“Carrefax, with C, not K,” says Dr. Filip. “Sit down.”
Instinctively, Serge looks around the room for his father before realising that “Carrefax” means him and complying with Dr. Filip’s order.
“Notes from English doctor indicate chronic intestinal problems,” Dr. Filip continues. His voice is sharp, and seems to issue from the tiniest of apertures nestled among the whiskers. “Please to describe them.”
Serge sticks his hands beneath his thighs and shuffles in his chair. “It’s like a big ball in my stomach,” he says. “A big ball of dirt.”
“Why you say ‘dirt’?” asks Dr. Filip.
“Well, because it’s dark. It seems that way.”
“You having constipation?”
Serge nods, reddening.
“And lethargy?”
“Yes,” Serge says. “Very much.”
“Headache?”
“Also.”
“Please to lie on table.” Dr. Filip rises brusquely as he indicates a kind of folding slab that’s held up by a complex frame of interlocking metal legs. It looks a little like an ironing board divided into segments that, hinge-mounted, rise and fall abruptly. “First remove shoes and shirt.”
Serge slides his shirt and shoes off and climbs up onto the table. Dr. Filip pushes Serge’s shoulders down into its flannel-covered surface with cold hands which then move down to Serge’s stomach, which they tap, as though sounding a box or wall. Serge begins to speak but Dr. Filip cuts him off:
“Shh…”
He holds his hand over Serge’s midriff and, tapping it a few more times-gently, as though nudging a dial-lowers his head and listens.
“Not good,” he says after a while. “A blockage. Stagnant. You are having autointoxication. Skin is dark, eyes too. You seeing well, or not?”
“Not,” Serge says. “I mean no. It’s kind of…”
“How is?” Dr. Filip asks, impatient.
“Furry.”
“What is meant?”
“Furry, like fur. The hair of animals. Small hairs. It’s like…”
His voice trails off. It’s hard to describe. Fur’s not quite right. It’s more like tiny filaments. The closest thing he could liken it to is one of his mother’s silks-the really fine, dark ones-held right up to his eyeballs and stretched out in front of them, making the world gauzed: dark-gauzed, covered in fleck-film. It’s been like this for months. When it started, he’d try to blink a hole in it, or wipe it away, peel the veil back; but that only ingrained it further, lodging it beneath the surface of the eyes themselves. He tried washing them, but this just made the filament-mesh run and stain, gauzing everything he saw before he’d even looked at it.
Dr. Filip says: “Please to provide a sample.”
“Sample of what?” Serge asks.
“Stool,” Dr. Filip answers. His cold hands pull Serge’s shoulders upright and turn them towards a low chair with a hole in its seat and a kidney-shaped tray beneath it.
“I can’t,” Serge says.
“Not to be embarrassed,” Dr. Filip sneers disdainfully.
“It’s not that,” Serge explains, reddening again. “I mean I can’t. It doesn’t want to…”
“You speak of what it wants?” Dr. Filip’s stringy eyebrows climb up towards his hairline, and his glasses ride up with them. “So: I am arranging enema for you this afternoon. Also,” he continues, turning to his desk and picking up a pen, “I am giving you diet from which not to digress. Lactose: soured milk and cereal. And fruit. No meat. You give this to hotel kitchen; they will administer.” He hands Serge two cards. “And you will follow hydrotherapy course. Here is schedule.” He slides from a drawer a sheet of paper and, reaching behind him, pulls from a shelf a honey jar, then passes both these to Serge. “Please to go now. Return tomorrow afternoon at four. Also drink constantly the water: from the fountains, with your eating, at all times. Every opportunity, you drink.”
Serge walks back to the hotel holding the jar, wondering what he’s meant to do with it. He tries to hand it in with his menu card, but the maître d’ returns it to him, instructing him to take it to his next appointment, which turns out to be in the building that he saw the nurses entering and leaving. The nurse Serge sees, in a room sharp from disinfectant, makes him lower his trousers and pants and bend across another segmented table whose lower end is ramped down to the ground; then she inserts a rubber tube in him and turns a tap on. As the warmish water enters and then leaves him, carrying no more than a small fragment of whatever’s in him out with it, the fabric of the veil that’s darkening his vision seems to expand and open slightly, making the objects in the room stand out more sharply: the taps and tubes, the tiled gutter running by the walls, the door’s handle and the nurse’s shoulders as she bends towards the gutter to retrieve the sample.
“You have bottle?” she asks.
“Bottle?” Serge says. “No. Should I?”
“Doctor has give you one, I think…”
The honey jar. “I didn’t realise that was meant for…”
“I use another,” she says. “Show me card.”
He shows it to her. She copies his name and number onto a small piece of paper and hands the card back to him. “Next time, bring.”
“Next time?”
She looks back at him without replying. Her look’s not unkind, just knowing and indulgent, like Maureen’s back at Versoie.
The sharpness brought on by the enema stays with him for a while: the air around the park as he walks back through it seems brighter, clearer and less flecked. The feeling lasts for an hour or so; then the gauze contracts and thickens again, veiling the world back up. As he heads to his bedroom after a dinner of soured milk and what looks like horse-food, he passes the stuffed otters, eels and pikes, and realises that he should have compared his vision, when describing it to Dr. Filip, to the glass of their cases: it has the same clouded quality, the same fine-filamented graininess as everything he sees. The glass of the bottled water in his room as welclass="underline" when he picks one of the bottles up, it’s like holding a miniature and concentrated version of the world-his world at least. The bottle’s got the heart-and-cherub logo on its label and, beneath that, a patent number. Serge pops its top and pours the water out: it, too, is cloudy, darkened, sooty. As he lies in bed, its bitter taste lingers in his mouth despite two vigorous brushings…
The hydrotherapy begins the next morning. After a fruit and yoghurt breakfast and a wander round the Mir fountain with a glass purchased from the kiosk by the signpost, he visits the complex in which hydrotherapy is offered. It’s the Maxbrenner building, built, like the Letna one in which he got his enema yesterday, around the spring whose name it bears. Serge presents his card at the front desk, and is ushered on towards the building’s innards. A musty smell fills its corridors; the air itself is moist and sulphurous. Opening the door of the room he’s been directed to, he’s attacked by vapour which invades his nostrils and half-scalds his lips. Inside, against a wall, are rows of cabinets, large escritoires with hinged covers, like the one that Widsun did his correspondence at when he was visiting Versoie. Some of these are open; others, closed, contain men, locked inside them with only their heads protruding from the top like unsprung jack-in-boxes. Other men’s heads jut out horizontally from blankets wrapped tightly round their bodies as they lie on benches, steaming. They look like insects, like pupating larvae lifted from boiling water. Tubes loll and snake around the room, running from cabinet to cabinet and bench to bench, forming a vapour-gushing mesh in which the human chrysalises all sit, lie or swoon.