Little Nothing (19 page)

T
he train is the first revelation.
When he traveled with Smetanka and the carnival, the old mare dragging the caravan behind her, the distance from one village to the next was never great. Each new town was just like the one they'd left, and the landscape between stops was unchanging. When he traveled with the wolf tracker, he had no sense of distance at all. The forest with its obscured sight lines and unfamiliar markings made him feel lost, and he relied entirely on the man to tell him where he was and where they were going. His ignorance made him powerless. Now, standing next to the dirt-streaked window of the speeding train, pressed on all sides by refugees from bombed villages and wounded soldiers making their way back to their homes, he watches the land pass in a blur of metamorphosis. Forests become fields become villages that disappear back into fields that are, in turn, overtaken by woods.

The scenes that slide from right to left across the train
window seem no more permanent than the backdrops of the carnival sideshows that created the illusion that the fat lady sat in a crimson-colored bordello and the boy with fins lived among the creatures of the sea. He imagines that in these quickly appearing and disappearing towns, performances are unfolding. Mothers hold their sons or chase them away from a freshly baked pie, fathers teach them, or hit them or, worst of all, ignore them. Children make do with whatever bounty or meagerness of affection they are born to because they know nothing else. Parents die, and homes are sold or sundered, and villages dissolve into one another, and war comes and war goes, and no one can remember why it was fought. On and on, mile after mile. He will never know the people who live inside the homes the train passes, and they will never have the slightest idea of him. Hardly anyone on earth exists for any other person, and everything is change.

It is possible, he thinks, that he and the boy will not be discovered, that this train will take them to a place where no one will have heard of an escaped lunatic criminal and a stolen child. And if they do hear about it they will not care because they will be busy loving or berating their children and praying in a half-demolished church, or they will be running alongside the train, finding a handhold or even a generous outstretched arm, swinging themselves and their bundles onto the platform between two cars and into a new life, just as men and women and children are doing now as the train slows through a village too small to merit a full stop. People risk death for the chance to be swept away from everything they once were. The sheer numbers of human souls stepping out of one life and into the hope of another. He
feels the same thing he did when he fit the puzzle of a shotgun together. All the misery of his life disappeared in that moment of transcendent focus.

As the train hurtles into the future, he realizes that, until this moment, he never thought of one for himself. He never thought beyond what was expected of him by any of his employers. Completing a given task, no matter how egregious—that was as far as he could imagine. His destiny did not extend beyond whatever someone told him to do or wherever someone told him to go. And so the world was small. Infinitesimal. Even the fortune-teller offered him no future. But now, that life feels like a story that happened long ago and very far away and to someone else.

He realizes that it is possible to become new.

The boy sleeps at his feet, his head resting on bags stuffed with sausages and spice jars and old wedding dresses and christening gowns and carving knives and cuckoo clocks and whatever else these travelers have decided will be enough to start their lives afresh. Danilo turns away from the window. He studies the scene unfolding in a private berth where a well-dressed mother wearing her traveling hat gives chocolates to her children who sit across from her. The boy is dressed like a sailor, bold white stripes decorating his shawl collar and his sleeves. The girl wears petticoats, and her hair is done up in ringlets. Next to the mother sits a man who, Danilo imagines, is the head of the family. He dozes, still holding his newspaper up to his face as if his arms were not aware that the rest of him has fallen asleep. The train takes a curve. The boy falls against the girl. She hits him. He starts to cry. The father opens an eye then shuts it
quickly before he is drafted into service. Meanwhile, just outside their berth, a man balances precariously on top of his suitcase in order to relieve himself out an open window.

At Danilo's feet, the boy stirs and then stands up. He rubs his face and looks outside. “Where are we?”

“I don't know.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don't know.”

The boy remembers the joke, but is too sleepy to smile. “Why did you call me Markus?”

“It just came to me. In the moment.”

“I hate it,” the boy says.

“I can call you whatever name you like. I can call you Orphan Number Twenty-three if that suits you.”

