Little Nothing (5 page)

“Let me help you, Mother,” Pavla says, as Agáta slathers the orange spice over the much-discussed piece of meat.

“No, no, darling. You rest.”

“But I'm not tired.”

“Of course you're tired after such a long trip.”

“You took the same trip.”

“But I'm an old woman and you are a young girl who needs her rest.”

“That makes no sense.”

“We should never have sent you to that school if all you're going to talk about is sense.”

“An idiot could tell you it makes no sense.”

“Are you calling your mother an idiot?”

But before Pavla can defend herself, she hears a familiar sound of metal sinking into earth. She looks out the window and realizes that her father has not gone off to work at all. Instead, he is in the yard, attacking the ground next to her mother's
garden with a shovel, grunting and flinging clots of wet dirt behind him onto the chickens, which squawk and flap their wings. She wonders if the doctor has told her parents that if they finally install an indoor toilet, she will grow.

Luckily, and Pavla will soon discover that this is her single bit of luck, the following morning dawns balmy and gives way to a clear blue sky and clouds so optimistic they might have been drawn by a child. Václav takes Pavla outside and introduces her to the results of his nightlong labor: a hole just over a meter deep and wider than any pipe she has ever seen. Pavla gamely scrambles into the pit. When her feet touch bottom, her head barely clears the ground.

“Will we tunnel from here to the house?” she says, thinking already about how her father might reconfigure the wardrobe into a water closet. “Shall I draw a map?”

He hands her a narrow pipe that is as tall as the pit and into which he has bored four small holes at even intervals. It is as useless a pipe for channeling waste as Pavla can imagine.

“Táta, I don't think this is what we need.”

The morning sun glints off the water in his eyes. “I love you, Pavlicka,” he says, in a voice so sad that she thinks he is dying and that she is standing in his grave.

“I love you, too, Táta.”

“I only want you to have a good life.”

“I have a good life. The best life.”

Agáta bursts out of the house, running and crying, her hands flailing in front of her face as if she were battling a swarm of bees. “Don't do it,” she pleads.

“Go back in the house,” Václav says to his wife. “Don't look.”

“It's good the way things are,” Agáta says.

“But what about when we are gone? What then?”

Pavla is right: someone is dying. She tries to climb out of the hole but her arms are too short to lever her weight. “Táta, give me a hand. Get me out of here.”

“I can't,” he says. Tears pour from his eyes and course down the deep runnels that score his cheeks.

“Táta, pull me up! Just like the enormous turnip! Mother, grab hold of him and pull!”

“Please take off your clothes, my darling,” Václav says.

“What? I don't understand,” Pavla says.

“Don't do it,” Agáta says, pulling on her husband's arm. “I beg of you.”

“Daughter, I'm ordering you to do what I say,” he says, trying for an authority that sounds like a pale imitation of the other village patriarchs who yell and berate and hit.

“But why, Táta?” Pavla says. Has she been wrong her whole life? Do her parents wish she had never been born? Are they going to kill her?

“Take off your clothes!”

Too shocked to protest or even cry, she pulls her dress over her head. When her mother takes it from her, Pavla grabs onto her hand and neither will let go of the other until Václav gently pries them apart.

“Don't resist, my darling girl,” he says as a shovelful of dirt rains down on her shoulders.

“Táta, please! I'll hide. I won't show myself anymore. I won't bring shame on you and Mama. Please stop. I don't want to die!”

—

D
R
. S
METANKA
'
S
PR
ESCRIPTION
,
Pavla slowly comes to understand as the dirt reaches her ankles and then her knees and then her chest, is that she and the narrow pipe are to be buried up to her neck. Then, over the hours that she will be so interred, Václav and Agáta will pour hot oil down the pipe. The oil that emerges through the perforations will slowly seep around her body and, in combination with the moist earth, cause her skin to become elastic.

“Like toffee,” her father says, his mouth struggling to form itself into a smile. “You love toffee.”

The sensation of the warm oil reaching her skin is not unpleasant at first. In fact, it is a relief from the clamminess that seeps into her bones. And the infusion of heat seems to put a stop to the nipping chiggers and crawlies that search her body's every fold and pocket for warmth and nutrition.

