Little Nothing (4 page)

T
he following morning,
Václav lifts Pavla onto the bench of his wagon as usual, but instead of the two of them heading off to dig through the bowels of another village home, Agáta joins them. She is dressed in her black church dress and she sits as stiffly and silently and, Pavla notices, as contritely as she does after Václav has been particularly blasphemous around the house and she feels she must represent his shame by occupying the first pew at church, in full, supplicating view of Father Matyáš. Václav shakes the reins, the horse snorts, and the wagon makes its way across the new bridge, through the slowly waking town, and then, to Pavla's utter surprise, beyond it.

This is the first time in her life she has left her village. The maps she studied and defiled at school attest to far-off cities and farther-off countries and so-far-off-as-to-be-unbelievable continents where people are, according to her old schoolteacher, black or yellow or red. But the idea of elsewhere has always been a
vaporous and not wholly credible notion. Its allure is qualified by the knowledge that although she has become commonplace in her village and is able to carry on with minimal interference and then only from strangers passing through, the wider world offers no such assurances. And what does she need from elsewhere? She has her parents and their aged, grateful love. She has her old classmates, all of whom have left school and begun their lives of work and responsibility. They see one another on market days. They nod and shake hands just as they have seen their parents do, and with these solemn, awkward gestures they assume the mantle of adulthood and their places in the village's predictable cycle of years.

And yet, here they are, she and her parents, somewhere else. The plumber's wagon bounces along roads not dissimilar to the ones she has traveled all her life, only these are vastly different because she doesn't know where they lead and because of what is now frighteningly obvious: that her parents intend to put her out of the wagon, give her a push, and tell her to keep going and not look back.

Is this true? She looks from her mother to her father. Both stare ahead, grim faced, betraying nothing. She checks behind her to see if there is a bundle in the wagon bed, if her mother secretly packed her clothing and some food for this endless journey to who knows where. But there are only a few lengths of pipe that roll and clank against one another as the wagon bumps along.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

Neither parent answers. Neither can bear to form the words
that will make a lie of what they've said all her life: that they love her just the way she is and that she never needs to change.

That first day, they visit Zlata, the witch who gave Agáta the herbs and taught her the chants that enabled her, finally, to conceive a child that survived pregnancy. The woman's skin is the color of cowhide, and she smells of the cheesecloth bladders that hang off the sides of her barrel-shaped caravan, transforming into the domácí tvaroh that she peddles from door to door. Inside the caravan there is barely room for the four of them as Zlata seems to have saved every candle, scrap of cloth, ball of yarn, and jar of herbs she has ever encountered in her seven decades of life. She sits on a three-legged milking stool, punches the bulky material of her tiered skirts between her widespread legs, then studies Pavla with a narrowed gaze, sucking in her upper lip so that all that is left in its place is her furry mustache.

Finally, she turns to Agáta. “You did not follow my instructions,” she says.

“I did everything!” Agáta says. “I slept with my head at my husband's feet. I bathed in the piss of a newborn piglet.”

But Zlata ignores her. She orders Pavla to lie on the floor, which is carpeted with as many differently colored blankets as skirts the woman wears. Leaning forward on her haunches, the gypsy dangles an amulet above the girl, moving it along the vertical axis of her torso, chanting in her strange language. The percussive, spit-flinging menace of it makes her sound like she is having a fierce argument with herself, and Pavla has the urge to
apologize, although for what she is not sure. Zlata tells Pavla to open her shirt. Václav turns away while his daughter unbuttons herself, although he can't help peeking, not because he is interested in his daughter's figure, but because he does not trust this woman whose fertility treatment included the instruction that he and Agáta were not to make love once she was impregnated—thus the head-to-foot sleeping arrangement—and that while pregnancy was being attempted, he was not to touch himself, a prescription that left him in the coop on many an afternoon, bringing himself relief from his urges while chickens pecked for food around his fallen trousers. The gypsy licks her finger and dips it into a small copper pot. When she withdraws it, it is covered with a deep yellow powder.

