Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else by Daniela Fischerova, Neil Bermel Page A

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 anumber 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.

    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