The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

The Very Shoe As Told to and Compiled by Helen Oyeyemi

Created: circa 1940–1941

Creator: Radim Kasparek (1901–1971) of Bohumil, Moravia

Materials: Silk and canvas, with leather uppers, glass strip (3 cm), pinewood heel. Antenna: galvanized steel. Inner compartment (low-grade balsa wood, cotton lining) and accompanying window (low-grade balsa wood, 10 denier nylon) at the front of the outer sole added at a later date by person/s unknown

Property of: Petra Neumann née Tichy (1970–), legal owner of shoe as per inheritance. Lambshead’s diary notes that “the most curious shoe” arrived in the first post on September 28, 1995, in a box postmarked Lausanne, accompanied by a note dated “October 1990”: “I trust you, Lambshead—inasmuch as I can be bothered to trust anybody. We are forbidden to bring material possessions to the monastery, so I leave this in your hands. Its value is beyond measure to me. It is my great-aunt’s shoe—the other one is lost, but the story in the family is that when Ludmila first saw the pair she was absolutely thrilled, clasped her hands together, and said in her best English: ‘They’re just too very very!’ So I call it ‘the Very Shoe.’ This thing is a witness, my friend. It stands by and it does not change its story. Extend the antenna and listen. Then tell me: am I mad, or are there still miracles in the world?” It can be seen that the doctor underlined the words “the monastery” and surrounded them with red exclamation marks, and indeed, the location and affiliation of this “monastery” Neumann mentions is unknown; subsequently, so are Neumann’s current whereabouts. The only other extant note from Neumann to Lambshead mentioning this institution is found among his papers—Neumann describes “the monastery” as “a place you go to learn conversation with stones, to find out what it is stones know.”

Accession number: L1990.43

The story of this shoe is quite a plain one, I’m afraid—the shoe has no ethnographic significance, nor does it have anything as exciting as a curse or a long-standing feud associated with it. It was made by a man who was not exactly poor, but close enough. He was awkward-looking, and he stammered because he was shy, and he always said the wrong thing to women, so they didn’t like him. He believed that he was born to loneliness. He ended up alone, so maybe he was. There was a William Blake poem that he muttered to himself as he worked, joining soles and heels:

Man was made for joy and woe;

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go . . .

(there’s more but it is a long poem)

. . . Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

And yet, and yet, Radim got a wife. A woman of elegance, a dancer. Ludmila. She had dainty, beautiful feet, with the highest and most pliant arches Radim had ever seen. The glass panel on the side of the shoe is titillation, designed to show a mere hint of a beautiful curve. Ludmila was of the Romani. One day, some soldiers and some doctors came to Bohumil, and they separated the Romani men from the Romani women, and made inspections of their health. The soldiers and the doctors found Ludmila even though she lived in a house with Radim—vigilant neighbours informed them that some of the Romani lived in houses now, so they knocked on doors. Ludmila’s health was excellent, and the following week she was sent a letter, ordering her to settle her affairs before a certain date, twenty-eight days away. Then, on the date given, she must go to a camp at Lety and serve as a labourer. Radim began to make plans for the two of them to run away together, but Ludmila would not run. Radim applied to go to the labour camp with her, but his application was refused. So he made her a pair of shoes, because he didn’t know what else to do. Ludmila danced for him the night before she went to the camp, and he was afraid that he’d made the heel too high. The next afternoon, Radim’s younger brother, Artur, went around to Radim’s shop to see how he was holding up after Ludmila’s departure. Radim told him about the dancing: “At one point she was simply spinning, round and round. And so fast, her face was a blur. It looked dangerous. And she said—I can’t stop! Catch me! And I did. But what about when she’s over there? What if—”

(What if she can’t stop? It was silly to ask such a question. That would be the least of her worries; even a fool could see that.)

Years later, Radim and Artur Kasparek went to that camp at Lety, where many, many Czech Romani were sent—the brothers went down on their knees amongst others who were also on their knees, and they searched a great hill of shoes, listening to cries of grief and cries of dismay: “They all look the same. . . .”

When they found this shoe, the brothers knew that Ludmila had died at Lety. They would not have to go to Auschwitz, where some five hundred of the labourers had been sent, and search the shoes there. Radim and Artur puzzled over the addition of the window to the structure of the shoe; then, with a finger, Radim pierced the scraps of stocking that hung over the window and brushed gnawed bits of newspaper out of the compartment, newspaper and breadcrumbs and little bits of crumbled sugar. A mouse had been nesting in there. A pet—Ludmila had had a pet, at least. Radim looked for the second shoe. He looked and looked, but he couldn’t find it. Night came, and he and Artur slept beside the pile, woke at dawn and kept searching, but by the end of the second day, they knew the other shoe was gone.

(For validation purposes, I should perhaps say something about who I am, and how I have come by this information. I am Antonin Neumann, Petra Neumann’s husband. The first time I took her to dinner, she told me she could never love anyone who ate their soup the way I did. I didn’t see anything wrong with the way I ate my soup, but I tried to change it. She laughed, and repeated herself. It demoralized me. I was reduced to asking for a very simple thing: her friendship, her respect. Then she made a U-turn and said she didn’t care either way, but we could get married if I liked.

I am a jeweller by trade, and I can say, without overstating my situation in any respect, that I am a rich man. Still, I have not known happiness for many years. Petra went off on her wild-goose chase without doing me the courtesy of announcing her plans, and I haven’t heard from her since. Talking to stones . . .

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.

Don’t ask me how this works, reader, when the transmitters are gone, and the man and the woman involved are deep in the ground, miles and miles apart. And anyway, even if the transmitters were still there, they would be in Moravia, and this shoe is now in Wimpering-on-the-Brook! I don’t know how this works, and it’s a headache even trying to think my way around it, but—pick up this shoe, reader, this pretty, sturdy thing. You’ve picked up the Very Shoe? You’re holding it? Good. Now—extend the antenna—slowly, carefully, so that it will continue to work for the next listener, and the next. First, you will only hear crackling; almost deafening white noise. Then you will hear some music . . . something silly and light, just barely melodic, in three-quarter time. Then you will hear a voice—deep and strong, speaking phrases broken with emotion. The man stammers. Allow me to translate for you:

Ludmila, I am with you.

I love you, Ludmila, more than ever . . . more than ever.

We cannot truly know what happened to Ludmila at Lety, how much she suffered, whether she danced there at all, whether she heard the music or the words. We don’t know anything about Ludmila Kasparek, not even what her surname was before she married. We just have one of her shoes, one transmission—we don’t even know the content of the other transmission. We only know that Ludmila Kasparek could dance, and that she inspired a devotion that lasted a long time. From then until now, and who knows how much longer . . .

Yes, that’s all we know about her. But I think she would have liked that.