Tom McCarthy - C

Serge settles into a routine. Each morning he wanders through the park and sips from the Mir fountain to the sound of the orchestra’s music, then heads on to Letna for a water-and-paraffin-oil enema, then to his hydrotherapy and massage session with the musty-smelling, crook-backed nurse. The lightening effect produced by the enema stays with him through the massage and on until just after lunch, when the veil thickens again and he sleeps for an hour. In the afternoons he has his lessons (Clair’s intent on teaching him German these days, deeming him old enough to start reading Marx) and takes walks around the town. He dines with Clair each evening, then spends an hour or so reading or playing games in the parlour: dominoes or bridge if in a group of four or five, or, if alone with Clair, chess. At first Clair always wins, but after a week Serge finds in the hotel’s library a book about the game and, learning the numbers and letters used to denote pieces and positions, starts applying the manoeuvres, familiar to him from nights of transcription, that the Marconi operators would tap across the sea to one another; now he wins each time. Whenever in his room, he drinks the bottles that are left for him every morning, with the heart-and-cherub logo and the patent number on their labels; each night he falls asleep with sulphur and soot on his tongue.

Serge gets to know the other patients staying in the hotel. They’re always kind to him: as the youngest one, he’s treated like a type of mascot. Besides Herr Landmesser and the Dutch woman, Tuithof, there’s a Frenchman, Monsieur Bulteau, who takes pleasure in explaining how each person’s diet acts on their metabolism, trotting out the names of chemicals, compounds and gastric juices; a Russian, Pan Suchyx, who reads sheet music in a deep armchair each evening, humming the odd snatch out to himself as though pondering a proposition or a line of argument; an Austrian banker named Kleinholz who keeps whipping from his waistcoat pocket a notebook full of columns of what Serge assumes are ledgers or accounts, and annotating these with a pen he keeps attached to it; and a score of vague Hungarians, Swedes, Serbs and Italians who nod and smile at Serge each time they pass him beside the stuffed animals or on the staircase. Nationality seems less of a defining label here than type of illness: the K4-to-X move of most long-serving inmates when they meet a fresh one is to enquire not where the new arrival’s from but rather what he or she’s got wrong with them, and patients subsequently tend to gravitate towards those with the same complaint. There are the arthritics and their outriders, people with sciatica and neuritis, who of an evening gather round a puzzle table, their stiff fingers prodding and poking the pieces into position; then there’s the skin-disease gang, the eczematics and psoriasistics, who generally loiter in the hotel’s interior courtyard (an area the other patients unkindly refer to as “the Leper Colony”); then the ones with urinary-tract infection, arterial spasm, hypertension, renal calculus, functional and organic diseases of the heart or chronic diseases of the liver-in short, what Serge and Clair call “the picklers,” people who’ve come here to douse their organs in the water in the hope of cure. They’re usually Dr. Filip’s patients. You can spot his patients all around Kloděbrady by the sample jars they carry about with them like passports. Serge wonders, as he waits outside the doctor’s office, where the samples all end up. Do they get filed in some huge archive? Or stored in a cellar, laid down in comb-shaped cubby-holes like a thick-set honey made from bees fed only on black flowers? There must be so much of it, enough matter to rival the mounds of cysteine rising from Kloděbrady’s outskirts and the countryside around it and constantly being loaded onto trains, carted away who knows where…

M. Bulteau has a theory about the cysteine, which he expounds one morning in the drawing room:

“For gunpowder, n’est-ce pas? Explosion: pow!” His hands fly apart in an explosive gesture. “The Prussians take it to their arsenales, prepare for war.”

“Ganz lächerlich!” a German lady mutters as she sips her coffee. Kleinholz, notebook out, starts annotating figures with more rigour. Herr Landmesser declares:

“The earth belongs to Prussia from long time ago, so she may use it as she wishes.”

“How does it belong to Prussia?” Clair asks.

“The whole region is Germanic, from way back,” Herr Landmesser explains. “This Jiři in the statue, patron saint, is just new, Christian name for old Germanic god.”

“What god would that be?” a Hungarian demands to know.

“Jirud. He was a prince expulsed from kingdom after he became diseased, and wandered as a swineherd. When he saw his pigs rolling in earth here, and their diseases ended, he did same and was himself cured. Then founded new kingdom here, and conquered back old one too. He was father of Volsung, who is father of Sigmund, father of Siegfried.”

“But,” says Serge, “no one knew about the healing powers of Kloděbrady until Baron von Arnow found the water under the castle and Maxbrenner plumbed it through the town.”

“You have eaten modern version of story like a good boy taking medicine,” Herr Landmesser informs him with a patronising glance.

“This is Prussian arrogance typique!” M. Bulteau almost shouts, his hands still gunpowdering apart. “They think all Europe ’s theirs, and make these stupid mythes to justify their avarice for land and power.”

“Mossieu!” The German lady slams her coffee down, red-faced. “You are not polite.”

“She’s right: you should apologise,” Herr Landmesser tells M. Bulteau.

“I shall not!” M. Bulteau answers.

The argument rumbles on throughout the day, with the German delegation demanding in increasingly aggressive terms an apology from the lone Frenchman, while Hungarians, Serbs and Italians first take sides then splinter into smaller groups who’ve found subsidiary grievances with one another. Only Pan Suchyx remains neutral, although not unaffected, humming first one melody and then another, contrary-sounding one to himself, as though weighing and counter-weighing the claims of each. People argue in Dr. Filip’s waiting room; their raised voices draw the doctor out to sternly tell all parties to desist, his white coat at this point, for Serge, resembling the toga of the Greco-Roman judge in the hotel’s dining-room fresco.

“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.