Little Nothing (15 page)

MaÅ¡ek straightens up, leans forward. “Go on,” he says.

Danilo is wary. Has his interest in pork or cabbage or both signaled his craziness?

“And . . . ?” the doctor urges.

“She cooks it for eight hours,” Danilo says, feeling himself falling deeper into a hole of his own making. “It is very . . . tender?” he adds.

“Tender.” The man scribbles on the pad.

“Yes,” Danilo says, deflated. He wonders if the doctor will prescribe the medication they give to the Twitcher. He looks at the skin on his arms fondly, thinks maybe it will be best to bite his fingernails down to the quick before he has the opportunity to scratch himself.

“Go on,” MaÅ¡ek says.

“It tastes very much like . . .”

“Like . . . ?”

“Like . . .” and here, Danilo knows he is walking straight into a trap but he is too exhausted to stop himself, “like someone is holding me in her arms.”

—

D
ANILO
'
S
SESSIONS
go on this way for months. It is undeniably pleasant to spend an hour a week in Mašek's office away from the chaos of the ward. Try as he might, he cannot inure himself to the nighttime weeping of grown men, or their incomprehensible muttering, their catatonia, or incessant rocking. But as the doctor seems intent on turning his patient's every word into proof of his derangement, Danilo becomes increasingly worried that he will never be released and that he will never see her again. He begins to pull out his hair. Each morning he wakes to find a fistful of the stuff on his pillow. With a seam ripper he steals from the sewing room, he opens up stitches on the side of his mattress and adds his hair to the stuffing so that no one will notice. But the problem becomes difficult to hide. During one of his weekly showers, he is horrified to feel bald patches on his scalp. Mašek will see the state of his hair and count it as one more mark against his claims of mental health.

Then, something wonderful happens: a patient is cured. In fact, it is the Frozen Man who suddenly begins to move and talk and act otherwise completely normal. No longer does he lie in
his bed like a corpse or sit at attention in the refectory, his hands on his knees, opening and closing his mouth like a nutcracker when one of the orderlies brings a spoon to his lips.

“It is a miracle,” a nurse says, when Danilo asks why he has not seen the former catatonic for days. He wonders if the man has been transferred to another ward where his cure is being studied just as assiduously as his illness. She whispers because religious talk is not tolerated at the asylum, especially one where a patient carries a bundle of dirty clothes at all times and prefers to be addressed as Our Lady of Sorrows. “One day he stands up and starts walking. The next, he practically runs out of here!” she says excitedly.

“He escaped?”

“He was released! We nurses gave him quite a send-off party! But we were sad to see him go. He was such a charming man.”

“He never spoke,” Danilo says.

“Yes. Lovely manners.”

While the nurse reminisces fondly about the virtues of catatonia, it occurs to Danilo that he has been trying to solve his problem the wrong way. Hoping to win his release, he's worked for months to convince Mašek of a mental clarity that could be ascribed to any sane man. But what can the doctor do with that? How can he make his professional reputation with a patient who is incurable because he is already cured? What Danilo needs to do is prove himself utterly and very specifically crazy and then allow the doctor to cure his disease. At the same time that he forms his plan, he begins to understand the doctor's particular interest in his mother's famous pork and his childhood fear of
snakes, and especially the man's fixation on the dream Danilo related to him where he was being led down a narrow street by a strange woman whose face he could not see toward the locked door of a small house. The woman pushed open the door and Danilo slipped into a corridor that tilted slightly upward.

“You
slipped
in?” MaÅ¡ek had asked.

“Yes,” Danilo said, recalling the dream fondly. “Glided. As if I were greased for the purpose.”

The man wrote so quickly his pen flew across the room, narrowly missing Danilo's head.

“I want to make love to a wolf,” Danilo declares at the next session, speaking before the doctor, whose shirttail is sticking out of his trouser fly like a small white flag, has even taken his seat. “Well, she was a wolf girl before she was a wolf, but not really, and before that she was a dwarf, and I built a machine that stretched her and she grew, but that's another story.”

“Why don't you start from the beginning,” the doctor says.

—

I
T
TAKES
D
ANILO
a month of sessions to relate the entire history. He tries to rush through so that the doctor can begin to work on whatever cure he has in store, but Mašek gets stuck on details. For instance, they spend an entire session talking about, of all people, Danilo's long-dead brother.

“Your twin,” MaÅ¡ek says.

“Yes.”

“Identical or fraternal?”

Danilo doesn't know the difference, but in his determination to be utterly and undeniably mad, he answers, “Both.”

