Little Nothing (2 page)

Left mostly to her own devices, which, at four months, are considerably few, Pavla lies in the wooden crib Václav bartered from one of his neighbors in exchange for a cracked commode. The slats create the frame through which Pavla watches Agáta excavate the dark eyes of potatoes with a bent-knuckled knife, yank stringy, gray tendons from chicken legs, wring out newly washed laundry, throttling wet sheets and Václav's undershirts in her muscular hands, and make the soap that she sells at the
market. Agáta heats the rendered cooking fat then mixes it with lye that she makes using ashes from the hearth. The blue glass bottle in which she stores the poison catches the sunlight and Pavla's attention so that the very first object she attempts to grasp is this ephemeral cobalt sparkle. Then Agáta stirs and stirs and stirs, stripping off her sweater, then her apron, then her shirt, then her skirt, until she is down to her underclothes. Her skin drips with sweat, her arms and breasts and stomach shake with her exertions. Of course, Pavla knows nothing of rendered fat or lye or the laborious process of making soap, or that her mother drops chamomile flowers or rose petals into her molds because with this small, inexpensive effort, her soaps can fetch a few more coins at the market. But what she does understand is that her mother is a digger, yanker, wringer, twister, and an aggressive and sometimes angry stirrer, and so is somewhat relieved to be left alone. Pavla also observes her mother in the rare moments when the potatoes are boiling and the laundry is hung and there is no fault in the world of her home that she must immediately attack and remedy. Then Agáta will stand next to the open window without moving, barely breathing, as if the wind that charges her hours and days has unexpectedly died down and she has been left stranded in the incomprehensible sea of her life, suddenly aware that she has no purpose except to avoid the one that is staring at her though the bars of the crib. To counter her creeping terror, Agáta tells stories. She speaks not to her audience but to herself, the sound and memory of the old fairy tales as soothing as the bit of worn, soft chamois cloth she carried in her pocket when she was a girl and that she rubbed
between her thumb and forefinger when her mother first told her these same stories, the bit of cloth she kept hidden for so many years in a small wooden box, intending to pass down the comfort to her own child. But now, this sentiment seems foolish. Maybe it is even the cause of her heartbreak, because everyone knows it is bad luck to second-guess fate.

In the Land of Pranksters there reigned a king . . . There once lived a poor, penniless man, truly a pauper . . . A good many years back it must be since the goblin used to dwell on Crow Mountain . . .
and the story she tells again and again, the one that little Pavla, even though she cannot yet understand it, will remember all her life:

Once there was an old grandfather who went to work in his field. When he got there, he saw that an enormous turnip was growing there. He pulled and pulled, but he could not yank the turnip out of the ground, so he called his old wife. The man held onto the turnip and his wife held onto him and they pulled and pulled, but still, they could not pull the turnip from the ground. So they called their little granddaughter. The grandpa held onto the turnip and the grandma held onto the grandpa and the granddaughter held onto the grandma and they pulled, but still no luck. And so they called their dog. And the dog held onto the granddaughter and the granddaughter held onto the grandmother and the grandmother held onto the grandfather, who pulled the turnip, but still nothing. And so they called their kitty, who got in the back of the line and pulled the dog, but the turnip wouldn't budge. Suddenly, they heard a little voice coming from a hole in the ground. It was the voice of a mouse. The grandfather said, “Oh, little mouse, you do not have the strength to help us,” but the grandmother said, “Let her help us if she wants to.” So the grandfather held
onto the turnip and the grandmother held onto the grandfather and the granddaughter held onto the grandmother and the dog held onto the granddaughter and the kitty held onto the dog and the mouse held onto the kitty and they pulled and pulled and pulled and . . . the turnip came out of the ground! And the grandmother said to the grandfather, “Sometimes the littlest one can be the biggest help.”

Each time Agáta reaches the end of the story, she dismisses the stupidity of the moral. “What a ridiculous bunch,” she might mutter, or, “Anyway, everyone knows that a giant turnip would be as tough as an old shoe.”

As the hours pass and the light in the room softens and the corners recede into shadows, and as she listens to the low drone of her mother's recitation, Pavla sees both less and more, for Agáta in shadow is somehow the purer distillation of her character: dark, wary, certain that this world she lives in is not as real as the one she visits in her tales where mountain kings and speaking rams are more comprehensible to her than the day's weather or the queer human she has made.

—

“O
H
HO
,
MY
WIFE
!”

