Read Online Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else by Daniela Fischerova, Neil Bermel - Free Book Online

her home. (Sometimes the theme is spiced with an incestual element: it is her own father who is courting her.) In a foreign land she conceals her beauty under an animal skin, blackens her face with ashes, and combs grease into her hair. Under the name Boarskin she takes shelter in the role of a mute farm-girl.
    My stay at Mrs. P.’s marked the most extreme point of my Boarskin phase. I still instinctively avoid pictures of myself from that time, because my affliction was dirty and repulsive. My tattered andutterly unpoetic rags hung on me with none of the provocative charm of the hippies, who were to make their entrance later. I am not a flower child, I am a dirt child. I am a picture of a powerlessness that is not at all touching, of a resignation that healthy spirits avoid, and of a futility that is truly futile. There is no dirt under my nails, but only because I have bitten them to the quick.
    It must be said that Mrs. P. accepted me quite generously as a “girl who’ll grow out of it.” She called my parents and told them I would be staying with her for a while and that it was all above board and respectable; she would not accept my meager savings. She tried at first to give me advice, but met with such obstinate resistance that she lapsed, relieved, into indifference — probably the truest feeling she had for me. I was there for just under three weeks; sometimes I cuddled passionlessly with her son, but I think that if anyone were to ask him today what he did that memorable spring, he would say, “I studied Arabic.”

    It is a hot, sunny morning in late April. The boy is having his lesson inside and we women are outside in the garden; in this sunshine I don’t have the strength to wander the city alone. We are kneeling on the lawn, weeding the tulip bed: concentric circles of warm colors wave at the heavens. For once, there is no tension between us.
    We chatter freely like women who till the soil, and Mrs. P. starts to open up. A certain colleague of hers at work, an older lady, has begun to act “oddly.” Suddenly she does things that she never did before, that no one ever does. She rechecks figures — not only hers, but everyone else’s too, which is not her responsibility; she is overstepping her authority, slowing the work down and, what’s more, offending everyone. This comes at the expense of her own free time: she stays late at work, past dark, into the night, till midnight, and by now even twenty-four hours aren’t enough for herutterly senseless tasks. Horrified at the thought that she might have overlooked a mistake somewhere, she takes taxis halfway across Prague to sit in the bank rechecking figures she had gone over earlier that day. She has begun to neglect herself: there is no time to change her clothes. Colleagues complain that she smells. One morning the custodian found her sobbing over a heap of scribbled papers, because all night long she hadn’t been able to get the right results.
    â€œIf she won’t give us some peace I’ll have to reprimand her,” Mrs. P. said, skillfully snipping a weed. “I hate to do it, but she’s causing bad blood in the office.”
    â€œReprimand her? When it’s not her fault? After all, it’s stronger than her!” I snap back, more loudly than I had intended. To my surprise, my throat constricts: from somewhere in that story the abyss looms up at me. I sense it and the weeder quivers in my fingers. Mrs. P. looks over, slightly startled, but with a firm hand immediately turns the clay over again.
    â€œYou 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