Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (2 page)

A translator, talented or otherwise, is only as good as those who back him up. So there are a few people waiting for their due.

For a non-native speaker of Czech like myself, every text has dark corners that no dictionary or handbook can illuminate. A native-speaker consultant is an absolute must — but as every translator quickly learns, very few people have the breadth of knowledge and the grasp of translators' issues to give reliable, solid advice. I am lucky to have a very kind, patient and extraordinarily knowledgeable consultant in Prague, Ilona Koránová. Herself an experienced translator from English who has worked with fiction, films, and television, she has over the past seven years fielded hundreds of questions from me about obscure words, quotations,
idioms, names, customs and slang words. There is many a phrase in these stories that we have puzzled through over coffee or discussed at length by e-mail, and if this book reads by and large smoothly, I have Ilona to thank for the lack of “speed bumps” in it.

I also owe a debt to Dr. Miriam Jelinek, School of East Asian Studies, and Dr. Petr Kopecky, Department of Politics, both of Sheffield University, and to Dr. Ivana Bozdechová of the Czech Language Department at Charles University, for their helpful and insightful commentary. Andrew Swartz was the first to wade into the English version with no recourse to the Czech, and offered many valuable comments. My father, Albert Bermel, himself a translator (of French and Italian drama), deserves thanks for his advice and support over the years. I would be remiss in not mentioning Catbird Press, in the person of Robert Wechsler, for taking my work from rough draft to final version with great care and insight, and for initiating numerous provocative and interesting discussions along the way.

There are two ways to translate words from a language far removed in time, Fischerová says in this volume's final story. “One is with the eternal present's abbreviated arc, in the belief that the sense of words and things endures and, like Zeno's arrow, hangs in flight. The other keeps to Babel's model, clinging anxiously to the literal meaning of individual words confined to the solitary cell of their place and time. We choose the first method, but this does not mean it is the better one.”

The dilemma, of course, applies to all languages, and every translator is intimately familiar with it. I've striven to do justice to Fischerová's work in Zenoic fashion: if I've succeeded, the arrow will remain suspended, and the stories will seize you and engage you, as good works of fiction should, while the gears and machinery of my translation remain essentially invisible. Happy reading.

Neil Bermel

Sheffield, England

August 1999

Is love finite or eternal? Aha!

I am not quite five. A hazy memory: my parents have arrived on the evening train. Look: Mother had her braids cut off. Do I like it? I don't. On the way back, Grandma cries over the braids. Then mother too bursts into tears. On a balcony in the twilight I study the curls almost oozing from her head — but I don't remember that house having a balcony.

Another memory: at a bend in the fence, tiny lavender flowers called slipperwort. I stick my fingers into them. I am sent to the garden for parsley, but return with empty hands (what is “parsley”?). My father the musician, who my grandma respectfully asks to write down the music for the song I “composed” yesterday. We are all standing downstairs in the hallway (Father has just arrived), each of them is singing over the next, but no one can recall exactly how the melody went. My own wavering, insistent voice. What I sing makes the least sense of all. Everyone snaps at me that that isn't how it went. An overwhelming sense of alienation from my yesterday: surely my song is whatever I'm singing right now. The confused smile of my father, who is still holding his suitcase and feels out of place among all these women.

Comings, goings, comings, goings. I am constantly threatened that my parents will be told how badly I behave, and then they are told what a good girl I am. I believe both. And most of all summer, summer, the massive surge of a child's summer between four and five. Time without beginning or end. A boundless present: a raincoat I never take off. Where is it?

And mainly, above all: my Aunt Marie. We live to be together, day after day, always within eyeshot of each other.
Grandma goes out to the fields, Aunt Marie looks after me. We never go anywhere. We never open the garden gate.

Of course, I understand this, because my aunt is a “voluntary prisoner” and I even know why. Because they stoned her in the village, on the green, with stones “big as a man's hand.” It seems completely natural to me not to go into a village where you have been stoned; still, the idea of a stoning does not disturb me.

Our days are endless and our mutual bond is rich. We weed the vegetable garden, feed the hens, and draw with pastels. Aunt Marie teaches me German. On Saturdays my parents are always surprised how much I have learned and how many pictures I have drawn. I learn not words, but whole sentences, because Aunt Marie realized immediately that I have a God-given talent. Sentences like: “I'm fine, thank you,” “I love you, Mommy and Daddy,” or “Grandma and Aunt Marie are nice to me.” I know lots of sentences already.

What we draw are more properly called “studies.” Aunt Marie, you see, is a painter. She could not study painting; it is somehow connected with my mother. She threw her off her bike (my mother threw my aunt off, that is) and Aunt Marie got pneumonia. I do not understand this; it is a vortex of secretive pauses. I do not ask.

The studies are girls' profiles. I learn to draw heavy eyelids, drooping eyebrows, lips slightly parted. I learn the magic of complementary colors: blondes have blue eyes, brunettes have dark ones, and a redhead's are green, like a cat's. When the face is done, then comes the most important part: I am allowed to break off the tip of the pastel and crumble it. Then, with exceedingly gentle, intimate touches, we spread the dust out around the girl's head. The girls give off a fragile glow. We deposit them in a prewar candy box. What does “prewar” mean? I am learning to water the garden.

Am I happy? I don't know. I simply am. The eternal present's protective cocoon carries me through the days, whose succession I barely notice. The current of infinity surrounds me — the current of the commonplace.

I barely notice my grandmother, because it is harvest time and Grandma is constantly in the fields. She is a quiet, pious woman, who is a bit afraid (I don't know why) of my aunt. A fragment of one hot afternoon, what I can retain of my childhood memories at this remove.

