Little Nothing Read Free Page A

mouse held onto the kitty and they pulled and pulled and pulled and . . . the turnip came out of the ground! And the grandmother said to the grandfather, “Sometimes the littlest one can be the biggest help.”
    Each time Agáta reaches the end of the story, she dismisses the stupidity of the moral. “What a ridiculous bunch,” she might mutter, or, “Anyway, everyone knows that a giant turnip would be as tough as an old shoe.”
    As the hours pass and the light in the room softens and the corners recede into shadows, and as she listens to the low drone of her mother’s recitation, Pavla sees both less and more, for Agáta in shadow is somehow the purer distillation of her character: dark, wary, certain that this world she lives in is not as real as the one she visits in her tales where mountain kings and speaking rams are more comprehensible to her than the day’s weather or the queer human she has made.
    â€”
    â€œO H HO , MY WIFE !”
    It is evening and twilight gives up its fight, and the night sky settles over the village. Agáta shakes herself out of her reverie and becomes all energy and spin, engaging importantly with whatever is at arm’s length—a sock that needs darning, a soup that requires spicing, even, because she can no longer ignore the sweet stink of baby shit, her daughter. The door of the cottage opensand a dark shape fills it: Pavla’s father is home. The tools of his trade hang off Václav’s thick leather belt and he jangles when he moves. This inadvertent music provokes his daughter, who waggles her little arms. When Václav notices this reaction, he shakes his hips again, and to his surprise, his daughter’s eyes grow wide and her mouth forms its first, wobbly smile. This is the opening conversation of Pavla’s life and she does not want it to end so she manifests a noise that sounds like the bleating of a goat.
    â€œDon’t upset her,” Agáta warns, not wanting to have her maternal skills put to the test.
    â€œShe’s not upset. She’s laughing!” Václav says, taking off his tool belt and dangling it over the crib. Pavla makes her sound again and watches as her father’s astonishment turns to pleasure, his smile unmasking a mouthful of brown and rotted teeth that emerge from his swollen gums at odd angles like the worn picket fence that surrounds Agáta’s garden and fails to keep out the scavenger deer. Pavla will do anything to keep seeing these teeth and so she laughs and waves her arms and feels, for the first time in her life, but not the last, the exquisite pain of love. In a few years, she will put Václav’s screwdrivers and wrenches and bolts of all different sizes to use, dressing the long tools in bits of cloth to make faceless dolls, and stringing washers on twine to fashion necklaces for her mother. For now, she follows the symphony of her father as he crosses the room and sits on a hard chair and waits for his wife to pull off his high boots whose soles are impacted with sludge. It is Agáta’s great shame that the handsome farrier she married so long ago, the boy who rode the horses he shod back and forth along the main street supposedly to try outhis work but really to show off his powerful thighs to the village maidens, saw advantage in turning his skill with iron and his eye for chance to, of all things, indoor plumbing. “Horses will soon be a thing of the past,” he explained to Agáta, the girl who was most impressed by those powerful flanks, as he lay on top of her in their marriage bed, pushing her knees closer to her face to improve his angle of entry. “But everyone shits once a day. Sometimes twice, if they’re lucky.”
    The work was slow at first. The villagers were used to chamber pots and being able to study their bodies’ expulsions for signs of good or ill health, and the notion of what was once inside them