Tom McCarthy - C

“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.

“Out now,” says Dr. Filip. “Go and start transforming.”

In mid-September there’s a religious festival. Clair thinks it’s the Exaltation of the Cross; Miss Larkham thinks it’s the Nativity of the Theotokos; Serge doesn’t care what it is; Lucia finds it all very amusing. She and Serge shadow the procession as it emerges from the doors of the town’s church and makes its way towards the castle, after which it heads down to first the Letna, then the Maxbrenner buildings, pausing to perform a ceremony on the steps of each. It then moves past the rows of chemists’ shops, the statue of Prince Jiři and the kiosks lining the main drag, each one of which it blesses too; then, finally, across the lawns of the fountain park, where it takes in all the mausoleums before ending up beside the Mir. At its head a priest, holding aloft a cross, intones liturgical script, while sub-priests and altar boys murmur assent. The orchestra, heart shape abandoned, follow behind, intermittently striking up tunes that sound rather funereal, breaking these off, then striking them up again, reprising the same passages. The townspeople who move along its route with Lucia and Serge join in at regular intervals, reciting short phrases in their own, non-liturgical language.

“What do you think they’re saying?” asks Lucia, holding Serge’s arm.

“ ‘O holy water, please keep bringing us rich foreigners so that we may take their money,’ ” Serge answers.

Lucia flings her head back in a peal of laughter and throws both her arms around his neck. A couple of townspeople turn round and cast them disapproving glances. A hush spreads through the crowd as the priest dips his cross into the Mir; then all heads bow as he holds it submerged beneath the water. He keeps it there for a long time. Watching him, Serge remembers what Herr Landmesser said about the old, Germanic origins of the town’s myths. As ancient and obscure words waft over the devoted, cowered crowd, it strikes him that Herr Landmesser was probably right-and strikes him too that all the water that’s gushed through the Mir since its inception would never purify him, wash his dark bile away, because the water’s dark as well. It’s bubbled up from earth so black that no blessing could ever lighten it, been filtered through the charcoaled wrecks of boats and tumour-ridden bones of murdered ancestors, through stool-archives and other sedimented layers of morbid matter. Serge turns his veiled gaze away from the priest-and as he does, sees Tania looking back at him with old, glazed eyes.

By late September only Serge and Clair, Lucia and Miss Larkham and a gaggle of full-time patients who’ve resigned themselves to the knowledge that they’ll never leave the place alive remain in the Grand Hotel. The poles outside stand flagless; the terrace, cleared of tables, collects leaves. Inside, the dining room is being redecorated: a large sheet hangs over the Greco-Roman judge and athletes of the fresco; the white-coated waiter manning the bar beneath it doubles to serve the four or five tables at which guests still sit. Beside the Mir the orchestra no longer plays; the floor of its bandstand, like a horizontal version of the fresco, is covered in sheets as workmen repaint the trellised ironwork of its rails and columns. Wandering out to the fountain every morning, Serge feels like an interloper, someone who’s found his way, like the rose-strewing cherub in the drawing on the brochure, into a picture to which he doesn’t rightly belong. The townspeople, who earlier were so attentive to the visitors, accommodating to the point that their lives, their daily movements and activities, revolved around them, now seem to orbit their own, obscure suns, ones that Serge can’t quite discern. The concierge and maître d’, as often as not out of uniform, chat to one another across the reception desk even when guests are waiting; men with ladders assume right-of-way in corridors and streets alike, leaving visitors to skirt and squeeze around them: this is their town now…

The general relaxation of formalities makes itself felt in Serge’s sessions with Tania. There’s nothing tangible that’s changed: she still wears the same coat and presses, slaps and saws in the same places-but her hands move over him more casually now. Each session seems like a weekend one, as though they’d both just popped in to an empty office before slipping off on an excursion. One morning, Serge asks her what she’s doing later; when she answers “I do nothing” he suggests they take a boat-ride on the Jiři together.

“Pleasure boat finished now,” she answers. “Not tourists enough.”

“Well then, we’ll hire a paddle boat,” Serge answers. “Want to come?”

Without pausing her rubbing she replies: “What time?”

“Six o’clock,” Serge says. “Make that five. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier these days.”

The boathouse by the lock turns out to be closed. He wonders what to do with Tania while he waits for her in front of it. He waits until five-thirty, then five forty-five, then six. At quarter-past he spots Lucia wandering alone beneath the castle. She hasn’t seen him yet; he nips across the bridge until he’s out of sight but still able to watch for Tania’s arrival. He sits there for another hour or so, looking at bubble-clusters moving from the weir’s sluice-gates to the water’s edge. Free and easily liberated, the brochure said; too many all at once will kill you, Dr. Filip warned. Behind him the generating station’s turbines clank and moan. Beyond it, just before the path gives over to fields, there’s a small substation: an urn-like building from which wires emerge and lead to poles, then wind round rubber spindles fixed to horizontal arms on these and split out into smaller wires, like organzine combining, only backwards, each separated strand then disappearing inside a metal casket that’s half-buried in the ground. Between the substation and the main one, vines emerge from the same ground-three rows of them, attached by strings to nursery posts that they’ve outgrown. Serge walks up to the knitted fence around the substation and, resting his fingers in its weave, looks at the vines more closely. They have fruit on them: dark-red grapes bursting with ripeness. He lets his eye run onwards, to the fields. Beyond these there’s a wood, already darkening in the dusk. Perhaps he could take Tania there, he thinks, if she turns up…

She doesn’t. The next day, as she massages him, he asks her why.