Little Nothing (20 page)

M
ost days, she doesn't speak.
She doesn't know what to say. She has only questions: How did she get here? When will she be allowed to leave? The last question is the most pressing but she senses that it would be the most foolish to ask, that it would betray a naïveté that would be used against her. For as long as she's been here—has it been months? Longer?—she's been observing the women and she knows there are some who make it their sole purpose to ferret out weakness in others and use it to their own advantage. The one called Iveta is like that. Scrawny, with sharp, covetous movements like a mouse darting here and there, never stopping long enough in one spot to be easily trapped, the woman is clever. She knows who is hoarding food beneath her mattress or collecting napkins for her monthly bleeding even though stockpiles are against regulations. If Iveta senses advantage in betrayal—an extra slice of bread, say, or being the first to visit the latrine after cleaning day—she will think nothing of it.

No, it is better not to speak. And if she has to, she is careful to make whatever she says as free of innuendo as possible. In this place, language must be flat and uninflected, impossible to decipher for hidden codes and intentions.

She lies awake on her pallet but none of the others around her stir. She doesn't know if it is morning yet. There are small windows built at the very top of one wall of the barracks, windows not made for looking into or out of but to provide cheap illumination. The glass is so dirty, though, that it is impossible to know whether the occluded light that enters is natural or only the oblique spill from the powerful tower lanterns that scrape across the prison all night long. She tries to figure out how many hours have passed since the women were told to go to bed and the door was locked. Four? Five? Time is her constant preoccupation. For a while, she kept track of the days, making marks on the bottom of the bunk above hers with whatever she could find—a sharpened stick, a wafer-thin stone, her fingernails until they became too brittle. But the accrual of those four straight lines crossed by a fifth became disheartening. Each neat bundle was meant to organize time and bolster the belief that it was finite and that when some was used up, there would be less of it to come. As if time could be ticked off and then a specific future would be reached, at which point those little packets could be put away into a drawer marked “the past” and she would walk outside the high stone walls that encircle her life and be—well, what would she be? What lies beyond those walls? What is her place there? The calculations were only delusions, and she stopped making them. Others cling to the practice, and she has to keep
herself from glancing at their marks because another woman's time is not hers. Time is personal and particular. A woman will talk about the time when she was a little girl and picnicked at a lake with her family, or the time it took for her husband to get his nightly job done (the shorter amount of time the better, according to the other women's reactions). Someone might tell the story of the time it took to give birth, two days of hard labor ending in nothing but a blue baby, a result that made what might have been a heroic effort into a waste of time. “I remember a time when . . .” the women are always saying to one another as they untangle the matted nests from their hair with their fingers because they are not allowed to have combs. They tell stories to pass the time. But can time can be passed? Can you run ahead of it and win a race against it? Isn't time, with its high, impassable walls, its dull, plodding, endless trajectory forward a prison itself?

She is fascinated by these stories and listens carefully while trying to appear disinterested. She has none of her own to add but hopes to recognize her history in the details of other lives. Has she ever had a man fall asleep with his face between her legs? Did she have a mother who knocked her senseless when she first began to bleed or an uncle who lay down on top of her at night? What about a husband who deserved what he got? She has a sense of a before but only as a vague shape that shadows her; when she turns around to sneak a look, it disappears. She knows the women mistrust her because she does not offer her version of the family outing or the way her man sounds when he lets go. She cannot even explain the scar on her thigh, its purple-red heart surrounded by damaged flesh. She runs her finger over
the lumpy tissue. The skin is numb and when she is particularly anxious, she finds some comfort in touching it. She tells herself that she has proof of her past because once upon a time
, this
happened to her.

The door opens and light spills across the floor. So it is morning, she thinks without pleasure.

“Showers!” a guard shouts.

In no time, the women scramble out of their beds. The prison is housed in a century-old armory too far from the center of town to have yet received the benefits of underground plumbing. Showers are infrequent, and when they do happen, water from the cistern is rationed. No one wants to be last in line and miss her chance to get clean. The guard—they call this one the Tongue because of the way he can't keep his inside his mouth while he watches the women strip and wash themselves—marches the prisoners across the yard. In groups of four, they shower in a curtainless stall that is barely big enough for two. When it is her turn, she steps underneath the spigot just as a limp drizzle of water is released. The water is so cold that she doesn't experience pain, only a kind of panic of the skin. The four women, and unhappily Iveta is among them, wash quickly, trying to ignore the fact that the most intimate parts of their bodies press against one another as they reach and bend and turn, breast against breast, buttock to crotch. They pass around a bar of gritty soap, the same abrasive they are given to wash their clothes, that leaves them smelling like beef fat. As she rubs away the layers of dirt on her arms and neck, passes the soap, then waits for it to make its round back to her, she considers how these showers are just
another form of punishment along with bedbugs and the incessant crotch rot that plagues them all so that at night the rustling of sheets is not a sign of private pleasure but of incessant, blood-raising itch.

“Look at this!” the woman named Monika says, slapping the skin on her belly that has gone flaccid from weight loss. Her laugh is as coarse as the soap. “There was a time when I was as round as a peach, and now look at me.”

“My tits were out to here,” the one named Barbora says, holding her hands in front of her withered breasts. “Nipples like bullets!”