Aunt Marie is having a “fit.” She is running around the sitting room, shrieking. I do not understand her, because she is shrieking in German. I have not learned the sentences she shrieks. Grandma is crying quietly into her clasped hands. I crumble a salted crescent-roll into my milk. The crumbs float silently on the surface. Suddenly Grandma jumps out of her corner and, with a wildness I have never seen in her, shrieks and latches onto my aunt's hand.

“Marie! Don't raise your fist to the cross!” she implores. “Don't raise your fist against it!”

I watch her with interest as, with the full weight of her tiny, withered body, she hangs on to my aunt's arm, the one threatening the black crucifix. And then that scene too slides into oblivion.

But these animated outbursts are not very common. It is my conversations with Aunt Marie, as I remember it, that cover the greatest expanses of time. For we talk incessantly. The discussions are about our future, even though I don't have a future yet (what is a “future”?), so what we're talking about has to occur as soon as possible, preferably right away. Because Aunt Marie is strong, because an arc of solidarity shines bright between us, we have only to speak and it all becomes real.

“A painter?” Aunt Marie thoughtfully shakes her head. Absent-mindedly she shreds a pod into tiny bits. “A painter?”

We are talking about whether I will be a painter or a writer. We endlessly analyze which of the two possibilities is better. It is entirely possible that I will be both. No: my future is in me. I am already both.

“The main thing is to start soon,” Aunt Marie insists. “There are whiz-kids everywhere these days. You mustn't delay!”

She pounds an earwig into the vegetable bed with a tool handle, and an s-shaped curl falls over her forehead. I have a curl
like that too, but it's not as pretty yet. My mother is silly for cutting my hair like a boy's.

“You know about Cornelia, don't you? That famous five-year-old German singer? Who bought her mother a house with what they paid her for that song about the satin dress?”

I too have a pink satin dress; Aunt Marie made it for me. She wears long flounced skirts and every morning curls her short fountain of hair into “snail spirals.” They bounce up and down across her forehead. She says that it's details like this that give us women our appeal. What is a “detail”? We often put snail spirals into our studies.

“You have to catch people's eyes!” Auntie insists angrily, thumping her hoe into the kohlrabi. “You've got to look pretty, even at your age! Does your mother think you're a little monkey? Is that what they call style in Prague? If you were mine, I'd have done things differently from the start!”

If you were mine: the other inexhaustible theme of our conversations. I'm already half hers anyway. A luminous twilight swallows the vegetable bed, the watered earth breathes around us, we pledge our troth to a secret life.

“I'd make you into a little princess!” says Auntie, plucking weeds. “I wouldn't leave you to rot in that darned Czechoslovakia of yours. We'd escape to Germany, find Franz, and he'd take care of us his way!”

When I live in Germany (with Auntie and Franz), I'm not called Dana like I am here. It's a silly name and it upsets my aunt. I have an old Germanic name: Saussika. I wear long flounced dresses. I have snail spirals, watercolors, a pallet and brushes — that's so I can learn to paint. I don't have to learn to write. Writing is from God. Neither Auntie nor I have any doubt that God is teaching me to write, today and every day.

“Once you're a little older,” Auntie says, “you'll write something about me. You'll write my life as a novel. If I'm still breathing, if our good Lord hasn't released me from this scabby old world, then I'll illustrate it for you. And your novel will clear my
name.”

How old is Aunt Marie? To me she seems much younger than my mother (she is five years older); she's on a parallel track with me, a joyous geyser of the present gushing back into itself.

“You'll write my whole life in it. How Franz and me loved each other and how those pigs here stoned me. I'll give you a title for it. It'll be called
Meine Gespräche mit Tante Mitzi.
That means ‘My Conversations with Aunt Mitzi.' It's a real good title for a book.”

The sun sinks below the horizon and summer's freshness wafts in off the fields. We take the watering cans — I have the smaller one — and make beautiful dark stripes between the tomatoes.

“Just don't waste time! Every day matters. The earlier you make your mark, the better. We'll start right away. I'll tell you my whole story and you'll put the truth of it on paper, nice and pretty.”

She gives me a penetrating look, silently counting something.

“How much longer till you learn to type? You're a clever girl. Maybe a year!”

At the moment I can hardly write three lines a day. No one could expect me to become a writer just like that. I can't be like Cornelia — a miracle at five. But people understand. After all, singing is different from writing.

“Another good title would be
Die Liebe ist ewig,
‘Love Is Eternal,' don't you think? Maybe not. They wouldn't believe you thought it up yourself. Too bad, because it's a pretty title. But everyone would say I gave it to you.”

The subtitle will be “Through a Child's Eyes.” What should I do? For now just listen and, most importantly, not close off my soul. God will take care of the rest.

“But will you promise not to betray me like everyone else? Do you swear cross your heart that you'll write about me?” Auntie asks doubtfully. “Will you promise? Nonsense! Promises, promises. Don't promise me anything.”

Why not? I'll promise everything. The omnipresence of time,
the everpresentness of my future guarantees that I will not be unfaithful. And do I truly believe in God? Of course. So I'll promise Him, not Auntie. Then it can never be taken back. I learn what an oath is.

“Raise your right hand! Two fingers together: like you and our good Lord. Repeat after me!”

We kneel in the beds of lettuce and bitter-smelling tomatoes. We rinse our hands, so as not to offer Our Lord our dirty fingers. Then both of us raise our hands at once to the heavens; Aunt Marie's voice shakes.

“Our Father, Who art in Heaven, I swear to You…”