Little Nothing (11 page)

D
o you know, by any chance, how to navigate by the stars?”
Klima says. The question is rhetorical. It has been a week since he and Danilo set off from the village into the surrounding forest, and Danilo has worked hard to be useful and earn his five percent. He pitches the tent and builds the fires and cooks the potatoes and onions they carry with them along with whatever game Klima shoots each day. In the evenings, he disassembles, cleans, then rebuilds the rifles in order to keep the works from jamming. At first, he carried the load of food and equipment on his back for hours at a time, a talent that can only be attributed to the fact that, for the last years of his life, he has been treated like nothing so much as an ass, and so he is able to manifest that animal's signature attribute. After the fourth day, he fashioned a sled from the new and malleable branches of an alder, impressing the normally reticent Klima who, upon testing the tensile strength built into the struts and stays, betrayed the barest hint
of approval. Sometimes they travel by day, sometimes by night, depending on the weather. As the days grow warmer, the wolves, according to the tracker, will move at later and later hours to take advantage of the cooler air.

“I don't know anything about the stars except that they are there at night and gone in the morning,” Danilo answers, glancing briefly at the speckled sky. He knows that Klima will not teach him the map of the stars just as the man did not explicitly tell him that wearing an animal pelt so that the fur lay against his skin and not the other way around would save his feet from rain rot. After they killed their first four rabbits, he watched as Klima carefully skinned the animals so that their hides remained intact, then hung them over the fire to dry. When Danilo woke the following day, only two of the hides were hanging. It took him until the middle of the next afternoon, when he could barely walk for the pain of his toes, to figure out why Klima did not seem to have the same problem. When they finally stopped to camp, Danilo worked as quickly as he could to knead suppleness back into the remaining skins, then wrapped the fur around his waterlogged feet. The long-awaited spring brings nothing more comforting than mud and drip, but Danilo is finally savvy enough to take care of himself.

As they walk through the night, Danilo watches the tracker attentively. He tries to figure from the angle of Klima's upward gaze which stars he is using to chart their course. Danilo is wrong more than he is right. After a few hours, a cluster that he thinks Klima is sighting falls away to their right, and by the time Danilo has figured out which stars the man is actually using to
orient them, it is nearly dawn and all he has learned about celestial navigation is how it is not accomplished. But little by little, as the nights pile one on top of the next, and with careful observation, he begins to understand which constellations appear in the north, south, east, and west quadrants of the sky. He learns that somewhere on the opposite side of the earth, at that very moment, there are other stars, ones that he cannot see, and that if he waited long enough for the earth to turn, those constellations would be his guide. Sometimes, he passes the long hours imagining some other tracker and his aide on the other side of the world who, right at that moment, are searching the universe for clues that will tell them where to go next. These ideas are so new they quickly slip away, and what he thinks he comprehends at one moment confounds him the very next. Then suddenly he grabs hold of the tail of the idea once more, reels it close, and understands that everything, even the step he takes over this tree stump and that rock, happens in relation to everything else—the stars, the air, the water, and her.

What he doesn't understand is what is taking them so long. Danilo had not known anything about wolves and their territory. He had thought, like everyone else, that the animals, having been last seen stealing from farms, would linger nearby, waiting for their next chance to trap easy prey from the corrals and pigstys. But Klima has informed him that everything he thinks he knows about wolves is the stuff of tales mothers tell their children to keep them close to home.

“Wolves are not interested in us,” he tells Danilo as they walk.

“They're not scared of men? Men with guns?”

“Men are scared of men with guns. And if a man imagines a wolf thinks like he does, a bullet will be the least of his problems.”

“How does a wolf think?”

“This is the very curious thing about you, Danilo. Your mind is always lost somewhere to the right or the left of the correct question.”

Danilo knows he cannot ask what the right question would be; the tracker would never tell him. But as they stray farther into the wilderness and time passes without the tracker explaining himself, Danilo begins to wonder if there is a question at all. A wolf does not think the way a man thinks. To believe that would be to imagine there is an explanation as to how a mother can reject her only living son, or how a girl can turn into an animal. These things have happened on their own terms, ones that defy the logic of how a gun is built or how to reckon distance by the heavens. A wolf is its own term.

As is Klima. It had fallen to Danilo to provision the journey, and it was not long before every shopkeeper and local gossip knew that, for no apparent reason, the great hunter, charged with the duty of keeping the community safe, had elected to take a young, unskilled, untried, and virtually useless drifter as his second, a man who, if the stories were true, could not even kill a wolf when it was staring into the barrel of his shotgun. Still, after their grumbling and while they were collecting the rope and tenting materials and the pure kava that, to Danilo, used to sipping cheap rye or chicory, seems dangerously luxurious, they told him what they knew about his new boss.

