Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  Outside, the road was noisy with trams and students and offices emptying, and I walked alone watching my feet on the cobbles, thinking of the pale hairs gleaming on Freddie’s skin as she danced. I went on in this way until I reached our shop, and when I looked up I saw that it was altered. The lights of the shop were out, and so was the single bulb that shone above the side door where I was to enter. This side door was set back in a little porch up a flight of stairs, and the porch was in darkness, and I stood on the pavement reluctant to make my way up in case I stumbled and fell. As I watched, the darkness began to deepen. It was as if it were not merely absence of light but a gap into which every bad thing was being slowly sucked. It pulsed. I saw it: it widened and narrowed and widened again, as though it were gasping for breath. It suddenly seemed to me that all that is worst in the hearts of women and men—all the things that I had simply never thought of before: the deceits and vanities and cruelty—had substance, and were massing there like a swarm of flies. Then the substance of it changed: it was like lengths of fine black silk hung there in the doorway, stirred by a breeze; then those lengths grew, and spilled like ink down the steps. There was no sound from anywhere: the street, which ought to have been all hustle and bustle, was empty save for a great black crowd of jackdaws seeking out places to rest. I knew then that I was watched. My body strained towards my watcher—my skin broke out in gooseflesh, and I felt my eyes adapt to that sucking blackness with a painful pulling of the tissues. I was terribly afraid, but there with the terror was something else, which was very like the sickness I’d felt as I watched Freddie dancing while the cabaret played on. It was a kind of frightened longing, like a man who sees a lover he has hopelessly longed for, and in his lover’s hands a noose; and I knew beyond doubt that my watcher was a woman. Very slowly I turned. Nobody was there.

  Then the light came on and I saw my mother on the step. The color of her dress, which in fact was drab and dull like all her clothes, seemed to me as bright as the flowers Frau Bayer had placed in the grate. The blackness dissipated. My mother said, “Up you come: don’t dawdle down there, when food is on the table.” I went up the step and put my arms around her waist and rested my head on her shoulder. She was warm and solid and smelt of soap and vinegar. She patted my shoulder stiffly and said, “What’s this, then? Eh—what’s all this?” Then we went inside. My father had already begun to eat.

  In the months that followed I often heard music playing as I passed the Bayer shop on the other side of the road. Sometimes what I heard moved me painfully. It seemed indecent that I could walk past in good spirits and be brought to tears by a violin; or that I could scuff by on my way to school, and find myself walking more briskly at the tantivy of the brass. Confusion and desire and envy lodged low and heavy in my stomach. I knew it did me harm. I didn’t care.

  One morning in March I woke late, and though my room was drearily familiar I felt a change of air. In the room where we ate our meals the window had been left open, and I could hear a kind of thrumming on the streets, and now and then a man’s voice raised in a yell which was not distressed or excited but somehow matter-of-fact. It was cold, and a little rain had blown in. I called for my mother but she was gone. Drawn down by the sounds of the street I went out and found my parents standing in a crowd that gathered on the pavement. My mother had covered her hair in a bright scarf I’d never seen before, and wore a cardigan stitched with flowers that fastened at the neck with woollen tassels. In her left hand she held a handkerchief which she pressed to her face while she wept. Her right arm was raised above her head, the hand flat and held palm down. I was astonished. I’d never seen her show such emotion, nor could I understand why she would give a military salute. My father was also weeping, though he could not cover his face, because his right arm was also raised, and in his left he held the Hoffman sword. Then I saw coming down the street a column of men. Some drove motorbikes with sidecars covered in tarpaulin; some rode bicycles that rattled over the cobblestones, and others were on foot. They all wore winter coats that looked too large, and carried long thin objects over their shoulders, and I remembered how the farmer back in our village by the Eger had shouldered his hoe and rake as he went out to work the fields, but these were the barrels of guns. Then the crowd drew back from the pavement and we all fell silent as if with respect, and a tank rolled past. A man stood buried in it up to his waist: he waved, and caught my eye, and waved again. Then the tank moved on, and the crowd closed behind it, and I thought there was a slight change in the noises all around me, as though excitement had been tempered with something else.

