Little Nothing (7 page)

Over the next two years, Danilo worked ceaselessly without even a Sunday off to rest. One of his tasks was to formulate the concoctions Smetanka prescribed for his patients' ailments. The doctor would write out specific instructions, and though barely literate, Danilo would follow them as well as he could, using a mortar and pestle to grind various leaves and grasses and twigs along with certain stones the doctor claimed were laced with beneficial minerals. There were relatively few ingredients in Smetanka's home apothecary, and what made each cure specific seemed to be a matter only of proportion and nomenclature. In this way, Danilo produced Essential Carminative for Disorders
in the Stomach and Bowels, Famous Patent Ointment for Itch, Much Esteemed Drops for Venereal Complaints, and Sovereign Restorative Infusion for Barrenness. The remedy Smetanka recommended most often was his celebrated Purging Elixir, although one day, Danilo, moved by curiosity, tasted a few of the other treatments and found that nearly all of them produced that explosive outcome.

He felt sorry and vaguely guilty as he watched grateful patients hand over their money for the doctor's bogus cures and he was surprised when these same patients returned to the office a week or two weeks later, carrying presents of fresh baked bread or recently slaughtered ducks, tearfully grateful that their health had been restored. There were, of course, patients, like Danilo's brother, who died despite the doctor's efforts. But somehow Smetanka escaped blame, for the deeply religious people who lived in the town and the surrounding villages knew God's will when they saw it.

Although he was deeply embarrassed to do it, Danilo told Pavla the events surrounding her terrible ordeal while under the doctor's care: As soon as she and her parents left the office after their first visit, Smetanka ordered Danilo to turn away the rest of the day's patients. A miller arrived with his apprentice who was bleeding profusely from the hand, and Danilo had to instruct them to visit the village seamstress, who might just as easily sew on the salvaged thumb as attach a sleeve to a shirt. A woman with a jaw swollen to the size of an orange and as hot as fire to the touch walked away holding her throbbing head in her hands as if she would just as soon take it off and leave it by the
side of the road. Danilo chased after her and handed her a vial of Smetanka's Miracle Salve for Toothache even though he knew it was useless and that he would catch hell once the doctor realized he'd given away medicine for free. Finally, at midday, just as Danilo was sitting down to eat his half meal of bread and watery ale, the door of the office opened and Smetanka emerged. His face was flushed and sweaty, and his eyes darted wildly back and forth. In his hand he held a rough sketch that, after sweeping Danilo's meal onto the floor, he lay in front of the boy. The drawing showed a curious table that was split down the middle crosswise. Another drawing showed the table pulled into two.

“Make it work,” the doctor said. “You have until tomorrow morning.”

It was, Danilo was ashamed to admit to Pavla, an exciting assignment. The challenge of interpreting the doctor's slapdash design and inventing solutions to the problems that arose gave Danilo a remarkable feeling, one he had never experienced before, not when he was a boy learning the shoe trade with his brother under the disapproving gaze of their father, certainly not when he prepared those idiotic potions for the doctor. For the first time in his life, he not only realized he had a brain but that he was putting it to use. The project took him into the night and the early hours of the morning. Mistakes were made. Hours of work had to be dismantled when the trusses on which each half of the table was meant to glide got stuck. But finally, he managed to get all the actions to work in concert: a crank turned, the rope navigated smoothly through the pulleys that he'd mounted
on the underside of the table, the split plank opened and closed as smoothly as a jaw. He worked with such concentrated intensity and with such pride in his newly discovered abilities that he did not once stop to wonder what the doctor had in mind for this contraption. Instead, he began to imagine a life for himself where doctors would come from near and far to order medical appliances that only he could make. He would save the reputation of his family. His parents might even allow him to come back home. He would once again taste his mother's eight-hour pork roast. He could feel his tongue swell with the memory of the succulent fat.

