Little Nothing (24 page)

A
s usual, Boris, Danilo, and Markus
drive the wagon to the work site each evening, past the shopkeepers closing up for the day, packing up their sidewalk displays to make room for the prostitutes and drunkards who will take up their nighttime posts. Danilo watches men file into taverns. Children, freed from the burden of lessons, play on the street until it grows too dark to see a ball fly through the air. Activities, once unremarkable, now seem uncanny to Danilo. These too-perfect renditions of the “life of a city at twilight” seem freighted with self-consciousness: Now we are walking home for our evening meal. Now we are going for our nightly drinks. Now we are smiling and coaxing a man toward us with a tantalizing wink. Now we are casting a disinterested eye on a boy and two men and their horse that pulls a wagon past us, dirtying the air and our party outfits with dust, damn them. How could anyone be
other than a fabrication in a world where he has encountered her so changed, so other, yet so certainly, so undeniably herself?

Danilo's ribs have nearly mended. The bruises on his face have mellowed into mustard-colored stains. There was no way to explain what happened to Boris and the others. What could he say? That he was beaten up at the very same moment he finally found the woman he loves who was once a dwarf and then a wolf and is now a convict who he does not recognize but who he knows just as he knows his own heart? That Markus was once an untamed child who ate field animals and before that a wolf pup who was born from the very wolf who became the imprisoned stranger Danilo loves? Morning after morning, the boy insists on going back to the prison, where visiting days are now forbidden, if only to lean his forehead on the wall or fall asleep at its feet, finding maternal comfort in the hard stone. Danilo cannot refuse him. And he can't deny that he wants to be there, too, putting his hands on those stones as he so often fantasized laying them on her body. He can't deny that when he does, he feels that she can, that she must, know that he is there.

He's noticed lately that Markus's lips move as they walk toward the prison. Every so often the boy exhales a sound, and the sound is a number. One hundred. Eight hundred sixty-seven. Four thousand and five. Danilo doesn't stop him. He feels that he and the boy have entered an enchanted circle and he doesn't want to break the spell.

He tells Boris and the others that he was beaten by thugs. Immediately, the watermen imagine that Danilo's attackers are rival crews intent on undercutting the prodigious work of the
Homulka Miracle by destroying the mastermind of their success. Danilo doesn't correct the false assumption.

The boy becomes fanatical about his work in the tunnels. He shovels dirt into the skip with more determination than even the most diligent of the watermen. He is unhappy when it is time for a meal break, and rather than wander down the empty tunnels with Danilo to eat and talk, he stands over the men, pestering them to get back to work.

“Someone wants your job, Boris,” one of them says.

“Well, I'll be dead one day,” Boris jokes. “The boy has a knack.”

“The boy's a pain in my ass,” the man says genially.

“That, too,” Boris says.

Markus refuses to go aboveground during detonations. He argues so insistently that Boris finally gives in. “You'll be deaf before you sprout hair on your cheeks.”

“I have good ears,” the boy says.

“It's true,” Danilo agrees, remembering how Markus heard the smallest animal in those potato fields.

Often, after a detonation, when the men walk from the mouth of the tunnel back to the blast site, Danilo sees Markus's lips moving. He worries for the boy. He thinks about the men in the asylum who carried on fierce and passionate conversations all day long, their voices sometimes escalating into shrieks as they argued with themselves.

“Markus,” he says one night. “What are you saying?”

“
Shhh
,” Markus hisses, his lips still moving.

“Markus, tell me.”

“Ugh!” the boy exclaims in frustration. “You made me lose count!”

“What are you counting?” But the answer comes to him immediately. “Are you sure?” he asks, but he knows the boy is not only certain but that he is right, and that his sense of direction is as impeccable as, well, a wolf's. Klima told him how, year after year, wolves follow the same route around their territory. No matter if months of snow and rain have washed away scent and signposts, no matter if there have been fires and the once bountiful trees are nothing more than singed trunks. “They always know where they need to go,” he said.

Markus inhales so deeply that his whole body seems to levitate. Danilo wonders if he intends to count his way to her all in one breath.

