Little Nothing (10 page)

O
f course no one believes him.
He knows it is ridiculous, this idea he keeps trying to convince everyone of: that it was Pavla he and the others—the handler for the dancing rats, the human skeleton, and the man with a prehensile tail—tracked through the forest, that it was she he had in his sights but refused, at that last moment, to shoot. He hardly believes himself that she has inexplicably turned into the very thing she once so convincingly playacted. But he is certain of it. At least he is when he lies down at night and sleep begins to smudge his thoughts, or in those dim, swimming moments just as he wakes, when the line that delineates this harsh, intractable world from the elastic and forgiving one of dreams feels like a porous border he can cross at will, when it still feels possible that his mother has welcomed him back home with kisses and warm food, that his brother is alive, that Pavla has allowed him inside her. This last dream is the most disturbing and thrilling. He is never sure whether he
is making love to a dwarf, a monstrous girl, or an animal, or all three at once, and the confusion feels like a ravishment that leaves him spent and delirious, his mind searching the quickly evanescing details of this otherworld that only seconds before felt like everywhere he had ever been and everywhere he needed to go. And then he is fully awake and holding not her dwarfish, girlish, wolfish body but a crushed blanket and a feeling of profound loneliness.

She was right: he is weak. He was too cowardly to declare himself. Even though now he would say she is the most beautiful being he has ever seen, he was too troubled by her long nose, the fine fur on her cheeks, and by his vanity that made him unwilling to admit that he desired the girl that others considered a freak. And even though he would still say that her eyes are the most cryptic and entrancing he's ever encountered, he was terrified by her chilling gaze. Sometimes, he believed she might have hurt him. And yet, she is the only person who has ever been kind to him, the only one to whom—and this, for a youth of nearly twenty, is a sad truth—it mattered that he existed.

—

W
ITH
S
METANKA
DEAD
and Pavla gone, Danilo has no work. The possibility that he will be hired by another act, perhaps as a tout for Juliska, who stays to the bitter end of the season because as wives grow hungry and thin during the lean winter months, husbands will pay to ogle the fleshy, bounteous woman, is scuttled by his reputation. No one will hire the coward who failed to
kill the marauding wolf that made a meal of his employer, leaving nothing but shredded clothes, a few bones, and a handful of rotten teeth. Danilo sells the caravan for next to nothing but keeps the old mare. He knows wolves can roam vast territories and that he may need to travel far in order to find her.

He rides from village to village looking for work, finding none. When he summons the courage to ask if anyone has encountered a wolf that seems, well, a little bit human, he is met only with laughter or snide jokes about the local Magda or Lenka (“She may call herself a girl but she sure acts like a wolf!”), for every town has its designated ugliest girl who, more than likely, has given herself away on muddy banks or behind haystacks, satisfying the local boys in heat for a smidgen of attention and sloppy affection.

“She'll do you for the price of a nice word if you can summon one!” he's told in one village when a skinny, taciturn girl is produced. “Not brave enough for this beast, eh?” they say when he demurs.

And what if he had been brave?
he asks himself as he and his buckle-backed horse ride to the next town so that he can find no work there, too. What if he had declared himself to her? What then?

In the forest, he looked into those yellow eyes and recognized something. A calm resolve behind that gaze, a cool forbearance in the face of such strange and unpredictable fate. He believes, no, he
knows
, that she was not going to hurt him but rather that she was telling him something. He understood what it was he had felt being in her presence from the moment he lifted her
onto the doctor's examining table and looked into her eyes: she planted a belief in him that out of the emptiness of his life something might emerge.

“Ach,” he says, kicking the mare gently to no effect. “Who do I think I am?”

—

T
HE
WINTER
IS
EMPHATIC
.
One snowstorm follows another with hardly any time for people to recover and grab a moment in the fugitive sunlight to remind themselves that there is a world beyond the walls of their homes. No one is taking on extra hands at the farms. People subsist on cabbage and potatoes and the occasional scrawny hen. There is little money to buy more frivolous items they might allow themselves in the warm months when a new pair of shoes or a length of ribbon seems as much a piece with springtime bounty as new peas, and so there is no work to be found as a shop assistant or delivery boy. Danilo is turned away wherever he goes.

He has more to battle than this annual hibernation of industry and hope. The story of the man-eating wolf and the feckless youth who failed to kill it at point-blank range, combined with the fear and isolation instilled by freezing temperatures and midafternoon darkness turn his story into a curse that follows him wherever he goes. The problem is compounded when word spreads that a wolf pack has been sighted lurking close to a village and its surrounding farms. When a report comes that the animals have breached an enclosure and killed a cow, the looks
Danilo receives when he enters a tavern convince him that even if there were a hundred available jobs that would pay a man enough to last through the grim season he would not be offered a single one of them. Finally, after many weeks, he manages to get work as a servant at an inn. He is paid nothing, but is allowed to sleep on the floor of the kitchen next to the stove.