The following day, the dwarf girl and her parents returned to the office. Wrapped in a blanket and carried in her father's arms, she whimpered pathetically and seemed nearly dead. Danilo was terrified when, for the briefest moment, he caught her eyes and saw there not a look of misery or fear, but utter vacancy. He could not look at her again. Her loveliness that had so captivated him and everything that had made him unaccountably shy and say stupid things, were gone, not as if these qualities had disappeared but as if they had never existed in the first place and he had dreamed the whole thing up. She was no more inside her body than his brother was when he lay in his coffin and Danilo bent to kiss his forehead. Like him, she was only a container of emptiness. Her beautiful hair was matted. The skin of her neck and face was sallow. Her eyes were as milky and lifeless as the eyes of the blind woman in his village who had memorized the feel of various palms so that she could thank you by name if you were generous enough to give her a few haléřs or a piece of cheese.
The petrified father looked at the doctor beseechingly, asking him if they had not understood the prescription correctly, for what the girl had endured the previous night had not made her taller, even by a centimeter. Danilo still did not understand what it was the old couple had done to her, but when the doctor ordered the father to take away the blanket, and before the mother demanded she be covered with a sheet, he saw the terrible burns that covered her naked body and the welts that were newly risen and filled with pus. His vision fogged and he broke out into a sweat. He lifted the girl onto the machine,
his
machine, as his mind, with which he had only recently become acquainted, finally grasped his invention's purpose. Like the parents, though, he was too stunned by incomprehension and fear to question the doctor, and following orders like a dumb mule, he affixed the girl's arms and legs to the straps that he had so carefully made using the leatherwork techniques his father had taught him. When he turned the crank, she made a wretched noise, but he could hardly hear her through the sound of his own scream.

P
avla did not blame Danilo then
and does not blame him now for what happened. And even though she was angry with her parents for wanting her to change, she does not blame them either. How could they or anyone have known what would happen to her? That she would not only grow as they had hoped, but that with her height would come this other unbidden disfigurement? But just as she learned that love is not always kind and is never simple, she does not allow herself to mistake Danilo's interest in her for anything other than what it is, a blend of guilt and pity and decency. During the long, slow drives following the parade of ramshackle conveyances that carry the fat man and giant man and the three-headed snake and all the other attractions from one town to the next, Smetanka sleeps off the previous night's drunkenness in the back of the caravan while she sits next to Danilo on the wagon bench. Sometimes they trade carnival gossip about the separate romances of the conjoined Chinese
twins. All Danilo has to say is “Can you please look the other way?” and he and Pavla fall against each other laughing. But as their bodies meet and then part and then meet again, their laughter becomes self-conscious so that every snort of the horse or crack of stones underneath a hoof feels as embarrassing as if one of them burped. They fall silent, and lulled by the slow rocking of the wagon and the nearness of him, she drifts into daydreams. He will put his hands on her face. He will brush her lips with his. He will— But the fantasy only serves to make her acutely aware of its implausibility. For how does she differ from Ling Ling and Ting Ting, whose names are really Marika and Markéta and who are from a village not far from Pavla's, but who are transformed into Oriental exotics by virtue of white face paint and black kohl? Or from Rosta, who is so thin that you can see every vein and bone in his body through his nearly pellucid skin? Or Juliska, whose folds of belly fat fall down to her knees? Or Leopold, who can swallow a padlock, a colored ball, and a live mouse, chase all of it down with a pint of beer, then regurgitate everything in whatever order the crowd demands? Perhaps, just now, the others are having a laugh at the expense of her hairy cheeks, which Smetanka forbids her to shave, or her ears, which twitch when she is nervous. If it weren't for the clatter and squeal of the wagon wheels she might be able to hear them, for her ears capture sounds she has never heard before. At night, she can hear worms inching up the sides of the caravan. She can hear a blade of grass rub against its neighbor.

How could he want her?

The two leave the tent and walk out into the crisp night. Her stretched muscles have mostly healed but walking is painful. Knowing this, Danilo moves slowly. Anyway, there is no rush to get back to the caravan. As tired as they are, sleep only means that the next night will come that much more quickly and with it more humiliation. They pass the fortune-teller's tent. Inside, her lamp is still burning. A gust of wind, and the wooden board advertising “Fortunate FrantiÅ¡ka” knocks against its post.

“You don't have money to waste,” Pavla says, but she knows Danilo won't be able to resist throwing away his pitiful salary on FrantiÅ¡ka the Faker, as Pavla refers to the old woman.

“You're the one who said all time exists,” Danilo says. “The past exists. The future exists.”

It's true. She did say this. And she does somehow believe that what has happened to her and what will happen exist simultaneously, that the story is already written but not yet told. She must be like someone in one of her mother's tales who has existed for centuries of telling and will live on even after her mother is gone. How else to explain her life? As something random?

