Little Nothing Read Online Free Page B

she hands them to him, sometimes using a pulley system that she and Václav devise with a rope and her Easter basket. She quickly learns the vocabulary of his trade—gaskets and bastard neck bolts, couplings and stems—and she is able to predict what her father will need before he asks for it. Václav and Pavla often work for hours without speaking, the only sound passing between them the clank of metal, Václav’s muffled grunts, his occasional, frustrated profanities, and her corresponding giggles. Often, a client will comment about what a good man Václav is to keep his poor daughter close and make her feel useful. Although Pavla can see her father’s expression harden, he never responds. That his stoicism is read as heroic forbearance helps his business: villagers are eager for a saint to install and sanctify their toilets. When a job is complete, and a client examines his new plumbing, flushing and then watching in astonishment as the water disappears from the toilet bowl, Václav will give Pavla a conspiratorial wink, and she knows they share the secret of her true value.
    The crib remains Pavla’s sleeping quarters long after other children in the village have moved into proper beds where the sweating or freezing bodies of their four or six or eight brothers and sisters keep them from rolling onto the hard floor. With no siblings and only one proper bed in the house, Pavla would sleep between her beloved parents, but she resists the transition. She is reassured by her crib, whose geometry is so conducive to her size. Confined, she feels that she occupies a comprehensible spacerelative to her mattress, the house, the village, the world. She teaches herself to add, subtract, and even multiply using the slats, and by the time she turns eight and finally convinces her fearful and protective mother, and her father, who frets the loss of a good assistant, to let her attend school, she is well ahead of the other children. She is sought after as a seatmate on test days and she obliges by angling her tablet to the advantage of her weak-minded neighbor. That lucky student’s result is never questioned because the teacher, Mr. Kublov, no student of science or of much else, believes that Pavla’s smallness of stature is mirrored by a corresponding puniness of brain, and that she is the one who cheats her way to a perfect score. She is forced to stand in the corner with her back to the classroom, and Mr. Kublov does not bother to admonish the boys who make a game of pitching nuggets of wadded paper at her back. The girls call her Little Nothing as though there were descending versions of nothingness. These girls want to assure Pavla that she counts for much less than the next-to-nothings their mothers tell them they are by virtue of their laziness when it comes to household chores, or the big nothings their fathers insinuate they are by only speaking directly to their brothers. During outdoor break time, the boys devise a game of chase where Pavla is the chicken and they are the farmers. The winner is the one who wrestles her to the ground and administers the coup de grâce. Then she must flap her arms and dance like a decapitated bird. The girls, led by their ring-leader Gita Blažek, are no less eager—they place her in the middle of their circle while they hold hands and raise their arms in an arch and chant:
The golden gate was opened, unlocked by agolden key. Whoever is late to enter, will lose their head. Whether it’s him or her . . . Whack her with a broom!
They close their arms around her head like a vice, then administer the punishment. Mr. Kublov watches from his post at the top of the schoolhouse stairs where he smokes his cigarettes and steals nips from the flask hidden in his coat pocket, relieved that the children have found a united purpose so that he doesn’t have to break up a fight and risk getting punched or scratched in the process.
    These