“Was he exactly like you?” MaÅ¡ek says patiently.

“They said he was smarter,” Danilo admits, although the insult, buried for all these years, stings. “I was never very clever in school.”

“Exactly like you in his looks, is what I'm getting at.”

“Oh. Well, I guess so. We both had dark hair and were about the same height, if that's what you mean.”

The doctor appears momentarily uninterested.

“But we didn't look the same when we . . . undressed,” Danilo says, testing out a theory he is developing.

“Go on.”

“He was . . . bigger.”

The doctor nods his head slowly. “And this was something you knew by—”

“Looking?” Danilo says. From the doctor's satisfied reaction, he can tell that his theory is correct, and that snakes and a dream of slipping into a narrow corridor are all of a piece.

“And your brother, he died how?”

“He got sick.”

“But you didn't get sick.”

“No.”

“And after he died, your parents sent you away to live with Doctor . . . Doctor—”

“Smetanka.”

“When they sent you away, how did you feel?” MaÅ¡ek says.

“Sad?”

“Can you remember other times when your parents made you feel sad?”

Danilo thinks for a while. “One time, when I cut the leather for a pair of ladies' boots all wrong and my father took his belt to me.”

“As a punishment.”

“Yes.”

“Because he blamed you for ruining the boots.”

“But it was my brother's fault. He ruined the boots. I took the blame because he was more . . . was more . . .”

“Go on.”

“Endowed?”

The doctor's enthusiastic nod tells Danilo he's given the correct answer. When Mašek is finished making his notes, he looks up, an expectant smile on his face. It dawns on Danilo what the doctor wants to hear.

“So, they punished me by sending me to Doctor Smetanka's because they blamed me for my brother's death?”

“Precisely!” MaÅ¡ek says excitedly.

Danilo leaves the session feeling utterly confused. Without knowing exactly how, he has admitted to killing his beloved brother because . . . because his brother had a bigger penis than he did.

But his misgivings are no match for the doctor's enthusiasm for his patient, and Danilo soon learns that the digressions that seem to make his ultimate cure and release that much further off are exactly what convince Mašek of the precise nature of his patient's illness. So Danilo learns not to rush things during the
session when Mašek wants him to describe what Smetanka looked like and to agree that, yes, even though the man was fair where Danilo's father is dark, and even though Smetanka was no doctor while Danilo's father is scrupulous and has a reputation for making boots that last a lifetime and wedding shoes that assure a fruitful marriage, the anger and passion Danilo feels toward them both have somehow transformed into his desire to make love to an animal that he can only, reasonably, enter from behind.

—

T
W
O
MONTHS
HAVE
PASSED
during which Danilo has admitted to many unseemly thoughts and sometimes deeds but has not received any treatment. In the wards, patients swallow pills that put them to sleep for days and others that wake them from their torpors. They receive injections that make them pleasantly happy, their loopy smiles permanently affixed, and injections that make the overly giddy controllably dour.

“Can I ask a question?” Danilo says during a session.

“Questions are as meaningful as answers,” MaÅ¡ek says.

“When will I receive my medicine?”

“Your medicine?”

“My treatment. So that I can be cured.”

MaÅ¡ek looks confused. “But this is the treatment.”

“What is?”

“Our meetings.”

“But where are the pills?” Danilo says, incredulous. “Or injections? I don't mind needles.”

MaÅ¡ek laughs, not unkindly. “Oh, I don't believe in any of that rubbish.”

“Rubbish?” Danilo says, disheartened.

“What we are doing together is modern! It is the only true medicine.”

“But all we do is talk.”

“Exactly.”

“But . . . but how will I get better?” Danilo says. “How will I be cured?”

“These things take a long time,” MaÅ¡ek says. “Sometimes years. My teacher in Vienna, why, he's worked with one patient for ten years! And he has yet to break through! You are a terribly sick young man. We have to have patience.”

“But I don't have patience!” Danilo cries out. He stands and paces the room furiously. His mind reels from his horrible miscalculation. “I don't have ten years. I need to see her now!”

“Who?”

“Pavla.”

“The wolf?”

“What kind of a doctor are you?” Danilo says. He's so distressed he doesn't know what to do with himself. He starts to pull books off MaÅ¡ek's shelves. “Why don't you find me a cure in here?” he says, tossing a book to the ground. “Or here.” Another falls, splaying open when it lands. “See this?” he says, crouching over the split spine. “To me it looks like a woman's parts. You see? I'm sick. I want to make love to this book! Why don't you cure me?”

