Little Nothing (8 page)

“Mama?” she said. “I don't understand. Is this me?”

“You're still beautiful to us,” her mother said.

—

A
LIE
,
OF
COURSE
,
Pavla thinks now, as she walks beside Danilo. But love is filled with lies.
We like you just the way you are. You are still beautiful. We will always be with you.
She believes her parents do not love her less, only that before, she had a child's notion of love that did not include the small treacheries of delusion and fear and shame.

“What do you think she meant by all that?” Danilo says.

“Who?”

“FrantiÅ¡ka. That I will have love and that I won't have love.”

“She meant that you just wasted all your money,” Pavla says. “She made a fool of you.” She doesn't want to be so harsh.
After all, Danilo is her only friend. But his question to the fortune-teller stung her, paralyzing her hope. “Will
I
find love?” he asked, and made himself clear. If he were interested in her that way he would not have had to ask. She is with him every day of their lives. But he said “I” and in so doing severed himself from her. She is not the future he is hoping to discover by throwing away his money on someone who, whether she is sighted or not, is no more a fortune-teller than Smetanka was ever a doctor.

“You should leave this place,” she says for the second time that night. But now, rather than say it to reassure herself of his fidelity, she wants to remind him of his inability to imagine something greater for himself. She decides to despise him for his lack of confidence. It is easier to hate him.

Later that night, Smetanka finally returns to the caravan. His face is covered with blood, and his mouth is two teeth poorer for whatever scrape he got himself into. He is filled with sloppy, borovička-fueled rage about how little money the act brought in.

“You are neither wolf nor girl,” he yells at Pavla. “You are nothing.”

“I know,” Pavla says calmly. “I'm a little nothing. Although I'm a bigger nothing than I used to be.”

Smetanka opens his mouth to speak but what emerges is a slurred and inarticulate growl.

“Perhaps you should be the one on stage,” she says. Danilo, lying on a clump of clothes that serves as his bed, laughs.

Smetanka lunges for her, but Danilo quickly crawls between them and pushes Smetanka, who is so drunk that he falls easily.

“You owe my parents ten percent, don't forget,” Pavla says.

“Ten percent of nothing,” Smetanka says. “You're not pulling in the crowds, and anyway I was robbed tonight.”

“Ten percent,” Pavla says. “That was the agreement.”

A month or so after the stretching treatment, Smetanka had shown up at her parents' door. He'd presented his offer as a great opportunity, claiming that some of the world's most important medical advancements were first introduced “on the circuit,” and that once the learned men of the academies got wind of what a small provincial doctor (and here, Smetanka smiled with false humility) had discovered, he would be celebrated. His experiment would be written up in important journals. He would be called upon to lecture all over the land. He would take Pavla with him as a living, breathing, and irrefutably tall proof of his genius. She would be celebrated, too. Riches, he said with assurance, would follow. Agáta and Václav were horrified at the thought of selling their daughter, but before they could chase the doctor out of the house (Agáta actually wielded her rolling pin), Pavla intervened. In the month following her startling change, she watched her father's business dry up. When the neighbors got wind of what had happened, they came to the door to slake their curiosity. They barely hid their delight in discovering that although the girl, who was so much more beautiful than any of their daughters, had grown to a normal size, her face had taken an alarming turn for the worse.
Those sickly yellow eyes! That unfortunate facial hair! She looks a bit doggish, don't you think?
Pavla was, once again, her mother's disgrace. She took to concealing herself in the standing wardrobe to avoid their naked stares.
And while she crouched among her father and mother's clothing, inhaling what was once the comforting scent of flowered soap that lived in the fibers of her mother's dresses and the sharp odor of grease on her father's shirts, she saw plainly, as if a light were shining in the darkness of the cabinet, that the rest of her life would be spent hiding from the world. She would be trapped in the confines of the small cottage. Her longest journey might be the one from the front door to the garden to pick carrots and beets and back again.

