Little Nothing (12 page)

“It's not a lie if it is believed. You seem to believe it. Otherwise you wouldn't be asking me these questions.”

Danilo is embarrassed. “I know there are no such things as werewolves.”

“How do you know?”

“Because a man can't turn into an animal?” he says hesitantly, unsure how he hopes the tracker will respond. “Because it makes no sense?”

“Most things in this world make no sense. That a woman dies on her wedding day. That murder will put an end to grief. But these things happen. We see them with our eyes. There is no better proof than that.”

Danilo wonders if the man is edging up to a personal revelation, but any question he might ask to get the tracker to divulge his history would be, as Klima would say, to the left or the right of the point. Danilo is beginning to understand that the obvious question is the wrong one, and that to interpret the world by way of its most available and reasonable clues will only lead him further down the narrow path that has, thus far, defined his existence. It is only that he does not yet know what the right questions are. He is not adept enough to see, much less decipher, the opaque and irrational narrative that lies beneath what appears to be the likely story. Or maybe it is only that, as Pavla said, he is a coward.

He and Klima crawl into the tent and prepare to sleep. “I've never seen a werewolf,” Danilo says.

“Have you ever
not
seen one?” The tracker turns on his side, adjusting his rucksack underneath his head. “We have a long night ahead of us,” he says. Within moments, he's snoring heavily.

But Danilo can't sleep. He is so agitated, so excited, he can barely lie still. He did not see Pavla turn into a wolf. And yet, he did not
not
see it. He did not see her grow after her terrible ordeal with the stretching table, nor did he see her nose elongate and the down on her face appear, and yet . . .

So many nights, as they performed their pantomime, squeezed together on that makeshift stage, their mouths were so near to each other that it would have taken only the slightest movement on his part to close that gap, to press himself into her, to feel what he has felt so palpably in his dreams, the suffusing warmth that spreads from their joined lips throughout his body, the weightless feeling, as if he were back home, a boy again, swimming in the lake with his brother, their legs twining and untwining as they played and fought and played again. Diving down beneath the surface of the water, parting the grasses there with the slow-motion strokes of his arms, reaching down and burying his hands in the soft, delicious slime—

He comes with a groan. He looks over to make sure Klima is still asleep, then lies back, an arm cradling his head. He thinks about all those days and nights he and Pavla spent together putting on the show, cleaning the tent, walking through the camp grounds. He always needed to be near her. He believed that if he
were not, he would possibly die. Those days begin to feel like the happiest he will ever be allowed.

People paid money to Smetanka in order to prove the man and his claim wrong. They paid money for a fight. And when Pavla unveiled herself as the monstrosity Smetanka promised, the spectators threw empty bottles and cried foul, and would not calm down until the shill ran up onto the stage and yanked her head so much that she suffered bruises and neck spasms. Then, the doubting audience believed the lie, and so the lie became true. But it was never a lie, was it? It was always—the logic makes his head hurt. He closes his eyes and soon is asleep.

—

B
Y
THE
TIME
D
ANI
LO
WAKES
,
Klima is already getting ready for the evening's work. He unfolds the felt that holds his toiletries and proceeds to shave his day's growth and comb his hair and douse himself with lavender water as if he were preparing for a party rather than a night of slashing through the woods. Danilo breaks down the camp and packs up. They no longer need the sled; they've used the better part of their supplies and Danilo can carry everything that remains on his back. As usual, once Klima finishes with his ablutions, he strides out of camp without a remark, and as the shapes of the trees begin to dissolve into the gathering darkness, Danilo races to catch up before he loses sight of the tracker and finds himself alone and utterly lost.

T
hey spend the next nights
walking more slowly than usual.
They are drawing close to the pack, and Klima's movements seem precisely calibrated, as if unnecessary motion will compromise him. The night is starless, the moon a smeared presence that lights their path only when the wind picks up and pushes the clouds aside. Klima seems even more surefooted than ever, as if, entering into the wolves' territory, he has become their equal.

“They are on the hunt,” he says on the second night, with uncharacteristic excitement. He holds a handful of mud to Danilo's nose. It is too dark out to see the discoloration, but the smell of urine is unmistakable.

“How do you know it's wolf piss?” Danilo says.

“It's not. They are far too clever to leave us such an obvious message.”

“They know we're here?”

“If you knew who your most lethal enemy was, would you not keep him in your sights at all times?”

“But that would put us within their range.”

“It works both ways.”

