C

by Mccarthy, Tom

  “Same problem in their heads as in your body,” he tuts as he prods Serge’s abdomen back in his office, ear lowered as it tunes into his intestines again. “Blood of Europe poisoned and cachectic; ptomaines and pathogens in system. Now the black bile is everywhere: the mela chole. All have clouded vision, just like you.”

  Discussions, hostile or otherwise, become less common as the hotel’s population dwindles in late August. Each day the porters’ suitcase-laden trolleys clank and trundle down the main drag from the hotel to the station, not the other way. The orchestra by the Mir fountain reduces its appearances to two a week, and even then is made up of fewer musicians than before, its heart shape retained but shrunk, the music now competing with the sound of workmen’s hammers banging at stone and plaster as they renovate the mausoleums. Sections of the fountain complex are switched off, drained and repaired. Serge spends whole mornings following the piping’s layout, fascinated by the bare mechanics of it all: the joins and junctions where the network splits, the small electric pumps beside the pipes, the insulated wires threaded through these. The habit catches: he starts looking at the ground all day whatever part of town he’s in, inspecting the cracks that run through it like skeins, its dark and viscous colouration, or the discarded stubs of bath season tickets and medicine labels ground into it and broken down until they seem as old and organic as earth itself.

  iv

  At the beginning of September, an arrival creates a small eddy in the flow of leavers from the town. She turns up in the Grand Hotel’s lobby with a large round hatbox, a mink stole, a folded parasol of the same light blue as the hatbox, a black handbag and a flotilla of smaller bags and boxes. As porters duck and tack around her, she stands static as a lighthouse in a busy harbour, leaving her older chaperone to issue instructions and distribute tips.

  Serge is heading out of the hotel towards the Mir, and half-stops when he sees her. She’s about his age—perhaps a year or two older, like the crook-backed nurse. She looks at him quizzically when his passage through the lobby falters, which makes him look back quizzically at her, as though he knew her, or perhaps were supposed to perform some task for her that’s slipped his mind—which makes her stare back too, bemused. She seems to understand the situation sooner than he does—to understand there is no situation—and releases his gaze with a confident, if mannered, kind of smile.

  He sees her next that afternoon, in the town’s museum. The museum’s in the castle; Serge didn’t even know of its existence until Mevr. Tuithof gushed about it over dinner last night. When he buys a half-crown ticket at its entrance, the old lady in the ticket-booth comes round to his side of the window and leads him towards an ancient sub-Berliner in the main gallery.

  “Deutsch? Franzözisch?” she asks, smiling up at him.

  “English,” he replies.

  “Ah!” She seems a little shocked, and scurries back to her booth, returning with a record that she lowers to the turntable with shaky hands. Stooping slightly, she leads the pickup’s arm across, then down. She turns to Serge now, and makes to say something—but, lacking the English words to do so, merely points to her ear: listen. Serge listens. A deep, male, English voice comes crackling through the speaking horn:

  “Of all the towns in Central Europe,” it informs him, “few have had a history so steeped in violence as Kloděbrady.” As though to illustrate its point, a scream—perhaps a child’s, perhaps a woman’s—interrupts the monologue. “Here it was,” the deep, male voice continues after the scream fades out, “that the child-prince of Kutna Hora was beheaded at the order of the Hauptmann of Olbec; here it was that Vincenzo and Rosnata, the sons of Mstislav, were killed by Vladimir after their own father’s demise.”

  Serge nods at the old lady knowingly:

  “The tumour-humour thing,” he says.

