Little Nothing (23 page)

“Either line up or move on,” the guard says.

“Come on,” Markus says, pulling Danilo toward the prison. “You promised.”

“I didn't.”

“You're a liar!” the boy says, tears forming in his eyes.

Danilo doesn't know what Markus's game is, but he can't believe that the boy is creating a commotion. Has he forgotten the asylum? Does he not care that Danilo, who has protected him and kept him safe all this time, is just one curious guard away from being arrested? Finally, he manages to put Markus in a lock the boy can't wriggle out of and, making excuses for his unmanageable son, drags him away.

The boy's fascination with the prison grows by the day. He no longer wants to walk to the clock tower or observe the guards at the palace. Nor is he interested in visiting the street of cobblers,
where the smell of leather hangs in the air and where Danilo has patiently explained to him how a shoe is made first to last, or in visiting the street of fishmongers and wandering among the bins of slick, wide-eyed, iridescent pike and flounder. He can't even be tempted by the baker's alley where the boy once stood so long outside a shop watching a man transform butter into sculptures of swans and delicate sprays of flowers that he was given a broken cookie from a warm batch. He wants to go to the prison.

After an argument one Sunday morning that begins as soon as the men finish their shift and lasts until Markus, Danilo, and Boris have offloaded the last of the rubble, Danilo succeeds in forcing Markus to stay at the stable. Thankfully, the boy has exhausted himself with his incessant pestering and he falls asleep quickly. But when Danilo's eyes flutter open a few hours later, Markus is gone. It's not hard to find him. He's at the prison, standing at the end of the line of visitors.

“You have to come away from here,” Danilo whispers, but it is too late. The gates swing open, the guards emerge, shouting their orders. Danilo knows he can't risk drawing attention to himself, so when the line moves, he follows Markus through the entrance. The moment the gates close behind him, he starts to shake and can't stop. A guard runs his hands up and down Danilo's body, checking for hidden weapons. The feeling of being trapped is so visceral that he can hardly catch his breath. The visitors form two lines, one for the men's side of the prison, the other for the women's. Markus is already falling in with the line headed to the women's side, and Danilo has no choice but to follow. After moving down a short tunnel, they come out into an
open area with a fence running down the middle. The prison wall is at their back. On the other side of the fence is a dirt yard and beyond that, low, utilitarian structures. The visitors stop and wait. No one speaks. Finally, women emerge from the buildings. They all wear the same gray dresses. Some wear ill-fitting sweaters and ragged shawls. Others fold their arms around their chests to keep warm. The guards order the prisoners and visitors to stand back from the fence line, but neither group obeys. Danilo grips Markus's hand tightly. The boy is too transfixed by the scene to object. People shout back and forth across the divide.
Hello! There you are! You look well!
Some dispense with the preliminaries and immediately begin to share pressing information.
Your mother has gallstones! The mattresses are infested with bedbugs! The horse has gone lame! They won't let me see a dentist!
The banality of the conversations startles Danilo. Despite the obvious privations of the prisoners, all of whom look worn, some so weak they seem about to fall over, and despite the guards who pass back and forth making sure no one comes within two meters of the fence on either side, the scene reminds him of when he was a small boy and his mother took him and his brother to the market square where shopping was only an excuse to trade gossip. But when he looks more carefully, he sees that the exuberance on the visitors' side is not nearly matched on the prisoners'. The women seem overwhelmed, and their smiles look more like the rictus of the dead. One woman forgets herself and reaches toward the fence, but a guard moves swiftly to hit her arm with a painful crack of a baton. She falls back without reacting. Danilo remembers how men who entered the asylum with
the glittering gazes of the anarchic mad quickly turned lackluster, their expressions so devoid of spirit that it became hard to distinguish one patient from another. Here, too, except for height, or hair color, or the occasional woman who is, against all odds, plump, the prisoners look unnervingly similar. Their skin shares the same pallid tone. Their eyes dart back and forth, attentive to oblique dangers. They listen to the information that is thrown at them about growing children and dying grandmothers and the escalating price of bread but they might as well be hearing words in a language they don't understand.

Markus stares across the chicken wire, fiercely attentive to everything. He lifts his chin, breathes quickly through his nose as if he were sniffing the air for signs of fire or food or a clue to something.

“Hey,” he whispers, and then, excited, he says it louder and points. He pushes past the other visitors to get closer to the fence. A guard immediately shouts at him. Undeterred, he stands on his toes to try to see over the shoulders of people who block his view. “Here I am!” he cries. “Over here!” His excitement seems genuine. In fact, he looks fragile and guileless all of a sudden, a boy waiting for a promise to be kept.

“There's no one here for you,” Danilo says gently.

But Markus has set his sights on a woman who stands far back in the crowd somewhat apart from the others. She wears no sweater but does not seem bothered by the cold.

“Here I am!” Markus repeats, but she doesn't notice him.

“I think you're confused,” Danilo says, heartbroken for the motherless boy.

But Markus persists and, after a few moments, the woman notices at him. She appears startled at first, then wary.