The boy is quiet for a long time. “Markus,” he says finally.

“I haven't called anyone that for a long time,” Danilo says.

“Is it a good name?”

“Very good.”

—

T
HE
SECOND
REVELATION
is that he is not a philosopher but a fool. The train stalls once, owing to a dead cow on the tracks, and then again, when the engineer, having pulled into his home village at the end of his shift, simply abandons the train, leaving it unmanned for three hours during which time the passengers have to wait for the next driver to emerge from his inebriated sleep and take his place at the gears. It is two in the morning
when the train finally arrives in the city. Dazed and cold, Danilo and Markus stand on the platform and watch other passengers meet the people who have waited for them through the night. There is laughter and chatter and the confusions of baggage. Everyone seems to know where to go. Danilo realizes that while it may be possible to become new, it will definitely not be easy. He and Markus follow the crowd into the station, a building so enormous it makes him even more aware of his naive belief that he could step off the train and into a wide-open future. Electric lights reveal a rich interior decorated with coats of arms, statues tucked into niches, and a floor polished by a thousand footsteps.

“Is this heaven?” Markus says, craning his neck to look up at the domed ceiling. A drunken man stumbles across the floor of the station, stops directly in front of them, and vomits.

“I hope not,” Danilo says, leading the boy through the arched doors and into the city.

The silence of a country night is filled with noises—hooting owls, wind shaking the trees, a dog barking at nothing or something, which is followed, in turn, by a door opening, a sleepy man's curses, then the high, pathetic whimper of that noisy dog as he's kicked out into the cold. Quiet dramas of man and nature that make a wakeful boy feel alone and not alone at the same time. But the quiet of the city feels tense and sinister, and the sounds that do interrupt—a glass breaking on cobblestone, and the susurration of a lone car as it glides down a street and slips around a corner—make Danilo ill at ease, as if each of these noises forecasts some greater danger that nothing in his life has
prepared him for. A high-pitched scream comes from somewhere. Or maybe it's laughter.

And the smell! The city in late summer is awash in odors, but not the fresh, grassy scent of manure or the oversweet, decaying smell of flowers past their prime, a perfume that always reminded Danilo of his grandmother, who would spritz herself with an atomizer to cover the scent of impending death. These urban odors are—he does not have the language for them yet. Petrol from cars. A clot of horseshit below the curb that smells putrid and not at all like the rich hay a country animal eats.

A light rain begins to fall. With no money, Danilo and Markus have to find some moderately dry and safe place to wait until daylight when Danilo can begin to figure out how they will live. The broad avenue that fronts the station feels too exposed, and there is the matter of the night watchman who patrols the area. Danilo leads the boy across the avenue, stepping over the trolley tracks and trying to avoid the pools of light cast by electrified lamps. They turn down a crooked street and thread their way into a neighborhood of derelict buildings. There is no one on the streets at this hour. A deflated ball in the gutter, a single shoe dangling by its laces from a fence, a mangled bicycle frame that seems menacing, having suffered some kind of violence. Danilo picks up a half-eaten apple that tops a pile of garbage, wipes the skin on his pant leg, and hands it to the boy who devours it in four swift bites, gnawing at the core for every last bit of pith.

“If you eat the seeds, an apple tree will grow in your stomach,” Danilo says. “My mother used to tell me that.”

“She's a liar.”

The rain falls harder. Danilo and Markus shelter against the side of a building underneath a line of laundry someone has forgotten to pull in. Danilo takes off his jacket and covers the boy. Markus lies closest to the building, Danilo behind him, protecting him from the street. He will take the brunt if they are bothered by a drunk or a thief.

“Don't try anything funny,” Markus says, but before Danilo can answer, the boy is
asleep.

