Little Nothing (22 page)

I
veta is called from the barracks for special questioning.
When the guard appears to summon her, the other women look at the floor or, if they are lying down, turn their faces to the wall as if they don't want him to make a mistake and choose them instead. Usually, a woman is called for special questioning if a guard or a lieutenant has a need. When the chosen woman returns, sometimes with visible marks around her neck or unable to sit without crying out in pain, the others ignore her. She has become an object of suspicion. The prisoners sense that after becoming intimate with an officer, her natural inclination will be to side with the man who, despite or because of his violence, has kindled in her the memory of a kind of intimacy that once went hand in hand with loyalty. No matter how battered she is upon her return, how tenderly she must undress, they ignore her. There is also the matter of jealousy, for to be chosen is to be lifted above the others who must then consider whether they
have lost the last shreds of their allure and whether the stories they tell of the time when men chased after them are only preposterous delusions. “The Rhino would fuck a rabid dog,” someone might say, as the chosen woman is escorted away by the guard so named because of the protruding mole that sits in the center of his forehead. The rest will offer their assessments of the various guards' deviant sexual proclivities, and through the exaggeration of these debasements, justify their exclusion.

A day earlier the women were made to line up in the yard for a head count. They waited for nearly half an hour until the door of the building that houses the prison commander's office swung open and the man appeared. She had only seen him once, and then quickly, when he was passing through the yard in his open car. He was a small man, his body so inconsequential that it hardly troubled the material of his smart uniform. His cap sat low over his brow as if it were a size too large. He never addressed the prisoners directly but spoke quietly to his subordinates, who then shouted his orders, as if their continued employment depended on volume. On the whole, he looked unthreatening as he surveyed the ranks of the women. When each prisoner's number was announced, that woman took a step forward, repeated the designation, then returned to her place in line. When Iveta was called, she was made to stand for a longer time while a lieutenant leaned over and spoke quietly to the commander. Everyone knew. Her ostracism had already begun.

When Iveta returns to the barracks after her first summons, she is uncharacteristically quiet. She keeps her eyes down as she walks to her bed and presses a bloody cloth to her forearm. Over
the next weeks, she is ordered to the commander's office again and again, and each time she returns with a new wound. On her cheek. On her shin. Since she is the particular victim of the man who controls their lives, the others are even more careful not to engage with her.

When she returns one day with blood on the back of her dress, she is surprised that the prisoner she hates most, that nearly mute one who can't even remember if she's borne a child, comes over to her holding a ribbon of torn sheet. Destroying prison property is one of the worst offenses, and from Iveta's expression, it's clear that she is deciding how she can use this to her advantage. But then she seems to lose heart. She unbuttons her dress, lets it slide off her shoulders, and allows the woman to tend her.

She cleans and dresses Iveta's cuts as gently as she can. “Why does he do it?” she says.

“What do you care?” Iveta says.

She does not dare admit that while the other women look at Iveta's scars and see them as something outside of themselves, someone else's problem that causes them only the same kind of cosmetic reaction as a story of a stranger's death, she experiences the wounds differently. Her skin throbs and aches at the places on her body where Iveta bleeds as if she were the one enduring the torture. She does not know why, but she understands what Iveta feels when she looks at her lacerations, unable to make a reasonable connection between whatever it is that happens to her in the commander's office and these defacements. More than understands—Iveta's dissociation is her own.

“He doesn't even fuck me,” Iveta says, laughing bitterly. “And if I make any noise at all, he rages. That little piece of shit.”

As she tends to Iveta's cuts, her mind travels elsewhere. She is in a room. Where, she doesn't know. But it is a familiar place. She is lying down. She has to lie perfectly still and make no noise. In order to do this, she makes the pain into something else. A flower. Opening. She sees it first as a closed pod, and then, as something pulls at her flesh, she watches as the petals slowly unfold, pushing up all together and finally spreading so that each petal separates from the ones to its side, revealing the delicate filaments hidden within, each topped with the tiny sac the bees rest on. She watches until the petals are fully splayed. She studies the colors, the way the black center gives way to deep purple which fades by degrees so that the delicate edges of the petals are a pale, nearly translucent violet. Or sometimes the flower is red. “Picture a flower,” she says.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Iveta says.