“What's going on here?” a guard says.

“Nothing,” Danilo says. “He is upset.”

“Who are you here to see?”

Reluctantly, Danilo points out the woman who stands alone.

“She doesn't seem to know him,” the guard says. He is young, and he holds his baton awkwardly, as if he's never used it. He seems nervous and unhappy to have stumbled upon a problem that might force him to make a decision on his own.

Danilo thinks quickly. “It's been a long time since he's seen her.” He puts his arm around Markus's shoulder. “He was just a baby when she was taken away.”

The woman pushes through the crowd until she is close to the fence. Her expression betrays neither recognition nor excitement, only curiosity. The guard stays where he is, looking from her back to Danilo and Markus, waiting to be convinced by this performance. She stops the prerequisite distance from her side of the fence.

“It's her,” Markus whispers. And then, louder, “It's you.”

The guard grips his baton so tightly his knuckles are white.

“There you are!” Danilo calls to her. “We thought we'd missed you! Look how he's grown. You probably don't even recognize him!”

The woman stares at the boy with such intensity that Markus falls silent. “Do you know me?” she says. Her voice is hoarse, unused.

“Of course he knows you!” Danilo says, glancing at the guard.

Now she turns her attention toward Danilo. She cocks her head, seems confused. He waits for her to say something that will expose him and the boy as imposters.

“Do you know me?” she says again, more urgently. “Can you tell me who I am?”

Danilo's heart is beating hard. He doesn't recognize her. And yet he feels that a seam has ripped open and he has stepped not just across to the other side of the fence but into another world where all the unruly and lost parts of himself are gathered up and shuffled into order. “I'm sorry it has taken so long for us to come,” he hears himself say.

“Move along now!” the guard says. “Visiting is over.”

Before Danilo realizes what has happened, Markus runs to the fence and pushes his hand through the chicken wire.

“Stand back!” the guard shouts, his voice alerting his counterpart on the prisoners' side who brings his club down on the woman's arm just as she reaches out to touch the boy's fingers. The rest of the guards take this moment of intransigence as a reason to shove and batter the prisoners back toward their barracks. Markus bangs his fist against the fence, crying, “Mama! Mama!”

At the sound of his high-pitched wail, some of the women turn back. Markus starts to climb the wire but the guard pulls him off and throws him to the ground. His cry is drowned out by the roar of the women who, seeing the violence done to the child, swarm back to the fence. Danilo falls on Markus to shield him, and the guard's club comes down on his
back.

T
he following morning,
when the women are marched to the latrines, she is ordered to wait behind for special questioning.
Think of flowers
, Iveta advises sarcastically. But the others are sympathetic. Everyone knows she is not being selected for her appeal or for the reputation of the work of her mouth, but because she incited the riot.

The boy's cry unleashed something in the women. No matter how the guards came down on them with their clubs, the prisoners ran toward the fence. And when the boy was finally carried away, the women continued to hurl themselves senselessly against the chicken wire. A siren flared but it served only as a rallying cry, and the women became more courageous. They threw themselves onto the guards, jumping on their backs to stop them from hitting other prisoners. A few women tried to climb the fence only to be pulled down before they had gotten beyond the guards' reach. One managed to make it to the top
before she was shot. The other women watched her fall, her fingers catching in the crosshatched wire. When she landed, she stood for a brief moment before gently collapsing.

Up until that point, she had stayed on the periphery of the uprising. She was so disoriented by her encounter with the man and the boy, so tormented by feeling, that she was closed off from what was happening around her. But seeing the dead woman unlocked something in her. Rage started as a heat in her belly and then quickly spread through every part of her body until it had nowhere to go but out, and she attacked the nearest guard. She hit and kicked. She clawed at his eyes and bit into his arms. The other women, encouraged by her unexpected ferocity, redoubled their frenzy. A convict bit off one of the guard's fingers then ran around the yard with the bloody digit between her teeth. By the time the uprising was finally contained, two prisoners were dead, including the one who, rather than surrender her prize, swallowed the finger whole.

—

S
HE
CAN
STILL
HEAR
the boy's cry. Not the exact sound of it—that is lost among the voices and noises of prison life. But she hears its recognition and the purity of its need. And the man. She can't remember his face exactly, only that he seemed undone when he looked into hers. That boy. That man. Can she join in the daily conversation now? I remember the time when . . . ? Still, there is no story. No walk in a park. No Christmas dinner. There is only the feeling of having mislaid something, the
bewilderment of knowing that she cannot remember what she knows.

She is led from the barracks by the guard the women call Teardrop because of a condition that causes his left eye to weep constantly so that he is forever dabbing at it with a ratty handkerchief. She considers what lies in store for her. Perhaps he will be as sympathetic as his false tears make him appear. But it is more likely that he'll be crueler than all the guards in order to prove the opposite. She already feels an incipient pain between her legs, her body preparing itself to be torn apart by whatever he will do to her to slake his need. But he does not lead her behind the latrine or to the area behind the kitchen building where the two dead women and the week's garbage await removal. They walk toward the commander's building. Is she to be Iveta's replacement, then? Does the small man want to desecrate a fresh human canvas? But Teardrop leads her past that building. Now she knows where he is taking her.

