Little Nothing (3 page)

B
y the time Pavla is five years old,
Agáta has enfolded her little daughter into her daily routine. The girl's tasks: sweep the floor, clean the chicken coop, carry the fresh eggs to the house in the cradle of her skirt, walking slowly so that the warm and delicate ovals do not jostle against one another and crack. Pavla is handy with a knife and she makes quick work of shelling peas or pitting cherries. Her arms and legs remain short relative to her torso, and when she walks or runs, she moves side to side to propel herself forward, her arms pumping double time. Watching her daughter race after an errant chicken or leap up to try and catch a petal-white butterfly, Agáta feels her chest expand to make room for the brew of awe and heartache that she has come to identify as happiness. Václav has fashioned a step stool so that Pavla can reach the basin in order to scrub dishes, scour her teeth, and wash her face, and he has made her a special riser that sits on the seat of a chair so that, at mealtimes, the
shining sun of her round, fair head surfaces above the lip of the table. When Agáta takes Pavla to the shops, the children stare and often laugh, while their mothers
tsk tsk
at Agáta's misfortune and their relative good luck. “Leave me home,” Pavla begs each time her mother announces the dreaded weekly trip, but Agáta slaps her. “If I have to do it, then you have to do it, too,” she says, not clarifying whether she means enduring the humiliation or selling soap.

—

B
ECAUSE
THE
MAJORITY
of houses in the village date from the previous century and have not been constructed with plumbing in mind, the work of retrofitting them for underground pipes is a job suited for the small. By the time Pavla is seven years old, Václav, recognizing both his daughter's quick wit and her unique suitability, begins to take her on his rounds. It is the girl's job to crawl into caverns beneath houses that hold eons worth of cold. Once she has studied these spaces and judged where the dirt is soft enough for digging and where rock forms too much of an impediment, she emerges, dusts herself off, then draws maps of the underground geographies. Because of the incessant comparisons she has been subjected to and is the subject of—
but she's half as tall as my Jurek and they share the same year and name day! But look: her hand is just a quarter the size of my darling Katarina's!—
Pavla has an innate grasp of scale, and from her crude yet accurate diagrams, Václav can determine where the pipes should be laid. Once he has done the laborious work of digging trenches,
he hitches up his pants, drops to his knees, and wriggles underground. Pavla stands by the mouth of the hole, and when her father calls for the parts he needs, she hands them to him, sometimes using a pulley system that she and Václav devise with a rope and her Easter basket. She quickly learns the vocabulary of his trade—gaskets and bastard neck bolts, couplings and stems—and she is able to predict what her father will need before he asks for it. Václav and Pavla often work for hours without speaking, the only sound passing between them the clank of metal, Václav's muffled grunts, his occasional, frustrated profanities, and her corresponding giggles. Often, a client will comment about what a good man Václav is to keep his poor daughter close and make her feel useful. Although Pavla can see her father's expression harden, he never responds. That his stoicism is read as heroic forbearance helps his business: villagers are eager for a saint to install and sanctify their toilets. When a job is complete, and a client examines his new plumbing, flushing and then watching in astonishment as the water disappears from the toilet bowl, Václav will give Pavla a conspiratorial wink, and she knows they share the secret of her true value.

