by Sarah Perry
As Hoffman departed—mouth coaxed shut, and decently zipped up inside a nylon shroud—a police officer arrived, her manner that of a teacher disappointed in her pupils. When had the old man arrived? They couldn’t say: doors were not always locked when they ought to be. What time was the file left at the cloakroom desk? Nobody knew: it had been tucked a little out of sight, and gone unnoticed an hour or so. Why, of all people, should it be left to—Dr. Pražan, did he say? He had no idea, and the authorities were welcome to it, so far as he was concerned. Had no one seen that one lamp shining? Had no one heard the lifting of the latch? No one had seen; no one had heard. Still (the police officer shrugged, and put on her overcoat): short of discovering a blade in the kidney, that was very likely to be that. The notice of refusal was taken down from the door: the students returned, and it was clear from their festive air that word had got round, and would brighten up the ordinary working day.
Karel pauses: lights another cigarette. The file is on the table between them. Outside, a group of girls in white ten-gallon hats go arm-in-arm along the cobbled alley. Snow has begun again to fall, sifting down against the kerb. The last girl—lagging behind, her feet sore in new shoes perhaps, or slowed by heaviness of heart—looks up at the window as she passes, and sees there a man and a woman, silent, grave, gazing down at something out of sight. They’re entirely unalike, these two, but something in the cast of their faces—say, a kind of melancholy exhilaration—makes them seem cut from the same stone. The girl shrugs—moves on (a lovers’ tiff, perhaps?)—and never thinks of them again.
“Still,” says Helen. “Is it so bad, after all? Sorry, of course, for your loss; and the dead, they—” There is a pause so slight it passes Karel by. “It’s an affront. The sight of it. It is unbelievable. But he was old, and likely knew nothing about it. Blew out like a light bulb that should have been changed, that’s all.”
“That he is dead doesn’t trouble me. I miss him, that’s all. It’s what came later—” He stands, seeming suddenly impatient, or perhaps angry: Helen is conscious of having failed a task for which she never volunteered, and moreover is entirely unsuited. “Look, I must get back. Thea will wonder where I’ve gone—yes, all right, I’ll take your scarf. And you take this—then you’ll see.” He unwinds the leather cord again, and withdraws a sheaf of paper. It is only half the contents. This he gives to her, without flourish or warning: he seems, she thinks, to have lost all interest in it. “Take it,” he says. “Read it or not, I don’t care. Come and see us next week—Thea sends love—then you can have the rest of it, if you like.” Again, and for the final time, there’s that look which sits so poorly on the face of a friend: a little private, a little malicious. It is this, above all, which gives Helen pause; then she takes the paper she’s offered, and puts it into her satchel. “Well—take care,” she says, meaning it more now than she ever has, but he’s gone, on a dismissive gesture, out through the curtains, out through the door; swiftly, as if hunted.
Helen Franklin lives east of the river on the fifth floor of an apartment block. It is by no means inconvenient for the Metro, though certainly it could be closer; it is not the city’s worst district, nor does it have much to commend it. There is a lift, which she doesn’t use: she only ever takes the stairs, enduring patiently the aching limbs, the palms scored by the handles of heavy plastic bags. At the threshold she pauses, the door ajar, awaiting the inevitable call—a woman’s voice, grainy, querulous: “Helen? Is that you?”
“Of course,” she says. “Of course it’s me,” and goes in. Follow her in, and what you will see is this: the small dark flat, densely packed with furniture, which jostles, like condemned cattle in a crate; the white walls entirely obscured by prints, by photographs of family long past remembering, by certificates of forgotten achievements which were never any use, and blotted watercolors of ships in the dock. On each surface useless ugly objects of some kind: dried flowers colonized by spiders, matryoshka dolls, a porcelain elephant lacking his trunk. Lying beneath these, prostrate in defeat, are embroidered mats, doilies of cheap machine lace in polyester thread, and scraps of Indian fabric; there is above it all the scent of cheap incense, sandalwood; the air is dim, because the curtains are drawn, and because it is full of dust and smoke. A silent television in the corner puts a fretful blue light against the wall. It is all so wholly out of keeping with Helen—with her neat unadorned clothes, her smooth graying hair and swift calm gait—that I daresay you’re taken aback. But if you open the door along the passage—there, to your right: white-painted, plain—you would see a room, which is also white-painted, plain. A narrow bed, and a dressing gown hanging from the back of the door. A small plain desk, and a small plain chair; a narrow wardrobe, in which a modest number of modest outfits hang, and beneath them, three modest pairs of shoes. Here Helen sleeps, eats, and studies: perfects her transitive verbs in German, attempts to master the fifteen patterns of Czech declension. She does not listen to music. The walls and the mattress are bare.