“You should picture a flower,” she says, trying to cover for her distraction. “To think about something besides the pain.”

“A flower!” Iveta says, sneering. She turns to the room of women. “The murderer says it will all be better if we think of flowers!”

T
he Brotherhood of Municipal Watermen is,
depending on one's idea of family, either aptly named or an ironic misnomer. The crews, working in every part of the city, are highly competitive with one another when it comes to how long it takes to mine a tunnel and the amount of rock and dirt that can be scraped from the bowels of the earth. Every waterman in the central district knows that Ladislav Franek's crew on the north side has recently struck gold in the form of soft rock, which is the easiest to blast through and which allows the crew to move at a pace that others can only envy. Watermen are covetous of their tunnel sites but they also take possession of entire neighborhoods. If a man from the eastern district drinks a glass of beer at a tavern claimed by the men who work on the south side, it will take nothing but a misplaced glance for a fight to start. Still, when news of the doubled earnings of Boris Homulka's crew spreads as though through the network of tunnels themselves,
curiosity leads to all manner of territorial incursion. The first to arrive is grizzled, tarry-skinned Rudolf Karlik, whose southside crew has, of late, been bedeviled by rock so impermeable that he's had to spend his daylight hours petitioning the Municipal Water Directorate for more than his share of dynamite so that his crew can make headway. When Karlik shows up at Boris's site at the end of a night's work, the crew makes a grand show of grunting and groaning as they climb the gigantic pile of rubble in the wagon, complaining loudly as if their bounty were a hardship. When Boris finally emerges from the hole, last as always, he is enraged to see the competing crew boss and orders his men to pelt him with rocks. Andrej Dudak from the far side of the river is sneakier, sending one of his newest and youngest crewmen to loiter about the worksite during the night, a man so fresh to his job that his skin is still pale and his hands soft. Nervously, he watches the top man work the levering mechanism as bucket after bucket is pulled from the tunnel at a breathtaking rate. Pretending to be nothing but an interested passerby, the spy manages to engage the top man in conversation. But before he can glean any hard information about the doings belowground, Boris climbs out of the manhole to relieve himself and terrifies the youth with threats to various parts of his nether regions.

Slavomir Blodek's territory is the most prestigious as it includes the castle and the entire hillside neighborhood it stands on. However, as the castle was the first to receive an up-to-date water and sewage system, there is not much new tunneling for his crew to do, and so they are relegated to the unheroic and less
remunerative work of patching cracked pipes. It is Blodek who decides that the reason Boris's crew is suddenly and unreasonably productive is because of the boy.

Watermen are, by nature, men torn between two opposing beliefs. Although they lack formal education, experience has made them learned scientists in the subjects of geology and, to some degree, physics as they know, from terrible experience, the grave consequences of unbalanced air pressure. But raised as they have all been by mothers who don't think twice about throwing a shoe behind them for luck or inspecting the core of a sliced apple and shivering with dread if the five seeds assume the shape of a star, it comes naturally for these men to vacillate between reason and superstition. More often than not, superstition wins the day as it lifts the burden of responsibility off human shoulders and places it squarely on the much stronger ones of magic. Each man on Boris's crew has his own set of rituals, which, performed properly, will ensure his safety during a shift. One will not descend into the manhole without first snapping his fingers three times. Another spits twice, once in each palm, then uses the gunk as a pomade to smooth his hair. A year earlier, when a supporting beam snapped in two, Mikoláš Dudik, a thirty-year veteran of the underground, died. It was generally agreed that no one had heard him recite the names of his wife, three children, and dead parents before climbing down into the hole as was his custom, and this, more than a poorly secured strut, was determined to be the reason for his tragedy. Children are no part of the watermen's lives. Their days are spent sleeping
and their nights working, so they are virtual strangers to their offspring. In fact, a prevailing belief holds that to draw too close to a child is to tempt death. The men will avoid boasting of a son's wrestling prowess or that their infant has been selected to stand in for baby Jesus in the holiday crèche. If they speak of their children at all they are careful to dismiss them as ingrates or mouths to feed so as not to tempt fate. So the presence of the boy, Markus, the respectful way the others on the Homulka crew treat him, his effortless way with the famously oppositional horse, the fact that even with the child around there have been no accidents—all this convinces Blodek and the others that Markus is not an actual child but a talisman, and that his presence is somehow responsible for Boris and his crew's good fortune.

