Tom McCarthy - C

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 courts 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.