“I thought you said wolves don't attack humans.”

“I said they attack fear.”

“You're scared?”

“You are. You fairly reek of it.”

Danilo looks as far as he is able in the darkness. He swears he can feel her devastating gaze on him as if she were just steps away. “Are they close?” he says.

Before he gets his answer, they hear the whipsaw of branches. The tracker crouches, then creeps forward. Danilo tries to imitate the stance and soon his thighs start shaking. His loaded pack slides up his spine and presses against the back of his neck. When the tracker stops abruptly, Danilo barely saves himself from falling on his face. He sees dark shapes moving not even fifteen meters in front of him. A low thunder of growls crescendos into a cacophony of fierce barking followed by strangled, desperate grunts: the wolves are attacking a pack of wild boar. Sound and shadow narrate the story. Some of the boar manage to break free and run, their hoof falls rapid as horses'. The wind pushes away the clouds and the scene is momentarily illuminated. A white wolf leaps up and falls on an unlucky boar. It rips into the side of the animal with such force and accuracy that the boar does not even have time to squeal in protest: it is instantly dead. The wolf devours the animal, then lifts the carcass, shakes it violently, and flings it to the
side. Tilting its muzzle to the sky, it lets out a magisterial howl. Then it turns and faces the men as if it has always known they were there and was only waiting to attend to the pressing matter of its hunger before concerning itself with this threat. In a second, it charges, its teeth bared. A shot explodes next to Danilo's ear. Every muscle in his body gives out at once. He falls to his knees and vomits.

—

I
T
IS
MIDDAY
when he wakes. The tracker sleeps inside the tent but he has left Danilo where he fell, his cheek lying in his sick. While he tries to clean himself off, Danilo wonders how Klima will treat him now that he has proven himself so gritless. Maybe he will be left to find his way out of the wilderness alone. Maybe the tracker will simply shoot him.

Klima emerges from the tent, stretching and squinting into the light. He looks at the state Danilo is in. “That was quite an entertainment you put on,” he says.

“Where is the wolf?” Danilo says.

“Off doing wolfish things, I suppose.”

“But you shot it.”

“I gave it a warning, that's all.”

“A warning? It was about to kill us!”

“That animal is more useful to us alive than dead.”

The tracker sets up his daily toilet and begins scraping the stubble from his cheeks.

“Because it will lead us to the entire pack,” Danilo says, finally understanding.

“You're learning,” the tracker says. “And five percent of one wolf is not going to see you through a month. But five percent of a pack, well . . . that's another matter entirely.”

The two work together for the rest of the afternoon, gathering wood to build a fire, drinking coffee, sucking the liquid between their teeth to filter out the thick sludge.

“How can you tell the difference between the urine of one animal and another?” Danilo asks as he breaks down the campsite.

“I can't. And if someone tells you he can, he is lying.”

“But you smelled the mud. You knew the boar were near.”

“I didn't smell boar.”

“So . . . you smelled—” Danilo stops. A clot of feeling is stuck in his throat. He has a memory so clear it is no memory at all but something happening right here, right now. He is in the doctor's office on that terrible day. He can smell the ammonia of her sweat and something he couldn't identify until now. “You smelled terror.”

“I always find it interesting that bravery has no smell,” the tracker says.

During the next few days, Klima begins to treat Danilo not simply as a lackey, useful for the strength of his back and his ability to build a fire, but as an apt pupil, testing him, praising him, even flattering him when Danilo shows himself to be a keen observer who, despite Klima's inscrutability, manages to absorb much about the tracker's art. In turn, Danilo grows more confident under the man's approval.

“I cannot take the whole pack on my own,” Klima tells him, handing him a gun one day.

“You want me to—”

“You've learned how to track a wolf,” Klima says. “Now you're going to learn how to kill one.”

—

D
ANILO
IS
NOT
a quick study.

“It's impossible,” he says, after he has missed ten chances to hit a cross that Klima has marked on a tree trunk. Several other trees block a clear path to the target. “The bullet would have to bend.”

“Can you see the target with your eyes?” Klima says.

“Yes. But I can also see the things that are in the way.”

“If you can see all those things, you are not looking at your mark.”

“I am.”

“You're not. You're seeing too much. You see the trees. You see the small green buds on the branches over there. You're thinking about how nice it is that spring is finally here. You're thinking how your toes itch and smell like something dead and how you hope this whole thing will be over soon so you can sleep in a decent bed and eat a decent meal.”