Suddenly, he understands. He looks at Mašek, who is standing
behind his desk now, frantically ringing the little bell there. “You haven't read them, have you?” Danilo says. He grabs one of the framed certificates off the wall and throws it to the floor, where it shatters. “You're like Smetanka, or those Chinese twins. You're a fraud!”

The door of the office swings open. Danilo does not put up a fight when two guards grab him and push him to the ground. When shards of glass bite into his cheeks, he doesn't even feel pain. He gives up. He will never see her again. It's over.

T
he smell isn't strong to begin with,
just the smallest alteration prickling her nostrils that lets her know. Still, Ivan keeps walking with the other man on his back, and she follows. The sun is high, and the air is full of dust. It is only when Ivan is overcome with a fit of coughing and stops to rest that he realizes his friend is dead.

“Ah, Jiři,” he says sadly, laying his hand on the man's cheek. “You kept me laughing through the worst of it. Well, get your best jokes ready. It won't be long for me. I'll see you soon.” He takes off his bandolier and his heavy jacket. She settles down on her haunches not far away.

“Go. Shoo.” He waves his hand at her. When she doesn't move, he turns out his trouser pockets. “See? I've got nothing for you.”

She watches as he tries to dig a grave using the stock of his gun and then, when that doesn't work, his hands. Giving up, he
places his jacket over the dead man's face, then sits down next to the body and stares at the wolf.

“Fine,” he says. “If you want to watch me die, be my guest. I hope I taste good.”

He sleeps. After the sun falls, she pads over to him and puts her muzzle in his face.

“No,” he whispers. “No more. Please.”

She butts him with her nose.

“Get away from me,” he says, swatting her.

She starts to walk away.

“Wait!” he says, sitting up. “Where are you going? Don't leave me alone.”

She begins to trot.

“You goddamn animal!” he says as he struggles to his feet. “Wait for me!”

—

S
HE
TRAVELS
AT
N
IGHT
and sleeps during the day. Ivan is slow and sometimes delirious from exhaustion and hunger. Sometimes he wanders off the road, and she doubles back, comes up behind him, and pushes him in the direction she wants him to go. She seems to be heading somewhere. But where? Where could a wolf go that would help him? Sometimes, overcome, he stops and weeps. At other times, he sings in a thin, wavering voice:
“Good night, my dear, good night.”
The same line again and again. Sometimes he adds to it:
“May God Himself watch over you. Good night, sleep well. Dream a little dream, oh dream it. When you wake up, trust
the dream.”
The words come out of him like ghosts rising from graves, unbidden and insubstantial. He doesn't recognize his voice. He is not certain he is alive. He wonders what being alive means.

She does not understand him, but his song enters her as surely as a bullet and lodges in her just as deeply. The tune compels her, and even though the territory is not one she and the others roamed, and she doesn't recognize any trees or outcroppings of rock, the man's song maps a pathway for her and she follows it. She deviates from her course only when she smells water. Then she will veer off the road and through dry meadows. Cursing, he follows. Although her coat protects her, his skin is so brittle that the sharp-edged grasses slice into his arms. He does nothing to stanch the blood. That smell is rich and alive and makes her want to run, but she keeps to a slow pace so that he won't fall too far behind. They drink from small streams where, owing to the blazing sun, the water runs low. Both soldier and wolf plant their faces into whatever puddle they find and they each emerge masked with silt. One night, he falls sick, and they have to stop while he writhes and moans. He curls himself against her side. His body shakes, and he clutches her fur when he convulses.
“Dream a little dream, oh dream it. Hmmm, hmmmm.”
His voice is as light as the breeze.
“That I love you. That . . . I'm going to give . . . you my . . . heart
.
”

He sleeps through the night, and so does she. When day breaks, a smell wakes her. She stands up, suddenly alert. The fur on her back rises. She pushes at him with her nose, her paw.

“Go away. Let me sleep.” He flings out an arm and manages to hit her with some force.

She yelps, steps back. Whimpers. Then she turns and heads toward the smell.

“Oh, fuck!” he says.

She hears him stumbling behind her.

“Wait,” he says. “Or don't wait. Leave me. It's fine.” He drops to his knees.

She circles back. She growls, bares her teeth.

“You don't scare me,” he says, but he's getting up, using her back to steady himself. He sniffs the air. “Hold on,” he says, suddenly alert. “What's that? What's there?” He points to a plume of smoke in the distance. He starts to run. “Hurry up!” he shouts. “What are you waiting for?”