The Homulka Miracle, as it is now known, galvanizes not only rival watermen but Boris's crew itself. The men are excited not only by their increased wages but by their local fame. Their dedication to increasing both their weekly pay and their renown motivates Danilo, their unofficial engineer, who spends his days thinking of ways to improve his invention. Although he admires the pulley system for its elegant simplicity, he realizes that the deeper the men bore the tunnel, the more of them it will take to pull the lengthier and heavier rope. One day, as Markus and Boris and Anuska sleep, a trio of snores and snorts and sighs punctuating the quiet of the stable, he lies on his straw bed and lazily recalls the train ride that brought him and Markus to the city. An image comes to mind: a small handcar he saw in one of
the train yards. He'd pointed it out to the boy and they had both laughed at the sight of a yardman seesawing the walking beam to propel the car.

Danilo sits up in bed with a shout.

The handcar, once built and implemented, is a huge success, but a complication remains: what to do with the loaded skip when it reaches the mouth of the tunnel. His elevating contraption is only fit for a bucket, and it takes too many men and far too much time to transfer the rocks into pails. The problem is glorious. Danilo thinks of nothing else for weeks. No matter if he is working in the tunnels or walking the city streets in the early mornings with Markus, he is working out the problem of how to lift an entire load of rocks out of the manhole in one go.

“What happens if the clock breaks?” Markus says one early Sunday morning as they stand in the square waiting for the hour to strike. Since they have been working underground they are only able to visit the clock tower once a week. As soon as they stabled the horse that morning, Markus ran through the streets, fearing that, in his absence, the clock had disappeared.

“A clock maker fixes it.”

“How does he get up there?”

“Stairs,” Danilo says. He isn't really listening to the boy. He's too consumed by his latest challenge.

“The stairs are inside the tower?”

“I suppose.”

“Do they build the stairs first and the tower after or the other way around?”

“
Shhh
, Markus. I'm thinking.”

“So am I,” the boy says.

“Think more quietly, please.”

“If I think more quietly then I can't hear myself think. And if I can't hear myself think, I won't know what I'm thinking.”

“Markus, you're talking in circles.”

Suddenly, the boy takes off running across the square and into the town hall. By the time Danilo catches up to him, Markus has already found the door that leads to the clock and has climbed halfway up the stairwell, which, as Danilo rounds one corner and then the next, feels like it will go on forever. At the top, on a narrow landing crammed with the inner workings of the clock, there are two lateral turnstiles holding six apostles each. Before Danilo can figure out how all the parts function, the hour sounds and the machinery moves.

To be so close to the noise of the ringing bell is terrifying. The din is so loud, so huge and total, that it becomes a space that Danilo and Markus are inside of and that they can't escape. Danilo feels it in his ears, behind his eyes, in his gut. It is a weight pressing down on his chest. But the sense of obliteration is exhilarating. He feels like he has jumped off the edge of a cliff and is flying. He screams. Markus screams. They can't hear each other and that makes them both laugh. The works are moving. The chain that connects and synchronizes the two turnstiles passes over the rollers. The apostles are carried forward up to and then past the open doors. Finally, they complete their solemn circular procession, returning to where they started—

“Markus!” Danilo shouts. The boy can't hear him, but it doesn't matter. He's figured it out.

—

I
T
TAKES
SOME
CONVINCING
,
but Boris finally agrees. He doesn't like the idea that the new apparatus will be aboveground for his competitors to see, but he orders the men to widen the manhole. He cannot argue with the fact that, by means of a drum mounted on an axle that works as a verticle winch, an entire skip full of earth can be lifted out of the hole, and production will double.