Danilo can't deny that all of this is true.

“You should see and think none of those things.”

“But you see them!” Danilo says in frustration. “You see everything. Even in the dark. You're telling me about this tree and that rock and, oh, we'll reach a creek in a quarter of an hour.”

“When you are tracking, you have to notice everything. You have to see what is in front of you and what is behind you. You have to let your mind create a map out of what you hear and smell and touch so that your vision is wider than your eyes alone can take in. But when you shoot, you erase everything on that map except for your target. You shut down your ears and your nose, even the sensations on your skin. If you can make the world that small,” and he holds his thumb and forefinger so close they could reasonably hold a single lentil, “then you will hit your target every time.”

Danilo lifts the barrel of the gun once more. He tries to do what the man tells him, to stopper his ears, to make his vision so narrow he might be wearing horse blinders. He inhales, holds his breath, pulls the trigger. “Fuck!” he exclaims, tossing the gun to the ground. The tracker laughs. “Shit!” Danilo says. The words feel stronger than any bullet. “Fucking son of a bitch mother of a whore who sucks off the world for free!” he roars, and all the pent-up humiliation he has suffered in his life and the rage he feels about his ineptitude come pouring out of him. When he runs out of words, he falls silent.

“It might be easier to simply shoot the target,” Klima says finally.

“I can't,” Danilo says.

“Pick up the gun,” the man says. “Try again.”

T
here they are,” Klima says warmly,
as if he has just caught sight of his beloved children from whom he has been separated for a long time. Three wolves rest peacefully in a clearing. A white one and two whose fur is the deepest brown. Danilo is relieved; she is not among them.

A storm is coming from the west. It is only midafternoon, but the sky darkens quickly. A squall kicks up and shakes the trees. Upwind of the men, the wolves don't pick up their scent. The white wolf stands and shakes its coat, then wanders over to a tree and buries its nose in a cleft between prominent roots. After a moment, one, then two more young wolves squeeze out of the hole. The white one lies down and the pups nuzzle his snout and soon his chest heaves and he passes something from his mouth to theirs. After they have eaten, they play with him for a while then gambol over to one of the dark wolves and try to rouse him with pokes and swipes of their paws. When that
proves futile, they begin to wrestle with each other, lunging and baring their teeth, clamping their jaws on necks and legs, letting go. Danilo is transfixed. He and his brother used to play just this way, picking fights for no reason other than to test their strength against each other. He remembers walking up behind his brother once, creeping softly just as he and Klima are doing now, and imagining what it would be like to break his neck. His twin was his closest ally. Having been enwombed together, neither felt whole without the other and they were rarely apart. And yet, he can summon the visceral pleasure that coursed through him as he imagined how he could harm his brother. Is it in him, he wonders? This willingness to kill someone he loves?

Klima holds out his palm. The weather arranges itself at his command, and a drop of rain lands on his skin. Then another and another, until a downpour begins in earnest. He wraps his shotgun in a blanket. Danilo does the same although he considers whether he could unload his gun without the man knowing, or if he should make a noise to alert the pack. Klima waits and watches, as heedless of the weather as the wolves are. Why does he hesitate? Danilo wonders. The wolves are in sight. They don't seem aware that they are in imminent danger. The drumbeat of rain buries all other sound. A few more steps and the tracker would be able to line up a clean shot. But Klima doesn't move, doesn't ready his weapon. His eyes scan from left to right and then back again, taking in the wolves, their surroundings, seeing what direction they might run once the first shot is fired. He's preparing his strategy. Danilo knows this; the man has taught
him. The tracker narrows his focus just as he instructed Danilo to do and as Danilo is doing now. The heavy rain makes keeping an eye on the wolves that much more difficult, and so it requires a kind of concentration that obliterates all other thought. He no longer feels the water hitting the top of his head, running down his face, soaking through his trousers. The cold wind doesn't trouble him. His eyesight seems more keen as the surrounding darkness becomes total. His absolute focus makes the forest an unobstructed plain. He has stepped out of time and place.

The tracker pulls the blanket off his shotgun and starts his final advance. He moves slowly, sinuously, with fluid calibrations of muscle. For a moment, Danilo cannot help but appreciate the man's finesse just as he did the perfect works of the table he made, the way the crank turned and the rope glided through the pulleys, the entire action sliding without a hitch. How easy it is to admire evil, to become entranced by its singularity of purpose and its amoral beauty.