It is evening and twilight gives up its fight, and the night sky settles over the village. Agáta shakes herself out of her reverie and becomes all energy and spin, engaging importantly with whatever is at arm's length—a sock that needs darning, a soup that requires spicing, even, because she can no longer ignore the sweet stink of baby shit, her daughter. The door of the cottage opens
and a dark shape fills it: Pavla's father is home. The tools of his trade hang off Václav's thick leather belt and he jangles when he moves. This inadvertent music provokes his daughter, who waggles her little arms. When Václav notices this reaction, he shakes his hips again, and to his surprise, his daughter's eyes grow wide and her mouth forms its first, wobbly smile. This is the opening conversation of Pavla's life and she does not want it to end so she manifests a noise that sounds like the bleating of a goat.

“Don't upset her,” Agáta warns, not wanting to have her maternal skills put to the test.

“She's not upset. She's laughing!” Václav says, taking off his tool belt and dangling it over the crib. Pavla makes her sound again and watches as her father's astonishment turns to pleasure, his smile unmasking a mouthful of brown and rotted teeth that emerge from his swollen gums at odd angles like the worn picket fence that surrounds Agáta's garden and fails to keep out the scavenger deer. Pavla will do anything to keep seeing these teeth and so she laughs and waves her arms and feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love. In a few years, she will put Václav's screwdrivers and wrenches and bolts of all different sizes to use, dressing the long tools in bits of cloth to make faceless dolls, and stringing washers on twine to fashion necklaces for her mother. For now, she follows the symphony of her father as he crosses the room and sits on a hard chair and waits for his wife to pull off his high boots whose soles are impacted with sludge. It is Agáta's great shame that the handsome farrier she married so long ago, the boy who rode the horses he shod back and forth along the main street supposedly to try out
his work but really to show off his powerful thighs to the village maidens, saw advantage in turning his skill with iron and his eye for chance to, of all things, indoor plumbing. “Horses will soon be a thing of the past,” he explained to Agáta, the girl who was most impressed by those powerful flanks, as he lay on top of her in their marriage bed, pushing her knees closer to her face to improve his angle of entry. “But everyone shits once a day. Sometimes twice, if they're lucky.”

The work was slow at first. The villagers were used to chamber pots and being able to study their bodies' expulsions for signs of good or ill health, and the notion of what was once inside them disappearing before their eyes made them suspicious. Even Agáta refused the improvement, not fully believing that it was possible for a body to eliminate its waste anywhere but in a boiling-in-summer, freezing-in-winter, always pungent outhouse. Time and again, people would fold their arms and narrow their gazes and ask Václav, “But where does it go, really?” His answer did not satisfy them because even though they talked a good game about heaven and hell to keep their children in line and satisfy that idiot, Father Matyáš, these were realistic people who had a pretty good idea of where they would end up for the rest of time, and who did not fancy the notion of sharing eternity with piles of their neighbor's crap. But eventually the idea caught on. Now, years later, Agáta is the wife of a man who makes a decent living unclogging the drains and pipes of villagers who have finally stopped squatting in the fields or pouring their slops out of windows to fertilize their flowers but who have yet to learn the idiosyncrasies of modern waste disposal. They are forever
putting all manner of objects down their toilets as if to bury their secrets. Love letters from mistresses or the bill for a frivolous hat purchase, fistfuls of hair cut off to approximate some newfangled style advertised in a gazette brought from the city by a peddler, the gazette itself—all these things and more create odiferous backups that warp floorboards and stain rugs. His clients regard plumbing as a sin-exonerating miracle, a daily confession, which is reasonable given the narrow confines of the indoor WCs that are built into the corners of rooms or fashioned from standing wardrobes, and owing to the contemplative and sometimes prayerful minutes spent therein. The villagers have no interest in Václav's explanations about the curved and narrow pipes that render their efforts at obfuscation useless. More than useless, as it turns out, for all it takes for a marriage to crumble is for a husband to be present when the plumber exhumes a clot of bloody towels flushed away because a mother of six has decided a seventh will be the death of her. In fact, Václav turns out to be the opposite of what people assume. He is not a man devoted to the eradication of unmentionable things but one whose very presence brings them to light. When he enters a house, the owners will not look him in the eye, as if he were judge and jury and taxman all at once. He has taken to demanding his fee up front because no man pays another to witnesses his humiliation. But Agáta cannot complain. Her husband provides a living for her and now, she supposes, for the unfortunate issue of her aged womb.