  She smiles back at him anxiously, then beats a slow retreat towards her booth. The deep, male voice continues telling him of wars and purges, plagues and fires. He looks around the gallery: its vitrines, made from the same murky glass as the pike-and-otter cases in the hotel, hold illuminated manuscripts depicting scenes of battle and execution. Larger images of similar events hang on the walls. A tapestry of roughly the same size as the one above the staircase at Versoie shows some kind of torture taking place: an unhappy-looking character’s being carried by two soldiers up a ladder leading to the rim of a huge vat from which steam rises, while a courtier-type points to the vat malevolently. Serge wanders over and inspects the scene more closely. The courtier has the same sharp, narrow features as Dr. Filip. Maybe Dr. Filip’s just the latest incarnation of a character as old as this town itself, Serge thinks to himself—a figure who reappears in era after era, like Dr. Learmont’s face repeating through the sickbed afternoons of his childhood, but on a larger scale, one to be measured not in the memories of a single life but over centuries. The borders of the tapestry are embellished with insects. Serge turns away from it and feels his veiled vision darkening further, and feels too the dark matter in his stomach tightening, solidifying. The deep voice on the gramophone is talking about the region’s landscape:

  “… already crossed by an extremely important long-distance trading route linking the centre of the country to the Kodsko region and Silesia inking the centre of the country to the Kodsko region and Silesia inking the centre of the country to the Kod …”

  The record’s stuck. Serge turns and makes to walk back to the gramophone so he can release the needle, but sees that he’s been beaten to it: a woman, not the ticket-lady, is lifting the arm up and sliding it above the record’s surface before lowering it back again, allowing the monologue to advance:

  “… for the transportation of the mineral-rich earth of the surrounding countryside, which remains a valuable resource to this day. At the beginning of the thirteenth century …”

  The woman turns around now, and he sees it’s the new arrival. She’s changed since this morning, and now wears an emerald-green knotted cloche hat and a sea-blue shawl.

  “My stumbling porter,” she says. “What’s your name?”

  He tells her.

  “Serge like ‘sedge,’ or ‘urge’?” she asks.

  “Just like I said it,” he replies. “What are you called?”

  “Lucia,” she answers. “It’s Italian.”

  “You don’t sound Italian,” he tells her.

  “It’s my mother,” says Lucia. “She’s from Genoa. My father’s English. ‘Serge’ sounds French.”

  “It is. My mother also: her family.”

  “You have brothers and sisters?”

  “No,” he says. “I had a sister, but not anymore. What are you here for?”

  “Here? To see the museum,” she says.

  “No, I mean here in Kloděbrady.”

  “Oh, anaemia,” she tells him, rolling her eyes up like a naughty schoolgirl. “My blood’s too light or something. How about you?”

  “The opposite: too dark.”

  Lucia giggles. “How perfect. Shall we visit the gallery?”

  They walk through the large hall beneath tapestries and past illuminations, while the gramophone’s account of wars against the Turks, Hungarians and Czechs, of infanticide, betrayal and sedition, echoes at them from the room’s high walls. The words soften and run together as they step into the cellar, in which rotting boat-fragments, the charcoaled skeletons of old canoes, are laid out among sepulchres whose stone reliefs level accounts between aggressors and their victims by giving the faces of both the same worn-down, characterless quality. When they come up to the main gallery again, the voice is telling them how Mstislav tried to buck the murderous local trend by developing and implementing pacifist strategies.

  “He was the one with radical oppinions,” says Serge. “I read about this earlier. He lay the groundwork for Prince Jiři to … Listen …”

  “… for the reign of Prince Jiři,” the deep voice says as though completing, or rephrasing, Serge’s sentence, “who submitted to the royal co
urts of Europe, under the title of The General Peaceful Organisations, a blueprint for universal peace.”

  “Well, well,” Lucia says, nodding at him wide-eyed and amused. “Impressive.”

  Serge holds up his finger like the ticket-lady did a while ago; they listen as the voice continues:

  “Although not immediately adopted, Jiri’s vision is now blossoming among all nations, and amicable trade has replaced warfare as a means of competition.”

  “Has it?” Lucia asks, more to the voice than to Serge. “That’s nice.”

  The record’s ended now; the gramophone’s speaking horn hisses. For a moment, Serge is back in the attic at Versoie, looking out over the rainy garden, shunting ghosts around its grid-squares. The ticket-lady’s shuffling over to retrieve the disc, smiling at them exaggeratedly as they pass her on their way to the exit. As she’s returning the pickup to its cradle, she must clumsily allow her shaky hand to drop the needle back onto the disc’s surface: the child’s or woman’s scream erupts once more, following Serge and Lucia out into the courtyard.