“You said we just have to look hard and we will see what will happen to us,” he continues.

“FrantiÅ¡ka can't even see her own hand in front of her face,” she says, laughing. Her voice is a girl's, but her laugh is a short, scratchy inhuman bark.

“Behold a blind woman who can see the future!” Danilo says dramatically, imitating FrantiÅ¡ka's husband when he tries to draw people to her tent. The joke around the carnival is that
if Františka could have known that the only man on earth who would fuck her was one with a goiter the size of a melon protruding from the side of his neck, she would have foreseen her death and killed herself. There is some rumor that Františka is not blind at all, that the impairment is simply a gimmick thought up by her canny husband. Someone saw her walk clear across the carnival grounds without once stepping in the mule turds that the animals drop as they carry children on laborious circuits around the amusements. Someone else claims to have caught her staring at herself in her mirror.

“Come with me,” Danilo says. “Just once.”

“I'd prefer to eat,” she says, jangling her change purse.

“I'll pay for us both.”

She sighs. “You're an idiot,” she says fondly, following him.

Inside, the tent is painted blood red, and the flickering lamp casts an eerie glow over everything, including the old, shriveled woman who sits at her velvet-draped table tearing apart a piece of ham with her fingers. “Go away. I'm done for the night,” FrantiÅ¡ka croaks.

“Then why is your lamp still lit?” Pavla says.

“How would I know if it is or not? That rascal who calls himself my husband has not bothered to drag himself home tonight to close up, so here I am, trying to eat my supper and having to fend off the likes of you.” She sniffs. “It's that little goat girl, isn't it?”

“Wolf girl,” Danilo says.

“It all smells the same to me.”

Pavla, like all the resident freaks, is used to talk like this and takes no offense. Anyway, she is too busy trying to suss out whether the woman is a scammer or not. She looks around the tent for clues. A full-length mirror stands against an upended trunk, although a cloth covers the glass. Crude paintings of turbaned mystics and one of an open hand with an eye in the center of the palm hang on the tent poles, but the decorations could just as easily be there to create an air of foreign mystery for the fortune-teller's patrons as for Františka's ocular enjoyment. Certainly the painting of the woman clothed in nothing but a diaphanous scarf that winds its way like a snake between her legs and over one breast must be there for the pleasure of Františka's husband, who is right this moment probably spending his wife's wages on one of the prostitutes who descend like buzzards each time the carnival arrives in a new town.

“We want you to read our fortunes,” Danilo says. He puts two coins down on the table to show he means business.

“You have no fortune,” the old woman says, devouring the last bite of her ham and sucking her fingers clean.

“Everyone has a fortune,” Pavla says.

“No. I'm telling you. You have none. Your fortune is that you have none. Now go away.”

“If you are telling us we're poor, we hardly need to pay money to learn that,” Danilo says.

The woman shrugs, taking a bite of bread and chewing slowly.

“Take your money back,” Pavla says to Danilo.

He reaches for the coins, but the woman is quick and her hand covers them before he gets there.

“You mean we have no luck?” Pavla says.

“So the wolf is the smart one. Smart as a wolf.”

“Smart as a fox,” Pavla says.

“Fox. Wolf, cat, dog. They are all apparently smarter than that one.” She looks directly at Danilo, and for a moment, Pavla is certain the woman can see perfectly.

“I'm smart enough to know it doesn't take a seer to tell us that we're down on our luck,” Danilo says.

“I told you, I'm closed for business.”

Pavla whispers to Danilo that they should go. She hasn't eaten all day.

“You took my money,” Danilo says. “I want my fortune.”

“Alright,” the woman says. “Here it is: one of you will be brave, one of you will be a coward. One of you will believe. One of you will doubt.”

“Which one—” Pavla says, but Danilo interrupts her.

“But what about love?” he asks. “Will I find love?”

“Love!” the woman exclaims. “All anyone wants to know about is love! My God! Is there nothing more important on earth than that? Why don't you ask the necessary questions: Will I have food in my belly? Will I have all my teeth? Will I be able to urinate without pain? But no, it's always love! It's pathetic.”

“But what is the answer?” Pavla says quietly. She is not sure she wants to hear. “Will he have love in his life?”

“Yes, he will have love. No, he will not have love. It's all the same to me. Now get out!”