  Hours it took for the men to go past, coming east over the bridge. All that day they spread and thinned throughout the city, as though they were particles in a dense black fog coming off the river that made its way into the alleys. The atmosphere was by turns subdued and hectic: often I saw women weeping and had no way of telling whether out of fear or jubilation. Despite the small crowds that gathered here and there the streets were quiet, and when I looked into apartment windows I saw faces that seemed fixed and gaunt. In the window of the Bayer shop a printed notice promised they’d return tomorrow, and I imagined Frau Bayer in a good silk dress saluting like my mother, while Franz and Freddie turned the dials of their radio until they found a jubilant, military march.

  It seemed Prague had come under occupying forces, but it was all somehow quite ordinary and hardly worth a column in the newspapers. Already white signs had been fastened to lamp posts: in prag fahren wir auf der linken seite. What danger could there be from an army that politely adhered to the Prague custom of driving on the left? Where was the gunshot—where the fires set in the streets? I’d seen no heroism nor cruelty: only weeping housewives, and boys in uniforms that didn’t fit them yet. It seemed the world, as I had long suspected, contained little in it of interest.

  That night my mother put flowers on the table. They were cheap gaudy ones with no scent and already the leaves were dropping. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were flushed, and I understood this had something to do with what I’d seen that day.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Sit down—it’s been a good day, don’t you think? The best day of your life, I’d say. Sit with your father.”

  My father sat very upright in his chair. The Hoffman sword lay on the table beside his outstretched arms. He looked happy, with a kind of hectic gleeful happiness I didn’t like. “Here,” he said, and slapped the seat beside him. “See what your mother has made.”

  The oven door was open and I smelt burning fat and red cabbage stewed with vinegar and apple. My mother set a large oval platter on the table and spilled thin liquid on the blade of the sword. She had prepared a roulade of beaten pork rolled around mushrooms that lay soft and gray in the pork fat. She set about it with a carving knife and gave first my father, and then me, portions of meat which turned my stomach. “Eat!” she said. She reached over and patted my belly. “Eat up! Don’t you know what happened today?”

  “Not him,” said my father, with a kind of fond contempt. “Never taken any notice of what’s beyond his shoelaces, that boy, eh? Well, Josef?” He cuffed my ear. It hurt, and I did not show it. “What do you make of it?” He chewed at the pork, and grinned at me.

  “I suppose the city has been invaded,” I said. “Those were German men—but why were there no Czech soldiers? Where was Polizist Novák?”

  “Invaded!” said my father. I could not tell if he were outraged or amused. He thumped the table, and the Hoffman sword quivered. “We are saved, boy. It is returned to us: everything that your grandfather and your great-grandfather knew, and everything that I lost, will be yours!” I had no idea what he meant. What had I lost? I slept, and ate. I spoke the language of my mother and my father. I could distinguish, because my schoolmasters taught me, between adjective and adverb. What use did I have for pride? I expected nothing, hoped for nothing, looked for nothing, asked nothing, gave nothing.

  My mother leaned forward and whispered. “They say by the we
ek’s end he himself will give a speech from Prague Castle. Just think of that! We shall go. Perhaps there will be tickets for sale.”

  “We shall most certainly go!” said my father. “They will wish us to be there: a family of an old German name. Ah Josef, to think I have lived to see you inherit what is yours!” It disgusted me to see that my father’s eyes were wet. I had always disliked strong emotion of any kind. I could eat no more for the remainder of the meal, but my parents paid me no mind, for they’d opened a bottle of good wine and were toasting, in swift succession, a long line of Hoffman ancestors of whom I’d never heard.