D
uring the first half year of Pavla's life,
except at mealtimes, when she is fed warm goat's milk and vegetables macerated to a soupy pulp, or during diaper changes, she has little contact with her mother who doesn't know what to make of her fractional child. Every seven days, she lifts her baby from the crib, removes whatever oversized garments have been left on the doorstep by pitying neighbors, and washes Pavla in a basin. When her daughter is naked, Agáta will sometimes let her eyes wander over her child, but just as she feels her tears begin to collect, she sets to scrubbing, using not a perfumed soap but one that is as harsh on the skin as gravel. Let silly women spend money on fancy toiletries they think will keep their husbands close. A body needs to be scoured like the inside of a pot. Holding up one arm, then the other in order to get into the creases of bunched-up baby fat, she reduces her daughter to parts and eradicates the implications of the deformed whole. If Václav is home,
he might do his hip-shaking, tool-jiggling dance to entertain Pavla and distract her from her mother's ministrations, but more often than not, he stands next to the basin and tilts his head to the side, studying his baby as if she were another plumbing problem in need of a fix.

—

B
UT
LIKE
A
RAT
or icy wind, love creeps in. When winter comes, and there are no vegetables to pull, and the life of the village turns hushed and isolated, Agáta comes to Pavla's crib more often and lifts her up, even when she has been cleaned and fed and still smells of—yes, lately, she cannot resist—roses.

“Who are you?” Agáta says, holding Pavla so that they are face-to-face. She is finally curious about this strange being who she has brought into the world and whose musical sounds, those triplet thirds that move up and down the scale, and whose beginning words, despite their rubbery incoherence, quicken her heart. If the child could speak she would say, “I am Pavla,” for that is all she knows about herself at this point having not been subject to the fantasies of a besotted mother spinning her baby's extravagant future of whirlwind romance, loyal children, and wealth. During the next months, as the cast-iron lid of sky hovers over the land, and as villagers are less eager to go outside to throw chicken bones where they belong, when the logic of “If I ate this piece of paper/bit of twine/pig's knuckle, it would come out the other end anyway” holds sway against the ice that seeps through the soles of boots and the bitter air that slices cracks into the lips
and hands on a journey to the compost heap, Václav's plumbing business picks up. As soon as he leaves the house each morning, Agáta opens the standing wardrobe, pulls up a chair, and with her daughter on her lap, gazes into the mirror that hangs inside the door. The reflective glass has browned and crackled around the edges so that only in its center does it allow for a true, if fuzzy, reflection. The two study each other. What Pavla sees: a woman whose occasional smile sneaks out only to be snatched back, as if Agáta recognizes her error.

And what does Agáta see?

She tells a story:

“A mother had her baby stolen from his cradle by a wolf, and in his place lay a changeling, a little monster with a great thick head and staring eyes who did nothing but eat and drink. In distress she went to a neighbor and asked her advice. The neighbor told her to take the changeling into the kitchen, lay him on the hearth, and make a fire. Then she should take two eggshells and boil some water in them. That would make the changeling laugh, and as soon as he laughed, it would be all up with him. The woman did everything just as the neighbor said. And when she put the eggshells on the fire to boil, the blockhead sang out:
“I'm as old as the Westerwald but I've never seen anyone try to boil water in an eggshell!”
And he roared with laughter. As soon as he did that, a pack of wolves appeared carrying the rightful child. They set him on the hearth and took the changeling away, and the woman never saw them again.”

When she finishes, Agáta looks at her daughter in the mirror. Certainly she must be a replacement for the child Agáta
expected. But then again, Pavla was taken away to Judita's milking house, and now has returned to take her rightful place in her crib. Agáta tries to ignore a pall of self-doubt. Holding her daughter against her breast, she feels Pavla's tiny heart pulsing against her wing-like backbones. Her daughter relaxes in her arms and grows heavy with sleep, and Agáta feels the pride all mothers feel when they have successfully ushered their children into the land of gentle dreaming. She holds her girl close and, she can't help it, she sings the song her mother sang to her so very long ago:
Good night, my dear, good night. May God himself watch over you. Good night, sleep well. May you dream sweet dreams!

Should she be allowed to invoke God? Wasn't it against God that she took the gypsy's remedies? Wasn't it He who paid her back for her pagan infidelity? Would God now, after all this, place within her the feelings that are stirring her heart? She pictures Father Matyáš and cannot help but see him through Václav's eyes: a man too ignorant for the words he delivers, too sullied to touch the wafer that he places on extended, hopeful tongues, too wracked by drunken tremors to hold the cup steady with his long, bony fingers. The same fingers that he uses to pat the heads of his altar boys and smooth the collars of their frocks even when they don't need adjusting. “No!” she says out loud without intending to, startling the baby. A God that makes that sheep fucker His emissary cannot deny her this feeling that fills her withered breasts and makes her nipples tingle.
Dream a little dream, oh dream it.
She sings in full voice, not caring that she cannot hold a tune or that the neighbors out tending their black
pigs might hear. How many years has she had to listen to them laugh at their children, scream at them, chide them, praise them, wish them well and safe as they troop off to school, off to the fields, off to life?
When you wake up, trust the dream,
that I love you. That I'm going to give you my
heart!