The crib remains Pavla's sleeping quarters long after other children in the village have moved into proper beds where the sweating or freezing bodies of their four or six or eight brothers and sisters keep them from rolling onto the hard floor. With no siblings and only one proper bed in the house, Pavla would sleep between her beloved parents, but she resists the transition. She is reassured by her crib, whose geometry is so conducive to her size. Confined, she feels that she occupies a comprehensible space
relative to her mattress, the house, the village, the world. She teaches herself to add, subtract, and even multiply using the slats, and by the time she turns eight and finally convinces her fearful and protective mother, and her father, who frets the loss of a good assistant, to let her attend school, she is well ahead of the other children. She is sought after as a seatmate on test days and she obliges by angling her tablet to the advantage of her weak-minded neighbor. That lucky student's result is never questioned because the teacher, Mr. Kublov, no student of science or of much else, believes that Pavla's smallness of stature is mirrored by a corresponding puniness of brain, and that she is the one who cheats her way to a perfect score. She is forced to stand in the corner with her back to the classroom, and Mr. Kublov does not bother to admonish the boys who make a game of pitching nuggets of wadded paper at her back. The girls call her Little Nothing as though there were descending versions of nothingness. These girls want to assure Pavla that she counts for much less than the next-to-nothings their mothers tell them they are by virtue of their laziness when it comes to household chores, or the big nothings their fathers insinuate they are by only speaking directly to their brothers. During outdoor break time, the boys devise a game of chase where Pavla is the chicken and they are the farmers. The winner is the one who wrestles her to the ground and administers the coup de grâce. Then she must flap her arms and dance like a decapitated bird. The girls, led by their ring-leader Gita Blažek, are no less eager—they place her in the middle of their circle while they hold hands and raise their arms in an arch and chant:
The golden gate was opened, unlocked by a
golden key. Whoever is late to enter, will lose their head. Whether it's him or her . . . Whack her with a broom!
They close their arms around her head like a vice, then administer the punishment. Mr. Kublov watches from his post at the top of the schoolhouse stairs where he smokes his cigarettes and steals nips from the flask hidden in his coat pocket, relieved that the children have found a united purpose so that he doesn't have to break up a fight and risk getting punched or scratched in the process.

These humiliations continue until heavy rains swell the river that separates Pavla and her neighbors' homes from the other side of the village, where the school stands. The bridge is demolished. A fallen poplar now stretches from one bank to the other, but the drop is precipitous and the spindly trunk does not fill the children with confidence. One boy tries to cross, but immediately falls off and lands in the muddy bank below. No one wants to make another attempt, but no one wants to return home and be beaten for playing hooky and forced to spend the day mucking out stalls. Pavla runs back to her house as quickly as her short legs will carry her. Agáta is busy stirring lard and lye. The steam from the boiling pot clouds the cottage's window, and she doesn't notice when her daughter slips into Václav's toolshed and gathers a mallet, a rope, and a set of pulleys. Once back at the river, she hammers one of the pulleys to a standing tree and feeds the rope through it. She puts the remaining tools into her school satchel and tightens the strap across her back. Holding the ends of the rope in one hand, she hoists herself onto the fallen tree. A wind created by the high and swift current makes balancing difficult, but her center of gravity is low enough to stabilize her and her
small feet find purchase on the narrow trunk. She envisions the makeshift bridge as just another subterranean corridor below the houses where she and her father work, a tight, enclosed space that enfolds her, and her imagination sees her safely to the other side. There, she hammers the second pulley into a firm root, feeds the rope through until it is taut, and ties a knot. Gripping one of the two ropes, the others nervously make their way across the trunk while Pavla slowly pulls on the other and guides them forward.

The games of chase-the-chicken stop, and if Pavla is remanded to the corner by Mr. Kublov, the other students leave her alone. They begin to seek her out not only to help with their schoolwork but also for the more important job of sneaking into the cloakroom in order to put a dead mouse in Kublov's coat pocket or smear glue inside his hat. Once the students begin their geography study, aided by a wildly inaccurate roll-up map suspended from the top of the chalkboard that shows their tiny country, which is routinely tossed back and forth between sovereign empires as a consolation prize for greater losses, to be the continent's largest territory, Pavla's precise and wholly proportional mapmaking skills are discovered. The children enlist her to draw a detailed schematic of the male genitalia on a large sheet of paper. Selflessly, Petr Matejcek offers himself as a model. During the following day's recess, he and Pavla hide behind the outhouse that is still in use because the mayor does not consider the school, or the children, or education in general worthy of the expense of Václav's services. Without ceremony, Petr drops his
trousers. She has never seen a penis before. It looks like a pale and very narrow and really quite useless section of pipe.

“It moves if you kiss it,” Petr says.

“By itself?”

“Try it.”

Pavla leans forward and puts her lips to skin that is as soft as the belly of a newborn pig and smells just as musky and tantalizingly complex. When she leans back, she watches in wonder as Petr's penis reddens and swells. For the first time, she witnesses something she has never thought possible—that a small, runty thing can magically transform.