“There she is,” Klima whispers, crouching behind a tree. He motions for Danilo to tuck himself behind him. “There's mama.”

A head appears at the mouth of the den, and then an adult wolf crawls out, stretches luxuriantly, and shakes her coat. Even in the gloom and despite the downpour, she is resplendent. Her russet and gold pelt is thick. She looks healthy and strong. Danilo doesn't even try to fend off the improbable; every part of him knows. He could be watching her from the side of the stage or staring into her smoky blue eyes as he lifted her onto the
doctor's examining table. Dwarf, wolf girl, wolf—she is all of these things at once, and she is here.

And she is a mother. One of the pups trots over to her and she nuzzles him with her snout, then gently bats him aside. She sits and bites the inside of her haunch, getting at some itch there.

The white wolf rises up on all fours. His ears twitch forward. Alert to his change in behavior, she leaves off grooming herself. The tracker levels his gun and cocks it slowly.

The white wolf falls even before Danilo hears the shot. And then one of the dark wolves goes down. The tracker picks off the other dark wolf on the run, aiming just ahead of the animal as he taught Danilo to do, so that it runs right into its death. The tracker moves so quickly and with such economy that Danilo does not even see him reload between shots. The pups' confusion makes them easy targets. One goes down, then the next. The third is on the run.

“Pick up your gun, boy. That little one is yours,” Klima says, shifting his sights toward the mother, who follows after her pup. Later, Danilo will remember everything happening in the time it took to draw a single breath. In the moment, however, it feels like Klima is in no hurry. The barrel of his shotgun moves slowly as he follows the mother wolf's path.

Danilo's hands shake uncontrollably. He has to steady his nerves so that he doesn't do something foolish.

Klima inhales deeply and holds his breath. His finger curls around the trigger.

The shots occur simultaneously. Klima and the wolf fall at
the same time. Danilo is frozen, still aiming his gun at the place where the man stood only a second before. His focus on his target was so absolute that it takes some time for the rest of the world to return to him and for him to realize that the rain is still falling hard, that his shot was so accurate that the man is not even groaning, that his own body is not shaking in fear and panic but that he feels utterly calm. At the corner of his gaze, he sees movement. The pup disappears into the trees. The mother struggles to her feet. Blood stains the fur on her leg, but she took only a glancing hit and she starts to run. Before Danilo can think to call her name, she is gone.

—

T
HE
T
HREE
ADULT
WOLVES
and the two pups are dead. The tracker was viciously accurate with his aim, and there is hardly any blood on the ground around the animals' bodies, as if the bullets managed to stop their hearts without piercing their hides. They look gentle in their endless sleep and they look small, too, smaller even than some of the village dogs Danilo grew up around and petted and played with in the stream on hot summer days. The pups look like stuffed toys.

Danilo's shot was not so elegant. At close range, the bullet tore through Klima's body and ripped him open so that the sausage of his guts is exposed. Like the animals, the man seems insignificant in death, hardly capable of killing five wolves let alone all the other bold acts attributed to him. The blast spun
him so that he fell on his side. Now he lies with his legs tucked into his chest. Death seems to have reversed time so that he looks like a sleeping child.

The man is dead. Danilo is holding a gun. Therefore Danilo killed the man. But he doesn't really believe it because he cannot recall anything about what occurred, not lifting his rifle, taking aim, pulling the trigger. He'd been a good student. He'd practiced and practiced so that, when the time came, shooting became second nature, no more remarkable than lifting a finger to point out a star. “Killing is beyond thought, beyond feeling,” the man had told him, and it turned out that he'd been right.

By the time the rain lets up, it is nearly dawn. Danilo has not slept. Wrapped in a sopping blanket, he walks past the dead man, past the scattered corpses of the wolves. Using Klima's knife, he cuts down a few saplings. He pulls the tenting material from his pack and slices it into strips, then ties the narrow trunks together so they form a sled. He works efficiently and without much thought, but as soon as he tries to move the sodden body, he loses his composure, overwhelmed by the realization that he has murdered a man. The numbness of the night before is replaced by a feeling so raw it is painful, as if Danilo were the one who was shot and all his organs were lying outside his dead body in a bloody stew. A tremor starts deep in his center and spreads through his body, and as he scoops out a shallow grave in the mud, rolls the man into it, and covers him, he can barely stand. He dismantles his sled and uses the strongest of the struts to make a cross, sinking it into the mud, then hammering it into the harder earth below with the stock of his gun.

