Little Nothing (17 page)

“Shit for shit,” Ivan says.

“This is not an original joke,” Václav says. “Here, I'll show you.”

He leads Ivan back into the water closet and flushes the toilet again, explaining the smooth operation of the mechanism, then describing the pipes that take the water underground, their length and trajectory, how those from different homes meet and how the waste from them flows into a single artery. He tells a few stories of his more challenging jobs and his proud successes.

“Well,” he says sadly, when he has finished, “a man cannot rest on his laurels. The world moves on, and you are forgotten. Which is as it should be, I suppose. But sometimes you can spend a lot of sorrow trying to change things for the better when what was first was best. It's only that you were too foolish to realize it.”

—

O
N
MARKET
DAYS
and Sunday mornings, when the neighbors are away from their homes, the couple agrees that it is safe for Ivan to take the wolf on longer walks. They swim in a stream beneath a narrow bridge. They wander beyond the small farms and into a meadow where the wolf hunts weasels and rabbits. While she eats, Ivan lies on the soft grass. Sometimes he sleeps. When he wakes, she is always there. Why doesn't she run away? He supposes she's become used to human comforts. The old woman is not a bad cook, after all, and although her husband disapproves, she hands the wolf bits of bread and chicken bones under the table during meals. The house is warm and safe. Frankly, Ivan could easily imagine staying here forever. When the sun passes overhead, they make their way home in order to be indoors before the neighbors return laden with marketing baskets and churchy guilt.

“She knows this land,” Ivan tells the couple one evening. They have finished their meal and sit quietly around the table. Agáta has washed Ivan's uniform, but because she is too nervous to hang it outside where it will dry more quickly, she has lent
him Václav's trousers, which are both too wide and too short for him, and one of the man's better shirts. “No matter how far we go, she finds her way back here.”

“She uses her nose,” Václav says.

“Maybe,” Ivan says uncertainly.

“She smells Mother's cooking.”

“Don't be an idiot,” Agáta says, unable to hide her grin.

“That must be it,” Ivan says.

They are quiet again.

“After the explosion, while we were walking—she knew where she was going then, too.”

Agáta frowns. “We make up the sense of things after they happen,” she says. “We tell stories. This happened because of that. We string things together one by one so that it seems like there's a reason to it all. But there is no reason. The most unbelievable things can happen and you have no idea why.” Her eyes become glassy.

“Why don't your neighbors come to visit? You are old. They should be taking care of you, bringing you food, helping you,” Ivan says.

“We have no need for their help,” Václav says. “We have our garden and our coop. We're fine.”

“What about your child?” Ivan says gently, glancing at the crib. “You have one? Maybe more than one?”

“We have a daughter.”

“Where is she?”

“Wherever she is, she is better off without us.”

“She owes you her care. You gave her life.”

“You've been in war,” Václav says. “You see how little life accounts for.”

“And you?” Agáta says. “You must want to see your family.”

“I don't think I'd be welcome. My father would turn me in himself if he had the chance.”

“So you know what monsters parents can be,” she says.

—

T
HE
NEXT
MARKET
DAY
,
once the neighbors have left their homes with fattened pigs and wheelbarrows full of vegetables, the wolf and her soldier walk through a meadow. The sun is warm on her fur. The smells of the earth are rich and she rolls in the grass. She traps a hamster. The soldier lies down in the shade and tries to sleep, but the wolf is restless, distracted by every bird and insect, by the shifts in the breeze.

“Calm down,” Ivan says, his eyes closed. “It's a beautiful afternoon. What are you so nervous about?”

Soon, he has his answer. Two men lumber across the meadow, hoes slung over their shoulders. Ivan picks up a rock, gets to his feet. When the farmers come close enough to see the wolf, they stop. Slowly, they take their tools and grip them like weapons. She bares her teeth, growls, and is about to charge when Ivan throws the rock. She shrieks. He throws another and then another, hitting her on the back and the sides until she runs away.

—

“W
E
'
VE
BEEN
SEEN
,”
Ivan says, when he returns to the house, breathless.

“By who?”

“Farmers.”

“Brothers?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“One tall. One short. Both ugly as mud?”

“I guess.”

“Kaminský,” Agáta says definitively.