Klima had made his first appearance over a decade or two decades earlier (the time, like so many other details of the man's story, was confused by memory and the exaggerating effects of repeated telling) during what was referred to as—and here the voice lowered as if mentioning a fatal disease—“The Disappearances.” During one hot and drought-filled summer, when the farms were so dry that fields spontaneously burst into flame, children began to go missing. First it was eight-year-old Otakar Dymek, a dreamy boy and a wanderer who, much to his father's embarrassment, spent his days in the meadows collecting the few wild snowdrops and primroses that clung to life despite the searing heat. His mother was beside herself when he did not return one day at the clanging of the dinner bell, although his father was not disappointed to eat his dinner without being confronted by the bouquet decorating the table, a gut-clenching reminder of the kind of son he had on his hands. At his wife's hysterical urging, he left the table before his meal was finished. Despite his misgivings about his boy, he became alarmed when, searching the meadow, he found the pea green and decidedly girlish toque his wife had knitted and which the vexing boy insisted upon wearing every day and sometimes even to bed despite the heat. Next it was Vesta Lenart, a thirteen-year-old girl, whose body, in contrast to the local crops, bloomed with such fierce determination that it was sometimes whispered that the drought could be accounted for by the fact that her own luscious development was sucking up all available moisture and nutrients. When a pair of her underwear was found knotted in the brambles along the banks of the dry river, the local boys were questioned. But
each of them, although conceding that their daydreams and nighttime fantasies were filled with images of their once stick-thin, no-hipped, but now voluptuous playmate, had to admit that they were somewhat frightened by the implicit threat of all that sudden succulence and that none of them had the nerve to speak to her much less carry her off. It was assumed that she had been abducted and defiled by some itinerant soldier, for it was commonly accepted that soldiers were de facto rapists, and so her parents, although they loved her truly and dearly, didn't want her back. But when Marta and Cyril Zdenĕk woke one morning to find that their little Ilona, not yet a year old, who slept snugly between her parents each night like a warm loaf of bread, had gone missing and that there were, strangely, three strands of coarse fur and the unmistakable smell of animal on the sheets, panic spread. The Zdenĕk bedsheet, Otakar's cap, and Vesta's underwear were brought to the town's most notorious nose, which belonged to the postman, Michal Vachelsky, whose mighty proboscis seemed to lead him down the street as he walked here and there delivering the mail. Vachelsky sniffed the evidence and determined that the common odor among the items was not the smell of unwashed scalp or a young woman's privacy but of a single perpetrator. After a reward for capture was raised, the community, smarting from the failure of crops and the prospect of a lean winter, became fixated on the task of apprehending the terrorist, and no one could speak of anything else. Talk of Krakonach, the giant from the mountains, caused idle farmers to walk their arid fields searching for oversized footprints. False claims were made and quickly scuttled by local experts who took
measuring sticks to swaths of flattened grasses and pronounced that the mark in question was either too large or too small or too much resembled the shape of the backside of the farmer who, in order to claim the reward, had imprinted his land with his own ample rump. It was then generally agreed that the culprit was none other than Jezinka, the wicked wood nymph, whose inability to birth children of her own caused her to steal those of others. Her method had normally been to leave a counterfeit in place of the stolen child. But once each village youngster was accounted for, all birthmarks and other identifying signatures verified, it was determined that there were no changelings among them. Finally, it was decided that the kidnapper was none other than Vikodlak. The proof was so obvious that it could only be due to the grandmothers and great-grandmothers and their stubborn belief in those ridiculous tales of giants and goblins that wiser minds had not earlier come to this most obvious conclusion. Those coarse hairs? That animal stink? The town had been visited by a werewolf.

At that time, Klima was a man known by reputation only. Long ago, and for reasons eagerly debated—a shattered heart? A murdered rival?—he abandoned society and became a mountain man. No one, in fact, knew exactly the location of his home, and a message had to be sent to a foothill hamlet where he was rumored to appear occasionally when he needed provisions or an hour of female companionship. While the villagers awaited word as to whether or not the man would take their case, they devised their own ways of insuring their children's safety. During daylight hours, the little ones were not allowed to venture from
their homes without adult supervision. At night, they were roped to their beds. Fires, which everyone knew kept werewolves at bay, were lit day and night despite the intense heat and the dangers of widespread conflagration. Scissors and knives or any other objects made of pure iron were laid in the cribs of newborns. Mothers tied wolfsbane around their children's necks, and the whole village smelled of garlic.

Klima's first entrance into the town is remembered with as much rippling pleasure as when the archduke and his new young wife passed through on their way to their honeymoon retreat. The couple did not alight from their car—a vehicle as unfamiliar as a royal in those parts—or even open their window shades to wave to the villagers who had lined up along the road to greet them. The much-anticipated event passed in a haze of dust and exhaust and was over even before the mayor was able to put on his eyeglasses to read his speech. Danilo knows, from the fanfare attending the tracker's most recent arrival, that the introduction of the beast slayer must have been greeted with a mixture of awe and dread, for in the time it took for the message to get to the man and for him to make his way to the village, and despite the ropes and chains and herbal precautions, two more children had disappeared (well, one—the other having unhappily rolled over in his sleep onto the point of a pair of shears).

The hysteria of the townspeople was as much a tinderbox as the bone-dry fields. Klima surveyed the evidence—the sheet, cap, underwear, and the strands of hair that had been kept in a bell jar at the local apothecary—and set out again without a word. After two weeks, a monster was seen at the edge of town:
the werewolf himself. As he made his way down the street, women screamed and men ran for their shotguns, certain that the tracker had been defeated and that Vikodlak had come for his revenge. But when the beast finally reached the town square, it shed its rank-smelling head and hide and revealed itself to be none other than Klima. In ceremonial fashion, he handed the skin to the mothers of the missing who wept and took turns holding it to their breasts as if to commune with the body that had eaten their children.

—

“D
ID
THEY
REALLY
BELIEVE
it was a werewolf?” Danilo asks one morning as he raises the tent for the day's sleep. According to signs—a pile of fresh scat, a wisp of white fur clinging to the debarked lower portion of a linden that, according to the tracker, serves as a scratching post—they have finally arrived within range of the wolves.

“Of course they did,” the man says. He puts a charred piece of black squirrel between his teeth and chews thoughtfully.

Once again, Danilo has asked the wrong question. What he wants to know is whether this man, who seems so scientific in his careful observation of nature, his ability to read the stars, and his unerring sense of direction, believes that a person can change into an animal. He does not know how to ask this without confessing his belief in Pavla's strange transfiguration and proving himself to be the unworldly bumpkin he is. “Old women's tales,” he says dismissively.

The man shrugs without commitment.

“You'd think that when you returned wearing the skin, they would have realized the story of the werewolf was a lie,” Danilo says.