M. Bulteau has a theory about the cysteine, which he expounds one morning in the drawing room:
“For gunpowder, n’est-ce pas? Explosion: pow!” His hands fly apart in an explosive gesture. “The Prussians take it to their arsenales, prepare for war.”
“Ganz lächerlich!” a German lady mutters as she sips her coffee. Kleinholz, notebook out, starts annotating figures with more rigour. Herr Landmesser declares:
“The earth belongs to Prussia from long time ago, so she may use it as she wishes.”
“How does it belong to Prussia?” Clair asks.
“The whole region is Germanic, from way back,” Herr Landmesser explains. “This Jiři in the statue, patron saint, is just new, Christian name for old Germanic god.”
“What god would that be?” a Hungarian demands to know.
“Jirud. He was a prince expulsed from kingdom after he became diseased, and wandered as a swineherd. When he saw his pigs rolling in earth here, and their diseases ended, he did same and was himself cured. Then founded new kingdom here, and conquered back old one too. He was father of Volsung, who is father of Sigmund, father of Siegfried.”
“But,” says Serge, “no one knew about the healing powers of Kloděbrady until Baron von Arnow found the water under the castle and Maxbrenner plumbed it through the town.”
“You have eaten modern version of story like a good boy taking medicine,” Herr Landmesser informs him with a patronising glance.
“This is Prussian arrogance typique!” M. Bulteau almost shouts, his hands still gunpowdering apart. “They think all Europe ’s theirs, and make these stupid mythes to justify their avarice for land and power.”
“Mossieu!” The German lady slams her coffee down, red-faced. “You are not polite.”
“She’s right: you should apologise,” Herr Landmesser tells M. Bulteau.
“I shall not!” M. Bulteau answers.
The argument rumbles on throughout the day, with the German delegation demanding in increasingly aggressive terms an apology from the lone Frenchman, while Hungarians, Serbs and Italians first take sides then splinter into smaller groups who’ve found subsidiary grievances with one another. Only Pan Suchyx remains neutral, although not unaffected, humming first one melody and then another, contrary-sounding one to himself, as though weighing and counter-weighing the claims of each. People argue in Dr. Filip’s waiting room; their raised voices draw the doctor out to sternly tell all parties to desist, his white coat at this point, for Serge, resembling the toga of the Greco-Roman judge in the hotel’s dining-room fresco.
“Same problem in their heads as in your body,” he tuts as he prods Serge’s abdomen back in his office, ear lowered as it tunes into his intestines again. “Blood of Europe poisoned and cachectic; ptomaines and pathogens in system. Now the black bile is everywhere: the mela chole. All have clouded vision, just like you.”
Discussions, hostile or otherwise, become less common as the hotel’s population dwindles in late August. Each day the porters’ suitcase-laden trolleys clank and trundle down the main drag from the hotel to the station, not the other way. The orchestra by the Mir fountain reduces its appearances to two a week, and even then is made up of fewer musicians than before, its heart shape retained but shrunk, the music now competing with the sound of workmen’s hammers banging at stone and plaster as they renovate the mausoleums. Sections of the fountain complex are switched off, drained and repaired. Serge spends whole mornings following the piping’s layout, fascinated by the bare mechanics of it alclass="underline" the joins and junctions where the network splits, the small electric pumps beside the pipes, the insulated wires threaded through these. The habit catches: he starts looking at the ground all day whatever part of town he’s in, inspecting the cracks that run through it like skeins, its dark and viscous colouration, or the discarded stubs of bath season tickets and medicine labels ground into it and broken down until they seem as old and organic as earth itself.
iv
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: