The Drowning Of A Goldfish Read Free Page B

to nothing is a trait of Czechs, subdued by the historical reality of being a small nation in the heart of Europe.
    I remember very little of the fifty-nine ladies with whom I had to spend my mornings. I would escape into an imaginary world; the bourgeois mentality is more contagious than the flu.
    Not to feel completely isolated, I sided with my teachers. Arms crossed behind my back, always attentive, I would diligently transfer every word from their lips into my memory. I had decided to appropriate all that was being offered, to squeeze each drop of their knowledge, and to store it as economically as possible, in my mind.
    Mathematics stifles me. Blue with asphyxia, I struggle with it. The ground gives away beneath my feet and I drown in the sweat of my bottomless despair.
    I take full revenge by closing myself in. The problem is no longer that I do not understand. At this point, I DO NOT WANT TO UNDERSTAND.
    I am watching the clouds, slipping by outside the window; I am contemplating the leaves, engaged in a rhythmic dance, teased by fondling touches of wind. My life is elsewhere.
    I transform the numbers into familiar images: Eights grow pointed ears and greet me, waving their tails above their mischievous heads; sixes, idle snails, creep across the blackboard, salivating to their hearts’ content; twos, majestically swinging their long flexible necks, float in the ocean of threes; fives—capricious monkeys—hang on the branches of fours; sevens, undulating giraffes, play basketball with the nines—Indian cobras, who with sharp, hissing cries, toss zeroes around, while the ones watch this circus, whipping the dried, cracking air.
    Tamer of ferocious numbers, I smile, savoring my victory. I have discovered the secret of my life: My inward evasions render me untouchable.
    I do not find one single friend among my classmates. I scorn them and they hate me. I could not care less. I do not want to become a part of their world. I am biding my time in a first class waiting room.
    The voice of my father yells somewhere far off in space: “Idiot, idiot, idiot” … and crashes against the ramparts of my private silence. Armed with calmness, I discern the mystery that father would like to keep to himself:
    HE NEEDS ME TO BE A WINNER.
    He had defined, once and for all, the basis of our relationship with a concise statement.
    â€œEither you are the best or I am not interested,” a condition easy to meet at a school for Daddy’s little girls.
    I could not give a damn.
    My great-grandfather was a gambler. His passion for cards devoured all that he had: his farm, his forests, his fields, his ponds, his family.
    Sorrow killed his wife. His son, my grandfather, moved into a shack formerly reserved for farm laborers, so shabby that even the estate executor did not want to seize it. He got married. Teeth gritting, he sired children, future helping hands. He worked the fields. Instead of a cow, he yoked his wife. He spared the cow. He needed her milk for sale.
    He saved money and bought fields. The soil was poor and stony. The children picked rocks and made a wall. He protected his property and made it grow. He had no time to waste. One can die before striking it rich.
    He would lose patience. In vents of rage, he would beat his wife and children with the iron chain he used to tie his dog. The dog would not profit from this moment of freedom. He would coil up. His turn would not fail to come.
    Some children died. They were replaced. What else is a woman’s belly for?
    The children went to school only if the weather was too foul to work the fields. The way was long. It rained. It snowed. It froze. One would not squander money for shoes. The skin cracked and bled, then hardened and healed.
    In spite of all that, my father would become the best pupil in his school. He pursued his dream: to end his poverty and become a “gentleman.”
    Secretly, at night, in the dim light of a candle he had made from