“Do you bleed yet?” she asks.

“No,” Pavla says.

“Are you frightened of men?”

“No.”

“You should be.” Zlata places her stained finger on Pavla's belly, just above the triangle of pale hair that has recently sprouted, and makes a small cross sign on her skin. “Men are disgusting, but you cannot be a child forever,” she says.

After the treatment and after money has changed hands, Zlata gives Agáta a pouch of herbs. “Boil these twice a day and make her drink a cupful while facing north,” she says. “This time, do what I tell you,” she adds, looking pointedly at Václav's crotch, and although it has been fifteen years, he has the feeling that she is standing outside the chicken coop, listening as he achieves his release.

While Zlata and her incantations may have been responsible for Pavla's birth, they do nothing for her height, although the following month, her bleeding begins. Agáta slaps her across the cheek, then hugs her, then tells her about the monster and the big sausage. Afterward, her face falls and she grows quiet. “But you will not have to worry about that,” she says.

A few weeks later, the family sets out again, this time to visit Dr. Andrasko, who lives two villages to the east. He is a tall man who wears a suit, a detail that seems to convince Agáta of his professionalism, although the exorbitant cost of his cure leaves Václav, who believes in a fair price for a fair job, enraged. Andrasko prescribes a draught that tastes of equal parts tree bark and snot to be imbibed three times a day. A month later, when this remedy shows no sign of working, the family travels farther afield to consult Dr. Bosak, who suggests that Pavla hang by her hands from a tree branch for a full half hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and by her knees on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Sundays she is instructed to lie prone for the entire day so that her blood and organs can sort themselves out. Dr. Krasny, a half-day's journey away, is horrified that Agáta and Václav would submit their child to that well-known scoundrel, Bosak, and suggests that they rearrange the house so that the girl is forced to reach for such necessities as food and water. In this way, he explains, “The body becomes trained to adapt to a tall world, the way a dog learns to beg for food.”

“She's a pretty little thing,” Dr. Matusek says (yes, Agáta and Václav are making their way alphabetically through the regional directory). His nostrils flare like an animal that has picked up a
scent as he examines Pavla on his table. “She seems limber enough,” he says, scissoring her legs into a wide V. “If you leave her with me, I'll see what I can do.” Agáta has to put herself between this doctor and her husband's fists as she hurries her family out the door.

—

D
R
. I
GNÁC
S
METANKA
wears a white lab coat, works in an office with a proper weighing scale and wooden models of various body parts, and has a framed certificate from a famous university on his wall. A sculptural wave of hair crests over his high forehead and he wears armless spectacles that sit importantly, if unevenly, on his authoritative nose. A young man—he might be only a few years older than Pavla—stands deferentially to the side. He is not introduced. He has chestnut hair, a soft, full mouth, and dark, watery eyes framed by luxuriant eyelashes. Pavla is used to boys taking no account of her, but this young man offers her the slightest hint of a conspiratorial smile when the doctor is not looking. As if they are complicit in something exciting. She's confused by the swift and unreasonable attachment she feels and embarrassed by the vulnerability of her attraction. Even before Dr. Smetanka instructs her to undress behind a screen and put on the examining gown she will find there, she feels naked. While she disrobes in private, she cannot help but think that the young man knows that now she is taking off her dress, and now she is unrolling her stockings, and now she lifts her slip over her head. It is new, this feeling of being
watched not because of her oddity but because she possesses something that a man—perhaps this young man—might desire. Does he know that her nipples have become pink and erect in the cold air? Despite the muslin screen, she covers her chest with her arms, but her impulse to hide differs from the mortification she felt years before when her father took her swimming in the river and all the neighboring children saw her in her bathing costume for the first time, the disproportions of her body no longer obscured by a dress. No, this embarrassment is something else, something better, because it comes hand in hand with another sensation—has she ever once experienced this? Is this vanity? Is this pride? She gently touches her nipples, flicks their hardness with her finger, feels a wire of energy pass from their tips all the way down her body and gather in a knot between her legs.