D
anilo wakes to the clatter and scrape of metal.
It sounds like a fearsome animal is trying to break free of its chains. Where is Klima? Where is his shotgun? He sits up in a panic and tries to remember where he is. The mist is thick, but when his mind breaks through the web of dreams, he sees there is no beast, only dark figures that seem to be rising out of the earth, one after the other. As if hell has released its denizens, they emerge and then disappear into the fog. All but one, that is, who lumbers toward Danilo and the boy. Danilo hears the unmistakable sound of a belt unlatching and, before he realizes what is happening, warm piss splatters his trouser leg. “Hey!” he says, grabbing Markus and dragging him to his feet. “Can't you see there are people here?”

“I don't see any people,” the man says. His voice gurgles with phlegm that he promptly spits.

“Fuck you,” Markus says sleepily.

“Why don't you tell your father here to get a job so you don't have to live in the gutter,” the man says as he continues to pee.

“It's the pissing giant!” Markus whispers.

“Ahh, fuck me,” the man says contentedly. After a few final spurts, he groans, buckles his belt, and hitches his trousers. “What did your boy call me? A pissing giant?”

“It's only a story I've told him,” Danilo says. “Nothing to be offended by.”

“I'll admit to a prodigious bladder,” the man says. “But they don't hire giants to do the work I do.” He takes a final assessing look at Danilo and Markus, then turns and walks away.

“What work is that?” Danilo asks, catching up to him.

“Nothing you want to know about.”

“I'm in need of work in the worst way.”

“Well, it is the worst work. I'll give you that.”

Danilo reaches for the man's shoulder. “Please, sir,” he says. “Tell me what you are.”

“I'm no sir, that's first,” the man says. “And second: never touch a man from behind if you don't want a knife planted in your gut. And third: I'm a waterman.”

“Hurry it up, old man!” someone yells.

A horse and wagon is loaded down with chunks of rock and rubble. On top of this pile sits a group of dark-faced men.

“You can't hurry Mother Nature,” the man says. “She comes when she comes.”

“He's too good to piss and shit down there along with the rest of us,” someone else says.

“If God intended me to do my business like a rat, he would have given me a tail,” the man says. He climbs onto the bench and takes hold of the reins. The horse reacts unhappily, shaking its head and snorting. “Calm down, you nasty old hag,” the man says.

“Give me a job,” Danilo says.

“Give you a job?” the man says, looking down from his perch. “Is that how it works, then? I just hand out a job to every beggar who asks for one?”

“I can do whatever you need. And I can hold my piss for hours.”

The man gives the reins a shake. The horse startles and snorts and after some coaxing, begins to pull. “You're out of luck today. I have a full crew.”

“I was out of luck yesterday,” Danilo says, trotting alongside the wagon as it gains speed. “It'll cost you nothing. Just enough for me to get some food into my boy's stomach. He can work, too. He's small but you'd be surprised by his strength. Both of us for the price of one!”

“Your boy's got the right idea. He doesn't ask, he takes!” the driver says, laughing.

As the wagon pulls ahead, Danilo sees that Markus is riding with the other men on top of the mound of rocks. Danilo chases the wagon and, just before it is out of reach, pulls himself onto it. Once he's settled, he looks around at the men. The whites of their eyes gleam against their dirt-smeared faces, their every wrinkle etched in black dust. Danilo waits for one of them to throw him and Markus off, but the men only stare impassively.

“They're very clean,” one of them says finally.

“Not for long,” says another.

The wagon makes its way through the streets of the waking city. The horse is stubborn, and the driver frequently snaps the loose end of the reins across her rump and lets loose a string of insults to keep her moving at a trot. Shopkeepers roll out their awnings and sweep the sidewalks clear of nighttime debris. Children race out of doorways with half-eaten buns between their teeth, satchels banging against their sides, dodging the garbage being thrown out of windows that lands with varying degrees of accuracy near the cans that hug the sides of buildings. Men wearing rumpled suit jackets and carrying worn leather cases tucked under their arms head toward the avenues to join other rumpled men who dodge trolleys and automobiles. Well-dressed women step around piles of manure as they head importantly into the day. Danilo is transfixed by the activity, which seems smooth and purposeful, every citizen part of a machine. He imagines that there is someone, somewhere, who has figured out how all these thousands of separate parts will move without catching on one another and jamming the whole works. As the horse pulls the wagon down one street, then the next, the watermen jump off and head toward their homes, until only Danilo and Markus are left. Finally, the horse comes to a full stop by the banks of a river. The driver lumbers down from the bench. He picks up a shovel wedged beneath the pile of rubble and tosses it to Danilo.

