Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (9 page)

It was precisely this volatile scent of futility that temporarily attracted the class nerd to me. For him, I had the sex appeal of heresy — which was, in truth, the only sex appeal I could muster. I was skinny, unkempt, pathetic. I was Boarskin. (We'll get to Boarskin shortly!) I was one of those girls to whom people say, “You know, you could look quite pretty if you only wanted to.” Boarskin did not want to.

The sole thing keeping me alive was the strength of my resignation. I believed I wanted nothing from the world. A sullen prescience accompanied me, sensing
breaches
everywhere. Effort is pointless, the soul bereft. Something is forever lurking behind us, something stronger than our will; one day, all our plans will founder. And wanting to resist it is futile: underneath is an abyss of nothingness.

(A doodle in the margin: from the time he was a child, the boy had a sign hanging on the wall, which his mother had stenciled for him on drawing paper. It said:
Where there's a will, there's a way!
During puberty he had, in a moment of inspired insubordination, added a cartoon figure and the words:
Where there's a wind, watch which way you piss!
Both these contributions to the philosophy of will remained in place.)

The little man peeing into the wind and I: we were the only two escape attempts this exemplary boy ever made. The odds were about equal, that is, zero.

Mrs. P. had a hobby that took up a great deal of her time: Dutch tulips. She had a garden next to the house and, thanks to certain contacts abroad, a constant supply of the best quality bulbs. They came by express mail, in attractive plywood cartons, and were really from Holland.

The flower bed was enormous and planting it involved assiduous preparation. Every year Mrs. P. drew up new designs that resembled aerial maps. The blossoms bloomed according to plan and formed complicated ornaments, arranged with an eye to harmony of color and to the overall effect from both the windows and the street. The results were flawless, and she was rightfully proud of them. This hobby fit her perfectly: it was luxurious, but not provocatively so, it took effort (tulips were a lot of work) and, most of all, it was tasteful. And now it is time to shed light on the two words “Boarskin” and “taste.”

Every day Mrs. P. — beige, calm, in practical low heels — walks through the “small salon” because there is no other way out of the house. I lie in bed in my tattered t-shirt, my dirty socks sticking out from under the pillow. I pretend to sleep and she quietly goes out.
This moment completely saps my will to get up. The sixties are beginning and the word “taste” has a very special ring to it.

It is heard everywhere, it is the staunch protector of my childhood. You can dress tastefully or tastelessly. You dine tastefully, and entertain and decorate your home tastefully. Even art is primarily a matter of taste. Van Gogh is no longer crazy, but tasteful: he hangs in offices and dentists' waiting rooms, sanctified by the genial spirit of the times as an appropriate accessory. It is an era when my country has renounced religion and has adopted a notably nebulous moral codex. Taste is not a personal matter, it is a universal, a dogma, and certain forbidden combinations of colors (for example, “crazy to be seen in blue and green”) have the taint of sin. It is as fixed as a nation's borders and as binding as grammar. There is taste and tastelessness: mixed states are rare, and decisions are quick as to whether the case in question (at this time, for example, the Beatles) belongs here, or there. There are people who are dependable in these matters, and Mrs. P. belongs among these elect few.

She fascinates me, and I cannot stand her. I flee from her any way I can. I roam aimlessly through empty Sundays, while she vacuums up the crumbs under my bed. A few times we clash in a fruitless debate and then steer clear of each other. Occasionally, when she is out, I walk through the apartment in envious indignation: everything in it harmonizes, like the music of the spheres. I have no taste; I cannot hear the secret voices that draw one thing to another. What's worse, I reject them. I proclaim chaos and nothingness, I say silly things, I bite my nails, even at the table, and loudly insist that taste is the jackboot of arrogant mediocrity. And beauty? No, I don't believe in beauty at all.

And now for the word “Boarskin.”

A long time ago my school organized a children's fashion show aimed at developing our taste. For our edification and
amusement (even humor was — in a certain restrained form — tasteful) they also offered an example to avoid. I was chosen for this heretical role: through the hazy layers of time I can see myself in stiletto heels swaying down the tables pushed together like a runway. I am in jeans and have a lacy jabot on my blouse, embodying what must be lunacy itself: after all, it is an unthinkable blunder, merely a cautionary exaggeration. In a few years this outfit will be commonplace, but today my classmates howl gleefully with laughter. There is music playing. I hop mink-like along the tables to its cha-cha rhythm, a stupid, saucy expression plastered deliberately across my face to emphasize the danger of my heresy. I am utterly intoxicated with my success. I still belong to the community of mankind. I am clear in my understanding of good and evil; the dogma is straightforward and transparent. What a simple spell! I am eleven.

A memory: I am six and the fairy tale about Boarskin is on the radio. Strangely uneasy, I bang my ruler against the table as I listen intently to the voice I am trying in vain to drown out. In that version she had a softer name: Mouse-Fur. I know her by other names, too: Donkey-Skin, Rag-Girl, Cap-o-Rushes, Leather-Dress, Catskin — but I usually think of her as Boarskin. Why? Of all the names, it is the nastiest.

In all these fairy tales a young girl, a princess, is so frightened by impending courtship that she flees 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 and
utterly 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 her
utterly 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.

“If 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.”

“Reprimand 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.