  The heart-logo’s embedded in the castle’s masonry; it hovers above them as they head beneath an arch, only this time it’s held up not by cherubs but on strands which protrude from its underside like fleshy tentacles, giving it an octopus- or jellyfish-like look. They pass out of the courtyard towards the town’s river, where, beside a boathouse, rowers are lowering their not-yet-charcoaled canoes from a jetty while swimmers in trunks and bathing caps splash friends in paddle boats. A bridge crosses this; Serge and Lucia walk to its middle, then pause and, leaning on the rail, look down over a large double-decker pleasure boat that’s waiting for a lock to open. On the boat’s stern is painted its name, Jiři.

  “How did your sister die?” Lucia asks. They haven’t spoken for a while: just walked and watched the river. Looking at the swirls emerging from beneath the boat’s hull, Serge replies:

  “She drowned.”

  The lock door opens; bubbles rise up from the churning water; the pleasure boat moves on; so do Lucia and Serge. After a few more yards the bridge turns into a weir. Sluice-gates beneath it channel and filter the water; above it, at intervals, gate-houses rise like watchtowers. Beyond these, a generating station runs from the weir to the solid ground on the river’s far side. Through its mesh windows, Serge can see turbines grinding and whirring, their wheels and belts resembling the strange machine in Dr. Filip’s office. The building’s electric moan hangs in the air and merges with another hum that comes from somewhere else—from higher, growing in volume and aggression like the buzz of a malignant insect. Serge looks up and sees an aeroplane flying low above the river. Lucia grabs his shoulder as it passes over them.

  “Look!” she shouts, all excited. “Look at that!”

  “It’s taking people on an aerial tour of the town and countryside,” Serge says. “They do it two or so times each week, when the weather’s good.”

  “Have you flown on it?” she asks.

  “No.” Clair suggested it one day but he declined, for the simple reason that he didn’t believe that all his weight could possibly get airborne. He knew it could, of course, knew that the laws of physics would allow the machine to bear him on its wings and propeller up into the sky—but psychologically … In his mind the morbid matter Dr. Filip spoke of has taken on proportions far, far larger than his stomach could ever accommodate, and expanded to become a landscape, a whole territory: the land itself, and then the murky, gauzy air above it, the dark waters flowing beneath this … How could all that be elevated? His abdomen’s swollen since he arrived here. Dr. Filip said that this was good—that it was the pure, air-filled water that was swelling it, that purity, like faith, would grow. But something else is growing inside Serge. He feels its heaviness. He sees its heaviness everywhere: in the scales hanging above the doors of chemists’ shops, the snakes that curl around them, weighing them down, in the cysteine-rich ballast being crane-hoisted onto groaning trains, or in the hearts that jets and cherubs strain to hold up against dragging weeds and tentacles. He’s taken to colouring the hearts black in idle moments in his room: on the stationery beside his bed or on the labels of the mineral-water bottles …

  He sees Lucia often. They take walks together on most afternoons. Both Clair and Lucia’s chaperone, the fifty-odd-year-old Miss Larkham, seem to think their company is good for one another. Lucia likes his, certainly: each time she laughs she fixes his eyes with hers, aquamarine and pale, holding them for longer each time. After a few days she starts punching him lightly on the arm whenever she makes a light-hearted comment, or grabbing his shoulder like she did when the aeroplane flew overhead and leaving her hand there, letting him support her as though she were about to lose her balance even though the patch of ground they’re on is straight and flat. He senses that she’d let him return the gesture if he felt like it, and hold her as closely or tightly as he liked, kiss her, do whatever he pleased …

  But he’s not sure that he wants to. For all Lucia’s levity and brightness, he prefers the company of his crook-backed masseuse. Her name’s Tania, he found out the third or fourth time she massaged him. He likes the way her hands circle around his stomach, the aggression of the palm’s ball pressing down into his flesh and muscles, the spiralling descent that follows, then the way she slaps and saws his sides. He likes her ruddy skin and musty, sulphurous odour; as she bends above him he inhales it deeply, as though breathing in, through her, the sulphurous fumes gushing straight from the springs. Walks with Lucia are enjoyable and pass the time, but sessions with Tania fill him with anticipation, so much so that he finds himself growing impatient for the next morning’s one each afternoon, losing the signal of whatever Lucia’s talking to him about as his mind tunes forwards to the mustiness, the pressing and descent …