“Make yourself useful, then,” he says.

By the time the three of them have transferred the dirt and
rocks into the river, Danilo and Markus are as black as the waterman, who throws his shovel into the empty wagon, climbs back up onto the bench, and shakes the reins. “Come if you're coming,” he says. Danilo and Markus jump onto the back of the wagon without questioning where the man is taking them, grateful only for this possible bit of fortune.

A quarter of an hour later, the wagon stops outside a free-standing building fronted by a set of wide, arched wooden doors latched shut with a crossbar.

“Door!” the driver commands.

Danilo jumps down from the wagon and lifts the plank, then opens the doors, releasing the unmistakable hide and hay smell of a stable.

The man gives the horse the gentlest of whips. “Anuska, my love,” he says, “we're home.”

The waterman tells the boy to feed the horse, and to Danilo's surprise, Markus doesn't put up a fight. He even seems happy as he carries armloads of hay from the cropper to the stall, whispering enticements to the horse as she noses her fresh feed, then returning to ask what he should do next. The man hands him a curry comb and then turns to Danilo.

“And you, sir, can draw my bath.”

Danilo looks around for a tub.

The man laughs and fills a rusted bucket with water from a spigot. “The last time I had a proper bath was—well, I'm too damn old to remember.” He takes off his hat and jacket and hangs them on a hook outside the horse stall, then peels off his dirty shirt. As he scrubs the filth off his face and arms, Danilo
gets a look at his new employer. The waterman's body is thickly muscled, and even though his skin sags with age, his strength is evident. His hair is thick and so silver it seems nearly made of the substance itself. Energy that belies his age seems to pulse just below his pale, luminous skin. He picks up his discarded shirt and hands it to Danilo.

“It could use a wash,” he says.

“How much will you pay me?” Danilo says.

“You filch a ride on my wagon and come into my home and now you want me to pay you?”

“Honest pay for honest work,” Danilo says, trying to hide his desperation.

“And what do you think honest pay would be for an honest laundryman?”

Danilo thinks about what Smetanka paid him each night at the carnival, then quotes double the amount.

“You're either a terrible worker or you don't think much of yourself,” the man says.

Realizing his mistake, Danilo asks for more.

“No, no, no,” the man says, wagging a finger. “Now that you've told me what you think you're worth, you won't convince me you're more valuable.”

Feeling both stupid and duped, Danilo takes the shirt and plunges it into the bucket of dirty water.

“Now I know why I'm paying you so little,” the waterman says. He dumps the dirty water into the horse trough and, with a glance at the spigot, hands the empty bucket to Danilo. “You're a lousy laundryman.”

—

H
IS
NAME
IS
B
ORIS
H
O
MULKA
and he has been a waterman for as long as he can remember. “And my father before me and his father before him,” he says. “Although in my grandfather's time, the work of a waterman ran to digging wells and carting sewage. If you wanted running water in those days, you just”—he claps his hands twice—“and the water came running. That would have been your job,” he says, turning to Markus, who stands next to Anuska, stroking her neck as she calmly chews her hay. “We'd have given you a yoke and a couple of buckets and you'd be racing here and there from morning to night.”

“I could do that,” Markus says eagerly.

Boris laughs. “I'm sure you could, boy. But we live in modern times and we've got water running every which way and up into your kitchen sink, and all you have to do is think to yourself, my, wouldn't it be nice to have a cool glass of water right now, and then up it comes with a mere twist of your wrist, and all thanks to the likes of me working all my life down in Hades, digging tunnels and laying pipes.”

“I could do that,” Danilo says.

