Little Nothing (6 page)

“Stop it! Stop it!” she hears, although she does not know who is speaking, if it is Danilo, her father, or her mother. Or herself. The words spread out around her, invade her ears, her mouth until it seems as if the sound becomes her. And then the noise is so thick in her ears that she can't even hear it. All that is left is silence.

C
ome see the Wolf Girl!” Danilo shouts.
The day is wet and cold. What few carnival patrons there are wander slowly from one soggy and sagging exhibition tent to another, their shoulders hunched against the steady rain. “The body of a girl, the head of a wolf! Only two koruny!”

Smetanka originally displayed Pavla as the Were-Woman, thinking that the inferred combination of two terrifying beings, a werewolf and a sexually potent female, would make his show irresistible. But one day, when Danilo mistakenly (or not—Smetanka has eyes; he is no fool) announced the attraction as the Wolf Girl, the crowd doubled. It turns out there is nothing remarkable in people's minds about the idea of a grown woman with hair on her face, whereas a young girl trapped in the bloom of her youth by an inescapable hideousness summons up the simultaneous feelings of horror and fascination that are the necessary ingredients of a successful freak attraction. It doesn't hurt
that, along with her awful yet stunning transformation, Pavla's body has filled out in the highly appealing manner of a virgin on the cusp. Her bust is of a pleasing roundness, her narrow waist flares gracefully at the hips, and even though her face has lost its former beauty (and Smetanka had noticed what a pretty little dwarf she was when the old couple brought her in) and she now looks out at the world through those eerie, yellow eyes, and though the palest russet down covers her cheeks and the shape of her face is dominated by an elongated nose that could reasonably be likened to a snout, she carries her now tall body with the candid informality of a girl who has not yet been split in two by a man. Smetanka has considered changing this condition on more than one cold and drunken night in the godforsaken caravan where the three of them live like dirty gypsies, but he knows the way an ill-used woman carries her resentment. It hardens her face and thickens her middle and makes her fearful and hesitant and then unpredictably violent, and he has to protect his investment.

Perhaps due to the weather or because the act is not as popular as others on offer—the human skeleton, the three-titted woman, the giant with a penis the size of an elephant's, the great regurgitator—the crowds are sparse. Once the tent is half filled and Smetanka judges the anticipation to be at its peak but not quite beyond it, when he knows that frustrated waiting will erupt into brawls and an unprofitable evening, he pushes Pavla onto the small wooden platform that serves as the stage. She wears a white gown that grabs at her waist and bust, and which she complains, quite correctly, is translucent when she is not
covering her body, head, and face with the red cape, as she does at the beginning of every show. Following Smetanka's directions, and they had to rehearse this many times—the girl is no actress—she begins to pantomime the part of a young maiden out for a leisurely stroll. She sashays just as he has told her to, exaggerating the swing of her hips and making sure to part the cape occasionally so that the onlookers can glimpse her figure beneath the gossamer material of her dress. She crouches down to pluck an imaginary rose and then stands and admires it. The crowd begins to grow restless. “We're not here to see Sněhurka and her seven fucking dwarves,” a man calls out, demanding his money back. Now it is time for Danilo to take the stage. Wearing stockings and a pair of threadbare breeches and holding a rusty sword by his side, he is the prince. He mimes being surprised then captivated by the young woman with the hidden face. As instructed, Danilo manipulates the sword so that its tip begins to rise. Hoots. Shrill whistles. Off to the side of the stage, Smetanka smiles to himself; the crowd is in his hands.

“Who is this young woman?” Danilo says.

Your mother!
Someone invariably shouts.
Your sister!

“She is the most mysterious lady I have ever seen. I must have her!” Danilo exclaims. “Yon maiden, show me your countenance!”

“I cannot do what you ask, kind sir,” she says.

“If you reveal yourself, I will marry you and take you to live with me in my castle and you shall have everything you have ever dreamed of,” Danilo says.

Smetanka bobs his head as Danilo makes the sword bounce up and down furiously to the predictable delight of the audience.

“Alas, I am cursed to wander this earth without ever showing my face,” Pavla says.

She tells her story: She was born the most beautiful girl in all the land. When rumor of her glory spread, princes the world over offered all their wealth to have her. But at her birth, an old witch put a curse on her saying that if she were ever to expose her beauty, she would lose it.