In the dim hall she sets her satchel down. “Helen? I said, is that you?”—and there is her companion, waddling on bowed legs, the joints of her hips worn down, splayed and weak like those of a baby; dependent these days on an aluminium frame, which catches against the carpet and in doing so is volubly cursed. She is in black, this woman, many layers of it, the layers containing the detritus of a week’s meals, and the scent of sandalwood, talc, and sweat. She is decked in garnet, in cheap black chips of it, on her ears and fingers, and in a brooch on her breast which glitters like a smashed black plate. This is Albína Horáková: ninety years old, malicious, unkind, devoted to sentimental opera and Turkish Delight. Helen takes in a breath and says, “Yes, it is me. It is always me, and never anyone else. Have you eaten?”
“I have eaten.” The women survey each other with a depth of dislike plumbed an inch deeper each day. Helen—rootless, not permitting herself the comfort of a home—had ended one brief tenancy in a dreary room in a stranger’s house, and sought another. Karel had said, “There’s Albína Horáková, I suppose, always looking for a lodger. They only ever last a month or so. Dreadful old bitch—nobody can stand her, except Thea of course—but quite entertaining in her way, and keeps herself locked away up there with her soap operas and her cakes.” Then he’d given Helen a look of calculating appraisal, which was amused, but not unkind, and said, “Perhaps it might suit you, having a cellmate you don’t like.” A slip of paper was handed over, the call was made—and now, here we are, thinks Helen. Albína has seeped into the fabric of the apartment like a stain. Her scent is in the teacups, in the laundry powder, in the leaves of the dictionaries on the shelves. Helen endures it all as she endures every discomfort, every hard thing: patiently, and as her just reward.
“Well, then,” says Helen, awaiting some jibe (regarding the drabness of her clothes, possibly; the narrowness of her life, or her idiotically poor Czech), but none is forthcoming.
“Well, then,” says Albína, retreats into her own hot, dense little den, and slams the door. Well! Reprieve, and a quiet evening, and in her satchel the Hoffman document. Helen hangs her coat, places her boots beneath it, and makes a pot of weak black tea. This she carries into her room, and sets on the desk beside the sheaf of paper. She stands for a long moment alone on the small square of oatmeal carpet, by the light of the naked bulb. Is she uneasy, now? A little—a little: the flesh on her forearms grows chill, the hairs there lift, there is a slight dropping sensation in the cavity of her chest, as if her heart has paused before a hasty beat. It is as if she feels a pair of eyes fixed on her, unblinking, calculating; she turns, and there is only the dressing gown on the hook, the satchel on the bed. Karel’s disease is infectious, it seems: she recalls, with a little quickening of the heart, herself as a child, as a teenager, certain that she was in some way marked out—feeling, as the young so often do, that she could not possibly be as ordinary as she seemed. (There is something else, also, swiftly suppressed: the memory of a cold gaze passing at
the nape of her neck, when she did what she ought not to have done.)
She sits at the desk and takes out the manuscript. That minute copperplate seems already familiar—appears, as she takes her reading glasses from their case, actually to dissolve upon the page, the ink reshaping itself into plainly printed English: sans serif, twelve-point type. She takes a sip of bitter tea, and begins to read.
The Hoffman Document
My name is Josef Adelmar Hoffman. This was my father’s name, and the name of my father’s father. I was born in 1926, in a village east of the River Eger,1 in the independent state of Czechoslovakia. The country of my birth was older than me by only eight years: had it been a child, it might have had trouble tying its shoelaces.
