Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Read Online Free PDF Page A

earthquake coming, I am walking across a bridge with no foundations, and then suddenly, impulsively, from the empty washtub I say:
    â€œThere was a goat in our garden today!”
    It isn’t true. What would a goat have been doing in the garden? It is a baldfaced lie.
    Without looking at me or saying a word, my aunt scrubs my back as if she were washing the floor. To my amazement, I hear myself spouting meaningless sentences about the goat. I mix together memories from another time, a fairytale, and labored lying; my imagination struggles mightily, I swim against the current without knowing why. Why am I spinning this tall tale, which has no rhyme or reason? My aunt isn’t even listening; she is scrubbing, lips pursed, letting me pile lie upon lie.
    â€œIt was bleating like this: meh, meh!” I run, wet and naked, around the sitting-room, poking my imaginary horns into the darkness and bleating at the top of my lungs, “Meh!”
    Is this the gift of words? Why do I suddenly sound different? I stuff my imagination’s phantom with words, wrapping the goat in the fur of speech; with growing anxiety and unexpected drudgery I spin my first independent text. Is writerhood really so arduous? So oppressive, so precarious? Distressed, I drown out the silence, which confuses me; in his trained hand, God writes me a message from the future, the promise’s knot tightens ever so slightly, but still my aunt does not answer.
    Finally, numb and worn out with fibbing, I fall into the featherbed, burrowing into it like a den. Now comes “Abend, ohAbend,” like every day. When we say our prayers together I will be cleansed of the imaginary goat and will fall asleep ever so quickly. But Aunt Marie does not sit down by my side. She stands erect over the bed, a lit candle in her hands, like a prophet, and for the first time that evening she speaks to me.
    â€œI don’t love you anymore,” she says slowly, raising the candle a bit. “I can’t love you ever again. I won’t tell anyone what you did to me. I’ll be like always. I’ll cook for you, sew for you … but I can never, ever love you like I did before.”
    Then she turns and disappears back into the darkness. The small candle stands next to the chamber-pot, so I won’t be afraid to use it in the night. In the night: how to describe the chilling draft of the night across my entire body? Grandma’s bed is empty; Grandma is at the fair in Jevícko. Everpresent eternity has ended forever.
    In the morning my mother and grandmother return from Jevícko, tanned and happy. The car is loaded to the roof with watermelons. They feel a bit guilty for having left us “alone” for so long, but, warmed by the zephyrs of other worlds, they are packed with news and very cheerful. My mother flashes with all her fingers, crams the car full of vegetables, throws my things into it any which way, and cuts an unbelievably large bouquet of dahlias. Her short hair whips around her head with each exclamation.
    Then there is much kissing: Grandma kisses me, Aunt Marie kisses me, I kiss both of them, they kiss my mother, thank you so much! for taking such good care of me! I haven’t been a nuisance? of course not! and we jump into the car, but I forgot my doggy, so quickly back, until my mother steps whole-heartedly on the gas and the car ecstatically carries us away.
    Can we truly bear the memory of love’s finiteness and still preserve our identity, that vertical current of eternity, a pemmican that resists cold and time, the heart of a divine game? The car carries me off through the hot, dusty September; like a rally driver, my mother barrels between the sleeping granaries and I am no longer myself. I am not suffering from the woes of love — the depths of my young ego are still too centripetal for love to bepossible. I am suffering from surprise. The happy time of temporal weightlessness, swimming while standing