“A dumpling, my darling?” Agáta says. She sits on a stool next to the hole. She gives Pavla water when she is thirsty and food when she is hungry. She sings and tells stories and she holds up old schoolbooks so that Pavla can read, turning the page when Pavla indicates she is ready.

“If you don't eat your meal,” Agáta says, when Pavla refuses the food, “you can't have dessert.” As if they are sitting at supper
after an uneventful day. As if mothers all over the village routinely plant their children in the ground to make them grow. But Pavla is too exhausted and confused by what is happening to protest. She wonders if her mother has gone mad and crossed over into the world of her imagination, and whether Pavla has not simply become a character in a story where goblins steal children and grotesque crones turn into beautiful princesses, stories her mother tells herself while she stares out the window of the cottage, no longer certain of the contours of her life.

When the neighbors get wind of what is going on in the Janáček yard, they arrive in numbers. Pavla waits for her old schoolmates to revert to behaviors they exhibited before she won their trust and respect, for the boys to water her with their pee as if she were a garden flower, for the girls to hold hands and sing that infernal rhyme and whack her with a broom. Instead, they stand before the hole silent and humbled, as if they are just now comprehending some essential truth about their lives. Seeing her makes them vulnerable to the real and troubling profundity of the very questions that made them once so merciless, when they thought she was not a person at all but an insect to step on or a chicken to behead. They are all of them nothing more than tubers. They have been planted by their parents, their fathers' seeds in their mothers' bellies, in order that they grow and prove useful, and when their usefulness comes to an end, they will be discarded. They are struck through with that queer feeling they experience as a shiver in the bones on those rare occasions when the moon passes over the sun and day and night switch places, or
when they receive an unexpected look of love from a father: they realize how brief and illusory is their happiness.

“Does it hurt?” her old schoolyard nemesis Gita Blažek whispers, unsure if she should venture words in this sacred space of revelation.

“It stings a little,” Pavla admits.

“Do you want some chewing gum?” Gita's older brother, Radek, asks.

“Yes, please.”

Radek removes the piece he was working. Some of the others reach into their mouths and contribute. Gum is a rare and expensive treat, and Pavla is moved by the sacrifice. As her teeth close down on the rubbery clot, it emits the taste of masticated potatoes and sweet tea, and the faintest trace of dejection.

Hours later, after the sun has lowered and her friends have gone home to do their evening chores or have sneaked behind barns to kiss and touch, or to do more than that, as is the case with Petr of the mapped genitals and Gita, who will end up with a baby before too long, Pavla's skin begins to burn. The next time Václav and Agáta administer a round of treatment, the oil, once as comforting as the infusion of boiled water into a tepid bath, touches raw skin. Pavla shrieks for Agáta, who in turn screams at Václav, who tries to be forceful, telling each of them not to cry. But he is weeping, too. Pavla begs and pleads, and he cries out for her forgiveness, and the three of them compose a trio of wails so furious that the neighborhood dogs yowl in response.

And then suddenly, with no warning, the pain seems to slice right through her bones so that not only is her skin aflame but her insides feel as if they have been struck by lightning. She cannot cry. She cannot speak. She cannot even think beyond the suffering. Her mind recalculates and, determining pain to be its new equilibrium, adjusts itself accordingly, shutting down all her other faculties in order not to disrupt the sensation in any way.

Then something astonishing happens: the pain becomes so total, so obliterating, that anything corporeal and sensate buries itself deeply in her center and she perceives it as virtually nonexistent. She feels like nothing so much as . . . well, her schoolmates were right all along—she feels like nothing.

—

N
IGHT
FALLS
and with it the temperature. Agáta adjusts a woolen hat on Pavla's head and ties a scarf loosely around her neck. She tries to get her daughter to speak or even hum along to her favorite lullaby, but Pavla can't make a sound. All she can do is stare out into the night sky. Once, she would have said that night was simply black. But now she knows differently about color and pain and delusion. Russet red, indigo blue, brown, ocher. She chants this litany to herself over and over, building up a wall of words that protects her from the sound of her mother's voice, the feel of the chill on the tips of her ears and nose, the smell of chimney smoke carried on the wind. She needs to block out any intrusion that threatens to remind her of her being.

Agáta kisses her daughter and returns to the house. Václav, wrapped in a comforter, settles down to sleep beside the hole. “I'm here, my Pavlicka,” he murmurs groggily until his words are replaced by his light snores.