“You mean to tell me that no man has ever seen your eyes? That no man has ever kissed your lips?” Danilo says.

The men in the audience grow impatient:
Who needs to see the face? Let her show you the lips that count!
But Smetanka is not worried. This small interlude of romance is dedicated to the women who predictably swoon and shush their rude spouses and who, Smetanka knows from months of traveling from one town to the next with this low-rent carnival, will be the ones to insist on a second viewing. These are women who spend their days gutting fish and wiping baby asses and whose only pleasure comes from the belief that all that separates them from their deliverance is a glance from a man of quality.

“If I cannot see you then at least do me the honor of dancing with me,” Danilo says.

Smetanka winds up an old, beat-up music box and Pavla and Danilo perform the dance he has choreographed for them—two steps to the left, two to the right, break apart, turn a circle, come together again. As instructed, Danilo's hand slides down her backside. She lets out a low rumble of warning. Danilo takes
her noise as an expression of passion and, turning to the audience, winks broadly. And then the climax: Danilo, overcome by love, must gaze upon the object of his obsession. With one swift movement he tears off her cape to reveal not a beauty but a face so unexpected and terrible that he backs up in horror.

The audience gasps. Sometimes, and this is good for business, a woman will faint. Danilo, affecting disgust, flees the stage leaving Pavla alone. In the wings, Smetanka, the exacting maestro, mimes her gestures, as onstage Pavla curtsies like a girl and then growls like a wolf. She watches the expressions before her turn from surprise to nervous hilarity to a reckless abandonment of manners as both men and women shout insults and throw stones and fistfuls of dirt at her. As always happens, someone complains loudly that what they are seeing is not real, that the girl is merely wearing a disguise, and that they have all been tricked. But a man—and this happens every time because Smetanka pays someone in the audience beforehand—steps onto the stage and, putting his hands around Pavla's neck, begins to yank on her head in order to unmask her and reveal the face of a normal girl underneath. Pavla shrieks, sometimes with genuine fright, depending on the force or drunkenness of the shill. Now it is Smetanka's turn to take the stage dressed in a tattered waistcoat and half-stoved-in top hat like the third-rate impresario he is.

“Sir,” he shouts over the noise of the audience. “Is she real?”

“She is real!” the man declares.

“There you have it, ladies and gentlemen,” Smetanka says. “Behold, the Wolf Girl!”

—

“I'
M
OFF
TO
SEE
TO
SOME
BUSINESS
,”
Smetanka announces. The final show of the evening is over. He has tallied the paltry sales, given Pavla and Danilo a few coins each, and left them to clean up the tent. The two are well aware that this “business” has to do with Civan Farkas, the Fattest Man in the World, who brews a putrid but effective trash-can rum, and some cheap and available ladies. When Smetanka finally returns to the caravan, he will either be rageful or weepy or both.

Pavla is exhausted. It is not that her duties are so difficult or that it takes any effort to remember her part. But in five months she has not gotten used to the dangerous energy of the crowd. During her dwarfish childhood when she was pitied and teased, occasionally accused of being the cause of a spate of fever or a poor crop yield, she never felt what she does now each night: that she is one step away from being murdered. She is, after all, the synthesis of two things men have a need to routinely destroy: animals and women.

Pavla and Danilo wander the tent, picking up spent cigarettes and broken bottles.

“It took Smetanka too long to get that man off me,” she says, rubbing her neck. Tonight's designated attacker was zealous, and she can hardly turn her head to the right.

It pains Danilo, this charade of violence, the risk to Pavla, and his inability to protect her. Smetanka is surprisingly strong and he prevents Danilo from going back onto the stage to rescue her from whatever brute he's paid. The crowd has to reach a level of frenzy
that will ensure future audiences. He picks up an orphaned glove, tosses it onto the pile of collected trash. “We could refuse to do that part,” he says, but he knows his words are not backed up by any will. It shames him that it is not Smetanka's strength that holds him back but the threat of being fired. Pavla turns to face him. Although the range of her expressions has diminished since her change, she manages to convey what she means, which is that there is nothing either of them can do to alter the situation.