The small structure that the women call the hole stands far enough from other prison buildings so that what goes on inside it cannot be heard. When they are nearby, the prisoners avert their eyes, believing that if they look at it directly, the hole will somehow be their destiny. She has seen women emerge from this place after their long, solitary confinements, has observed the feral quality of their movements, the dark mania in their gazes. They are reduced to a series of protective gestures. At meals, they eat swiftly, certain that, at any moment, a guard will come in and snatch away their food. They avoid physical contact of any kind and seem to lose a measure of personal awareness so
that their hygiene becomes abhorrent, their stink part of their self-protection.

Once they are inside the building, Teardrop leads her down a set of stairs and into an underground bunker, past a desk where a lamp burns, and into a lightless room dug out of the ground. The floor and ceiling are made from hard-packed dirt. Roots and rocks protrude from cracks in a coat of plaster and paint that barely covers the walls. The uncirculated air smells of damp earth and mold and all the others who have been imprisoned here before her. Does anguish have a scent? Does hopelessness? Does a spirit decay and give off this odor of sour rot? A soiled mattress lies in one corner. Next to it, a small bucket where she supposes she is meant to relieve herself.

“Royal digs,” Teardrop says. He wipes his eye, and she reminds herself that he is not moved by her predicament. “The paint'll kill you, by the way,” he says as he leaves the room. He closes and locks the door behind him. She stands in absolute darkness, thinking about a woman so starved that she ate the walls.

The initial panic that surges through her is overwhelming. She is alone. She is trapped. There is no light. No air. She can't breathe. She paces. She hums. She will not survive this. Not even for an hour. There is no way out of this room, but worse, there is no way out of this unmanageable terror that is building up inside her. She screams.

In the quiet that follows, her head clears. And suddenly, she is calm and strangely reassured by something familiar:

Everything that is happening to her has happened before. She has been trapped in a small, tight space. She has been inside
this darkness and knows it as a condition of wakefulness and movement, a precursor not a finale. She recognizes the expansive silence that feels like fullness rather than a lack. She feels like she is floating. She cannot see the space she inhabits or herself within it but she can see colors: red, ocher, a deep, dark green, every color imaginable imbricated in the blackness.

—

T
IME
PASSES
but it does not move forward. It surrounds her. She is at its center. Even though she has nowhere to go, she feels borne by time. She is not confined within this small space. She travels through something that is without boundary. She is the flow itself, shifting and roiling, changing but unchanged. She cannot tell day from night, only knows that occasionally the door is unlocked, a fog of ambient light from the guard's lamp spills into the cell. A bowl is placed on the floor, questions are asked, and then the door closes. She despises these interruptions. They seem not to mark the time but somehow wreck it. She begins to think that all the things humans do to define time only destroy its beautiful fluidity. They want to dam it, interrupt it, break it down into passable bits. Mostly, they want to define it.
The time when.
She understands: there is no “time when” because time circles and comes back so that time when becomes future time that has not yet been reached.

She does not despair. She imagines that other women in this place have felt the terror of being cut off and discarded. But she does not fear these things. She is not scared at all. She tests
herself: three steps forward and, yes, as she suspected, there is the wall. Six steps backward, and there is the door. Holding her arms akimbo and rocking side to side, her fingertips graze the paint-washed dirt. Be careful not to put your hand in your mouth, she tells herself, remembering the warning, but she is not hungry. Each day, when her meal is delivered, Teardrop asks the same questions:
Who was the man? Who was the boy?
Her answer never varies.
The man was a man. The boy was a boy.
Sometimes he will even coax her:
They might let you out of here if you answer
, he says.
The man is a man
, she says.
The boy is a boy.
Teardrop closes the door. It takes her a few moments to return to her safe solitude, to rid herself of the need that the guard's visit encourages in her. How easy it is to fall into the trap of wanting, of believing she can't live without. The minute she hears the lock rattle, her mind falls into old habits of anticipation. The door will open, then the light, then the bowl, then the questions, and then, even though she works hard to rid herself of this, she experiences the desperation of his departure and the readjustment to isolation.

No, she does not like the interruptions. Even for the few moments of light that accompany them. Light is unnecessary. She does not need to look around her cell or at her hands or her legs, her belly or her breasts. Unlike the women in the showers, she does not need to think about what she looked like before, because before is nothing. The short conversation, that diffuse ambience, the presence of another human—these are distractions. She allows herself only the water, which she sips judiciously. She pours the soup onto the floor, where it is absorbed
by the dirt. Food, like those twice-daily intrusions, makes her feel tethered to the world outside. It makes her craven and in thrall to whoever decides when and what she should eat. She wants no relationships, not to people, not to food. Not eating makes her stronger than need, stronger than hope. Wanting nothing gives her an exhilarating sense of
being.