My father had been born a citizen of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it was a source of great bitterness to him that his son was denied this birthright. He regarded the Great War, and the breaking up of the lands of his birth, as a personal slight. He would drink from whatever he had to hand, and tell me: “Do not forget that your blood is in the soil, and the soil is in your blood!”
We lived in a small house not far from the river. It was a region famous for its glass, and the Hoffmans had been glassmakers for five generations. From the window of my mother’s kitchen I sat and watched the butcher’s boy go by, and Herr Schröder, who was injured at Verdun and taught twenty boys in the village school. We knew his shrapnel scar far better than the Latin verbs he taught us. As I think of it now, it is as if I look into a cupboard full of objects, some of which remain forever shrouded in dust, but some of which I see quite plainly: a forest glass vase in which bubbles were suspended, and in them the breath of some ancestor of mine who’d lived in the Bohemian woods; a single Moser champagne flute, beautiful and useless; my mother’s sewing box; the coral ring on which I cut my teeth; buttons cut from the tunic of a captain of the cavalry; a moldavite2 in the form of a green glass chrysanthemum.
I suppose my parents loved me, as parents must; but no jury would convict, and no judge pass sentence, on any evidence of love that I might put before the court. I cannot praise them as a good son should. My mother’s mind was confined to daily purchases in the village stores, and excursions to small towns with women she professed to dislike. She cooked diligently and I was at all times neatly dressed, but I do not recall her undertaking any activity which was not strictly necessary. She did not sew flowers on pieces of linen, as I’d seen the mothers of other boys do; she did not sing Lieder as she peeled potatoes; she did not make sketches of the river running past the lindens just beyond our door. She talked a great deal: her knowledge of the activities and scandals of villages ten miles along the Eger in each direction was exhaustive, and delivered without wit. I was fond of her, because I was her son. My father, meanwhile, was a man made up of the parts of other men: the achievements and eccentricities of my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, and great-uncles, and so on, were his sole source of pride. I think of him now as a piece of mirror hanging on a wall: empty, unless another man walked past. At eighteen he’d been wounded in an accident in a glass furnace. The resulting deformity fused two fingers on his right hand, and exempted him from military service. It was a source of great shame to him: I believe he almost thought that if he could have served his country with the famous Hoffman valor, the dice of war may have fallen in his favor. Before my birth, in the years of the war, he would dress in the uniform of some ancestor of ours—red breeches, blue jacket pleated over the buttocks, a hat with a gold cockade—and parade drunkenly up and down the village square, rapping the hilt of a dead man’s sword on the doors of homes with lost sons, offering congratulations. It is rare for a son to see his father as his neighbors see him; but I did, and I hated him, and I despised my mother for consenting to marry him. Indeed, in later years I have come to set aside a portion of my guilt and shame, and lay it at their door—for they meant no harm, but did no good. I came into their hands naked and helpless, my mind an unwritten slate; what might I have been, in the hands of their betters? For I heard nothing in that house but my mother’s prattle, my father’s vanity; I do not recall their reading literature, or catechizing me on the doctrines of the church, or even standing me beneath the stars and teaching me to know Orion from the Great Bear; we possessed no musical instruments, no images save that of a deposed emperor. Might I have done what I did, if I had heard “Ode to Joy,” and known by heart the words of Schiller’s hymn to the divine spark—if I had read Augustine’s Confessions, or watched Faust enter into his contract, and wished that I could beg him to stop? They were dull, and they made a dull boy duller.
My father’s injury excluded him from being an artisan, but he had a good head for figures, and when I was nine years old he was offered a post at the Moser glassworks in Carlsbad.3 Nothing could have given him greater pleasure. My mother took walks to show off her new dress, which had covered buttons and a stiff underskirt; my father threw fistfuls of noisy coins in the collection plate when we attended church. The Moser name was more sacrosanct than that of God. Did I know, my father said, that the Holy Father himself, Pius XI, possessed a full set of Moser glassware for use at the Vatican? Did I know that at the close of each day the master glassblower inspected each bowl, each glass, and smashed as many as eight out of every ten, for some fatal flaw no other eye could discern? It had always been assumed that I, too, would grow up to be a glassmaker, and by the age of nine I could recite the formula for the famous Moser crystal as a devout boy might have recited the Nicene creed: knew to combine silica, soda ash, potassium and limestone; to melt it at 1460 degrees. But I did not excel at school, and showed no aptitude for any skill or subject. I had no ambition of my own. I was content, always, to eat the dish that was handed to me.