“And the wolf?”

“I threw rocks at her. She ran away.”

“Did they ask questions?” Agáta says.

“I told them I was just passing through. I thanked them for saving me from being eaten by a wolf.”

Agáta looks at him. He is wearing his uniform. “They may be ugly, but they are not stupid,” she says. “And they won't turn their backs on a reward.”

“I didn't mention your names. They didn't see me come back here. I'm sure of it,” Ivan says.

Václav and Agáta glance at each other nervously.

“I'll leave,” Ivan says. “Right away.”

“Wait until the sun goes down,” Václav says. “You'll have better luck in the dark when they're drunk.”

“She must hate me now,” Ivan says softly. “After all that she did for me. And I threw stones at her. She'll never come back.”

“Those Kaminskýs are barbarians. They nail live hedgehogs
to trees and shoot them,” Václav says. “You saved her life. Now you're even.”

For the remaining hours of the day, while Agáta prepares food for his journey, Ivan and Václav take turns with the gun, watching out the window. As soon as the last of the light slips from the sky, the old woman hands Ivan a bundle filled with bread and potatoes and hard-cooked eggs. She embraces him. Václav tries to give him his box of bullets.

“You keep them,” Ivan says. “Otherwise you won't be able to defend yourselves.”

“We don't need to protect ourselves anymore,” Václav says, pressing the box into Ivan's hands.

“If they come for you, tell them I forced you,” Ivan says. “Tell them I held a knife to your throats. That you had no other choice than to take me in.”

“Don't worry about us,” Agáta says. “We know what to do.”

“You're old,” Ivan says hopefully. “They will forgive you.”

“We will not need forgiveness,” Václav says.

“I'm sorry I brought trouble into your home,” he says.

“It will be a story to tell,” Agáta says.

“A soldier who thinks he was saved by a wolf,” Ivan says.

She smiles. “No one will ever believe it.”

—

S
HE
FINDS
A
VACANT
DEN
and hides inside it. Her soldier has not traveled far when they surround him. He tries to run. They shoot him, and he falls. They tie him behind a horse and drag
him through the woods. She stays in the den for days, but finally, she is too hungry. During the night, she crawls out and finds her way back to the house. All is quiet. The window is open. Rising onto her hind legs, she climbs through. The room is half lit by a full moon. They lie on the bed. She knocks a paw against a glass bottle on the floor and sets it lazily spinning. She sniffs it, backs away. She noses the faces of the old man and woman. They smell of the same stuff. She whimpers and moves to one side of the bed, then the other. Again, she nudges them, but they are dead. Agitated, she prances backward, circles around herself. She is starving. She paces the room, sniffing every corner and crevice, hoping to find something to eat. There is nothing, not even a crumb. An insect darts away from her nose. She lets it scurry halfway up a wall, then with a swipe of her paw, she brings it down to the ground and laps it up. It moves inside her mouth for a moment before she swallows it. She knocks her tail against the wardrobe and the door opens. She buries her snout in the clothes there. Then she bites down on the material and drags it onto the floor. She shakes her head violently, just as she would were she holding a small animal between her teeth. The clothes smell of their bodies. Her saliva softens the material so that she can suck out the dirt and bits of food and the taste of skin encrusted in the fibers. Unsatisfied, she returns to the wardrobe and bites into a shoe, tearing at the leather, chewing, swallowing, then flinging the carcass of wooden heel and sole across the room. Her tail whips against the wardrobe door and sets it swinging. A scabbard of light ricochets around the room. She jumps back. Something is alive in there. She moves closer and sees—she stops.
Her ears pull back. Her tail lowers. She lets out a low growl. The animal growls in return. Its ears are flat against its head. She makes another warning sound, shifts forward slightly without moving her feet. The animal does the same. She flares her nostrils. She is ready. But the animal does not move. It does not have a smell. She inches closer until its body disappears and all she can see are eyes.

There are voices outside. She hears the familiar ratchet of guns. She leaps onto the bed and drapes herself over the
bodies.