He is here. But where is she?

She is with her mother at the flower stall on market day. Agáta is frustrated with her because she has not chosen which flowers to buy. But the roses look sickly and the edges of the cerise petals are already brown. Agáta takes Pavla by the elbow and attempts to pull her from the stall. Go pick your flowers in a field, she says. In desperation Pavla points to a giant linden tree that, oddly, grows in a pot. She wants that tree, she tells her mother. Agáta says she is being ridiculous. A tree is too expensive and there is no way they can carry it home, and why do they have to spend money on a tree when trees grow everywhere and cost nothing to look at? But the flower seller tells Agáta that she will give her the tree as a gift and that her husband will deliver it. Later, when the man pulls up to the house in his wagon, Pavla sees that the branches of the tree have been cut away so that all that is left is a spindly trunk. Plant it in the sun and in a year it will grow back, the man instructs. But Agáta objects. Why did you cut off the branches of our tree? she demands. Because, the man says, I heard a knocking sound coming from the coffin and I had to cut down the tree in order to find out if your daughter was really dead. And then, irritated, Agáta says to Pavla, Are you dead? Are you really dead? And Pavla cries: I'm not dead but
I'm so lonely!

—

I
T
IS
DAWN
and Václav is frantic, even praying to a God he doesn't care for as he shovels earth from around her. Agáta is on her knees, clawing the dirt like a dog, crying, “Are you dead, my Pavla? Is she dead?” Václav throws down the shovel and pulls his daughter from the hole then carries her to his wagon. She faints during the ride. When she wakes, she is lying on Dr. Smetanka's examining table, except it isn't the same table she was on before. This table is rough-hewn and the edges are raw. She can already feel splinters sliding underneath her skin. But she doesn't mind the smell, which is sweet like wet leaves or fresh-cut firewood. Also, and this is the strangest thing of all, a crank is affixed to one side. She is so bewildered by everything that has happened and is happening that it takes her a few extra moments to realize that her ankles are pinned down by straps and that the doctor's assistant is in the process of lifting her arms over her head and fitting her wrists into another set of immobilizing leathers. She is naked beneath a sheet, and when the material shifts even the smallest bit, she feels as if her skin is being ripped off.

She gasps. “Mama?” But she doesn't say it because she can't make her voice work.

Once she is secured to the doctor's satisfaction, the assistant comes around to the side of the table. She tries to catch his gaze, to reaffirm their connection, but he will not look at her.

“Begin,” the doctor says. The assistant turns the crank, and Pavla feels a space open up underneath her. The table seems to be splitting in two. As she is pulled northward and southward,
what begins as a tug becomes a pull, and then the pressure in her armpits and around her hips and groin becomes unbearable. She has to make it stop. She forces a sound out of her, but the noise she makes is nothing like her voice. It is low and raw, more animal than girl. The assistant stops. He looks at her for the first time that day. His beautiful eyes are filled with terror.

“Danilo! Keep going!” the doctor orders.

Danilo. She tries to say the name, to make her appeal, but she can't.

“I don't think—” Danilo says.

“Who is the doctor here?”

As the space between the two halves of the table widens, it feels like her arms and legs are being ripped out of their sockets. And as her body stretches, so, too, her mind undergoes an expansion. Pavla is on the table being pulled in opposite directions while another Pavla stands next to Danilo, watching as he slowly turns the crank. The distance between her two selves feels immeasurable—it could be only a couple of meters or it could be of a scale larger by hundreds. Or perhaps the measurements she uses on her father's maps are insufficient and the distance must be calculated in days or even years. In fact, she is not certain that there is distance, because she is no longer confident that she is in a place with the sort of assurance she normally feels, when she can sense the boundaries of her crib, her home, the walk to town, even the distance between her village and the ones her parents have taken her to in an effort to cure her. There they are, cowering in the corner of the room, horrified by what they are witnessing and yet they do nothing to stop it. She wonders who
they are, these people she loves, who she believed would protect her. As the Pavla on the table feels her muscles stretch to their limit, the Pavla standing next to Danilo feels another kind of dislocation, for she is no longer certain who she is. The world has become suddenly enormous. It not only includes the girl on the table but it also includes the girl who is watching the girl on the table, and if this is true, it must also include another girl watching that girl, and on and on.