“Is there a problem?” the doctor calls out.

“No,” she says, tying the gown around her. When she emerges and notices the younger man take in how ridiculous she looks, swallowed up by this overlarge garment, her humiliation quickly returns, as though it knew to stay close, that it would be pressed into service again. Her mother was right: Who would want her? The doctor gives an order, and before she realizes what is happening, the young man, who she now understands is the doctor's assistant, gently lifts her onto the examining table. She feels his grip on her waist, feels her skin tingle beneath his hands. He is careful not to look at her, but she can't tell whether he is uncomfortable with the intimacy or whether he feels nothing more than he would were he hoisting a basket of yams.

Dr. Smetanka washes his hands at the small sink and then stands with them held out and dripping so that the young man, who anxiously anticipates the doctor's moves, can dry them with a frayed cloth. She recognizes his attentiveness. She is just as focused when she listens for the particular ratchet of a screw or the tones of differently sized pipes as they clang against a wrench so that she will be ready with the next tool her father needs even before he asks for it. Somehow this thought calms her. Maybe this doctor is like her father and he will be able to fix her, too. These past months of potions and strange exercise regimens, of having her parents measure her against the doorjamb and then trying to hide their disappointment when there isn't any change, of her growing awareness that, despite what they have always told her, she is a mistake that must be corrected—all these things have left her feeling anxious and ashamed, and angry, too, if she will admit it to herself. Her parents have become like everyone else who sees her as a pity, a blight, or as a convenient way to assure themselves that their lives could be worse. She feels more isolated than she has ever felt in her life. There are her parents, standing against the wall, nervous and craven, and here she is, alone.

She lies back on the table and stares up at a spider scrabbling along the ceiling while Dr. Smetanka opens her gown. How stupid, she thinks, to put on the thing only to have him take it off. How ridiculous to insist on the privacy of the screen when now she lies flayed open like a gutted sheep. The assistant, thankfully, has turned his back and pretends to busy himself with something in a glass cabinet while the doctor stares at her body,
not bothering to hide his fascination with her deformity. At his instructions, she breathes in and out, opens her mouth wide, turns her head to the left and right, counts from zero to twenty and back to zero again. When the examination is finished, she dresses and is instructed to leave the room while Agáta and Václav remain for a consultation. The assistant follows her into the waiting area and the two stand together awkwardly.

“My family once owned two pygmy ponies,” he says, finally.

“Is that really what you want to tell me?” she says.

When he blushes, two wine stains of red spread unevenly across his cheeks.

“Don't worry,” she says. “People never know what to say to me.”

He looks down at her, emboldened. “What would you like them to say?”

Before she can answer, the doctor's office door opens and Agáta and Václav, looking pale, motion for Pavla to follow them outside. She turns to look back at the assistant, but his head is bowed as he listens to the doctor. The older man claps three times to put a fine point on whatever he has said and closes the office door.

During the ride home, the sky opens up and rain falls heavily. The horse drags the wagon along the muddy roads. Despite that she is cold and soaked, Agáta is talkative. She chatters on about whether she should use paprika on the meat before or after she braises it and Václav, who cares only that food is enough and easy to chew, becomes uncharacteristically engrossed in her culinary dilemma. When that discussion runs its course, Agáta breaks into the song the villagers sing at the Drowning of Morana
festival to herald the end of winter. If Pavla were not thinking about the young man and his lovely, glittering eyes, and if she were not busy trying to remember and interpret his every word and gesture, she would understand the workings of Agáta's mind and know which way things were heading for her. When they arrive home, she is happy to be neither suspended from a tree nor made to drink a foul-tasting tea and she hopes that the doctor has told her parents to just leave her alone. The rain lets up. Václav announces that he is going out, but when Pavla offers to help with whatever plumbing job he has going, he tells her not to trouble herself, that he can take care of things on his own.