Free Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else by Daniela Fischerova, Neil Bermel Page B

thawing snow dotted the fields like sour cream. I dozed for part of the night, and woke to the slanted rays of the early morning sun. The train cars were divided into rows with two seats each. In the sharp, immature light of daybreak I saw a singular woman sitting across the aisle from me. I hadn’t noticed her before.
    She had the classic profile and indeterminate age of a beauty bred in the bone; she could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. A knot of hair, jet black, and a guarded face too carefully made up. She gave the impression she had not slept at all, but had kept watch all night, staring intently into the dark. Directors classify all female roles as blondes or brunettes. And they don’t mean hair color. Everyone understands what they mean. Ophelia is blonde, like vanilla pudding. Lady Macbeth is nothing if not brunette.
    I took her for a Hungarian. Not only because of her hair — it was more her air of foreignness: addressing her in Czech was out of the question. Addressing her at all was out of the question. Her bubble was like a concrete shelter.
    When I spotted her, she had just begun to remove the rings on her long, pale fingers. She had advertising hands; her nails were traffic-light red. Slowly, with single-minded attentiveness, she took off ring after ring (there were seven of them, one a wedding band), carefully laid them aside on the fold-down tray, and then slowly and thoroughly began to rub an expensive, artificial-smelling cream into her hands. The procedure was an unusually long one, and the woman stared at her hands the whole time like a surgeon during an operation.
    This spectacle fascinated me. By itself it was ordinary: there was nothing special about a woman putting lotion on her hands inthe morning. But there was something strange in her tenacity. She set the cream aside and put the seven rings back on. She did not look around or glance out the window. For a while she sat and stretched her fingers. Then she removed her rings again, this time in anxious haste, set them on the tray and applied another dose. She rubbed in the cream, grinding one hand against the other. Her knuckles were white. Her face remained impassive as she wrung her hands in a gesture of utmost despair.
    Suddenly the man next to her stood up; I had not noticed him before over the high divider between their seats. He stepped over her legs without a word, and because the tray further narrowed the already impassable gap between her and the seatback in front, he had to press his whole body against her. He did not look at her, nor she at him. She did not even symbolically move her legs aside to show that she wanted to make way for him, and he did not make the slightest effort to pass more considerately. There was no apology for entering each other’s bubbles. He overcame her like a geographical obstacle; she went on moisturizing her hands. They were from different universes where different laws applied. It looked terribly rude, even though nothing had happened. But there was a warning of sorts in that mutual disregard. It was a banal moment, but a defining one as well; there was a mute, lurking evil about it. The man worked his way through to the aisle and walked quickly toward the dining car. He did not notice me. It was Dr. M.
    The woman’s face gave nothing away. She recapped the cream and put on her seven lures of beauty. The wedding band was the one I knew from his hand. I vanished, resettling three cars down, and once in Budapest I took great care not to meet them, even by accident.

    In January we met as usual. The incident on the train had taken root in my mind. I did not understand it, nor did I want to. I wanted to have a companion to protect me from the outside world,but one without any rights — like a folding screen.
    Prague was completely socked in that winter. It was pretty side up; the tattered, dirty obverse stayed face down. We were returning from a movie, walking quite exceptionally arm