“… already crossed by an extremely important long-distance trading route linking the centre of the country to the Kodsko region and Silesia inking the centre of the country to the Kodsko region and Silesia inking the centre of the country to the Kod…”
The record’s stuck. Serge turns and makes to walk back to the gramophone so he can release the needle, but sees that he’s been beaten to it: a woman, not the ticket-lady, is lifting the arm up and sliding it above the record’s surface before lowering it back again, allowing the monologue to advance:
“… for the transportation of the mineral-rich earth of the surrounding countryside, which remains a valuable resource to this day. At the beginning of the thirteenth century…”
The woman turns around now, and he sees it’s the new arrival. She’s changed since this morning, and now wears an emerald-green knotted cloche hat and a sea-blue shawl.
“My stumbling porter,” she says. “What’s your name?”
He tells her.
“Serge like ‘sedge,’ or ‘urge’?” she asks.
“Just like I said it,” he replies. “What are you called?”
“Lucia,” she answers. “It’s Italian.”
“You don’t sound Italian,” he tells her.
“It’s my mother,” says Lucia. “She’s from Genoa. My father’s English. ‘Serge’ sounds French.”
“It is. My mother also: her family.”
“You have brothers and sisters?”
“No,” he says. “I had a sister, but not anymore. What are you here for?”
“Here? To see the museum,” she says.
“No, I mean here in Kloděbrady.”
“Oh, anaemia,” she tells him, rolling her eyes up like a naughty schoolgirl. “My blood’s too light or something. How about you?”
“The opposite: too dark.”
Lucia giggles. “How perfect. Shall we visit the gallery?”
They walk through the large hall beneath tapestries and past illuminations, while the gramophone’s account of wars against the Turks, Hungarians and Czechs, of infanticide, betrayal and sedition, echoes at them from the room’s high walls. The words soften and run together as they step into the cellar, in which rotting boat-fragments, the charcoaled skeletons of old canoes, are laid out among sepulchres whose stone reliefs level accounts between aggressors and their victims by giving the faces of both the same worn-down, characterless quality. When they come up to the main gallery again, the voice is telling them how Mstislav tried to buck the murderous local trend by developing and implementing pacifist strategies.
“He was the one with radical oppinions,” says Serge. “I read about this earlier. He lay the groundwork for Prince Jiři to… Listen…”
“… for the reign of Prince Jiři,” the deep voice says as though completing, or rephrasing, Serge’s sentence, “who submitted to the royal courts of Europe, under the title of The General Peaceful Organisations, a blueprint for universal peace.”
“Well, well,” Lucia says, nodding at him wide-eyed and amused. “Impressive.”
Serge holds up his finger like the ticket-lady did a while ago; they listen as the voice continues:
“Although not immediately adopted, Jiri’s vision is now blossoming among all nations, and amicable trade has replaced warfare as a means of competition.”
“Has it?” Lucia asks, more to the voice than to Serge. “That’s nice.”
The record’s ended now; the gramophone’s speaking horn hisses. For a moment, Serge is back in the attic at Versoie, looking out over the rainy garden, shunting ghosts around its grid-squares. The ticket-lady’s shuffling over to retrieve the disc, smiling at them exaggeratedly as they pass her on their way to the exit. As she’s returning the pickup to its cradle, she must clumsily allow her shaky hand to drop the needle back onto the disc’s surface: the child’s or woman’s scream erupts once more, following Serge and Lucia out into the courtyard.
The heart-logo’s embedded in the castle’s masonry; it hovers above them as they head beneath an arch, only this time it’s held up not by cherubs but on strands which protrude from its underside like fleshy tentacles, giving it an octopus- or jellyfish-like look. They pass out of the courtyard towards the town’s river, where, beside a boathouse, rowers are lowering their not-yet-charcoaled canoes from a jetty while swimmers in trunks and bathing caps splash friends in paddle boats. A bridge crosses this; Serge and Lucia walk to its middle, then pause and, leaning on the rail, look down over a large double-decker pleasure boat that’s waiting for a lock to open. On the boat’s stern is painted its name, Jiři.
“How did your sister die?” Lucia asks. They haven’t spoken for a while: just walked and watched the river. Looking at the swirls emerging from beneath the boat’s hull, Serge replies:
“She drowned.”
The lock door opens; bubbles rise up from the churning water; the pleasure boat moves on; so do Lucia and Serge. After a few more yards the bridge turns into a weir. Sluice-gates beneath it channel and filter the water; above it, at intervals, gate-houses rise like watchtowers. Beyond these, a generating station runs from the weir to the solid ground on the river’s far side. Through its mesh windows, Serge can see turbines grinding and whirring, their wheels and belts resembling the strange machine in Dr. Filip’s office. The building’s electric moan hangs in the air and merges with another hum that comes from somewhere else-from higher, growing in volume and aggression like the buzz of a malignant insect. Serge looks up and sees an aeroplane flying low above the river. Lucia grabs his shoulder as it passes over them.
“Look!” she shouts, all excited. “Look at that!”
“It’s taking people on an aerial tour of the town and countryside,” Serge says. “They do it two or so times each week, when the weather’s good.”
“Have you flown on it?” she asks.
“No.” Clair suggested it one day but he declined, for the simple reason that he didn’t believe that all his weight could possibly get airborne. He knew it could, of course, knew that the laws of physics would allow the machine to bear him on its wings and propeller up into the sky-but psychologically… In his mind the morbid matter Dr. Filip spoke of has taken on proportions far, far larger than his stomach could ever accommodate, and expanded to become a landscape, a whole territory: the land itself, and then the murky, gauzy air above it, the dark waters flowing beneath this… How could all that be elevated? His abdomen’s swollen since he arrived here. Dr. Filip said that this was good-that it was the pure, air-filled water that was swelling it, that purity, like faith, would grow. But something else is growing inside Serge. He feels its heaviness. He sees its heaviness everywhere: in the scales hanging above the doors of chemists’ shops, the snakes that curl around them, weighing them down, in the cysteine-rich ballast being crane-hoisted onto groaning trains, or in the hearts that jets and cherubs strain to hold up against dragging weeds and tentacles. He’s taken to colouring the hearts black in idle moments in his room: on the stationery beside his bed or on the labels of the mineral-water bottles…