“I want to go with him,” she declared, before the doctor had left the house. Václav and Agáta refused, but she prevailed. “There is nothing for me here,” she told them.

“We are here,” Agáta said weakly.

What more needed to be said? Agáta and Václav knew they had little to offer their daughter. Pavla knew that if she left, her parents' final years might not be filled with hardship. Smetanka might have ruined her, but perversely, his offer was her only chance at life. She made her father agree to the deal.

But now she realizes they have all been tricked.

“I was there,” she says to Smetanka. “You shook my father's hand.”

“He had a fine handshake. A workingman's handshake. Trustworthy. But I'm afraid the agreement had to do with our work advertising my medical achievement, and, well . . .”

He does not need to finish his thought. The exhibition of “Doctor Smetanka's Miracle Cure for Dwarfs of All Sizes” had been an abject failure. Wherever they went, Danilo would set up the stretching table in the town square. Pavla would lie on it
while Smetanka described his “world-famous” procedure to whoever would stop and listen. He peppered his declarations with phrases like “medial compartment of the thigh” or “adductor longus” and “adductor magnus,” but no matter how erudite he sounded, no one would believe that the girl on the rack (whose face he covered with a veil to “protect her privacy”) was not simply tall to begin with.
Show us the proof!
they said. But even when he made Pavla open her shirt in order to display the stretched skin around her armpits, people were unconvinced. There was no fame. There were no riches. There was only the growing realization that soon they would starve. When they arrived at a town where a carnival had recently raised its tents, Smetanka ordered Danilo to dismantle the table and use the wood to build a stage.

“A handshake agreement stands. Everyone knows that,” Pavla says.

“She's right,” Danilo adds. “My father paid his debt to you for my brother's care with nothing but a handshake.”

“Oh, you backward country children,” Smetanka says, peeling off his shirt. Curls of dark hair sprout from the armholes and neckline of his undershirt. “Don't you know that we live in modern times? We live in a world of contracts and courts of law, not I'll-pay-you-tomorrow-for-the-milk-you-sell-me-today. Let me tell you a secret, little girl. Your parents ruined you.”

“Whose fault was that?”

“My dear, I did exactly what I promised. Are you not tall? It's really quite remarkable. One day, people will realize what I have accomplished and I will be heralded as the true scientist that I am.”

“And this?” She touches her lightly furred cheeks, draws her hands down the odd contours of her face. “Will you be praised for this?”

“Is it my fault that your ignorant parents took the advice of others before they consulted a real doctor? I can't account for the effects of all that gypsy hocus-pocus.”

“You are no more doctor than any of them,” Danilo says. “I saw what you gave people. I could have spit into a bottle and they would have been no worse off than they were taking your tinctures of whatever-the-hell.”

The silence that follows is so taut that Danko, the high-wire acrobat, could slide across it without a hitch.

“If you are not paying for me, then I don't have to be here,” Pavla says finally, more to herself than to the others. She finds a tapestry bag and begins to throw her few belongings into it.

“And where will you go?” Smetanka says, peeling off his socks and releasing the mildewed odor of his feet.

“Home.”

He lies down. “What makes you so sure they want you back? They may have ruined your life, but you ruined theirs first,” he says woozily, and in seconds, he is asleep.

Dispirited, she stops packing.

“Pavla,” Danilo says, laying a hand on her shoulder.

She shrugs him off. Listening to Smetanka's mucus-filled snores, inhaling the stale, liquor-soaked air that rises off his skin, she begins to feel like she will suffocate. She steps over him and goes to the door.

“Let me come with you,” Danilo says.

“I don't need your pity,” she says.

“I don't pity you.”

“Really? What do you see when you look at me? Do you see a freak?”

“No!”

“Do you see a girl?”

He hesitates. “I see,” he says, stammering. “I see—”

—

S
HE
STAYS
OUTSIDE
all night, pacing restlessly to keep herself warm until she begins to feel like a wolf in every way, her skin and eyes and nose alert to sound and smell, to the wrinkle in the wind that tells of bats in flight. The chirrup of cicadas becomes so loud and insistent she thinks she might go insane. And like a madwoman, she strides across the sleeping village of caravans until she reaches the now darkened tent of the fortune-teller.

