Little Nothing (18 page)

Sunlight pours through the broken walls of the orphans' refectory. The air is filled with dust and floating debris. The room is so quiet and still that for a moment Danilo thinks the children must have been somewhere else at the time of the blast. But then he hears whimpering and realizes they are huddled together in a far corner, barricaded by overturned tables and
chairs. When he comes close, they shrink back in a mass as if he were the embodiment of the terror they just experienced. None of them speaks or even cries loudly. He wonders if they have been told to keep quiet on pain of an even more terrible punishment. The only adult among them, and barely one at that, is a serving girl.

“Are we going to die?” she says, and bursts into loud sobs.

The boy crouches next to a wall. He appears sharp and alert to the possibility of a further attack. Danilo climbs over the furniture and the other children and kneels down beside him. He lifts his hand, and the boy rears back. Danilo turns his palm over. He has no weapon, no pill. “Come with me,” he says.

“But they told us to stay where we are!” the serving girl shrieks. “I'll get into trouble!”

“There's nothing for either of us here,” Danilo says to the boy. “Do you understand? It's time for us to
go.”

N
o matter how kind or solicitous he tries to be,
the boy doesn't trust him. And the more Danilo asks him how he is doing or if he needs to rest, he realizes he sounds no different from the doctors and nurses who pretended to care but were only hoping for an excuse to dose the boy and give themselves one less problem for the day. Or maybe he reminds the boy of those friendly soldiers who probably fed him sweets and said they were taking all the children to safety only to deposit them at an orphanage that turned out to be a madhouse. Maybe the boy doesn't trust Danilo precisely because he is kind.

“What's your name?” he asks, as they walk down a deserted road.

“I don't know,” the boy mumbles.

“You don't know your own name?”

“Fuck you.”

“What did they call you at the asylum?”

“Number twenty-three.”

“I never heard the children being called by numbers,” Danilo says.

“Why were you listening?”

“The windows were open. It was impossible not to hear.”

“They called me nothing,” the boy says.

“I don't believe you.”

“Believe whatever you want. I don't care.”

“You can call me Danilo.”

“I don't have to call you anything.”

“That's true. It's just the two of us.”

“I don't owe you anything.”

“I didn't say you did.”

They walk for a while in silence. They lost sight of the bombed asylum hours earlier, and the peppery scent of ash is only a bare trace in the air. The day is hot, the sky cloudless. Danilo is grateful for the occasional breeze that cools the sweat on his neck and back. When a covey of rooks flies off a tree, it looks like the leaves have sprouted wings. He watches the billowing shape the birds make as they head in one direction and then turn the opposite way. How do they know to do that? What signal do they hear that tells them the right way to go?

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Fifteen.”

Danilo checks his laughter. “You're a bit small for your age.”

“Fuck you.”

“I'd put you at about eight. Maybe nine.”

“I'd put you at about a hundred or a thousand.”

“I feel like I'm a thousand.”

“Are you stupid? No one lives to be a thousand. Why do you keep walking next to me?”

“We're traveling together.”

“I'm not traveling with you.” He trots ahead a few steps, checking behind him to make sure Danilo isn't trying to catch up. Danilo hangs back to give the boy some privacy. There is no risk of losing him here. They have been walking half a day and have not seen a soul. On either side of the narrow road lie potato fields in full flower. Danilo is thirsty and hungry and imagines the boy is, too. The potatoes are a taunt. To eat them, they'd have to build a fire, but the smoke would be a flag of surrender. As it is, he looks back over his shoulder every few minutes, waiting for their inevitable capture. He and the boy walk in single file for a while. The boy's legs are too short to stay ahead without his having to run every so often. His mind seems clear; the explosion took care of that, snapping him out of his medicated dullness in an instant. But he runs sloppily, as if the drug still lingers in his muscles. Finally, he seems to give up and lets Danilo walk by his side.

“What village are you from?” Danilo asks.

“I don't know.”

“What is your family name?”

“I don't know.”

“What was your father's business?”

“His business was shit!”

Danilo feels badly for reminding the boy of his dead parents. “Well, like I said, my name is Danilo.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? It's the name my parents gave me. It's what people call me. It's how anyone knows his name.”

“It's stupid to take someone else's word for it.”

Danilo laughs. “I suppose you're right. I guess that's been my problem all along. I take everyone's word for it.”

