place.

“It's ludicrous!” Eva shouted, but she shouted quietly, because Father was sleeping in the next room; the shout sounded like it was out of a radio play. “Dad shouldn't even pick up a garbage can! Do you understand what a second heart attack is? Do you have any idea what it means to have a heart attack? And in less than a month you're sending him to rip down a house!”

“But Eva darling,” her mother said soothingly, “Dad's a reasonable fellow. He won't be ripping anything down. He'll find himself a nice comfy seat in the shade and direct the Å efl boys. He won't have to lift a finger.”

“For Christ's sake, Mom, open your eyes! Come on, IÅ¡a! Don't just sit there like a pasty-faced statue! At least say something clever! As if Dad will stand by and watch other people work! An hour of that and he'll be carting bricks and climbing around the roof like a monkey!”

IÅ¡a, who had long since lost the muscles developed when he ran away, sat hunched over, with his thinning pate visible. He was carefully making a design out of matches on the tablecloth. His nails were short, as those of a child who bites them. The expression on his face was what Eva called “the unhappily married old young man.”

“If Mother thinks Dad's up to it, then he's up to it,” he said, annoyed. Eva drummed her fingers on the table.

“Then listen up, boy! In the first place! Dad's doing MalÅ¡ov for us, in case you hadn't realized! For us, since we're both so incompetent we can't even pull out the bathtub stopper. He's in a
hurry. Know why? Because he's afraid he'll die, and that we're such numbskulls we'll let the cottage slowly collapse around us. He's willing to kill himself for us! The doctor said—”

“Doctors overdramatize things, Eva,” her mother's voice unexpectedly broke in. “A bit of exercise in the fresh air will only help him.”

Eva groaned inside. It's always the same, still the same old powerlessness, and not even twenty years and three marriages have made her any stronger. She's banging her head against a wall. She's right, it goes without saying, but her mother's impervious affability wins the day again.

“Mom!” she said beseechingly. “Don't be blind! It's suicide! Dad's worked himself to death, he's an old man, his heart has given out twice already, and I simply won't permit—”

At that moment the door opened and their father stood there, having only had twenty of his winks.

“What's the big discussion?” he said sleepily. He looked like a large, flaccid bear. His pyjamas hung on him like a flag on a still day. Mother smiled indulgently.

“Eva's just afraid MalÅ¡ov will be too much for you. Except it won't happen without you. You can't leave Å efl alone with it. He's a nice fellow, but you have to tell him everything twice. And he's really not the builder you are.”

Dad's not a builder! Dad's a retired foreman! God, is she slick! How did she give him the illusion he wore the pants in the family? Eva's heart almost burst with tenderness for this easily deceived man. It was up to her. She was the only one with the courage to face the truth — the truth that this was a matter of life and death.

Her father gave a weak but delighted smile.

“Well, true. If I don't take the roof down, it'll come down on its own,” he said genially.

The night after this family assembly was a filter, trapping all the defeats and losses of forty years. Eva would wake up, then fall back to sleep again. At a feverish clip she dreamed up plan after plan, each more hopeless than the last, including blowing the cottage to smithereens. Finally — on the narrow threshold of daybreak — she decided to revolt.

Could no one see that her mother was losing her mind? Did her cobra-like will hypnotize them so completely? It wasn't will, it was loss of judgment in old age! But no one in this clan sees anything they don't want to see. In the weak light of dawn Eva sat on the bed, shaking her head over all these people hopelessly afflicted with blindness.

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. Å efl, you're my only hope! Please consider my father's heart!” (No, even better: “Save my dad!”) “If you go ahead with MalÅ¡ov, 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.