T
here are children living at the asylum now.
They arrive weekly, deposited at the front gate of the old monastery. Danilo watches from his window as the children jump off the backs of canvas-covered trucks into the arms of soldiers who carefully place them on the ground as if they were made of glass. But of course they are made of much sturdier stuff than those soldiers, who, if they survive battle, will return to the safety of family homes and mothers' arms. Not so these children. There are no mothers and fathers waiting for them. There is no invisible thread that, no matter how far they stray, will connect them to a familiar place. They are orphans of the war, and someone has decided that the safest place for them to live out the uncertainty of their childhoods is alongside the lunatics in the asylum.

The children are housed across the courtyard from Danilo's ward. He hears them at night through the barred windows that are left open to let in the evening air and the bugs that bite so
that the men scratch their necks and behind their knees while they sleep. He hears the howls of the children's nightmares and also a softer descant of weeping. He knows they cry because they are lonely and scared, but he finds the sound comforting, and it helps him sleep.

During the day, their noise is a much harsher aberration. When was the last time he heard the excited cries of children at play? Their laughter? Their gleeful shouts as they insist on rules and regulations for games that have been made up on the spot? During the periods when the orphans are in the cloister garden, the lunatics are kept inside. If Danilo is working in the sacristy, stitching rough wool trousers and sewing brass buttons onto jackets, he is not aware of their activities, but if he is in the ward, he watches them. He is mesmerized by the constantly shifting choreography of their play. They run this way and that. They cluster in small groups for a moment then split apart and form others. One will walk from here to there and, in the middle of his journey, begin to skip. Why skip? Danilo wonders. Did this child suddenly say to himself,
I must skip now
? Or is this just some spontaneous urge of the body, some small explosion of internal exuberance, present circumstance be damned? Was there ever a time when Danilo skipped?

He is not the only one affected by the arrival of the orphans. The patients react in various ways. Some, like Danilo, find their presence calming, and he even catches those with normally vacant expressions responding to the children's voices with nostalgic smiles, as they remember their own childhoods when things were easier for them than they are now. Others become
agitated, even enraged, and their doses are increased to keep them in line. One man stands by a window watching the children while his hand works inside the front of his trousers. He cannily keeps his activity to the times when the nurses are not in the room or are busy with more demanding patients, but once he is discovered, he is taken away. When it comes to these especially offensive cases, the guards do nothing to hide their work, and the man returns to the ward with a bruised and bloodied face. After that, he is chained to his bed.

Following Danilo's outburst in Dr. Mašek's office, he was taken to a room that was entirely bare save for a drain in the center of the floor and two metal handholds welded to a wall. He was ordered to strip, face the wall, and spread his legs. Fearing the worst, and beginning to imagine the girth of what dangled between the guards' thighs, he stood with his own pasted together and clenched his buttocks. But the assault was not what he expected. First, he heard the screech of ungreased metal, and then, before he realized what was happening, he was thrown against the wall by a torrent of ice cold water shooting onto his back. It felt like a thousand splinters had found their way into every pore of his skin. Grabbing the handholds, he managed to look behind him to see the men holding a hose that writhed in their grip as if it were alive. It was impossible to know the best way to endure the attack. He tried to angle himself to the side in order to take the brunt on the smallest area of his body, but letting go of one of the handholds was a mistake. He slipped and fell, slamming his hip onto the slick concrete. All he could do was curl up like a pill bug and wait until the torment was over.

As a treatment for agitation, the cure was successful. He was so exhausted, and his muscles so wrecked, that he had to be carried back to the ward on a stretcher. After this, he developed a paralyzing fear of the shower. Even the sound of a sink faucet turning on sent him into a panic. These new symptoms were determined to be the effects of a buildup of toxins, so he was prescribed a treatment of cathartic medication that had him visiting the toilet five times a day, putting him in more frequent proximity to the plumbing that terrified him, and effecting no amelioration of his nervous condition. Finally, it was determined that the only hope for him was the sleeping cure that had turned so many of the patients into droopy-headed slobberers. Now, a single dose of Veronal keeps him knocked out for twelve hour stretches of a deep, mindless sleep he has never experienced in all his life. He wakes feeling as if he is absent from himself, that his body is currently unoccupied, and that he is no more animate than a line drawn on a blank sheet of paper. For a long time, his thoughts loiter out of range of his perception, and when they do edge closer, they are nothing more than the shadows that float across his vision when he stares too long into the sun. No thoughts. No worries. Nothing. It's incredibly pleasant. Once the medication begins to wear off, though, his nerves feel inflamed so that even touching the pads of his finger to his thumb sends spikes of pain shooting through his body. He clamps his jaw to try to withstand it and cracks two teeth. All he can think about is when he will get his next white pill. The only consciousness that he savors comes right after he swallows that small lozenge. Just as he loses awareness of the sheets on his bed, the humid air, the close,
bodily smell of the ward, he begins to sense the buoyant expansiveness of the drugged world he is about to enter, the lightness and possibility of its delirious vacancy.

