The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

I suppose I could fall in love with someone else, or, at the very least, distract myself with some other love, but I don’t want to. I’ve been tracing Petra’s family tree instead. With money, you can buy whole lives; you have only to wait until they have been lived. I’ve been reading diaries, reading letters of the most trivial kind, travelling, looking into the faces of her forebears and finding her there. I don’t think I’ll show her anger when she returns: my time has not been wasted. Somehow we’ve grown closer, much closer than we could have grown if she had been sat by my side all these years, much closer than most lovers ever get. Needless to say, I’m grateful to have been asked to produce the notes on this item.)

I’ll get on with it now.

Radim Kasparek’s younger brother, Artur, is still living. The things I have written are things he dictated to me. He says that Radim first saw Ludmila at a bonfire—there was a fiddler there, and he saw her at the edge of the crowd, knee-deep in shadow, and she chose his shadow, Radim’s shadow, and she danced with it, and she came near . . . and he thought—“Is it me she’s coming to? Can she mean it? She cannot mean it.” Radim wrote this down. His thoughts about Ludmila. She was like a reed—when she moved, you saw her and you saw what moved her. She opened her hand to him. Here is the wind. She came still nearer, and Radim offered her his cup, and she drank mead from it, and she greeted him in a language he didn’t understand.

Artur says he didn’t talk to Ludmila much. She was only interested in Radim, and dancing, and her people.

“Want to know what that brother of mine spent his life savings on?” Artur asked when I visited him. He still lives in Bohumil with his wife, two doors away from the shop and the flat above it, where Radim and Ludmila lived for two years. He showed me a blackened patch on the roof, where lightning had struck years ago; he showed me two blocks of space that were lighter than the tile that surrounded them. At first, I didn’t really take in what he was telling me, because I was nervous that he should fall or injure himself in some other mysterious way that only those over eighty are capable of.

But the gist of the matter is this: Radim Kasparek bought two wide-ranging transmitters, hi-tech stuff back then, though it looks almost pre-mechanical now. He placed the transmitters on the roof, and he played music for Ludmila to dance to. Nothing especially tasteful, or sophisticated, nothing that outlasted the era—saccharine waltzes, mainly. And he recorded his voice, and he transmitted that, too. He’d only say a couple of things—he was none too imaginative, and he was unsure that the messages would really go from Bohumil to Lety, and he was wary, too, of saying too much, of his voice being heard by others tuned into that frequency. Still, it was a nice idea. When he returned from his trip to the camp of Lety, he stopped the transmissions, though he left the transmitters on the roof, left everything in place until the storm that finished it all off six or seven years later.

That’s the story of the Very Shoe—but there’s just one thing more. On the back of one of my Petra’s letters to him, Lambshead scrawled some words I recognize.

Ludmila, jsem s tebou.

Miluju tĕ, Ludmila, víc než kdy jindy ... víc než kdy jindy.

How do I recognize these words?

I have heard them.