It takes him four days to find his way out of the wilderness. By the time he reaches a town, he is delirious with fever. As he wanders down the main street, people clear a path around him. He tries to speak, but no one will stop to listen. Finally, a priest comes out of a church and hears his hoarse confession.

“I killed a man,” Danilo says, when he finally stands before a constable. “I killed him to save the girl I love.”

—

H
E
LIES
ON
A
COT
in a cell. A jailer brings him a plate of food. He devours the slice of meat and piece of bread. This is the first food he's had in days. He has not eaten bread for—how long has it been? How long was he in the woods with that man? When was the last time he was inside an actual building? He studies his new habitat and feels immediately grateful for its walls, its bars, and its solid iron lock that protect him from the confusion his life has become.

But his comfort is short-lived. After failing to provide a clear verbal description of where he buried Klima, and unable to pinpoint the place on a map the constable shows him, his hands and feet are chained and he is led outside. With considerable effort, he climbs into a wagon and is ordered by the constable and two other officers riding alongside him to direct them to the body. As they drive, they pass soldiers marching in a line, young men no older than Danilo, most of them haphazardly dressed, some of them armed with shotguns, others carrying spades or pitchforks.

“Where are they going?” he asks.

“To fight,” one of the officers says. “Something an able-bodied man such as yourself should be doing. Instead, you've murdered your own countryman.”

“Are we at war?” Danilo says.

“You really are daft, aren't you?” the man says. “Where've you been?”

“I've been in the woods.”

“Fucking a wolf, is what I hear,” he says. “Of all the excuses for murdering, that one is something new, isn't it?”

Remarkably, although he has no memory of how he reached the village, Danilo manages to direct the police to the exact spot where the wolves lie, as if, in his feverish state, he'd somehow memorized every hillock and stand of trees and narrow river he'd passed, noticing the intricate geography of the land just as the tracker taught him to do. The animals are mere carcasses now, having been eviscerated by the carrion birds that wheel overhead. He points out the cross, and the policemen exhume the dead man.

—

T
HE
STINK
of the massacre site, the constable announces at the trial, hoping to claim some extra measure of heroism, was enough to kill off all the enemy forces. This statement raises a welter of patriotic exclamations from the crowd. Some begin to sing the nation's anthem before they are hushed by the judge's gavel. When Danilo takes the stand, he is less coherent. He mumbles and stares into his lap when the prosecutor questions him, and more than once the judge has to remind him to speak up.

“Tell the court why you murdered Mr. Klima,” the prosecutor says.

“Because he was going to kill her.”

“Who are you referring to? State her name for the court.”

“Pavla. Pavla Janáček.”

“And this Pavla would be?”

“The girl I love. There was blood on her fur, but it was just a scrape. She escaped.”

The spectators begin to whisper and have to be reminded to hold their peace.

“Blood on her skin, you mean?” the prosecutor asks.

“She has a beautiful coat,” Danilo says. “More red than blond, although she was a fair girl. Well, I'd say her hair was golden. No, not golden. More like the color of light. Afternoon light, I guess you'd say. She was shot once before. By the human skeleton. I don't think she could have survived another injury.”

Laughter breaks out in the courtroom.

“Pavla is a woman?” the prosecutor says.

“Yes!”

“Or is she a wolf?”

“Yes!”

The judge leans over his desk to observe Danilo more closely. “Do you need some water, young man?”

Danilo nods and a clerk brings him a glass. He drinks down the whole thing at once while the court waits in anticipation for whatever clarification might be lying at the bottom of the tumbler.

“Thank you,” he says, handing the glass to the prosecutor, who looks unhappy to be taken for a servant.

“Now then,” the prosecutor continues, setting the glass aside. “He shot her on the left side—”

“Flank,” Danilo says.

“And where is this . . . wolf now?”

“She ran into the woods to find her pup.”

“She has a child?”

“She had three. Three!” he repeats, amazed.

“Three children now, is it?” the prosecutor says.

“But he shot two of them,” Danilo says.

The spectators erupt. The judge silences them. “Are you accusing the dead man of murdering children?” he asks Danilo.

The prosecutor sighs. “The police found a pack of dead wolves, your honor. There were no children there.”

“I'm telling the truth,” Danilo says.

The prosecutor takes an elaborate glance at his pocket watch to suggest his impatience. “So you are telling the court that this man, Klima, shot at a woman and killed two children, and that the woman, whose left . . . flank . . . was grazed by a bullet, escaped into the woods.”