Toward the end of the winter, another cow is killed and then, in a single night, five goats. A council of five villages is called. A name begins to circulate, first in whispers, then in pronouncements, and then in votes, and a group of men is dispatched to find the famous tracker, Bruno Klima. The way this man's name is spoken in worshipful, if fearful, tones, and the fact that the tracker eschews society and lives a hermit's life in the mountains lead Danilo to expect a pelt-covered giant to come striding into the village, his musket over one shoulder, wolf flesh dangling from his teeth. He is surprised when, a week later, Bruno Klima arrives looking like nothing so much as a government functionary sent to the provinces to conduct some official business. Bespectacled and slight, he wears, yes, a coat with a fox fur collar, but underneath is a fine, worsted three-piece suit. Instead of an arbiter's leather satchel full of important documents, he carries his guns in a polished wooden case. After following the deliberations of the council anxiously, fearful for what might happen to Pavla, Danilo is put at ease by the sight of the man who does not look the least inclined to hunt and kill a wild animal. But the gossip that attends Klima's arrival tells another story: how, pinned to the ground by a bear, he still managed to aim his pistol and shoot the beast between the eyes; how he
shot a hawk as it carried off a child, then caught the baby in free fall and returned it safely to its parents; how, during a time of great famine, he single-handedly managed to kill enough deer to keep the villagers from starving. That Klima's meticulous appearance belies these heroics only makes them all the more unlikely and therefore, in the logic of mythology, inarguably true.

While preparing for his new mission, Klima stays at the inn where Danilo works. When the great tracker appears in the dining room for his meals, the innkeeper, whose jacket, washed once a year on the first warm day of spring, serves as a history of the year's menus, is obsequious, as if a dinner service removed too soon or a rabbit cooked to an unpleasant toughness might cause him to be the next target in the tracker's sights. Klima seems accustomed to this kind of deference and, after taking his first bite of each meal, he gives a slight nod to signal that the evening's fare, while not necessarily to his liking, is at least edible, at which point the owner backs away quietly and watches from a safe distance behind the partially closed kitchen door.

One afternoon, while the tracker is out, Danilo enters his bedroom to stoke the fireplace. Klima has laid out all his belongings on the room's small dressing table as neatly as if they were a tradesman's display. Danilo remembers going to the yearly agricultural fair with his father and brother to see the latest instruments for measuring rainfall or wind velocity. His father pretended to understand these newfangled improvements for his sons' benefit although, like all the villagers, he was frightened by the modern. Danilo is particularly captivated by the tracker's
toiletries, his ivory comb and brush set, his ornately filigreed nail scissors. Like everyone he has ever known, Danilo uses his teeth to get the job done, saving the thickest thumbnail to serve double duty as a toothpick. He uncorks a small vial and sniffs the lavender-scented water inside, runs his finger along the sharpened edge of a gleaming razor. He knows he ought to leave the room before he is caught snooping but he can't before examining two rifles that lie on the bed side by side like newlyweds. These are gorgeous instruments, their barrels polished to a sleek shine, the handles inlaid with red and green gemstones. They are a far cry from the splintered shotgun Danilo was given to kill Pavla with. Although he was terrified to hold that weapon, he cannot help but run his hands along these gamine instruments with a kind of respectful tenderness. Metal and wooden fixtures lie piled next to them, the works of yet a third shotgun whose body has been broken down to its smallest components. Each is freshly oiled, for the tracker cares for his guns as meticulously as he does his body. Danilo picks up a slim piece of metal that looks like a trigger guard and before he knows it, he has forgotten to lay the fire and is kneeling on the worn bedside rug, the parts scattered around him, fitting them together, one by one. He has never built a gun before but his hands pick and choose the correct pieces as if he were expert at the job. The intensity of his concentration and the small pleasure he receives when random elements slide into their proper places remind him of nothing so much as the hours he spent building the stretching table and that marvelous feeling he had of finally putting the dormant mechanism of his brain to the uses for which it was clearly
intended. Of course, back then, the delight he took in the ingenious workings of the table, and even in Smetanka's approval, was spoiled when he realized how the man intended his invention to be used. Still, as guilty as he feels about his involvement in Pavla's torture, he is reminded now of the sheer joy of inventing something that a man can put to use. He supposes this is what his father must experience as he fits together the pieces of a shoe, arranging the backstay and the quarter, the vamp and the tongue, affixing them to the sole and the heel, and then watching a customer take his first step. Even though he was banished from his family, he finds a bitter comfort in this association.

Once the gun is assembled, he picks it up and holds it to his shoulder, sighting himself in the full-length mirror that stands in the corner of the room.

“There are more effective ways to kill yourself,” a voice says.

Danilo spins around, the gun still poised.

“But that would be a very good way to kill me,” Klima says. Calmly, he reaches out and puts his hand on the end of the barrel, redirecting Danilo's aim toward the floor.

“Forgive me,” Danilo says, handing over the gun. “It's not my place.”

