C (10 page)

The pupils pause, then launch stumblingly into the final verse:

What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball;
What though no real voice or sound
Amid the radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice …

The voices run out to their furrows’ end, and trail off into silence. There’s a pause. Serge hears a motor car go by on the far side of Telegraph Hill, then looks again at the beetle, still carrying on its battle with the earth clump. His father issues an instruction to the two workmen, who transfer the draped coffin from its podium onto the platform suspended above the trench, then winch it down onto the rails. One of them steps over to the other winch-handle and starts cranking it; the coffin begins to slide towards the Crypt. Carrefax nips over to the column supporting the curtain-rail and flicks the switch on. As the coffin slides beneath the perpendicular bar above the trench, the drapes jerk into action, their long hems slipping from the higher ground to fall into the trench and, to the sound of an electric whirring, draw closed across the coffin as it passes through their axis. That’s what’s meant to happen, at least: in fact, one of the hems catches on the coffin and gets pulled backwards, sending the electric motor first into whining overdrive and then into suspension.

“Blast the thing!” says Carrefax. He switches the motor off, tugs at the curtain to unsnag the hem, then flicks the switch again. The coffin slides right through the curtain now, which falls back into place behind it.

“She’s gone!” sobs Frieda.

Her girls whimper agreement. Serge, still hard, can’t stop himself from smiling: the coffin’s not two feet from where it was before. If they moved round to the side they’d see it, dumb and wooden and unaltered. It strikes him that this whole event’s more amateurish than the Pageants—more contrived, more sloppy. The curtain’s just a curtain, and a badly designed one at that. His hands still covering his crotch, he runs his eyes beyond it, to the Crypt’s wall. Is that meant to be the edge, the portal to beyond, the vicar’s heaven? And its far wall, then: would “beyond” stop there? He runs his eye on further, to the grass behind the Crypt, moist and stringy and no different from the grass they’re standing on back here—then onwards, to the dung-filled, sloping field beyond the water, the telegraph line on the hill. He pictures the cars beyond that, then the boats, the towers, the stations, archipelagos …

The workmen have moved along the trench’s edge to operate the pump-lever contraption. As they hoist the coffin up into its slot inside the Crypt, Serge feels a heaviness enter his stomach, as though something foreign were being lodged there. It’s a pronounced, visceral sensation—strong enough to make him release one hand from his crotch and rub his midriff, in the manner of a pregnant woman. He closes his eyes in discomfort, and sees dark globes orbiting in seas of light. When he opens them again, the workmen have finished pumping and are standing back, rubbing their own hands. Several mourners are sobbing. Mr. Clair is weeping quietly. Not Serge: for him, this shoddy, whining spectacle has nothing to do with death, nothing to do with Sophie either. Both death and she are elsewhere: like a signal, dispersed.

i

K
loděbrady is a twenty-three-hour journey from Portsmouth; from Versoie, twenty-eight. Serge and Clair board first a train, then a boat, then another, grand train laid on by the International Sleeping Car Company and, finally, when this pulls up somewhere near Dresden, a series of smaller trains that carry them across borders of countries, time zones, principalities and semi-autonomous regions Serge has never even heard of. If the names sliding across the compartment’s window beside telegraph poles, red-roofed farmhouses and haystacks that seem to float ten feet above the ground seem vaguely familiar to him, this probably owes more to the fairy tales Maureen would tell him as a child than to anything he’s learnt from Clair of geography or history. He’s passed through zones of boredom and exhaustion too, emerged from them and started waking up now for the journey’s last leg. His senses, though out of kilter, are alert; the lethargy that’s hung above him like a pall for months seems to have lifted—not completely, but a little: lifted and lightened.

The train’s come to a stop. It’s not a station: they’re just waiting for a signal to change, or a point to switch, or an instruction to be shouted from the track-side in a foreign language. Serge stands up, pulls the top half of the window down, leans out and looks around. It’s the end of summer: bushes and trees beside the lines are overgrown and faded; dandelions and weeds stand a foot tall between the sleepers. A stone post has been painted black and yellow, in straight stripes. A small electric box clings to one of the rails, short legs clamped around it like the femurs of a tick while a longer, more tentacular protuberance drops from its underbelly to send currents through the earth. The countryside is flat. A mile or two away, a smokestack seems to rise straight from it. Nearer by, an earthworks plant groans as its stilted runways convey ballast before dropping it onto a growing mound. Other, fully grown mounds of the stuff stretch for hundreds of yards beside the railway line, strangely black against the blue sky and golden foliage.