—

T
HEY
ARE
QUIET
as they walk the rest of the way home. The giant stands near his caravan taking one of his epic pisses after a night of heavy drinking. He's fallen asleep during the endless evacuation, and Danilo and Pavla watch in awe as he tilts precariously toward his splatter. Just before he topples, he wakes himself with a snort, and they have to run to avoid the wayward geyser. Laughter rings out from the home of Juliska, the Fattest Woman. There is a happy person, Pavla thinks. And it is true. There is never a moment when that woman is not filled with mirth. Her joy seems to reside in the folds of her neck and the jiggle of each buttock, which she can, amazingly, sway in opposite directions. Unlike some of the other performers whose lives of being tormented have made them hard-edged and bitter, Juliska takes as much pleasure in displaying herself as do those who pay to see her. As a result, she never receives the sorts of taunts or the barrage of flying objects that are Pavla's regular due. Pavla once snuck into Juliska's tent and watched her perform. The woman showed off the magnificence of her body as if she were displaying the most mouthwatering desserts.
Here is my giant arm
, she seemed to be saying, allowing a lucky patron to reach out a finger and set the fat into pendulous motion.
Here is my mighty thigh
. The men, for her patrons are mostly men, women not being the least entranced by flab, responded by treating her with enormous care, touching her as though she were something delicate. Because of her welcome and her generous love for them, she had been transposed in their minds into the statue of the
virgin they were allowed to carry in the processions when they were boys, bearing her giant wooden body aloft like a miracle. How proud they felt to be given the awesome responsibility to guard that simulacrum of sacred flesh!

Pavla supposes it's different for Juliska and the giant, who have lived with their curious bodies their entire lives and who have never known themselves to be other than the porcine or enormous people they are. Had she remained a dwarf, she believes that she would have been as happy as Juliska. But she has become unfamiliar to herself.

After fainting on the stretching table, she woke up to the sound of saw teeth gnashing against wood. For a moment, she thought she was still in the doctor's office and that something new and even more horrifying was about to happen to her, but then she looked around and saw the slats of her crib on either side of her head. She was home, and everything around her was recognizable if only a bit more snug than she recalled. It was when she looked down . . . and down toward a pair of bafflingly distant feet that she realized the sawing noise was coming from the bottom of the crib, and that her father had, while she was sleeping, removed the slats to make way for her—yes, they belonged to her—very long legs.

Before she could take full stock of her growth, she heard weeping. She sat up and looked over the crib rail (and not simply through the bars anymore) and saw her mother sitting on the chair, her face in her hands.

“Mama, don't cry. Look, I am tall!” Pavla said. But when she
reached toward her mother, the pain in her armpits was so searing she fell back against the mattress.

For the first few days, her parents ministered to her with warm compresses and emollients of honey and egg whites to soothe her skin where the hot oil had made it blistered and raw. Once the pulled muscles at her groin had healed and she was strong enough to stand, they helped her adapt to her new height. It was strange to feel her body move through familiar space in such drastically new ways. She felt that she was standing at the edge of a cliff and was always just about to plummet headfirst to her death. Her first steps were stiff and tentative; she did not trust these new limbs to hold her upright. She had to think her way from the sink to the door.
Move your left leg
, she would say to herself,
now the right
. She and her parents even laughed when, reaching for a cup and saucer for her tea, she swung her arm well above the level of the shelf and toppled a bowl of peaches in the process. Her father clapped when she experimented with running from the house to the chicken coop. She no longer needed to lurch from side to side as she once did; her legs carried her smoothly forward. Still, there were moments when she caught both her parents staring at her with frightened expressions on their faces, and her mother wept at night when she thought Pavla was asleep.

“What is wrong?” she asked them the following morning. “I am tall just as you wanted me to be. Why do you look away? Why does Mama cry?”

And it was only then, under duress, that her mother opened
the wardrobe door and beckoned Pavla to stand in front of the mirror they had looked into so often when Pavla was a baby, the one that finally reflected back to Agáta not a terrible mistake but her very own beloved daughter. For the first time since coming home from the doctor's, Pavla saw her face. Slowly, she brought her hand to her furred cheeks, ran her finger down her long nose, stared into the yellowish eyes. She didn't cry. She didn't make a sound. She thought: I am looking into a mirror at a girl who looks nothing like me but who is me. And I am looking at the girl looking at herself in the mirror seeing the person who is nothing like herself but is herself.