  Here ends the portion of the document that Karel Pražan gave to Helen Franklin. She is weary. The ink on the page thickens: begins, it seems, to seep towards the margins, as if it might very well drip down and stain her clothes beneath the desk. But what is there here to account for Karel’s altered appearance, his gaunt cheek? She ponders that name which has become familiar in the passing of an hour or so: Melmoth, or Melmotte, or Melmotka; ponders a woman questioned by men, and refusing them; ponders the justice of the sentence meted out. It is easy enough to summon up this watcher, this witness: to imagine, say, a hag, black-clad, stooped, unblinking, baleful; to summon up also the pricking sensation of an implacable eye fixed on a bare neck. She finds herself unwilling to raise her head to the window, as if she might see beyond the glass a face with an expression of loneliness so imploring as to be cruel. (And since she will not look, you must—there, beyond the railing—no, a little further still: between that parked car and this—wait, and grow accustomed to the dark; and yes, there you have it, do you not? Against the beech hedge with its burned leaves, something unmoving, and yet distinct; the night’s fabric thicker. A figure in—yes!—black; slender, and not tall; looking steadfastly at the bare bulb burning five floors up.)

  Meanwhile Helen closes her eyes, and sees behind the lids a boy—stocky, fair, unsmiling; eyes cast down at his boots; in shorts perhaps; seeing little, saying less. There is movement behind her—very slight, only the shifting of fabric on fabric—and at once the imagined boy lifts up his head and looks directly at her. She is watching! he says; and at the nape of Helen’s neck the hairs lift. Slowly she turns in her chair (laughing at herself a little, of course, that she should be so fanciful)—and there is a woman in the doorway, steadily watching: Albína Horáková, who has draped upon her many layers yet another: black silk, green-stitched, velvet. She holds a plate. “I have treats!” she says. “Sweet things for a sweet girl, eh?” She swings and shuffles across the carpet, grunting; places a plate upon the desk. Half a dozen small cakes, the icing gleaming pink as a wet fold of flesh. “Sweet Helen,” says Albína. “Eh? Eat, eat! Think it’s poison, eh? Well, well. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is.” Wickedly she smiles down at Helen. “Not hungry? Never hungry, are you? Thin. Look: thin, nothing there. Won’t eat. Won’t sing. What’s this, here? Nothing on the walls, nothing on the bed. Ugly everywhere, ugly like you.” From deep in her gullet: a noise of disgust. “Eat, eat, eat.” Then she turns—slowly, like a ship’s hulk adrift—murmurs to herself, in Czech, incomprehensible. The scent of the sugar, of the moist and half-baked dough, rises from the chipped plate, and Helen’s stomach contracts. It would be well, she thinks, to eat one now: force down thick sweet paste, and swallow. But her habits of self-denial are inescapable. She never intended this—cannot recall, when plotting how to expiate her guilt, how best to achieve redemption; does not remember having said: “I will take no joy in food, merely let myself live.” Yet here we are, she thinks: butter, and sugar, and so I cannot eat. Nor can she recall when Albína first observed her rituals of discomfort: the uncovered mattress, the unheated room, the bitter tea. But she did notice, as she notices all things: slyly, from the corner of her black eye. Quietly Helen takes the plate into the kitchen; quietly sets it deep within the fridge. From Albína’s room, music: violins sweet as cake, and as spitefully intended to sicken. Helen pauses, and places a hand to her side, and presses, as if the music’s source is there within her kidneys, her spleen, and may be suppressed at a touch. Then she returns to her room, exchanges her clothes for a nightdress resembling the coarse shift of a penitent, lies on the bare mattress, sleeps well—though the small hours are punctuated by dreams that come in startling flashes, as if seen through the window of a train that’s running late: green tiles in a corridor and an antiseptic scent; wasted limbs under a sheet; scarlet flowers seeping over a dirty windowsill; and her own hands, very steady, when they ought to have trembled in fear at what they were about to do.