“Triple, even,” Boris says. “We won't be able to dig fast enough for you. The men will curse you for the extra work.” But he is unable to hide his enthusiasm.

It takes four watermen to work the turnstile, which is three more than either Danilo or Boris would like, so Anuska is pressed into service. She is initially resistant, whinnying and arcing her neck angrily, but Markus leads her around for the first few nights, encouraging her with praise and carrots, and soon enough she allows herself be harnessed to one of the spindles.

As for the men, far from cursing Danilo, they work faster than ever. The tunnel grows steadily deeper. Each night it takes longer to reach the place where they must drill new blasting holes and set explosives. Danilo has the feeling that they are walking the length of the entire city. The watermen congratulate themselves; they will reach their goal ahead of schedule and their wallets will grow fat.

—

O
NE
S
UNDAY
MORNING
,
Danilo and Markus decide that instead of visiting the clock and the castle, they will follow the river north. After a time, they find themselves at the fringes of the city where civic zeal seems to have lost heart. Unfinished roads are lined with half-built or half-demolished buildings as if optimism and resignation were pitted against each other in a long-winded battle that neither cares to win. Where trees have been cut down, their stunted trunks remain. Weeds spring up in unfinished doorways. Wheelbarrows have been left upended as though the workers who would normally push them ran off in a hurry, heeding some ominous warning. A few wild dogs sniff around in hope.

“Let's turn back,” Danilo says. Now that he works belowground, he does not have as much energy for these daytime adventures. “There's nothing interesting here. I need to sleep.”

A few paces ahead, Markus stops and stands as rigid as those castle guards he so admires. When Danilo catches up to him, he sees why.

Like some contrapositive version of the magical castle on the other side of the river, this edifice is just as enormous and prepossessing. But where the castle is all lightness and whimsy with its exuberant buttresses and its cake-like crenellations inciting the tongue to imagine what they might taste like if they were made of sugary batter, this massive complex appears as dense and unforgiving as the word of God. That it is a prison is obvious not only because of the high spiked wall that surrounds it but because
the sight of it produces in Danilo the vertiginous terror of a repeated nightmare.

Seemingly out of nowhere, people appear, all of them heading toward the prison. The elderly steady themselves with canes or are pushed in wheeled chairs, mothers cradle babies, fathers carry baskets and bundles. For the most part, the people walk in silence as though they are on a religious pilgrimage and their every footfall is an opportunity for holy contemplation. When they reach the wall, they form into a line that snakes around the perimeter.

“We're not safe here,” Danilo says. It has been a long time since he's thought of himself as an escaped criminal but now he feels that at any moment he will be caught. He tries to pull the boy away, but Markus shakes him off.

The day began sunny but clouds move in quickly and a cold drizzle begins to fall, flirtingly at first. No one appears impatient or inconvenienced: they have come to wait. Danilo puts his arm around Markus's shoulder, a feeble attempt at keeping the boy dry, and although he knows they ought to try to find some shelter, maybe under the frame of one of the abandoned structures, he is as mesmerized as the boy is by this strange scene. After a short while, the rain stops and sun pokes through the clouds. People lay coats down on the wet ground, open their baskets and bundles, and lay out small picnic lunches.

“I don't have any food,” Danilo says.

“I'm not hungry.”

“You are always hungry.”

Just as the boy starts to defend himself, the people scramble to
their feet, hastily pack up their belongings, and call their children back from wherever they have wandered off to. The leisure of only minutes earlier is replaced by a collective anxiety. The gates of the monstrous building open, and uniformed guards file out, shouting a litany of orders at the crowd.
Stay in line! Keep moving! If you slow down, you will be ordered to leave. If you attempt physical contact with a prisoner, you will lose your privileges!

A guard notices Markus and Danilo standing apart and approaches them. “Get in line,” he says.

“We were just out for a morning stroll,” Danilo says, trying to appear composed despite his racing heart. The guard looks skeptical and Danilo regrets his excuse. In a city of churches and palaces, who would choose to spend his leisure in a place like this?