They look at her, waiting for her to chime in. Her own concave belly sinks between her hipbones. At her underarms and around her groin, striations discolor her skin. She wonders if she, too, is a shrunken version of herself, if her skin was once plump enough to hide her skeleton. Was there a time when there were no sores lining her gums that make it painful for her to eat and drink and perversely grateful for the tasteless gruel and thin, lukewarm soup that are the staple meals? Were the welts along her spine that make it impossible to sleep on her back always there? The other women tilt their faces up, their eyes closed against the spray so that, if you didn't know better, you might think they were luxuriating. Even perpetually sneering Iveta looks serene. She wonders what her own face looks like. As if self-reflection were a freedom, the women are not allowed to have photographs or mirrors. The ones who have been incarcerated for the longest complain that they have forgotten what they look like. The only opportunity for them to see their faces
comes following a night of rain. The women have surreptitiously placed a bucket below a gutter on the backside of the kitchen building, where garbage waits to be removed along with the week's dead, a place so rank the guards refuse to go there. They use the collected water to wash more often than these infrequent showers permit, and those who get to it first thing after a downpour have the best chance to study their reflections. But she has never been first and has only seen herself as an opaque blur in water flecked with bits of dead skin and oil. It is nothing like peering into the surface of a clear lake, waiting for the exact moment to catch a trout. She was always more patient than the others. They would punch the water whenever they spied movement, creating a whiplash of froth and disturbance but no catch. Soon, they'd give up and wander off to look for other adventures in the woods or rest in the sun, but she would stay behind. Slowing her breath until it ran in rhythm with the desultory late afternoon tide, she would wait for the fish to forget their recent brush with death and swim up to the surface to gobble the insects floating there. She would see herself then, but she cannot remember that face. And she can't be sure this happened, this idyll by a lakeside. And who were those others? And why would she be catching fish in her mouth? And then the whole scene, too fragile to withstand the weight of examination, disintegrates and becomes just part of that amorphous dark shape she drags behind her.

The other three women stare at her scornfully.

“Are you deaf as well as dumb?” Iveta says. “Answer the question.”

“Yes, tell us. How many monsters have you popped out?” Monika says.

“Monsters?” she says.

“Brats,” Iveta says. “Those teats of yours looked sucked dry. Or maybe your man got hungry and confused you with his mother.” The women laugh.

“I don't know.”

The women look at her curiously, especially Iveta, who, she can tell, is already considering how this odd response might benefit her.

“It's not something you're likely to forget,” Barbora says. “It's like shitting a pumpkin.”

The shower turns off abruptly. They curse and brush soap scum off their bodies while they file out of the stall. They dress themselves quickly, yanking clothes over their wet skin. The Tongue turns on the shower again. Four new bathers let out a collective gasp.

—

T
HE
DAY
SPREADS
before her as empty as all the others. To combat the monotony, the women tell stories about notorious escapes. One woman, it is said, flew up and over the wall on a particularly windy day, tethered to the strings of a homemade kite. Another managed to play dead and was loaded into the back of a garbage truck and driven to freedom. The details change—there was one kite or three. The woman who faked her death was a champion swimmer and could hold her breath for prodigious
amounts of time, or she had once worked as an artist's model and knew how to hold a pose. These stories are volatile things. If there is not enough outlandish embellishment to keep them a safe distance from reality, or if the emotion of the telling hints at hope, the women become testy. Someone will accuse another of breathing too loudly or of smelling too foul. Insults will be hurled. There will be fistfights.

She keeps herself at a distance from the others and their trumped-up arguments and dramas. Instead, she focuses on solving the central problem of her life. Who is she? Usually, the question results only in a frustrating blankness, as if she's come to the end of her mind's capacity for thought. But sometimes she senses an answer flickering at the outskirts of her consciousness, some image or sound or smell. She reaches for it, thinking that if she can just grab hold of a solid detail with her mind, she can pull her life toward her.

—

“T
ELL
ME
,”
she says to Nĕmec, the pock-faced guard who keeps a toothpick lodged in the side of his mouth at all times, even when he eats, even now, behind the barracks, while she holds his cock in her hand.
If I did my husband by hand once a day, I got whatever I wanted.
One of the women in the barracks once said this and the others agreed, although they all had variations—in the mouth, up the backside. One woman provoked cackles of laughter when she claimed she had only to let her husband suckle her big toe. Nĕmec exhales his stinking breath in her face and
stares at her with dead, unblinking eyes. When he doesn't answer, she releases the pressure. “Tell me,” she repeats, as she watches his expression contort in agony.

“I will. I will,” he says, “Just . . .”

He reaches down and presses her hand tighter around him until he gives a short, mirthless grunt. And then, because he has not held up his end of the bargain, she squeezes in a way she has learned will cause pain.

“Murder!” he says.

She lets go of him, stunned.

“Old people,” he adds contemptuously. And then, to make the crime all the more abhorrent, he says, as he buttons his trousers, this extra detail offered as a tip for a job sufficiently done, she was discovered sleeping on the very bed where she killed them. “That's really quite sick,” he adds. He peers around the corner to make sure no one is near, then leaves her alone to clean herself.

All that she remembers is that she woke up one morning on a plank bed in a chilly, cavernous barracks surrounded by women who seemed unimpressed by her appearance. Day and night, she tries to re-create the scene of her crime, hoping that some part of her imagination will unlock her memory and she will be able to say, like the other women, “I remember the time when . . .” But she can't remember, doesn't even know how to. The only way she can manufacture the sensation of sadness and loss (for this must be what memory feels like because the women retreat into morose silence or weep after sharing their stories) is when she smells certain things. The mossy, moldering odor of
damp trees. The smell of urine, dense and pungent and alive. The sweet-sour curdle of the rancid milk they are given to drink that is also, maybe, the smell of skin. Her monthly blood smells like shower water when it is first released—all pipe and hollow and stone. This particular smell is so precise that she can feel it tickling the hairs in her nose. She can taste it on her tongue, and it makes her inexplicably hungry. But what does it all mean?