  And since she sleeps well, and deeply, you may step quietly onto that plain square of carpet, and look again at that characterless room. Where is the evidence of who she is, this Helen Franklin: small, insignificant, having about her an air of sadness whose source you cannot guess at; of self-punishment, self-hatred, carried out quietly and diligently and with a minimum of fuss? If you kneel (be very careful, very quiet) you’ll see beneath the bed a cardboard box. It is gray, and the lid torn at the corner; there is the remains of a label at the end, and a pair of shoes drawn on it. Bring it out, put it where the street light shines, and lift off the lid. Here is what is kept inside: a cassette tape, and a picture of a young man, black-haired, laughing through green-rimmed sunglasses, on a city balcony. Folded and pressed, a handkerchief in a stiff shining fiber you’ve never seen before, its scalloped edges stitched with pink. A small book, hardback, clothbound, blue: the poems of Rilke, not translated. A plastic-wrapped packet of tamarind seeds rolled in sugar, the lyrics of a sentimental pop song decorated with pencil in the margins. A string of very small seed pearls, pale pink, the string yellow and loose between the beads, and earrings made of abalone shell. A ticket for what might perhaps be a tram in a foreign country—a letter, in a language you do not recognize—a bottle of perfume from which the liquid has long evaporated, but which has a sweet strong scent. Two lipsticks: greasy, pearly, violet-pink. They are well-handled, these things: the box has grown fragile from being withdrawn and concealed, pored over, held. Touch the letter, and it will fall apart in your hands. It is a whole life contained in twelve inches by eight by six; buried, as if beneath six feet of English soil; begun, forty-two years before, in a pebble-dashed house in Essex; and ended, twenty-two years later, by an act of will.

  Helen Franklin had been born to a family constrained by lack of money, and by the mistrust of change which is the mark of a certain kind of English family. Her parents were small, anxious, punctilious, polite; her father occasionally bad-tempered, if pressed beyond the limits of what was comfortable, her mother occasionally unhappy, if given glimpses of a life less limited. They went each summer to a hotel where the breakfast could be relied upon, amended their Christmas card list on the first of December without fail, and never neglected to bring the begonias indoors over winter; they grew fretful if asked to drive to unfamiliar towns, ate swift quiet meals at precisely six each evening, asked guests to remove their shoes on the doormat. That Helen, early on, showed signs of an aptitude for languages which drew attention from her teachers, caused them a great deal of unease—to pass without notice, and without asking or requiring attention, was their sole ambition for themselves, and for their daughter. When she was accepted into a grammar school her mother wept, because she could not reconcile maternal pride with her feeling that she was now marked out among the neighbors—had transgressed, somehow, and would in due course be punished for it.

  Helen, meanwhile, seethed. Certainly she looked like her mother’s daughter—her face was narrow, sallow, pointed at the chin; she was short, and thin, and her hair lay too flat against her scalp—but there, she ardently felt, the similarity ended. It seemed to her impossible that nothing lay in store but a job in local government, with sufficient salary for a mortgage, and adequate maternity leave. Sometimes, when walking home from school with her satchel bumping on her hip, she felt watched. It was not the stern benevolent eye of an all-seeing divinity keeping a general look-out, but som
ething more personal, more attentive; almost, she felt, the eye of a lover, who expects a great deal of their loved one. Sitting in school assemblies, cross-legged on the parquet floor, Helen looked at five hundred other girls and knew that something awaited her that would likely pass them by. In her room at night she papered her walls with cheap prints of the Pre-Raphaelites and dressed, at the weekends, as nearly like Ophelia as the local shops allowed. She listened to unfashionable songs with obsessive attentiveness, and dreamed she dwelt in marble halls with vassals and serfs at her side. She took off her clothes and stood in front of the mirror by lamplight and imagined that after all she wasn’t small and thin with spots on her breastbone, but sumptuous and dark. She saved her pocket money and bought a bottle of jasmine perfume, and trailed the scent behind her in the corridors. She read Rilke, Rabelais, Neruda; formed ardent friendships on a whim, and broke them as readily; pitied those ordinary girls for whom life held nothing more than what it had offered their mothers. That she looked so ordinary, and could pass so entirely without notice, only pleased her more. She was, she felt, in disguise.

  What you have in your hands, then—in that shoebox with its worn-out lid—is all that remains of the time when Helen Franklin lived. Everything before it was prologue: everything after, a footnote.