The hours of insentience have, unfortunately, come to an end. The war continues. According to the nurses' whispers, fighting is intensifying in the east. The need for uniforms grows daily, and the asylum cannot afford to keep one of its best workers in a semipermanent coma. Owing to the sudden and total stoppage of the medication, his skills are compromised. His hands tremble, and a physical restlessness makes it seem like rodents are scurrying up and down the hollow corridors of his bones, nipping at him from the inside with their sharp teeth. Sometimes he thinks he can hear them scratching and scrabbling, and even if he stops up his ears with cotton, the sound only becomes louder. Added to this, as if to make up for all the time he has recently spent happily numb, he cannot sleep. He passes the nights in a state of half-crazed distress. That the lunatics around him sleep soundly, dulled by the drugs he craves, feels like a rebuke. In his worst moments, he imagines sticking a finger down a man's throat so that he will vomit up some trace of the medication, then swallowing the spew. Better to be truly insane, he thinks, than have to endure the life that awaits him. He does not believe he will ever be released. He will have to live out his days tormented by the curse of being just sane enough to know he is not mad. His only hope is that, over time, his mind will become so warped by his surroundings that he will surrender to the diagnosis and accept this confinement. Then, perhaps, he will be thankful for the boundaries of the thick
monastery walls and locked gates, for the occasional straitjacket, and for a life that requires him to do nothing more than sew an inseam and listen to the laughter of children.

Lying in bed one night, trying to quell his insomniac jitters with these thoughts, he hears an altercation break out in the orphan's ward: the shrill sound of high voices hurling insults and complaints and the grunting exertions of weak wrestlers. He goes to the window and tries to make out what is happening across the courtyard, but it is too dark. Finally, a door opens into that room, letting in light along with two nurses whose angry voices cut through the commotion. A child screams. Then another. He hears “Quiet down!” “Get off him!” and “Stop that! Stop that or else!” And then, rising above it all, he hears a wail that begins as an anguished stutter but develops into a wretched howl that carries across the courtyard. It's a powerful noise, mournful but also as beautiful as music. Danilo grips the windowsill so fiercely that his fingernails carve half-moons into the soft wooden frame.

He is still standing at the window the following morning when the children are let out for their exercises. The orphans play at their games and enter and exit their small, constantly shifting dramas as if nothing unusual or upsetting happened the night before. But just as Danilo is about to leave for the sacristy to begin his day's work, a nurse arrives in the garden, holding a young boy by the hand. The boy has the familiar lethargy of so many of the men who hug the corridors of the asylum. When the nurse drops the boy's hand, it falls lifelessly to his side. Danilo knows this boy is the one. He is certain of it. This is the
child who made that unearthly, intoxicating sound. Even after the nurses put an end to the fighting, and after the rattled children were finally asleep, he could still hear that long, aching note echoing inside him.

