Little Nothing Read Online Free Page A

place within her the feelings that are stirring her heart? She pictures Father Matyáš and cannot help but see him through Václav’s eyes: a man too ignorant for the words he delivers, too sullied to touch the wafer that he places on extended, hopeful tongues, too wracked by drunken tremors to hold the cup steady with his long, bony fingers. The same fingers that he uses to pat the heads of his altar boys and smooth the collars of their frocks even when they don’t need adjusting. “No!” she says out loud without intending to, startling the baby. A God that makes that sheep fucker His emissary cannot deny her this feeling that fills her withered breasts and makes her nipples tingle.
Dream a little dream, oh dream it.
She sings in full voice, not caring that she cannot hold a tune or that the neighbors out tending their blackpigs might hear. How many years has she had to listen to them laugh at their children, scream at them, chide them, praise them, wish them well and safe as they troop off to school, off to the fields, off to life?
When you wake up, trust the dream,
that I love you. That I’m going to give you myheart!

B y the time Pavla is five years old, Agáta has enfolded her little daughter into her daily routine. The girl’s tasks: sweep the floor, clean the chicken coop, carry the fresh eggs to the house in the cradle of her skirt, walking slowly so that the warm and delicate ovals do not jostle against one another and crack. Pavla is handy with a knife and she makes quick work of shelling peas or pitting cherries. Her arms and legs remain short relative to her torso, and when she walks or runs, she moves side to side to propel herself forward, her arms pumping double time. Watching her daughter race after an errant chicken or leap up to try and catch a petal-white butterfly, Agáta feels her chest expand to make room for the brew of awe and heartache that she has come to identify as happiness. Václav has fashioned a step stool so that Pavla can reach the basin in order to scrub dishes, scour her teeth, and wash her face, and he has made her a special riser that sits on the seat of a chair so that, at mealtimes, theshining sun of her round, fair head surfaces above the lip of the table. When Agáta takes Pavla to the shops, the children stare and often laugh, while their mothers
tsk tsk
at Agáta’s misfortune and their relative good luck. “Leave me home,” Pavla begs each time her mother announces the dreaded weekly trip, but Agáta slaps her. “If I have to do it, then you have to do it, too,” she says, not clarifying whether she means enduring the humiliation or selling soap.
    â€”
    B ECAUSE THE MAJORITY of houses in the village date from the previous century and have not been constructed with plumbing in mind, the work of retrofitting them for underground pipes is a job suited for the small. By the time Pavla is seven years old, Václav, recognizing both his daughter’s quick wit and her unique suitability, begins to take her on his rounds. It is the girl’s job to crawl into caverns beneath houses that hold eons worth of cold. Once she has studied these spaces and judged where the dirt is soft enough for digging and where rock forms too much of an impediment, she emerges, dusts herself off, then draws maps of the underground geographies. Because of the incessant comparisons she has been subjected to and is the subject of—
but she’s half as tall as my Jurek and they share the same year and name day! But look: her hand is just a quarter the size of my darling Katarina’s!—
Pavla has an innate grasp of scale, and from her crude yet accurate diagrams, Václav can determine where the pipes should be laid. Once he has done the laborious work of digging trenches,he hitches up his pants, drops to his knees, and wriggles underground. Pavla stands by the mouth of the hole, and when her father calls for the parts he needs,