A
t first, Teardrop,
whose duty it is to bring her food each day, food he knows she will not eat, was scornful of her hunger strike, certain that there would come a day when she would no longer be able to resist, when her body would take over from her enfeebled mind and demand to live. He nearly swaggered with the assurance that she would fail, and that when she did, he would be the triumphant one who broke her. But lately, his attitude has changed. For the longer she goes without, the stronger she seems. When he opens her cell door, rather than lying withered on her mattress unable to move or speak, he finds her pacing back and forth, counting.
One, two, three, four
, she says. And then the next day it is
thirty thousand and three, thirty thousand and four
. Each day, her voice grows stronger, as though the figures nourish her and keep her alive. She counts to numbers he has never thought about. When would he have occasion
to consider one hundred thousand and thirteen? What use is three hundred thousand and twenty-seven to a man living on this earth whose life consists of four children and one wife and figuring out how to feed them all on twelve koruny a day? Even if he gambles, lying to his wife and telling her that his paycheck has been docked for the week due to government shenanigans, he is only thinking about sixty koruny or perhaps, if he is lucky, which he almost never is, one hundred and twenty koruny, double or nothing. The prisoner has become someone as incomprehensible to him as the numbers she chants in her low, affectless manner. Rather than demand that she eat, as he has been instructed, or ask her incessant questions, to which she has only the same opaque answers, he apologizes for interrupting her. He places the bowl on the floor as quietly as he can so as not to intrude on her work. He bows his head, ashamed to offer her something so banal and useless as bone broth.

But the strangest thing: when he is home at night, instead of slipping into a beery haze that helps him forget the dreary work of the day, he feels restless and eager for his next shift when he can be near her, when he can sit at his desk outside her cell and listen as she paces and counts. She disgusts him. Of course she does. Her ragged body, her eyes sunk deep in their purpled sockets, her matted hair, her rank smell. And yet, if he were to be honest with himself, he would choose all that over his wife's powdered skin and her plump cheeks, her body that, even after four children, is ripe and available to him each night. All the life in his house, the bickering and crying and laughing and the
kisses and soft snores of his children seem nothing compared to the life inside that cell, where a woman blooms as she withers.

Within the walls of the prison a rumor spreads that something peculiar is happening in the hole. Other guards use their break time to come see the miracle of the dying but living woman. The door of her cell opens and closes, opens and closes all day long. She is aware of this, hears the men's whispers, can sometimes even smell their body odor or the shaving colognes that fail to mask it, but none of it bothers her. She has moved beyond their curiosity, beyond their need for her to explain what is happening. She inhales and swells with lightness. She exhales and floats. Inside her head is a vast emptiness that is filled to the brim just as the heavens are filled with stars. She no longer feels the boundaries of her skin. She is powerful beyond strength. She is beyond. She dances, holding an imaginary partner.
Two steps to the left, two steps to the right, circle around, join hands.

“She's gone mad,” one of the guards says as he observes her.

“Wouldn't you?” says another.

“But you know,” the first says. “Something strange. She looks . . . she looks—no, it can't be true.”

“Yes . . . you're right. She looks—”

“You know how sometimes you see something so normal. A bird. Or the way your wife runs a comb through her hair, or when I come home, my little one, he hides under the table and I have to find him. I can see him clear as day, but I have to make a show of looking.”

“And each time—”

“I'm not ashamed to say it: I cry.”

“It's just that—”

“She looks . . . is she . . . no, but . . . is she—”

“Beautiful?”

—

I
N
THE
BARRACKS
the prisoners talk of nothing else. Suddenly, the woman who rarely spoke and whose introversion made her seem practically invisible becomes an object of veneration. Even those who believed Iveta when she told them the woman had murdered her child (“Who doesn't know if she's given birth? A baby killer, that's who!”), a crime considered so depraved that even the prisoner who dismembered her own mother found it distasteful, are mesmerized by the stories that the guards tell about how she does not eat and yet grows strong.

“She's planning her escape,” Barbora declares one night. The women debate how this might be accomplished. She will pretend to be dead, they agree, and once again, someone tells the story about the prisoner and the kites. “It was before your time,” Barbora says, when one of the convicts is skeptical.

A hush falls over the room as the women contemplate this befuddling phrase:
before your time
. They can recall the time before, when they were mothers or lovers or stood for fifteen hours a day at weaving machines trying to keep their fingers clear of the pinch rolls. But that other thing,
before their time
. They cannot conceive of this and they are struck with wonder. Suddenly, the possible opens up to them. They are no longer
hemmed in by their memories, dragged down by what was once but can be no more. Because no one can remember themselves before their time. And with this newfound sense of the infinite that stretches both forward and back comes a lightness. In the days that follow, the women no longer strike up petty arguments among themselves. Iveta, who by this time has lost the commander's interest, holds on to the old ways for longer than the others. She informs on the woman who allows another to take her place in the shower line out of kindness and on the one who gives her bread to someone who is ill. But the guards are no longer interested and offer her no privileges in return for the intelligence. Finally, she stops and then she experiences the buoyancy that fills the others and lifts the corners of their mouths. She cannot help but smile for no reason, too, and, yes, when the women hold hands in the yard, when they circle to the left five steps and then to the right for another five, when they break apart and spin around and then reach for one another again and lift their joined hands, Iveta dances with the most exuberance of them all.

