“What else could it be?” Serge demands to know.
“I refer you back to what I said about the body and its discharges,” his father tells him. “If the ones emitted by the brain are anything like the wireless waves that wend their way around the earth, they’ll leave a trace for a considerable time after their creation.”
“But that doesn’t work,” Serge says. “Transmissions travel. They go somewhere else, and then they’re not here anymore.”
“Ah: you’re behind the times, my child.” His eyes move from the dial to Serge, bathing him in pity. His left hand starts rising and sinking at an angle, cutting diagonal peaks and troughs in the air. “Imagine a ball bouncing around a dome, and hardly losing any energy in doing so-bouncing around the inside of a sphere and ricocheting off the outer surface of a smaller, solid sphere inset within the larger sphere…”
Serge cast his mind back to the tennis court in Berchtesgaden. He tries to roll its asphalt flatness up into a tarry sphere, to coil the outlying landscape into a larger, hollow ring around it, and to bounce a tiny, yellow ball between the two, but finds the mental space through which the smaller orb should move filling up with crackling gorse and heather. His father’s explaining:
“Waves move around the globe, bouncing off the ionosphere. The ones that make their way through this-” his left hand, rather than angling down here, continues its upward rise until his arm’s extended at full stretch-“go on until they hit some object out in space, and-” now the hand falls-“bounce off that. They all bounce back eventually, or loop round: everything returns.” The hand starts looping as he carries on: “Now, if-if-the electric charges generated by our organisms move in the same way…”
“Then they can be detected later?” Serge completes his sentence in the interrogative.
“Why not?” his father answers. “In principle, it shouldn’t be any harder. If a measuring device is present at a scene of great mental stress-and at the right time in the cycle according to which the electrical disturbances created by the event pass by the spot again, then the whole scene might be replayed, albeit in decayed form…”
The hand-loops slow down, then stop, and the two men stand in silence for a while, the regular plash and scrape of Bodner’s paintbrush punctuating their thought. Then Serge says:
“If your theory is right, there’s no reason why one spot should be any better than another.”
“Why not?” his father asks.
“Because the ball bounces all around the space between the dome and sphere, hitting one place with as much force as it hits another. An event could replay elsewhere.”
“I never said I had the whole thing worked out,” his father harrumphs. “This is new research. Cutting edge. I’m corresponding with von Pohl about it on a weekly basis. He, like me, is of the opinion that it is these cycles of return that are responsible for lack of germination in certain ground areas. He’s already done extensive research on the subject. I, for my part, have suggested to him that the curious groups of three staccato signals that one commonly picks up amidst the interference on one’s receiver are none other than the echo of Marconi’s first three ‘S’ signals, transmitted on-”
“It’s true,” Serge interrupts. “There’s often three beeps in the background. But that doesn’t mean-”
“-on the twelfth of December, 1901,” his father concludes, adding: “If I’m right, the implications are enormous.”
He’s started walking away from the mulberry trees as he speaks. Serge follows him across the lawn and through the Crypt Park ’s gates. As he strides through the long grass, his father’s still holding the ammeter out in front of him.
“Imagine,” he confides to Serge, lowering his voice as though they were being overheard, “just imagine: if every exciting or painful event in history has discharged waves of similar detectability into the ether-why, we could pick up the Battle of Hastings, or observe the distress of the assassinated Caesar, or the anguish of Saint Anthony during his great temptation. These things could still be happening, right now, around us.”
He pauses, and looks down at the ammeter before lowering his voice right to a whisper as he says:
“We could pick up the words, the very vowels and syllables, spoken on the cross… ”
His voice trails out in a hiss. Serge peers down at the needle once more: it’s veered way over to the right side of the dial, past forty. He looks up again, letting his gaze sweep the Crypt Park. As it does, he seems to detect a general static hovering round its grass and trees: a static through whose reaches, it strikes him for some reason, bounce the cries of all the men he’s killed-ranged guns on, strafed, pinpointed with photography, failed to protect from shark-bite, snagged from their cushioned downward drift and slammed into the earth. He closes his eyes for a moment, and sees, behind the static, an operator: a female one, sitting at some kind of switchboard shaped like an outlandish loom.
This ghostly operator’s face is mirrored in those of the Day School pupils. These have changed since he left for the war-grown older, been replaced-but seem strangely familiar, even the new ones. It works both ways: a sense of recognition seems to flicker over the faces when they meet his, as though their owners were somehow privy to what happened out in France and Germany, could hear it rebounding round the reaches of their deafness. Bodner too: in his immense indifference to almost everything around him there seems to lie a tacit understanding and acceptance of anything Serge might have undergone, as though he’d undergone it too. Perhaps this is because Bodner, unlike the shopkeepers, or Dr. Learmont, or each and every member of the stream of visitors who pass by Versoie, makes no demand to have Serge’s adventures recounted to or summarised for him. He chews his tongue-stump like he always used to, shunts wheelbarrows from one garden to another, makes tea for Serge’s mother, all just as before…
His mother’s aged. She looks depleted, like a silkworm that’s secreted all it can. Her eyes have sunk into their sockets; her cheeks have contracted around her jaw and cheekbones. Despite having no production line to oversee, she still spends long stretches of time inside her storeroom, itemising the few remaining silks, doodling designs for new ones to be made once the blight lifts, or sitting at her low table staring into space. Serge joins her there most afternoons: they now take tea together. When the weather’s nice they adjourn to one or other of the gardens and sit there in silence, untroubled by the bees and flies that hover around them, land on them, take off and land again quite nonchalantly, confident in the knowledge that they won’t be swatted off.
ii
Serge’s London flat is in Bloomsbury, on Rugby Street. It’s on the second floor, above a dairy shop. Each morning he’s awoken by the rattle of glass bottles and the tap of hooves, mingling with men’s voices as they rise through his dreams to break their surface like the tentacles of some primordial kraken. He stops off around the corner for his breakfast, in a Turkish café on Lamb’s Conduit Street: a syrupy, layered baklava. Sick children, let out of Great Ormond Street Hospital on parole, are wheeled by like the cripples were in Kloděbrady. Sometimes their parents or nurses stop and buy them pastries, which the children never seem to enjoy much. Their faces have the look of old people’s: disillusioned, sad, resigned. Sins of the fathers, Serge thinks as he watches them each day. Sucking walnut pieces from the gaps between his teeth, he strolls through Russell Square Gardens, trying to work out the logic governing the fountains’ spurting sequences (a task to which he sets his mind obsessively for as long as it takes to wander past them, but instantly forgets as soon as he’s left the square), then skirts the stone lion-guarded rear wall of the British Museum and, finally (and always anticlockwise), follows the fence-rails round the closed garden in Bedford Square until their long ellipse deposits him a few yards from the Architectural Association’s front door.