“I clock you better for my personal valet.”

“Watermen have personal valets?”

“They do if said valet and his supposed son are hopeful of a place to sleep where a man won't wake them up with a golden shower.”

Danilo is about to defend his paternity but stops himself. That the man is on to him comes as an enormous relief. Perhaps
now he can stop ferreting around, hiding himself and the boy, living in fear of being discovered. He has been discovered! It is a marvelous thing, he thinks, to be known.

Danilo and Markus adapt to the nocturnal schedule of their patron. Each evening, as church bells across the city chime the six o'clock hour, Danilo wakes from his straw bed, lights the fire in a squat brazier, and prepares coffee. While the water boils, he runs to the nearby baker and buys a loaf of bread at end-of-the-day half price, then to the cheese monger for a slab of sweating olomoucké tvarůžky that smells like feet. Finally, he picks up a blood sausage and heads back to the stable. By this time, Markus will be feeding and watering Anuska, who follows the boy's directions without protest. The smell of brewed coffee will wake Boris who can be heard before he is seen, grunting in the hayloft where he sleeps and from which he descends by way of a ladder, fully naked, displaying the two full and hairy moons of his buttocks. Still naked, his penis, depending on his ultimate dream, either curving up like the spoke of a coat stand or dangling between his legs, all unrealized potential, he commences his setting-up exercises. He touches his toes five times, leans to the left and to the right, his ample belly jiggling with the effort. He ends the routine by pounding on his chest and heaving up a clot of mucus, which he carries in his cheeks across the room like a secret he can't wait to share, and spits into Anuska's feed bucket. It is not until these rituals are concluded that he looks around him, seeming to register where he is and who is with him.

“A man and a boy,” he says appraisingly, as if Danilo and Markus were characters in a dream he is only just remembering.

Once Boris is dressed, it's time to hitch the horse to the wagon. The waterman gives Markus the important task of bridling her. Markus shows no fear of the giant dray even when she protests and stomps her petrified hooves, big as dinner plates. He puts his face into Anuska's neck, and whether he is whispering encouragement or curses, Danilo can't tell, but the horse seems to pay better attention to Markus than she does to her master. As a reward, Boris lets Markus ride beside him and handle the reins as they make their rounds to pick up the watermen for the night's shift. Danilo doesn't mind sitting in the back. He is interested in these men. One by one, they climb into the wagon, all of them sozzled, the smell of fermentation oozing from their pores. Not one of them appears capable of doing the dangerous work of dynamiting tunnels and laying pipes that will funnel water into otherwise unplumbed parts of the city. The men pick their teeth and belch and talk about boxing matches and bets they've lost or won. They groan about their bodies, all of which seem to be wrecked in one way or another. When Danilo shows interest, they happily display their scars and missing fingers and single blind eyes, and he realizes their complaints are a form of pride. Their stories have been told so often that a single name elicits the same emotions as would the entire account if someone took the time to tell it and well. Someone has only to say “Emil” and every man crosses himself. “Stepan” draws a laugh and a shake of the head at the expense of this apparently beloved but feckless man. “July seventeenth” and the watermen fall silent. Expressions are somber as the men contemplate whatever terrible event happened on that day and how it separated
who they were on July sixteenth from who they later became. As Markus leads Anuska through the streets, and the wagon takes on more workers, and as it draws closer to the place where they will descend into the earth for the night, the men undergo a change. They become utterly sober, their eyes sparkling and clear. Those same maimed and aching bodies now appear strong and ready. Even their liquor-soaked breath seems to dissipate. When the wagon stops, the men gather their tool belts and jump to the ground like the most capable fighting battalion, their movements methodical and compact. Boris pulls aside the manhole with an iron hook and counts the men one by one as they descend to be sure that, come next morning, the same number climb out. The men offer him jaunty salutes but there is no mistaking that they are about serious business. Boris is the last to go down the hole and before he does, he turns and offers his own salute. Markus returns the gesture gravely, then shakes the reins, and the boy and the valet head home.