—

T
HE
BOY
USU
ALLY
SITS
ALONE
when the children play in the courtyard. Occasionally, if they need an extra body to even out the sides, someone will pull him onto the field of play. He follows willingly, or rather, without any will at all. He stands wherever he is told to go. He stares at his shoes or gazes vaguely at the sky. He is oblivious as the other children rush back and forth screaming. Once, his arms rise almost of their own volition and, without even seeming to look, he picks a ball out of the air. When he has it in his hands, he stares at it as if he doesn't know what comes next. He only reacts when the biggest of the orphan boys, a thick hulk who looks more adult than child, starts to barrel toward him. Then he runs incredibly fast, nimbly dodging the obstacles of the other orphans. The game dissolves into a chase as the children try and fail to trap him. His speed and agility are noted, and in later games, when sides are chosen, he becomes the object of competition between team captains. But once selected, as often as not, he will stand in the midst of play in his dull way, frustrating those same children who vied so fiercely to have him on their team. Sometimes, if the nurses are not watching, someone will kick him. It is all Danilo can do not to shout out the window to warn off the bully and get the nurses to
protect the boy, but if he does, he'll expose his interest in the children and he will be forbidden from watching them any longer. Who knows? The orderlies could take him away for a beating or chain him to his bed. He can't let this happen for he has come to believe that if he is not there to stand guard, the boy will suffer something more dire than drug therapy and a black-and-blue shin. On the days when he is kept late in the sacristy or when it rains, as it did solidly for one ten-day period, Danilo works himself into such a state that the nurses give him a pill. He has learned how to swallow it in such a way that, when the nurses leave, he can hock it back up. He fears what will happen to the boy if he sleeps.

One day, the boy finally reacts to his tormentors. Instead of fighting the big bully, though, he goes after a punier sycophant. The otherwise tractable, listless child has his victim on the ground in no time and pummels him with all the power of his small fists. Danilo is startled by the violence of a boy whom he thought utterly defenseless and he is astounded by the precision of the beating. Unlike the other orphans who fight with uncontrolled effort, their arms swinging and missing, the boy seems to summon skill and strategy from a place inside him that circumvents his drugged torpor.

Watching the boy deliver his blows makes Danilo realize how far he has fallen into reticence and dumb agreeableness. He has stopped thinking about when he will be released from the asylum. He looks forward to the daily meals of boiled vegetables and hard bread. He is upset by change, whether it is the sudden appearance of meat on the menu, or the fact that his Saturday
shower, which he no longer fears, has been inexplicably shifted to Tuesday. He is no longer bothered by the madness around him but finds it somehow comforting to see the Twitcher's spasms or to listen to Our Lady of Sorrows minister to her baby Jesus. He can barely recall a time when he resisted like the boy is doing now.

Having been summoned by the hysterical nurses, orderlies enter the yard and separate the children. The next day, when Danilo sees him, the boy is once again lethargic. He slumps against the cloister wall beside, but not within, a rectangle of shade. Either he doesn't realize he could be cooler or he doesn't care. Maybe, Danilo thinks sadly, he is too lost in a hallucinatory muddle to feel the day's heat. The other children ignore him.

—

T
HE
BOMB
STRIKES
during the midday meal. One minute, the servers are filling bowls, the next, hot soup is spraying in every direction. Danilo, who was sitting on a refectory bench between two catatonic men is now on the other side of the room, sprawled on the floor. Or is it the ceiling? A rafter beam lies beside him. When he tries to move, he has the feeling his bones have disintegrated. He can't lift himself up. He can't breathe. Dust clots his nose and throat and his eyes sting. He can't hear anything. Not the screams of the man lying next to him whose head lies at a very wrong angle from his neck, not the words of the orderly whose mouth is so close to his face that Danilo can see into the back of the man's throat. Despite the evident hysteria, Danilo
feels calm and purposeful. He manages to get to his knees and then his feet. He moves automatically, his mind giving his body a set of instructions.
Climb over that, push this aside, shake off the hand that has grabbed onto your trouser leg, nod and agree to anything anyone seems to be telling you.
One entire wall of the dining hall has crumbled. The destruction looks venerable, as if it has been there for hundreds of years and is a place people visit to remember that something important once happened here. For a moment, Danilo becomes disoriented. Perhaps he is the visitor learning about the history of a war and about a bomb that destroyed a building that once housed believers and then the insane, who, perhaps, had even more faith in the unseen. He nearly trips over a leg that sticks out from between two fallen stones. He knows there are probably bodies buried underneath the rubble, patients who were sitting nearest that wall, the unlucky serving girls who were attending to them, but he can't think about that. He climbs through, or out of the room. His thoughts confuse him. Is a room still a room when it has no wall? Is the outside really inside, or is it the other way around? Making his way down a corridor, he passes a constant stream of doctors and nurses who guide bleeding patients. One of them is crying. “Help us! We're dying!” He can hear her. He is no longer deaf.