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

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.
    â€œBy 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.
    â€œOne 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.
    â€œI just remembered something!”
    The pleasant memory made her face grow younger.
    â€œYou 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.”

Far and Near
    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.
    â€œIf 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