“Is that why you were in there?”

“The asylum?” Danilo is about to tell him that taking people at their word is not a proof of lunacy, but then he thinks that perhaps it is. “You're very smart.”

“Smarter than you.”

“I've never been very smart. I've made a lot of stupid mistakes.”

“Like what?”

“Like I lost the girl I loved.”

“Where did you lose her?”

“If I knew where I lost her, I'd know where to find her.”

“Ha, ha,” the boy says drily. “I already know that joke.” Suddenly, he takes off running into the field, leaping over the neat rows and landing in a furrow. He stops, listens, then launches headlong and lands on his belly. When he stands up, he's holding the hairless tail of a vole. He slams the animal against the ground. Once, twice, a third time. He waves his catch over his head in circles, then lets go and cheers as he watches it sail toward the road, where Danilo stands. His aim is perfect. The vole lands right at Danilo's feet. The boy bounds over the plants, making one final, elegant leap onto the road, then snatches up his catch. “You can't have it. It's mine,” he says.

“Why did you do that?” Danilo says, horrified.

“I'm hungry.” He stares at Danilo for a long moment. Then he snaps the vole's neck, rips off the head, and tears into the hide with his teeth. He chews and swallows and wipes the blood from his mouth. Then his face goes white, and he vomits.

Danilo kneels down and cleans the sick off the boy's shoes with dirt and leaves. He wonders how long the boy had to fend for himself before he was brought to the asylum, how many rodents he had to eat to stay alive.

“You have a stupid face,” the boy says, looking down at him. “Your lashes are too curly, like a girl. And you have eyes like a cow.”

“And you have the eyes of . . .” Danilo says, staring into the boy's, which are the palest chestnut color flecked with bits of gold and green. “The eyes of—”

The sound of a motor in the distance distracts them both.

“Hey!” the boy yells. He jumps up and down. He waves his hands over his head. “Over here! Help! Help me. I'm being stolen!”

Danilo clamps a hand over the boy's mouth and holds onto him. The truck appears from behind a scrim of dust, lumbering over the road, its engine stuttering as the gears shift. A plume of exhaust dirties the sky. The boy manages to free himself but before he can run, Danilo pulls him off the side of the road. He pins the boy facedown, and his protests are buried in dirt. The rumble of the truck swells and then subsides and finally disappears. As soon as Danilo climbs off him, the boy jumps up and runs back to the road, chasing the dust left in the truck's wake,
screaming and waving his hands over his head. Finally, winded, he stops and stares down the empty road. His narrow shoulders rise up by his ears, and he starts to shake.

“They wouldn't have helped us,” Danilo says, as he approaches the boy. He tries to touch him, but the boy wheels around and puts up his fists.

“Fuck you! Get away from me. You're one of the crazy ones. They told us to stay away from all of you.”

“I'm not crazy.”

“I saw through the windows. I saw a man hit his head against the wall a hundred times. I counted. His whole face was bloody but he didn't care. And I saw the one who always watched us. I know what he was doing. He showed it to us once. It was big and purple. Once he squirted on us in the courtyard. I saw you, too. You were always looking at me. Maybe you were doing the same thing.” He puts his hand in front of his crotch and mimes rubbing.

“I wasn't doing that.”

“Why were you watching?”

“I don't know.”

“Because you're crazy.”

“I wasn't there because I was crazy. I was there because I killed someone.”

The boy studies Danilo carefully. “You're just trying to scare me,” he says. Suddenly, his eyes grow wide. “You're going to kill me.” He starts to run away. “Help! Help! He's going to kill me!” he calls out to no one but the potatoes and a lark pecking in the dirt.

“What do you think will happen if they find us?” Danilo calls out.

“They'll throw you in jail,” the boy shouts. “That's where killers go. And perverts. Pervert killers.”

“And what will they do with you? They'll take you to a place just like the one you were in. They'll give you drugs to keep you quiet. Is that what you want?”

The boy mumbles something, but the breeze snatches it up.

“I didn't hear you,” Danilo says.

“Fuck you!” he yells.

“So you keep saying.”