“It’s the cysteine,” Clair says, noticing Serge looking at the mounds.

“Sistine? Like the chapel?”

“No, what makes it black: the chemical. Cysteine and sulphur, chloride, sodium, what have you. That’s what’s going to cure you.”

He tosses Serge a brochure from among the papers lying beside him on the bench-seat. The train’s almost empty; with the compartment to themselves, they’ve spread out. Serge lets the brochure land on his own bench-seat, then sits down again and picks it up. The front cover bears a drawing of an elegant lady strolling with a parasol along a boulevard lined with Greco-Roman buildings, a glass in her hand. Beneath this image’s border and slightly in front of it due to the perspective adopted by the brochure’s illustrator, a large red heart’s held aloft by a jet of water while a cherub, balancing above the heart on one foot, breaks across the border into the main picture to strew roses across the lady’s path. It’s that depth thing again: the technique Serge could never master in his drawing lessons. It’s not
right:
the cherub, occupying the same plane as the master image, couldn’t simultaneously be several feet in front of it, and therefore couldn’t strew the flowers from outside its frame—unless he’s reaching up from beneath a screen onto which the picture of the strolling lady’s being projected and, holding the flowers in front of the path, performing some clever optical trick. Above the lady’s parasol, shot through with black sunrays, are the words “Kloděbrady Baths.”

Serge flips through the brochure, past photographs of gentlemen and ladies very like the lady in the drawing strolling past domed mausoleums or posing in front of fountains, also with glasses in their hands. The accompanying text gives the town’s history, which seems to consist of a series of invasions, wars and squabbles over succession. One such squabble, dwelt on at some length by the brochure’s author, sees the heirs of a King Mstislav accusing the pretender to his throne, one Vladimir, of poisoning their father, only for it to turn out that he’d died of “corruption of the blood due to bad humour”—a cue for Vladimir, cleared of foul play, to decapitate his libellers. This Mstislav, or perhaps another, is mentioned a few paragraphs later, only now the humour has become a
tumour:
he (or his namesake) it was, the brochure says, who, “seeking for his way in the labyrinth of events and social problems” prior to his blood’s corruption, established Kloděbrady as a centre for “radical social oppinions”—laying the ground for the progressive reign of the man who, emerging eighty or so years later, would eventually become the town’s saint, Prince Jiři. Under Jiři, Serge starts reading out loud to Clair, society and culture flourished in the mid-fifteenth century, and the town “undoubtably attained the zenith of its import.”

“As your father would point out, it should be indubitably,” Clair says.

Their train’s pulled off again. A goods train passes them, heading in the other direction, its carriages laden with the same type of black ballast they were watching pile up in the earthworks.

“This is interesting,” Serge continues, flipping past more Mstislavs and Vladimirs into the nineteenth century. “The whole town burned down in 1805. When it was rebuilt, the Bavarian king and his Spanish wife brought in the water-diviner Baron Karl von Arnow, who discovered the spring in the grounds of their own castle.”

“How convenient,” snorts Clair. “A subterranean water-source that big would have been found under a peasant’s hut if Baron von Aristo had divined there.”

“No,” says Serge. “This engineer, Maxbrenner, had to lay pipes beneath the whole town, leading out from under the castle, in order to create the spa. He plumbed in pumps, and heaters, and all sorts of things. So now, it says here, ‘all visitors may divertise themselves imbibing of the restorative balm.’ Oh, look: here’s a list of what it’s got in it.”

His eye runs down a table in which cysteine breaks down into sulphur, which in turn subdivides into various chlorides, carbonates and sulphates: chloride of sodium, chloride of lithium, of potassium; chloride, sulphate and carbonate of magnesium; carbonate of lime; then, intriguingly, “free and easily liberated” types of carbonic acid. The heaviness inside Serge’s stomach that’s a constant presence for him these days makes itself felt as he reads the table. He flips the page and finds a photograph of Kloděbrady’s Grand Hotel, its terraces alive with water-swilling people, flags of all the states of Europe fluttering above them and, above these, the heart-and-cherub logo once again.

The logo’s waiting for them at the station, painted on the wood beside the town’s name, its heart blackened by grime. Porters load their bags onto a trolley and push this rattling up the main drag. There are the domed mausoleums, set among a park; there, too, the strollers, just like in the brochure, only not so many. There are nurses, chattering in groups of three or pushing wheelchaired cripples past kiosks selling trinkets and chemists’ shops above whose doors hang model scales with snakes coiled round them.

The Grand Hotel’s terraces are half-empty. Chairs are leaned up against tables. Only three flags are out today: they hang limp above two old men nodding on a bench behind newspapers. The porters hand Serge and Clair over to their counterparts in the hotel, who take them to their rooms. In his Serge finds, beside the bed, a season ticket to the baths, two bottles of sparkling but slightly murky-looking water and a book of writing paper with the heart-and-cherub logo on it—only now the heart itself is sprouting flowers, dishevelled ones that look like the dandelions and weeds along the train tracks, while four cherubs hovering beneath it struggle to hold it up. There’s also a menu of the therapies on offer, with a list of prices: inhalation, twenty-nine crowns; gas injection, twenty crowns and fifty; underwater massage, twenty-two; and so on. How much is a crown? Serge thinks of those covetous Mstislavs and Vladimirs again, of their corrupted blood and rolling heads.

Dinner’s at seven. The long dining room has a bar at one end behind which a white-coated waiter stands, hands on the counter, bottles rising up from staggered shelves like organ pipes behind him. On one wall, beneath curled-vine cornicing, a fresco shows, in Greco-Roman style, ladies and gentlemen in togas sipping water while divertising themselves in games of discus- and javelin-throwing over which a togaed judge presides. The room’s just under half-full. Serge and Clair are seated by a waiter at a small round table and served quail and boiled potatoes with a bottle of red wine.

“Drink it slowly,” Clair says. “It’s supposed to be good for digestion.”

Serge shrugs. The other diners glance their way occasionally while speaking a mish-mash of languages. Serge can pick out French, German and Spanish; Clair identifies Hungarian, Serbian and Russian on top of these. English is spoken as well, but, exchanged as a currency of convenience between people to whom it’s not native, sounds foreign too. After dinner, while they’re taking coffee in a lounge whose walls are lined with local wildlife specimens—otters, eels, pikes, water-rats and toads—stuffed behind slightly darkened glass, a German man comes up and, introducing himself to them as Herr Landmesser, asks them what they’re “in for.”

“It’s the boy,” says Clair. “
Das Kind
. Stomach complaints. Me, I’m as right as rain.”

“If you can say that, you are a lucky man,” Herr Landmesser answers with a deep, sardonic laugh. “Or happily ignorant. Which doctor will you see?”

“Dr. Filip,” answers Serge. “My first appointment is tomorrow morning.”

“My doctor also, Filip. Gout, for me.” Herr Landmesser points down at his foot. “For Filip, it is all the same: all moral.”

Serge begins to ask him what he means, but is cut off by the arrival in their group of a tallish, middle-aged lady.

“So young!” she says in a grainy voice as she looks at Serge. “I have a niece so young as you. You should meet her, when you would be in Rotterdam one day. Me, I have heart problems. How long will you stay here?”

“Three weeks, I think.” Serge looks at Clair to confirm this, but Clair seems too offended, or worried, by Herr Landmesser’s jibe to take part in the conversation.

“You missed—it was five days ago,” the Dutch woman continues, “the spectacle. Dressed as the sun, the people of the town and doctors, nurses: sun, and clouds, and weather. Very funny. You and my niece would much have liked it, both. More people were here then.
Paní!”

She calls this last word after a waiter who’s just passed by with a coffee pot. He doesn’t hear her, so she sets out after him. Herr Landmesser, too, moves away from them towards some bookshelves. Clair and Serge sit for a little longer in depleted silence, then retire upstairs. Serge drifts off to the sound of running water not far from the hotel, a stream his mind makes flow again internally, recasting it as dark, with creatures moving slowly through it.