Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (8 page)

Sometimes it seems everything's just a fiction. A substitute for something that doesn't exist. In spite of this, each life has moments it can vouch for. This is one of them.

Outside it's pouring. In bed, flashlight in hand, I'm writing a letter. I love Hana so awfully much that there is no room for wonder. I didn't know it this morning, but now the whole past is nothing but a pedestal for my love. In the feeble glow of my flashlight, lines pour forth from me onto every page.

I love you. Till I die I will love only you. The mountain hurricane carries me through the air. Five pages spill, foaming, over the margins.

When I finish writing it is midnight. The house is asleep. I run along the balcony in the pouring rain and try to guess where Strakonice might be. Then I stand there in sheer triumph and project myself south-southwest. This is no fiction. It is no gesture. It is love itself. For it is high time the truth be told: if only I could experience such love again!

In the morning, Sasha is allowed outside. For the first time she roams the garden alone. I stay home, reading. Sometimes I peer out under the curtains and watch her wandering the paths. Only when I should be chopping carrots do I run out to see her.

“Hi. Were you sleeping?”

“No, why?”

“‘Cause you're later than usual.”

“So?”

We sit, swinging our legs, on the edge of a basin full of wet branches. Sasha brushes lightly against my ankle.

“Are we going to play?”

“Play what?”

“The usual.”

The sun makes a burning cap on my head. I twist my ankle around my other leg.

“I can't today.”

“Why not?”

“I have a vacation assignment to do.”

“An assignment? Over the summer?”

“Only the best students have to do them. Like me and my friend Hana.”

Sasha kicks at the basin wall. A yellow powder drifts down from the crack.

“We both write pretty well. We wrote to President Eisenhower together.”

“So then will you come down?”

“And we also wrote to the American government. To make sure there isn't a war. My friend has the prettiest handwriting in the whole class. And I do the best essays.”

Sasha falls silent. Mr. Zámsky comes trudging down the path. As soon as he spots us, he heads off. Suddenly a black spark of hatred flashes through me.

“Why do you keep kicking our wall?” I say. “You're going to wreck it!”

Sasha jumps down off the rim. I deliberately take my time picking bits of gravel out of the grass, but she doesn't turn around. I have to go home for lunch anyway.

Sasha left Prague two days later. We said a listless good-bye. Mr. Zámsky left with her. I never sent the letter to Hana. I carried it around with me for a few days and then left it in the pocket of my windbreaker.

As for the Mountain of Mountains, Mount Everest got the furthest, but even he never made it to the summit. His transmitter went dead. He must have wiped away the snow and covered the frozen girl with his own body. Somewhere up there the trail
disappears. No one has ever conquered the Mountain of Mountains.

In September Hana and I sit next to each other, but it's awkward and futile. The wheel of friendship doesn't spin round again. Fifth grade languidly and painlessly draws us apart.

One day I'm rushing down the hallway at school. There's a bulletin board there for the Young Communist Pioneers council. Suddenly something stops me in my tracks. “Dear President Eisenhower!” a tiny, familiar hand has written.

For a while I can't believe my eyes. Our letter has been in America for ages! After all, it was for President Eisenhower! Then finally the jolt hits me and in a flash I understand it all.

That letter was never intended to be sent. There was no hope it would reach its addressee; it was just pretend. It too was a gesture that missed its mark — a finger that might point somewhere, but somewhere it will never touch.

The uneasy spirit of storytelling is forever glancing over its shoulder to see which slug-track, still slightly moist, we took to get where we are now. When I was sixteen, life brought me briefly into contact with a woman who could be my mother-in-law today, had that track led elsewhere. I had just run away from home after a major emotional storm and now I teetered at the very edge of my desire to survive it: I can still feel that almost intriguing sensation of vertigo. A fellow student offered me temporary asylum. Our relationship was unimportant. It was one of those brief, hazy bonds that leave behind only a shallow imprint, while what is essential (that segment of memory where the tidal wave incessantly pounds) is close at hand: in this instance, a spring morning when I'm weeding tulips with his mother. But more on that later.

I hesitate to mention the causes of that storm, lest I divert my attention from the matter at hand. So, just briefly: at home we had had what in espionage is called a
breach
— a sudden flood of information from a carefully guarded reservoir of knowledge. It happened when we breached my father's double life, which came complete with two apartments and two wives. He collapsed, sobbing piteously that he “couldn't have done otherwise, it was stronger” than him. My shocked heart had to choose. I could either judge him responsible and hate him — or accept that he truly could not have done otherwise, that life is always stronger than us and that all our plans are battles lost in advance. I plumped for the second version, threw my keys in the mailbox and ran away from home. But the spirit of storytelling lost interest in this a long time ago. What is this
tale about, then? Well, for a start, it's about the word “taste.”

My classmate's mother said I could call her Milada, but I never used her name and still think of her as Mrs. P.

Mrs. P. was over fifty and was a manager at a large savings bank. Her position carried significant responsibilities. Once I asked her what she did, and she said, “I work out savings plans for the following six-month period.” I didn't understand this at all: was it really possible to plan an activity as random and absurdly capricious as the savings of thousands of unknown people? She smiled and said that it was.

Mr. P. was absent: the couple had divorced long ago and the husband had fled to parts unknown.

The son was predestined to devote his life to archaeology, which is what in fact happened. This plan too had been worked out by his mother. What lay behind it was not a romantic interest in the past, but rather an interest in the future, based on the annual reports of Charles University. The plan took into account a certain exclusivity (places were available only once every five years), the surprisingly low level of competition, and the field's considerable social prestige. When the boy was six, she started taking him to excavations instead of the zoo. He toddled along behind the archaeologists with a little shovel in his hand and an elegant mother at his side. In no time at all he became a sort of team mascot: a delightfully precocious little boy who was permitted to look at things up close and to document the day's finds with his bakelite camera.

Five years later Mrs. P.'s attention was caught by the neglected, empty display cases in the hallway of her son's school (she ran the Parents' Association). Through the boy, she arranged in them a quite decent exhibit on the history of Prague; there were even contributions from the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, where mother and son were on friendly terms with a
number of scholars. Mrs. P. alerted a television crew. Two representatives of the school spoke on the program: the principal and the boy. —Am I making myself clear? Need I add anything further to emphasize the theme that the spirit of storytelling has been moving toward all this time, a theme now manifest beneath the morass of facts? To the word “taste” I add the word “plan.”

At the time I am speaking of, the mother concluded that to say “archaeology” was to say “Egypt” (we are on the threshold of the sixties; Mrs. P. knows what she is doing) and that acolytes familiar with Arabic would have a leg up. Through acquaintances she found an Arab dandy, a pudgy boy from an embassy, to converse with her son for an honorarium. Every other day, the room she had allotted me (they called it the “small salon”) became a gateway to language. I refused to study Arabic, even though it was offered to me, and instead spent the time moping around pubs and indulging in feelings of futility.