—

T
HEY
EAT
RAW
POTA
TOES
that taste terrible and give them bellyaches but at least have the advantage of containing moisture. They fall asleep in a ditch. In his dream, Danilo feels secure and warm. When he wakes up, he realizes that sometime during the night, the boy nestled up against him. Danilo doesn't move, tries not to breathe deeply. But then the boy stirs and is on his feet in seconds.

“Get off me, you sick pervert!” he says.

“Calm down,” Danilo says, picking dirt out of his eyes and slowly getting to his feet.

“If you try anything, I'll kill you.”

“I believe you. And now I have to take a piss.”

“I knew it! You're going to take it out!” the boy says, staring in horror at Danilo's trousers.

“Unless you know another way, then yes, I'm going to take it out.” Danilo walks down the furrow and, with his back to the boy, does his business. Despite how little he has had to drink, his stream lasts for a long time.

“What are you, a horse?” the boy says.

“I once knew a giant who could piss for fifteen minutes straight.”

“I don't believe you.”

Danilo finishes, does up his fly, and walks off the field and onto the road. The boy catches up to him. “How tall was he?”

“Over two meters.”

The boy looks up, slack-jawed with wonder, as if the giant were standing before him.

“I knew someone who was born with fins on his back,” Danilo says.

The boy narrows his eyes suspiciously.

“I knew a dwarf who was stretched to the size of a normal person.”

“How?”

“On a machine.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes,” Danilo says.

The boy thinks about this for a while. “That's not true. You're just making up stories.”

“Maybe.”

They walk on. The haze of the morning gives way and heat settles in so heavily that, after a while, neither has the energy to talk. The only sound comes from their shoes scraping the dirt
and the unmusical buzz of flies that becomes so loud that the boy walks with his hands covering his ears. At times, he sits down and refuses to move. But Danilo reminds him that if he stops, he will be no closer to water or food or a bed. “And you'll be stuck with me forever,” he adds.

The boy spits at him and his logic but he cannot even summon a worthwhile
gob.

L
egless men, men missing arms,
sightless men who hug the buildings as they walk, and when the buildings are not there, paw the air. The wounds of others are less obvious. The old woman selling plums from a street cart appears perfectly healthy, robust even, as she calls out her prices, but when the boy stares hard and longingly at the fruit, she snarls at him and calls him a son of a whore.

“I am no one's son,” the boy says.

They flatten themselves against a wall in order to let a phalanx of soldiers pass. Danilo watches the men banter and joke, bragging about getting drunk and lying about things they've done with girls, wearing uniforms Danilo might have sewn. If it weren't for the fact that he murdered someone, he'd be one of them. Maybe this would have been a better fate for him. He would have joined up and perhaps even killed people but he wouldn't have been punished for it. He would have been called a
hero. His parents would have taken him back into their home and paraded him boastfully past the neighbors. He would have finally exonerated himself of the sin of outliving his brother.

The town has suffered in the war, but the destruction is haphazard and irrational. A perfectly intact bookshop stands next to what was once a ladies' dress shop but which is now the site of a massacre of mannequins, some armless or headless, all of them naked, having been stripped of the latest fashion by looters. The church is sheared in half. Like the apoplectic Smetanka once pretended to cure, the left side of the building stands, its rose-colored glass windows reflecting the late afternoon light, while the right side is only a mound of bricks and splintered wood. On the preserved side of the building pews are still set in their close, orderly rows. Danilo wonders if people continue to pray there, huddled like those in a capsizing ship who must move continually to the highest elevation to avoid sliding into the sea.

