Little Nothing Read Free Page B

disappearing before their eyes made them suspicious. Even Agáta refused the improvement, not fully believing that it was possible for a body to eliminate its waste anywhere but in a boiling-in-summer, freezing-in-winter, always pungent outhouse. Time and again, people would fold their arms and narrow their gazes and ask Václav, “But where does it go, really?” His answer did not satisfy them because even though they talked a good game about heaven and hell to keep their children in line and satisfy that idiot, Father Matyáš, these were realistic people who had a pretty good idea of where they would end up for the rest of time, and who did not fancy the notion of sharing eternity with piles of their neighbor’s crap. But eventually the idea caught on. Now, years later, Agáta is the wife of a man who makes a decent living unclogging the drains and pipes of villagers who have finally stopped squatting in the fields or pouring their slops out of windows to fertilize their flowers but who have yet to learn the idiosyncrasies of modern waste disposal. They are foreverputting all manner of objects down their toilets as if to bury their secrets. Love letters from mistresses or the bill for a frivolous hat purchase, fistfuls of hair cut off to approximate some newfangled style advertised in a gazette brought from the city by a peddler, the gazette itself—all these things and more create odiferous backups that warp floorboards and stain rugs. His clients regard plumbing as a sin-exonerating miracle, a daily confession, which is reasonable given the narrow confines of the indoor WCs that are built into the corners of rooms or fashioned from standing wardrobes, and owing to the contemplative and sometimes prayerful minutes spent therein. The villagers have no interest in Václav’s explanations about the curved and narrow pipes that render their efforts at obfuscation useless. More than useless, as it turns out, for all it takes for a marriage to crumble is for a husband to be present when the plumber exhumes a clot of bloody towels flushed away because a mother of six has decided a seventh will be the death of her. In fact, Václav turns out to be the opposite of what people assume. He is not a man devoted to the eradication of unmentionable things but one whose very presence brings them to light. When he enters a house, the owners will not look him in the eye, as if he were judge and jury and taxman all at once. He has taken to demanding his fee up front because no man pays another to witnesses his humiliation. But Agáta cannot complain. Her husband provides a living for her and now, she supposes, for the unfortunate issue of her aged womb.

D uring the first half year of Pavla’s life, except at mealtimes, when she is fed warm goat’s milk and vegetables macerated to a soupy pulp, or during diaper changes, she has little contact with her mother who doesn’t know what to make of her fractional child. Every seven days, she lifts her baby from the crib, removes whatever oversized garments have been left on the doorstep by pitying neighbors, and washes Pavla in a basin. When her daughter is naked, Agáta will sometimes let her eyes wander over her child, but just as she feels her tears begin to collect, she sets to scrubbing, using not a perfumed soap but one that is as harsh on the skin as gravel. Let silly women spend money on fancy toiletries they think will keep their husbands close. A body needs to be scoured like the inside of a pot. Holding up one arm, then the other in order to get into the creases of bunched-up baby fat, she reduces her daughter to parts and eradicates the implications of the deformed whole. If Václav is home,he might do his hip-shaking, tool-jiggling dance to entertain Pavla and distract her from her mother’s ministrations, but more often than not, he stands next to the basin and tilts his head to the side, studying his baby as if she were another