It was at about this time I first began to show symptoms of an inherited disease. So, at least, I have always thought of it; but it seems to me now that in terming it thus I exculpate myself, when more properly I should think of it as a garment I was given, and wore unthinkingly, when I could easily have taken it off.
On his first day returning from the Moser glassworks I heard my father say to my mother: “They are Jews, of course; but the good kind. The kind any man might trust.” I heard this without surprise or censure. One of the few books I possessed was called Beware of the Fox, and I vaguely understood it was a warning against the Jews. That one might readily discern them by their sulphurous scent seemed to me quite natural, for had they not, in centuries past, poisoned the wells of Christians, and desecrated the host? Had they not stolen away Christian children in the night, for purposes I could not guess at? That the Jews I saw now and then in Carlsbad seemed indistinguishable from Christians did nothing to straighten the crook in my mind. Though I do not recall my parents having ever tutored me in bigotry, in the course of ordinary conversation they would often turn to the Hilsner Affair,4 which each remembered—with the particular pleasure the unintelligent have for the ghoulish—from their youth; and I suppose this contributed to my own loathing.
One incident alone from that part of my life I recall with perfect clarity. My walk to school took me on a narrow track past a field of wheat, where often I saw the farmer picking stones by hand in winter. Now this farmer had a habit of leaving out some form of seat in the field, which I never once saw him use. In winter, a wooden crate; in summer, a bale of hay. I even once saw a small dining chair set out in the harrowed field, but he must have been admonished by his wife, for I never saw it again. My curiosity at that time was sluggish, my intelligence mean: a thousand other wonders must have passed me by, but this one thing puzzled me. Encountering him one morning on the path, I screwed up my courage and asked what purpose these empty seating places served. “Why, it is for she of course,” he said. He looked for a time at the stack of logs placed against the wall of an outhouse twenty yards from where we stood. A handful of jackdaws were pecking at the soil. Then he gripped me by the shoulder, and I could see a milky quality to his eyes.
“It is for the Wanderer,” he said. “For the Witness—for she who is cursed to walk from Jerusalem to Constantinople, from Ireland to Kazakhstan; she who is eternally lonely, who is excommunicated from the grace of God and the company of men; she who watches, whose eyes are upon you in your guilt and transgression, from whom God has withdrawn even the respite of sleep!” He spoke like some mad preacher who goes from door to door with pamphlets in one hand and a tin cup for begged coins in the other. I left him with the idea that some damned soul required that he should leave out for her a resting place, in case she should happen by; and that he’d glimpsed her once, as a boy, and lived in terror and hope that he might one day see her again.
Later that same day I lingered after school to speak to Herr Schröder, and ask if he too had seen that single chair set out in a harrowed wheat field. It was just an old myth, he said, and one he was surprised I did not already know. “It is nothing but a story told to children to keep them in line,” he said. “Did your mother never take you on her knee, and tell you that Melmoth was watching?” My mother had never told me any stories, I said. “It began like this,” he said. “You know, as your bible has taught you, that a company of women came to Jesus’s tomb, and found it empty, and the stone rolled away, and right there in the garden they saw the risen son of God. But among them was one who later denied that she had ever seen the resurrected Christ. Because of it she is cursed to wander the earth without home or respite, until Christ comes again. So she is always watching, always seeking out everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress. In doing so she bears witness, where there is no witness, and hopes to achieve her salvation.” Could he have said all this to me, a boy with whom he’d never exchanged more than a handful of words? I think so, for I remember it well, and how he ran a finger in the furrow of the scar that ran from ear to collarbone. “Well, that’s the legend,” he said, “and this is her name: Melmoth the Witness, or Melmotte, or Melmotka, depending on the town where you were born. But what you must remember is this: that she is lonely, with an eternal loneliness which will end only when our world ends, and she receives her pardon. So she comes to those at the lowest ebb of life, and those she chooses feel her eyes on them. Then they look up—they see her watching—and she holds out her arms and says: Take my hand! I’ve been so lonely !”
