Tom McCarthy - C

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.”