Evidence of deprivation is everywhere. Danilo realizes just how well the asylum staff kept news from the lunatics. But he must also blame his own incuriosity. It's as if somehow, without knowing it, he gave into the isolation of that place, surrendered to the relief of his ignorance and the way it kept his worries for her at bay. If nothing in the world was changed, then he could believe she might still be alive, her beautiful coat shining, her wild, amber eyes flashing, and maybe some part of her thinking—well, not thinking exactly, he does not know what goes on in the mind of a wild animal, but perhaps sensing—that he is somewhere, that he is looking for her, will always look for her, that this will be the preoccupation of his life. When he hears his own
thoughts, his conviction falters. Maybe Dr. Mašek was right, and she is nothing but an illusion brought on by—what did the man say—abandonment by the mother? Mašek never said
your mother
, it was always
The Mother
, implying that there was one gigantic, hugely bosomed, enormously lapped, all-powerful matriarch for everyone in the world, a feminine deity who might turn her back on one or another of her millions of children on a whim, relegating them to a life of insane imaginings. Mašek told him that Pavla was his symbolic creation and that he needed her to be a dwarf and then a deformed person and then an animal because he was terrified by The Female Genitalia. As he listened to the excited doctor form his conclusions, Danilo imagined an enormous vagina soaring overhead like an extravagant bird. The only vagina he'd ever seen—well, he hadn't really seen it, had he? Lidmila had been fully clothed when she let him lie on top of her behind the schoolhouse. And then—he is not even sure how it happened—his prick was inside something warm, which he didn't immediately identify as being part of her body, and then, a minute later, it wasn't, and the school bell rang, and she was skipping toward the door with the rest of the students as blithely as she would had she spent her recess gossiping with her girlfriends and eating roasted peanuts. She never bothered with him after that, and when he tried to get her to meet him again, she looked like she had no idea what he was talking about. Was he hurt by her casual cruelty? Yes. Was he embarrassed that all her friends laughed knowingly? Shamefully so. There were many days when he chose a beating from his mother over subjecting himself to the humiliating gauntlet that school had become. But did he hate the
place where his penis had been? No. He craved it, made facsimiles with his pillow at night, or his spit-coated hand, or the jar of softened grease his mother kept by the kitchen stove, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to manufacture that warm, moist—yes, the doctor was right—corridor. Dr. MaÅ¡ek had asked him what images came to mind while he touched himself. And when Danilo, ashamed to be talking about such things, admitted that he sometimes thought about food, specifically the spiced sausage his mother made at the end of Lent, the doctor grew very excited. “You think of sausages?” he said, practically laughing with joy. What incredible luck that his patient exhibited so exactly the textbook description of, as he explained it, Sexual Mania in Extremis, a term Danilo could only remember by humming to himself the doxology he'd chanted each Sunday when he was a boy. Sexual Mania
in Excelsis Deo
!

As he and the boy round a corner, they nearly collide with a woman and her children on their way out of a shop. A loaf of bread rises from her marketing bag like a warm, yeasty beacon. The boy's gaze latches onto the bread as they follow the family. His expression is furious, as if he bears malice toward that loaf, the embodiment of everything he does not have: food and comfort, a mother, a home. Two police officers pass by, and Danilo instinctively shrinks within himself and stares at the ground. How long will it take for word to get out that a madman convicted of murder has kidnapped an orphan and escaped the asylum? Surely someone has alerted the constables in the nearby towns. When will an officer pull him aside, or even just a nosy patriot, curious about a fit young man who is not in uniform and an urchin who is about to—

“Thief! Thief! Stop him!”

The boy has snatched the loaf out of the woman's bag and is already halfway down the street. She screams, clutching her children to her as if she is at risk of losing them as well. Her cries draw the officers who, along with a few other men who have nothing better to do, chase the boy. Danilo follows, trying both to keep up and avoid particular notice, all the while cursing the foolish boy who will be caught and put right back into another orphanage. If he continues to plead ignorance, claiming not to know his name, his age, the village where he was born, he will surely be scrutinized and experimented upon by some eager doctor with a head full of preposterous theories about the ravages of war, a zealot like Mašek who will be fascinated by the boy's blend of intelligence and determined ignorance.

The chase comes to an abrupt halt when the men lose sight of the boy. The valiant pursuers of justice become a group of deflated, befuddled, somewhat embarrassed citizens who, seized with a momentary purpose, are cast back once more into their aimlessness. The police, eager to look authoritative, begin questioning everyone in the vicinity, their frustration turning their interrogations into near accusations. Before they turn their attention to him, Danilo slips away.

—

B
Y
NIGHTFALL
,
he is exhausted. He's walked up and down streets, searching alleyways and behind and inside garbage cans. The more tired he becomes, the more he wonders why he is
trying so hard to find a boy who does not want to be found, who feels no more attachment to Danilo than he does any single stranger on the street. Less so, probably, because Danilo has so little to offer. The boy is right: he owes Danilo nothing. It is vain to think he saved the boy when all he really did was steal him from a place where, destroyed as it was, there might have been someone to look after him, at least that. If Danilo were honest with himself, he would have to admit that he has only harmed people—his mother and father, Pavla, certainly Klima, although he killed him in an effort to save her, so a relative harm. He tries to imagine himself walking away without the boy, being free of his cunning petulance, leaving him behind in this village so that Danilo can—do what? For a moment he stops walking, stunned by the plain truth: He has nothing. He has no home, no relatives to take him in, no work, not her. He has no idea what on earth he is meant to do.