“Which one am I?” she says when she enters.

An elephantine lump on the bed moves. “Who is there?” FrantiÅ¡ka cries out. “We're being robbed! Do something, you idiot!” A thrashing of sheets and limbs, and then the husband stands up. A match strikes and the lamp is lit. His goiter bulges above the neckline of his nightshirt. “It's that she-wolf,” FrantiÅ¡ka says from the bed.

Pavla doesn't care if the woman can see or not. “Who is it?” she demands. “Who is the brave one and who is the coward? Who believes and who doubts?”

“Get out of my house!” the man says, aiming a pistol at her.

“Yes! Kill me. Please. Do it!” Pavla says. She means it. For what is her life now that she knows the contract is a lie? Now that she is sure Danilo hopes for love, but not for her? Now that all she can foresee with or without this fraud's help is her life going on the way it is, one performance, one humiliation after another without end? This is the story that is written for her. She has already stepped into it. She can hear her mother's voice:
There once was a dwarf . . . “
Please,” she says quietly. “Put me out of my misery.”

“What is she talking about?” the man says. “She's not a dog.”

“Put your gun away, you old fool,” FrantiÅ¡ka says.

“Tell me. Please,” Pavla says. “Who will he love and who will he not love?”

“Go away,” the woman says. “Come back tomorrow and I'll tell you.”

“I have to know now,” Pavla says. She walks over to the mirror and pulls off the cloth that covers it.

She studies her face. It has changed since she first saw herself in her mother's wardrobe mirror. It is a face that is neither that of a girl nor that of a wolf, but is somehow, and more disturbingly, both. The high cheekbones of her childhood are markedly flared now and are accentuated by how narrow her face below them has become. Her nose, once so precise that a visiting magistrate ordered it to be drawn so that he could have his family portraitist replace his wife's crooked nose with Pavla's for posterity, is now so long that it defines the shape of her face. The hairs that cover her cheeks that at first were disturbing but at least
pale now have acquired deep russet undertones. Taken one by one, the strangeness of her features provokes in her a kind of awe, just as her breasts or the new shapeliness of her thighs do. But when she takes in the whole effect, she understands why her audiences shriek. The true horror of her presence is not that she is a hideous girl or that she is a wolf, but that she is a bizarre combination of the two. The fortune-teller comes up behind her. Pavla still cannot tell if the woman sees or not, but it doesn't matter. She seems to know.

“You should have let him shoot me,” Pavla says.

“No,” the woman says, and for a minute, Pavla sees not FrantiÅ¡ka, but her mother behind her, staring past her shoulder into the mirror. “You're not going to die,” the woman says, patting her back. “Now go away and leave an old couple in peace.”

—

A
FTER
THAT
NIGHT
,
Pavla's performance changes. When Danilo removes the cape, instead of simpering and pretending to be ashamed and then roaring for effect, she simply stands motionless, looking out at the audience. She waits out the horrified shrieks, the gasps, the catcalls, and stoning until that menacing energy is spent. At that point, the audience, no longer allowed to engage with her as an act, must come to different terms with the fact that she is a living truth, no more fantasy than those who look upon her. Her stillness, her unwillingness to prance and perform, become a different sort of confrontation that makes them feel less superior, vulnerable even, as if their own masks
have been violently ripped away and now the truth of their ugliness and their distorted desires are on display for Pavla to see. Each night, as the women drop their hands from their eyes, as the men stop leaning into one another to tell their nasty jokes, Pavla sees in their faces not ghoulish pleasure but confusion. Why is she staring at
them
? What horror does
she
see? She watches as even the most obstreperous of them wither; their shoulders turn inward, their eyes cast about for reassurance. They grab one another's hands. People leave as quietly as they do the confessional. And then they buy a ticket for the next show.