Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (5 page)

I fly home, riding the crest of the moment. Outline, point one: greeting. Dear President Eisenhower! Outline, point four. The horrors of war. Like in Soviet films. Signature: We, the children of Czechoslovakia. And it is I who was given this historic task!

Fourth grade took something out of me. Just last year I swam through life like a fish through water. Now I'm a dry cork on the surface. I tread water and try to get down into it. Life's everyday certainties are irrevocably gone.

Everything is just pretend. Since I can still faithfully imitate
the loud, pudgy little girl I was not so long ago, no one has caught on yet. For example, everyone believes I love writing essays, but actually it bores me to death. My “Merry Christmas Party” was made up out of thin air. About thin-air kids doing thin-air things. In spite of this, everyone believes I'm going to be a writer. I'm sentenced to fiction for life.

It doesn't bother me. I play laboriously at playing. Sometimes I sense adults' fleeting anxiety that everything's already happened. I secretly hope for a “jolt,” for a catapult of transformation, as if I were a larva that ravenous inertia drives forth from its cocoon.

Is this my jolt? Presenting mankind's credentials in a letter? It's high time the truth be told! For ten days I write as if in a fever.

First I describe rivers of blood. I awaken the conscience of the American government. I speak with Eisenhower as an equal, but then behind all mankind's back I chew on my pen. I cross out whole mountains of pages, I don't sleep, I fall exhausted at the foot of the White House steps. Hana's mother says the whole thing is pretty stupid. Hana, of course, repeats this to me.

Finally the letter is ready. It contains the horrors of war, as depicted in films. It contains many, many exclamation points. It contains the sentence: “After all, I myself am still a child!” Hana contends that it is too long, but doesn't put up a fight. She copies it perfectly, without a single mistake.

That evening I find an excuse to go out, and I run over to Hana's. My authorial pride goads me on. I long to see that beautifully copied letter again. I want to touch it before Eisenhower does. To weigh in my hands the paper confection in which my challenge to the White House will arrive.

Hana awkwardly lets me in. Usually we run right to her room, but today we stand in the hallway, shifting from foot to foot, as if on a train. Suddenly, through the wall, I hear an explosion of laughter and the voice of Hana's mother. She's reading my letter to her guests. “We children are too weak; our hands cannot carry bombs,” she declaims in a flat, cadaverous voice. That's how the TV comedian they call the Sad Man speaks. Hana doesn't laugh, but her tidy, perfidious face makes it clear that she completely agrees with the antics on the other side of the wall.

“My parents insist that the principal's crazy,” she says defensively, looking straight at me with prim courage.

“You're the one who's crazy! Just wait till there's a war!”

I turn on my heel and trot down the dark hallway. Hana quietly closes the door as waves of laughter billow forth. Blinded by my humiliation, I vanish into the darkness.

For the three days left till the end of the year, we don't speak to each other. On Friday, on the very brink of vacation, she stops me to say she's not my friend anymore. Stunned, caught unawares, I say I don't really care. It's all over between us, she says. I say that's fine. Hana heads home with an even stride, trailing straight A's from her beribboned folders.

I flee into the coatroom and cry a little. It's my pride that hurts, not my heart. This year I have no heart. The principal meets me in front of the school and stops me with a stern gesture. She stares at me for a while, as if trying to remember who I could possibly be. Then she shakes her head with a strange horselike motion, strides off and, as she walks away, says forcefully: “The letter's fine.”

July is desolate. I wander listlessly around the garden with nothing
to do. A dull film lies spread over everything; under its protective coating the summer fades like a chest beneath a plastic slipcover in a deserted room. I try to think about President Eisenhower, but since the incident with Hana a film has spread over him too. The chill gray days slide by.

On Sunday evening someone rings the bell. The caretaker, Miss Zámsky, runs to the gate. Boredom keeps me eternally draped out the window, and so I see a burly old man come in. He has a cane and keeps coughing. Behind him walks a sturdy, dark-skinned girl. She furrows the ground with her dark, indifferent eyes, and scowls.

“Hello!” Miss Zámsky shouts, and she waves at me. “We've brought you a friend! She's from Votice! Show yourself to the young lady, Sasha!”

The next day they put us together. It is wet, and we're wearing sweats and jackets. We wander here and there near the house. Sasha is glum.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Just turned thirteen.”

Even under the jacket I can see that she has breasts. She doesn't look at me. She doesn't look at anything. She just goes where the path takes her, with a heavy, uninterested tread.

“Are you starting eighth grade?”

“No.”

“Why not? If you're thirteen ….”

We walk past the bench. Mr. Zámsky lets out a guffaw. He slaps Sasha on the rear and for about the fifth time says:

“Thatta girl! And what a piece of girl she is, huh?”

Mr. Zámsky gives me the jitters. His big head is continually shaking. His tongue hangs out of his mouth and his eyes look like they're swimming in formaldehyde.

“Is that your uncle? Is he nice to you?”

Sasha just shrugs her shoulders. “He's nuts.”

My feet are killing me. I'd like to go home. I have no idea what to say, but the footpath pulls me onward like a tugboat.

“What do you like to play?”

“You won't tell my aunt?”

I raise two fingers, wet with my saliva. “Promise.”

“Lovers,” Sasha says. I am dumbfounded.

“But … how?” I ask. It begins to rain again. Sasha looks around.

“Come over behind these trees,” she whispers. We step into cool, damp shadows. Rainwater drips down our necks. Sasha doesn't hesitate. She bends over and kisses me on the lips. Her mouth is slippery with baby oil.

“That's how,” she says flatly. I guess that's all there is to it. We run out into the rain and then play rummy with Miss Zámsky until evening.

After that we're together all the time. We never leave the garden; we play constantly. At what? At being lovers. Sasha doesn't want to play anything else. How? It's simple. We walk through the birch trees, hand in hand, and give each other kisses. Do I like it? Not at all. At ten I have finally left cuddliness behind and they won't get me back so quickly. Besides, there's something missing for me in this game, but I don't know what it is.

“And what are we called?”

“What is who called?”

“Ow, why'd you bite me?! I mean the lovers!”

Without names it just won't work. A name is always more than a body. Sasha licks a blade of grass and concentrates on tickling the inside of my ear. I squirm, dissatisfied.

“So are we going out with each other? And will we get married someday? And have children? Huh?”