“No, it's not,” Klima says, turning the weapon, studying it from all sides. “You're handy with a gun, then?”

“I'm a terrible shot.”

“I've heard you're no shot at all.”

Danilo can't hold the man's gaze. Instead, he fixes on the golden watch chain that stretches across his vest depositing its treasure into a small pocket. Somehow, this invisible elegance
seems to sum up Danilo's failure. “I guess if it weren't for me, you wouldn't need to be here,” he says quietly.

“Well then, I have you to thank.”

Danilo wonders if the man is teasing him, adding a final dollop of shame to the mound piled on him by the community, but when he looks up, Klima's expression is serious.

“You know that if a gun is put together badly, it will more likely kill the person firing it than its intended target. It's a foolproof form of sabotage,” Klima says.

“I didn't mean—” Danilo says.

“But,” Klima says, studying the gun in his hand. “I watched you. You put it together correctly on the first try. You've built weapons before.”

Could he be referring to the stretching table? Can it be that word of this atrocity has followed Danilo from village to village as well? No. It's impossible. Still, the man is shrewd, and Danilo has the feeling he knows everyone's secrets. “Not intentionally, sir.”

“Well, I can use a man with a bit of beginner's luck.”

“Use me, sir?”

“That is, unless you'd rather chop wood in exchange for sleeping with kitchen rats and eating my leftovers. Nothing escapes my attention,” he says when Danilo looks embarrassed to have been so carefully observed. “You'll earn five percent of my take. I get paid by the head. And I never
miss.”

H
er hunger is perpetual now.
Even though she ate just a day ago, her belly feels empty. Her leg doesn't trouble her—she's adjusted to its limitations—but her body feels heavy and sluggish and it insists on another rhythm than the other wolves keep. As they cross their territory, she falls behind. The dark wolves often circle back, sometimes coming up behind her to sniff beneath her tail until the white wolf warns them off. The two dark ones are filled with jumpy energy and they fight more often and more fiercely with each other. For her part, all she wants to do is dig.

It began when they attacked the cows. Three nights running, they circled a farm, catching field mice and rabbits and then retreating to the forest where it was safe to sleep. Then one night, the white wolf slowly walked toward the big, dark animals and the rest followed. It wasn't until they began to claw their way underneath the fence that the cows took up their lowing. Lights appeared in windows and, after a few moments, men
stormed out of the house, shouting. It had taken the white wolf no time to strike the calf. Just as swiftly, the others tore into the body and before the men could stumble within range, the wolves slipped under the fence and ran toward the trees. She and the two dark ones were quickly absorbed by the night, and the shots missed them. But one flew so close to the white wolf's head that it clipped his ear, taking off the tip. The wolves ran deep into the forest and when they finally stopped, she licked his wound. After this, he began to walk by her side and sleep close to her, lick her muzzle and nose her beneath her jaw. She no longer assumed her low stance when he was close. Often, she lifted her backside, and he would lick underneath her tail. When her blood began to stain the ground, she moved her tail to the side so that he could smell it. And then he was behind her and on top of her at the same time. Over the next days, she insisted that he mount her again and again. And then, one time he tried and she snarled at him. After that, he left her alone.

Now the air is warmer and all the snow has melted away. The earth is soft underneath her paws. The others keep moving, but when she stops and begins to dig, they return to where she has settled, and the pack finally rests.

While she is making the den wide and deep, she feels her insides convulse. She has barely finished the job before she has to lie down on the newly churned dirt. Each time one comes out, she bites off the cord and eats the flesh attached to it. Then she licks the pup until her belly churns again, and the next one emerges. By the time she is done, there are four of them. She is exhausted, but the meat of her insides has given her enough
strength to clean the last one. When all four attach themselves to her and begin to suck, she sleeps.

She dreams.

She stands by the edge of a lake. Fish swim just below the reach of her muzzle, their nearly translucent bodies darting here and there. When one rises up, she plunges her face into the water, but it slips away. She waits for the disturbance she's created to calm, and once it does, she peers into the surface. But this time, instead of seeing fish, she sees the reflection of a man whose skin is pale and hairless and whose eyes are the color of night and who lifts a gun, points it at her, and—

She wakes. Blindly, they are sucking on her. All of them but one. Where is he? She shakes the others off. They complain with high, squeaking cries and try to burrow up against her and find her teats, but she snaps at them. She makes a full turn around herself until she finds the fourth. She pushes at him with her paw and her snout, but he doesn't move. His body is cold. She picks him up in her mouth and crawls out of the den. The other pups sense her departure and they are distressed, but she doesn't pay attention to their cries.

The others are sleeping in the sun. She carries the pup over to them. They stir and wake. She shows the pup to the white wolf first and then to the others. After a time, she lays him on the ground. One of the dark ones picks him up with the fleshy part of its mouth and walks here and there while she digs. The dark wolf brings the pup and lays him in the small depression she's made. She turns around and, with her hind legs, kicks dirt over the body. She returns to the den to feed the
others.