Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Read Online Free PDF

on my head, is irretrievably gone. Flung from my orbit, I fly off sharply on my own. As I take on direction, the overload grows. My past detaches from me with a rumble and shoots off into the clouds; the stages fall away and instantly burn up, my body bursts through into the formless future, into today, furrows behind me, swirling fog before me; the lights in the distance are fiery streaks behind my back, nothing lasts even a moment, and yet my speed is still increasing.
    â€œAunt Marie doesn’t love me anymore,” I say suddenly, just as the car flies into a curve. A truck whizzes past us like a hornet. My mother turns the wheel sharply, leans out the window, and shouts, pointlessly, at the clattering back of the truck, which is already disappearing down the road:
    â€œYou idiot!” she calls out. “I hope you kill yourself!”
    Then she starts the car again and, before her wrath fades, she exclaims:
    â€œI’m never taking you there again! She’s really messed you up!”
    She never did take me there again. I never saw Aunt Marie after that. She is still alive. I am thirty, she is almost seventy, and Cornelia, if she is still among us, is swimming toward the eddies of old age. Twenty-six years have elapsed since I passed the starting line that night.
    What happened to the contract concluded in the tomato patch? God fulfilled his promise: I am a writer — but not even I can untie the knot of an oath. Twenty-six years later, I am discharging my debt and finishing these
Gespräche mit Tante Mitzi, My Conversations with Aunt Marie.
But I won’t let her know. It wouldn’t mean anything to her anymore. That narrow band of clear summer, when we lived together in a common time, has ended forever. Now we each have our own direction and speed, and when there is no common moment, there is no room for meaning. Only one thing remains, and it is always the same: the anxious call of love, which for a moment is eternal, an illegible letter tossed againstthe current that silently carries us away.

A Letter for President Eisenhower
    Sometimes it seems that everything’s pretend. That it’s only a gesture that misses the mark. I am ten years old.

    It is the year synthetic materials hit Prague. A new store, Plastik, appeared on Wenceslas Square and there are lines in front of it every day. Everything still amazes us: parkas, nylon bags, statues made from PVC.
    One day my mother returns victoriously with plastic cutlery that looks like wood. The marvel is that the wood isn’t wood, just like the statues’ marble isn’t marble. It is a collective plastic attack that will soon pass — within a year, the cutlery will end up in the trash — but now we raise the strangely weightless knife up to the light, the knife tips upward like a finger pointing somewhere else and, marveling, we fall under the spell of its artifice.

    One morning Comrade Principal comes for me and for my best friend Hana. To the envy of all our classmates, she plucks us out of a test and leads us to her office in silence. Hana’s dark ponytail trembles. Hana is perpetually alarmed, always more exemplary than me.
    â€œOur school,” the principal says sternly, “has decided to write to President Eisenhower.”
    Small, bent, and wrinkled, she is sitting in her army jacket behind a large desk. To my horror I see that she is holding ournotebooks. Hana’s are much more attractive than mine. Hana has terrific handwriting. She gets to write for the school bulletin board. Her handwriting is just like her: tiny, well formed. Always the same, tidy.
    â€œThe West,” the principal continues, “is secretly preparing for war. They want to stab us in the back. But we won’t let anyone take peace away from us!”
    She picks up a composition I recognize, and the shock makes my heart leap in my chest. It is my contribution to the Young Writers competition, which won second prize in the