“I stick it in things,” Petr says, touching himself tenderly.

It makes perfect sense to Pavla, who thinks of washers and fittings.

“You better draw it before it shrinks,” he says.

The following day, when Kublov yanks the string and unfurls the map, there is Petr, or at least the truly marvelous part of him, drawn with a hand so deft that were this a lesson in anatomy, the children would know exactly the location of the dorsal vein and they would be able to count the folds of the scrotal sac. The ensuing geography lesson is a huge success. Petr is quite pleased, and even though the children agreed to protect his anonymity, he cannot help but boast of his contribution. He is suspended from school for a month. Pavla and the others lean over their desks, pants and stockings lowered and dresses hiked, their naked bottoms pink and proud, Pavla's no less for being lower to the ground, and wait for the stinging crack of Kublov's walking stick.

They still call her Little Nothing, but the name is now a sign of inclusion, no more incendiary than Toes, which is what they call Tabor Svoboda on account of his ability to write with his feet. These nicknames mark them as a group separate from parents and teachers and Father Matyáš, whose aim it is to separate children from their delights. Pavla revels in her name because she knows that if nothing is little, then it must be something indeed.

D
ream a little dream, oh dream it
. When you wake up, trust the dream, that I love you, that I'm going to give you my heart.”

Older now, Agáta's voice trembles up and down the scale, barely hanging onto one note before sliding off. Pavla is ten years old and although she is nearly too long for her crib she still does not want to give it up. Her parents stand over her as they do each night, staring at the inexplicable wonder of their clever and delightful and wholly beloved daughter as she sleeps. But now, although her eyes are closed and she breathes evenly, she is awake.

“There is something odd about her,” Václav whispers.

“Are you an idiot?” Agáta whispers back. “She's a dwarf.”

“No,” he muses. “It's something else, something more strange . . .”

Their faces come even closer so that Pavla can feel their hot breath on her cheeks and smell the night's dinner of onions and chicken feet mingled with tooth rot.

“Could it be that . . . could it be . . . ?” Václav says.

“Spit it out, husband!” Agáta says too loudly for the sleeping child were she sleeping.

“Is she . . . pretty?” Václav asks tentatively.

Agáta blows out her cheeks in disbelief. But then she leans back to take in a wider view. “Huh,” she says.

—

W
HEN
MOST
PEOPLE
hear of a dwarf, they imagine court jesters or circus clowns—little, disproportionate people whose physical development seems to have been conceived exclusively for entertainment purposes. A torso of scaled-down adult proportion appended to stubby legs and arms that must adapt to the peculiar physics of their job produces a knee-slapping guffaw if you are watching such a clown try to outpace a galloping horse in a circus ring. A monarch might watch a dwarf duo enact a famous drama of doomed love for the same reason he might order his court architect to construct a miniature version of his palace to be displayed in the conservatory. There is something enticing and discomfiting about viewing one's life in perfect miniature. We are, quite literally, brought down to size. A dwarf, in short, is made for human comedy, not beauty. But Václav is right. As the childish plumpness falls away from Pavla's maturing face, an unmistakable loveliness reveals itself. Her eyes are the deep blue-gray of winter dusk, and her pale lashes are as luxuriant as feathers. The planes of her high cheekbones angle
sharply and the small dips where those bones give way to eye sockets create secret, dark spaces that shadow a mysterious gaze. Her hair, however, is her true glory. To call it a color is to misname something that is better understood as the absence of color, as a trick of light. The flaxen locks flow like batter from the mixing bowl. Agáta, whose coarse hair is now fully silver and is hidden morning and night under a maroon head scarf, spends hours playing with Pavla's mane, lacing her fingers through its whorls, weaving it into braids or gathering it on top of the girl's head so that fern-like tendrils cascade down the sides of her face and her neck.

“My hair was once as lovely as yours,” she tells Pavla as she stares into the wardrobe mirror past the girl's shoulder, past herself, deep into the forward and backward depths of the glass. “There once was a girl with long, golden tresses who lived in a tower,” she begins, but she does not continue because she knows that Pavla will not be able to profit from this treasure and that there will be no prince brave enough to climb the ladder of her profuse femininity and rescue her from her fate.