  He and Tania talk little. Once he asks her how she came to be a masseuse and she tells him that she contracted polio as a child, and came to Kloděbrady because her family wanted her to benefit from the healing powers of the local earth. They weren’t wealthy enough to keep her here as a patient, so she became a chambermaid’s assistant; then, when she was thirteen, started training at the Letna. Despite working in hydrotherapy, she’s adamant that it’s the earth and not the water here that’s special.

  “You’re like Jirud, then,” Serge tells her as she pounds him.

  “Who he?” she asks.

  “He came here with pigs, and the earth cured them—or at any rate that’s what Herr Landmesser says. Is he one of yours?”

  “I do not know either Jirud or Landmesser,” Tania tells him. “But the earth here is good. Without it, I would have much pain. You turn over now.”

  As he turns, her distended shoulder looms above him. He likes her crippled body, the illness inside it. Like her smell, it seems to convey something else—something gurgling upwards from below, running through her as though she were a conduit, a set of pipes. Her glazed look too: the way her eyes seem almost oblivious to what’s in front of them, fixing instead on something other than the immediate field of vision, deeper and more perennial …

  Does his health improve? Not really. Its progress certainly isn’t to the satisfaction of the old judge and torturer. He sees Dr. Filip once a week and, lying on his back while the detector-whiskers twitch and bristle and the tapper-arm hovers above his abdomen, is lectured on his failings as a patient.

  “So: appears your body is responding to the treatment only so it then can re-intoxify,” the doctor’s sharp voice scolds.

  “What’s re-intoxifying it?” Serge asks.

  “What? There is no what. It re-intoxifies itself.”

  “With what then?” Serge tries.

  “Not with either. Your illness is not a thing; it is a process. A rhythm. Toxins are secreted around body, organs become accustomed and, perverted by custom, addicted. So when toxins are gone, organs ask for more. More ptomaines, please! More pathogens! And body makes more. The rhythm is repeating, on and on. It will repeat until you—I
mean your will, your mind—tell it to stop.”

  “How do I tell it that?” Serge asks.

  Dr. Filip stops tapping; his thin eyes lock on Serge’s from behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. “Tell me,” he says; “you like it here?”

  Serge shrugs. “It’s fine.”

  “You like the rhythm of your days? The enemas, the hydrotherapy, the walks …”

  “It’s rather pleasant,” Serge tells him.

  The thin eyes glint metallically. “See? You find it pleasant—and I think you find the rhythm of your illness pleasant too. It pleases you to feast on the mela chole, on the morbid matter, and to feast on it repeatedly, again, again, again, like it was lovely meat—lovely, black, rotten meat. And so the rotten meat pollutes your soul.”

  “But if I like it here,” Serge counters, “and follow what’s prescribed, doesn’t that mean I’m accepting of the treatment rather than resistant to it?”

  Dr. Filip turns from him and fiddles with his instruments. His small, tight back seems tense with thinking. After a while he answers:

  “Things mutate. That is the way of nature—of good nature: things pass through on their way to somewhere else, and both they and the things they pass through are thereby transformed. You following me?”

  “I suppose so,” Serge says hesitantly.

  “You, though,” the doctor continues, “have got blockage. Jam, block, stuck. Instead of transformation, only repetition. Need to free what’s blocking, break whole rhythm of intoxication—then good transformation can resume and things will pass through you and make you open up. You still are only adolescent: still have much transformation to perform. Blockage must be broken, then body and soul both will open up, like flowers.”

  Still lying on the segmented table, Serge sees in his mind’s eye cocooned men, trapped in escritoires or trussed up in sweat-filled blankets, pulsing in figures of eight as they mutate into resin-oozing, black silk-larvae that will never become moths. From the recesses of his stomach, as though from a box, he hears again a child’s or woman’s scream.