“Fuck you!”

The voice is as unmistakable as the vocabulary. He rounds a corner, and there is the boy, being held between the same two policemen who were chasing him earlier. The offended woman stands in her doorway. Her children crowd around her, thrilled that their mother and their home should be the focus of such excitement.

“I'm sorry for stealing your bread,” the boy says unconvincingly. “There. I said it. Now put me down!”

“How will you punish the little bastard?” the woman says.

“Don't worry about that, madam. We know what to do with him.”

“Markus!” Danilo says, hurrying up. “There you are. I've been looking for you!”

Everyone turns to face this surprise. The boy gives Danilo a savage look.

“My God, boy,” Danilo says. “What trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”

“Who are you?” one of the police says.

“I'm his father. I've been looking for him all day. What has he done?”

“Your son is a thief.”

“Markus!” Danilo says. “Is this true?”

“I don't know him,” the boy says. “He's crazy. He's a lunatic. A real one!”

“Of course you'd say that,” Danilo says. “When you know my punishment will be far worse than what these officers will do to you.” He turns to the policemen. “You understand, I'm not cruel,” he says solicitously. “But ever since the rest of my family was killed, I've had to use a strong hand with him. I'm sure it's grief that makes him do these things, but right is right, and wrong is wrong. Isn't that what I always tell you, Markus?”

The boy lets out a furious snarl. The woman gasps and pushes her children behind her. “You better hide from me,” he says. “I might catch you and eat you up!”

Danilo lets out a suffering sigh. “He was such a good boy . . . the light of my wife's short life. But after—”

“After what?” the woman whispers, fascinated.

“Ah, I don't like to talk about it, much less think about it.”

“Of course,” she says.

“Who would want to think about enemy soldiers storming into your home, throwing your beloved wife to the ground and, well, you know, taking her, right in front of you while you are being held back, just as you are holding my son now,” he says to the officers. “She was dead before they were through with her,” he adds, he thinks, affectingly.

“You're awfully young to be his father,” one of the policemen says.

“In the countryside our motto is ‘early and often.'”

The man nods his head admiringly.

“You poor man,” the woman exclaims, wanting to claim her part in this affecting drama. “This terrible war! To lose your wife, his mother. What tragedy.” She sniffles and even manifests a tear just as one of her daughters wriggles out from behind her. She grabs the girl by her hair and yanks her back. “Don't punish the boy,” she begs the policemen, her voice trembling selflessly. “What is a loaf of bread compared to what he has lost?”

The policemen confer over the boy's head, then let him go. He stumbles and Danilo deftly steps toward him so that it seems like the boy is falling willingly into his arms. “That's right, son,” Danilo says. “I'm here now.” The boy bites Danilo's nipple beneath his shirt, but Danilo manages not to react. “My apologies, madam,” he says. “It won't happen again.”

With a hand firmly gripping the back of the boy's neck, Danilo pushes him down the street. When they are far enough away from the police, the boy shoves his elbow hard into Danilo's ribs.

Danilo lets go of the boy and massages his side. Suddenly, it all seems pointless. “Just go,” he says.

The boy doesn't move.

“I'm not your jailer. You're free. Go wherever you want. Do whatever you want. I've had enough.” He walks away. As he nears the corner, he thinks to himself,
I will turn left and it will be over. The boy will go his way, I will go mine. He will be better off without me and I without him.
But his resolve is weak, and he glances over his shoulder. The boy is still there.

“I hope you got to eat the bread at least,” Danilo says.

“I dropped it.”

“What?”

“When they were chasing me.”

Danilo starts to laugh.

“Stop making fun of me!”

“No, no. I'm not,” Danilo says, sighing. “It's only that . . . sometimes this life is hard to believe.” He walks back to where the boy stands.

“I don't like it here,” the boy says.

“I don't like it much either.”

“We should go somewhere else.”

We
. Danilo tries not to react. In the distance, a train horn blows. The boy lifts his chin to the sky as if to hear the message more
clearly.