The villagers take note of this new development. When mother and daughter run errands, the women stop to inspect the girl whose sudden beauty agitates them. They cannot make sense of the pitiful body and the enviable face.

“Such hair!” they exclaim.

“Eyes the color of . . . what color would you call that?”

“And the nose. It is so . . . so . . .”

“From the neck up, she looks just like . . . just like . . .”

Pavla is a sentence they cannot finish, an equation they cannot solve, and their desire to figure her out obviates any privacy she might otherwise hope for. Where once she was the local shame, now she is a good luck charm. If she waits outside the butcher's while her mother argues prices with pock-cheeked Orlik, whose apron is a perpetually stained canvas of the day's murders, women gather around. They touch her head, kiss her hand, and exclaim over her small perfection. If her hair is newly washed and combed and particularly fine in its luster, they will grab at it the way they do when they want to test the authenticity of one of the silk scarves that Mischa Bobek brings to town once a month, his cart resplendent with jewel-toned garments he claims come from a village in a hidden valley of a distant mountain range in a country everyone pretends to have heard of.
Is she real?
they shriek when they cannot separate the girl from her magnificent gift.

In the evenings after such a day, Agáta brushes out Pavla's tangles, trying, with each downward stroke, to erase the residue of those groping, avaricious fingers.

“Am I real, Mama?” Pavla asks, her head jerking back with her mother's pitiless yet adoring ministrations.

“What are you talking about?”

“What they say at the market. And at school.”

“What do they say at school?”

“They call me Little Nothing.”

Agáta lowers her head until her lips tickle Pavla's earlobe. “When you were born, I pictured a flower, and that flower became you. You are everything to me,” she whispers. The slosh
and steady rhythm of her breath reminds Pavla—of what, she is not sure. But to be reminded does not always have an object, it is simply a suffusion, and she feels happy, away from the villagers, in the home of her parents, where she has always felt, and will forever be, safe.

“There once was a girl,” Agáta whispers dreamily one night as she rubs lanolin into her daughter's scalp. Pavla is fourteen now and she has just been displayed for the admiration of the district magistrate who makes an appearance in the village once a year to collect official taxes and unofficial bribes. As if she were a small child, the man bounced Pavla on his knee, although that didn't stop him from squeezing her newly ripening chest. “There once was a girl who—” Agáta stops short because this is the first time she imagines narrating her daughter's future the way she always dreamed she might during the humiliating years when she and Václav could not produce a living child, the way she forbid herself to do once Pavla was born with no future worthy of fantasy. But Pavla's new if not actual stature as the town attraction has made her mother dare to hope. She continues: “There once was a girl named Pavla who was so beautiful that when a prince rode through the village and saw her, he promised to marry her and take her to live in a castle where she would have all that she could ever want or need.”

Pavla pulls away. “But I don't want to go anywhere,” she says. She cannot imagine her life outside the village, away from her parents. Her schooling is finished, and she is happy that once again she can help Václav with his work.

“Your father and I, we are old,” Agáta says.

Pavla can't draw a full breath. For the first time, she realizes that this is true, that her parents' skin is wrinkled and spotted, that their teeth are falling out, that they groan when they sit and when they stand and complain of exhaustion upon waking each morning, and that one day, a day that will come sooner than the one day other children think of when they have these same thoughts, Agáta and Václav will die and she will be alone. She feels like she has been thrown into the air and for the brief moment she is aloft, the earth has turned so that when she comes down, she recognizes nothing.

That night, she lies in her crib listening to the terrible duet of Agáta's climbing hysteria and Václav's low, percussive interjections as they argue outside the cottage door. Agáta says it is no life for a girl to crawl in shit, and Václav argues that if shit is good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for his daughter.
“But who will maaarry her? How will she liiive?”
Agáta wails. And then, there is a silence that is so familiar that Pavla begins to shake. Where has she heard such silence before? And how does she know that it portends great change?