“When did she come here?” they ask one another when they discuss the prisoner in the hole, whose name, they realize, they don't know, but who they think of fondly, with love, even. “Does anyone remember?”

“She was always here,” another says. “She was always there.” She points to the empty pallet. “It was she who made those marks.”

The women study the underside of the bunk, which is scored by hundreds, by thousands of lines. Four lines crossed by a fifth, again and again. The bundles spill down the wall next to the bed
and onto the floor and then across the floor and up the opposite wall. The women wander the barracks, studying what they took to be the grain of the wood but which they now realize are days. Weeks. Months. Years.

“She was so quiet, you wouldn't notice her,” another says.

“She was always there. Alongside us.”

The women smile. They are comforted.

“Is she still here?” a woman says. She is new to the barracks. Young. Her body still fresh and full, her eyes clear.

The others are not sure what to say. The guards tell them nothing when they ask after her. But the men's faces betray them. Their eyes shift warily, as if they are not sure it is safe to talk of what is going on in the hole. They mutter like boys who don't know the answer to the question the teacher has posed. Something has confused them. They become derelict in their duties. When the women dance, they watch with open-mouthed amazement, as if they were seeing water spring from stone.

—

“W
H
Y
DON
'
T
YOU
EAT?
”
the commander says to her, puffing his chest to make himself appear tall in his perfectly pressed uniform.

He is furious. His guards are lazy. There is laughter and dancing in the yard, and nothing is done to suppress it. He has even seen one of his lieutenants help a prisoner who has stumbled. When the minister of prisons comes for his twice-annual review, he will see the situation and the commander will
certainly be censured. This is the first time he has actually been inside the solitary cell. The place is sickening and, he'd have to admit, frightening. It reminds him of his grandfather's cellar where he was forced to go as a child to retrieve the winter put-ups. He was certain that a vodnik lived there, and even though his grandmother assured him that those water creatures lived near ponds and could only survive for short amounts of time on land, he swears he saw a gilled, green man down there, saw his long, bony, algae-covered fingers, his mischievous grin. Not unlike the woman he faces now, who, if truth be told, or maybe it is just an effect of the light coming in the open door and casting shadows, has a green tint to her skin. Her flesh hugs her bones. Her eyes are a sickly yellow.

“If you believe we will be lenient because of your condition, you are mistaken,” he says.

“I don't believe anything,” she says.

“You think your death will provoke your compatriots, that they will rise up in your defense, and that we will have another riot on our hands, but you are wrong. You mean nothing to them. I've seen it all before. Prisoners are the most selfish people on God's earth. Believe me, when you die, they will not even remember you ever lived.”

“I'm not dying.”

“Look at you,” he says, helpless to conceal his pity.

“How can I?”

Frustrated by her unnerving calm, he turns to the guard, that idiot who looks like he's crying all the time. “Get me a mirror!”

“We have none, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mirrors are forbidden,” Teardrop says, nervously reminding the man of his own arbitrary rules.

The commander leaves the cell. She hears him climb the stairs. A window shatters. He returns holding a section of broken glass. He closes the cell door so that only a trace of light filters into the room. He holds the makeshift mirror up to her.

“Look at yourself. What do you see?” he says.

She stares into the glass. “Nothing.”

“Look at yourself!”

“I'm not here,” she says.

Barely suppressing his fury and suddenly aware that his hand is bleeding, the commander leaves, ordering Teardrop to follow and lock the door behind him. “And keep it locked,” he adds. “Don't bother feeding her anymore. Let her rot.”

When other guards come to observe her, Teardrop tells them that he cannot open the door, that he is under orders. But even though there is no longer any reason for him to stand at his post, he doesn't leave. He stays through the rest of the day and all that night. He's sure his wife is fretting over his absence, that his children miss him, but he can't abandon her. From time to time, he puts his ear to the door. He hears nothing. No dancing. No counting. Perhaps she is resting, he thinks. She needs her rest.

Past midnight, when he still does not hear her stir, he can't help it: He unlocks the door. The cell is empty. She is not lying down or crouching in a dark corner. She is simply not there. Stupidly, because he doesn't know what else to do, he looks
under the mattress, even inside the pail, as if somehow she were able to curl up there to die. But if she is dead, where is her body?

His confusion overcomes him. He feels bereft, the way he does when he wakes from a perfect dream of happiness. He lifts his dirty handkerchief to his eye and as he sheds a tear, the ground begins to
shake.