v
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.
“Boathouse closed,” she says. “Other nurse tell me.”
“Well, we could have gone for a walk,” Serge says.
“Where?” she asks.
“In the woods, for example. They look nice. Why don’t we do that this evening?”
“Six o’clock again?” she asks. “Turn over now.”
“Five,” he says as her shoulder looms above him. “On the far side of the weir, by the power station.”
“Power?” she asks, sawing his back.
“Yes. You know: electricity.” He makes a moaning noise and wheels his arms around beside his waist.
“I understand,” she says, pushing them down again. “I come.”
She stands him up again. As he waits by the substation he watches soldiers practising manoeuvres in the fields. They run a few feet forwards and lie down, pointing their dummy-rifles at the wood, then jump up and run a few feet further before throwing themselves at the earth again, advancing in stops and starts towards some imaginary enemy within the trees. Serge thinks of what M. Bulteau said about the Prussian arsenals, of what he called their avarice for land and power. Widsun thought the same. Advance thy empire, Venus said to little round Giles. The deep, male voice on the record said that Jiři’s peace-blueprint was flowering among all nations. He remembers the way Lucia smiled at that, then, longing for Tania’s musty smell, turns back towards the weir to look for her, and sees that a door in the generating station is opening. A man walks out and says something to him. “I’m sorry…” Serge shrugs.
“Deutsch?”
“No: English.”
“Oh! You English!” The man’s face lights up. He’s fifty-ish, well-built, with thick grey hair and bronzed, sinewy arms that look like the vines in the patch he’s just stepped out into. “English good people!”
“Thank you,” Serge says to him. “Are these vines yours?”
“Vine? Kystenvine, special of region. You like vine?”
“They look nice,” Serge answers.
“I get for you,” the man says, then turns and heads back to the generating station. He emerges a few moments later with a bottle.
“Here: Geschenk for good English!” he says, pushing it through the mesh with his strong, wood-dark arm. “Electro-vine. You take!”
The bottle’s made from the same murky glass as everything else around here. Its contents are so dark that at first Serge thinks the man has handed him some bottled local earth; but when he takes it through the fence he realises there’s liquid in it. As he turns it in his hands the liquid runs inside, its silky, deep-red filaments stirring and catching the light until they seem to glow.
“It’s wine?” he asks the man. “From these vines?”
“Da-ja-how say? Yes! Kystenvine: we make here, only few bottles, for us. Electro-vine for good electro-men!”
He lets out a deep, hearty laugh, then disappears into the generating station once more. Serge thinks of taking the wine to the field’s edge and drinking it as he watches the soldiers train, but realises that he doesn’t have a corkscrew. Returning to the hotel, he slips the bottle beneath his shirt so Clair won’t see it.
In his room, a letter’s waiting for him. It’s from his father.
Dear Son,
he reads,
I trust the water’s to your liking. As you’ll doubtless be aware (or perhaps not, bathed as you are in splendid isolation), the Pontic seas of politics are flowing with compulsive course to the Propontic and the Hellesport. Should a retiring ebb not be felt soon, I fear we’ll have to curtail your stay among the Nix and bring you home, lest Vernichtung lay down a barrier preventing your return. Await instructions.