A nurse takes Serge’s card and leads him first to a changing booth, then, towel-loined, to a cabinet inside which she seats him, clamping its door shut around his neck. Steam swirls around his enclosed limbs and torso, making them wet and dry at the same time, immersing him without immersing him in anything. Drops form on his forehead and run down his face. It’s sweat and sulphur mixed together: licking it from his lips since he can’t use his constrained hands to wipe it off, Serge tastes the bitter sootiness again. He spends what seems like hours inside the cabinet. To pass the time, he thinks of the ink set next to Widsun’s headed government paper: how he’d dip the signature-seal in the ink and stamp the man’s name out across his forearm while Sophie sat at the desk learning all those cipher sequences. When he’s finally released he sees that the sweat that’s poured from him is dirty, a blue-black, as though he were full of ink.
He’s sent through to an adjoining room to be massaged. The nurse who performs this is only two or three years older than him, short and dark-haired. Her hands make circular passes around his navel, the ball of the hand pressing down into his abdomen before descending in spiralling ovals towards his pelvis; then they move up and down his sides, slapping and sawing. Her body, as she bends above him, seems a funny shape. Her skin is ruddy; her arms and chest give off the same musty, sulphurous smell that pervades the corridors, as though her flesh had imbibed it and turned each of her pores into mini-fountains. When she finishes the massage and straightens up, Serge realises that the unusual shape of her body wasn’t just due to her position as she bent, stroking and kneading, over him: her back is slightly crooked.
“Finish now. Same again tomorrow,” she says. Her voice is low and earthy. She has a glazed look, not quite in the present, as though she were staring through him, or around him, at something that was there before he came and will be there after he leaves.
Serge is meant to have a class with Clair after lunch, but he’s too exhausted. He sleeps till almost four, then makes his way over to Dr. Filip’s. In the waiting room he picks up the Lazensky Soutek, which, as far as he can make out, is a kind of local Bathing Times. It’s amateurish, badly printed onto thick, rough paper. On its front page is a grainy image showing some kind of spectacle taking place, with girls on a stage holding up cut-out suns. That’s what Serge assumes the objects are: they’re sun-shaped but, due to the saturation in the printed photograph, much darker than the girls who hold them. Is that what the Dutch woman was talking about? Do they do Pageants here, just like at Versoie? There’s a text beneath the image, but Serge doesn’t understand it. He looks up from the paper. The other patients are resting their sample-filled jars across their knees, or on the seat beside them. His is waiting for him in Dr. Filip’s office: the doctor’s holding it up, turning it around and inspecting it when he walks in.
“Not good; very much not good,” Dr. Filip says disapprovingly. “Please to look.”
He hands the jar to Serge. On its outside is a label bearing the handwriting of the nurse who hydro-mined him for its contents. The matter inside is solid, liquorice-black, with an undulating surface in whose folds and creases small reserves of dark red moisture have collected.
“Blood,” says Dr. Filip, pointing. “You have cachectic condition: encumbrances in bowel causing autointoxication. Ptomaines, toxins, pathogens all enter bloodstream. Look how dark it is.”
“You mean the blood?” Serge asks. “Or…”
“Both,” snaps Dr. Filip. “And if not treated, more. You have a poison factory in you that secretes to arteries, liver, kidneys and beyond. To brain too, when we don’t prevent.”
“What’s causing it?” Serge asks.
“Morbid matter!” Dr. Filip’s thin voice pipes from his small mouth. “Bad stuff. If I am speaking several hundred years ago I call it chole, bile-black bile: mela chole. Now, I can call it epigastritis, alimentary toxemia, intestinal putrefaction, or six or seven other names-but these do not explain what causes it. It needs a host to nurture it, and you are willing. Yesterday you spoke to me of what it wants, which means you serve its needs, make them your own. This we must change.”
“How?” Serge asks.
Dr. Filip’s whiskers rustle as his lips curl in a wry smile. “I cannot tell you this,” he says. “You must discover. I can prescribe treatment and diet, monitor symptoms. The rest is for you.” He slips a sheet of paper from his drawer and starts to write. “Take this to chemist,” he tells Serge. “The pills, one time each day-not more: too many all at once will kill you. And drink the water, always, all day long. If abdomen distends a little, not to worry. Like your own Lord poet Tennyson has said of faith: ‘Let it grow.’ ” His eyes glow slightly, like thin filaments, registering satisfaction at the quip he’s just made. Then their grey-metallic colour returns as he tells Serge: “Please to go now.”
iii
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…