“I know,” Danilo says. He looks away. He is always looking away even though this is exactly the opposite of what he wants to do, which is to stare into her strange and beautiful amber eyes, to trace their outlines, which angle down toward her nose, to study the variegated hues of the hair that dusts her narrow face. The wolfish features are unmistakable and they would be horrible were it not that he can sometimes, when she looks at him a certain way, or cocks her head just so, see the girl he met at Smetanka's office so many months ago, the one whose face was so remarkable that he could think of nothing to say to her other than to compare her to ponies. Her eyes were blue then but no less unnerving, their color unfathomably deep. She was small and oddly formed, and yet her creamy skin, her sumptuous curls, and that gaze which seemed guileless and knowing at the same time—she'd moved him more than any girl he'd ever seen.

But he knows that if he looked at her now the way he dreams of, taking her in fully, letting her see his desire for her, she would be insulted. She is too used to being stared at, to seeing the curious, then leering, then repulsed expressions on the faces of strangers. How could he convey to her that his interest is any different?

And is it? Would he really take her in his arms? Would he lay his cheek next to hers, feel the bristles there, run his hand over her long nose and not be sickened? Would he brush her mouth with his lips?

She picks up a pair of lady's underwear that has, inexplicably, been left on the ground. She twirls it around on her finger and laughs before letting it sail and land on top of the trash. Their cleaning duties done, she wraps herself in a ragged shawl. “You should leave,” she says. “Get away from him. I don't know why you don't.”

Danilo tries to hide his disappointment. They have had this discussion many times before. Of course she has no option but to stay with Smetanka. Who else would employ her? How would she live? Václav's plumbing business folded once the village learned what he and his wife had done to their daughter. Her parents are living off money from the deal they struck with Smetanka whereby he sends them a percentage of her earnings each month. Her work is all that is keeping them alive. But Danilo is another story.

“I won't leave you alone with him,” he says.

“Your guilt doesn't do me any good,” she says.

The truth of this stabs him. How could she ever care for him? It was he who built the table, who turned the crank. It was he who didn't have the nerve to stand up to his employer then just as he doesn't now.

He started to work for Smetanka when he was seventeen and his twin brother fell ill with a fever that wouldn't abate. His family did not have the money for the doctor's care and so offered
their healthy son as payment. Despite Smetanka's prescriptions, the twin did not survive. After a year of unpaid service to the doctor, Danilo settled the family's debt. But when he returned home, he found that his parents no longer wanted him there. Although the birth of twins had been considered a sign of great luck, the boy's death signaled that the family's good fortune had turned and that they were cursed. Danilo, as the living representation of their failure, made it impossible for his father, a cobbler, to attract new business, and even loyal customers began to take their worn-down shoes elsewhere. Where once every self-respecting family wanted a newborn to wear a pair of Novák soft leather booties at first communion, or a daughter to be shod in a pair of Novák satin wedding slippers on her special day, now to ask the shoemaker to punch an extra hole in a belt to accommodate an expanding waist was to court bad fortune. Danilo was a torture for his grieving mother. When he arrived home from Smetanka's after that first indentured year, she screamed as if she were seeing a ghost, and it was hours before her husband could calm her enough to convince her that Danilo was not her beloved dead son come back to haunt her. But even then, she would not look at him. With no family business for Danilo to inherit, no mother willing to cook for him and give him a bed to sleep in, and no one else in town offering to take him on as an apprentice, all that was left for Danilo was to return to the employ of the doctor at unfavorable terms: in exchange for his work, he would be allowed to sleep in the storage closet and receive one and a half meals a day.

Danilo had little formal learning, but it did not take him
long to realize that the doctor had not much more in the way of medical education. Although there were fat and important-looking texts in the office, they were mostly used to block the cold wind that snaked under the window sash during winter or to crush mice. The storeroom where Danilo spread his blanket each evening was a nightmare bower whose shelves were lined with medical curiosities the doctor had collected over the years from traveling vendors who traded in the macabre. One jar was filled with a baby's foot that had a single toe as long as the sole of the foot itself. In another dangled the translucent hair of an African albino. Suspended in a viscous liquid was, according to Smetanka, a still-beating heart. Although Danilo was reasonably certain a heart could not function outside a body, there were times, late at night, lying awake on his blanket in the airless cubicle, when he could swear that he heard the measured thump of that organ. He would weep, thinking of his brother whose death left him feeling as if he were trapped in a dream of being lost.