by Sarah Perry
Eight days pass, and Helen often thinks of Josef Hoffman. A certain disquiet now attends the day, though she’d be hard pressed to account for it. It is not that she expects to encounter, in the corridors of the General Library or in the aisles of supermarkets just as trading ends, Melmoth the Witness; it is something less readily cast off. Reading Hoffman’s document has been like hearing a confession, and she finds herself unequal to the task of confessor, being herself unabsolved. She is sufficiently unnerved to find herself avoiding the library, unwilling either to encounter desk 209 (would she see the marks where Hoffman’s dying hand had gripped the leather?) or, it seems, Karel Pražan, for all that he’s her friend. Nine days pass, of small spiteful gestures from Albína Horáková (a fragment of cake ground into the carpet at the threshold of her room; the burning in the small hours of cones of incense that leave an acrid fug in the over-heated flat), of thirty-nine pages of German translated into English, and likewise six pages of Czech. On the tenth day it occurs to her that never has Karel been silent for so long a stretch, and so she sends a message. I haven’t seen you in a while. Are you well, or did you catch the cold I said you would? Say hello to Thea—see you soon. It is precisely calibrated between care and carelessness, and entirely fitted to their friendship. A day passes, and another message, warmer by a fraction of a degree: Hope all’s well with you both. I ought to give you back this manuscript—perhaps I’ll drop by later? It would not do to confess that she thinks often of Karel not singly, but as part of a larger whole—as part of Karel-and-Thea, and of the meals had at their dining table, which glowed with beeswax and spilled wine, before Thea’s blood tried to kill her; of the evenings in which very faintly she had felt herself unbending. That morning she at last attends the library, and is pleased to find that she is able to pay no heed to the plaster babies descending from the ceiling shrieking in distress, or to the precise position of desk 209. She looks for Karel: he is not there. At the close of day she puts her work in her satchel alongside the fragment of the Hoffman document, and resolves to pay a visit to her friends. It is sufficiently out of character for her to wonder at herself, as she passes beneath the stone arch where a man in a ticket booth catches her eye (he knows she cannot be importuned to hear light opera sung in deconsecrated churches): an uninvited visit? She? Well—she tightens her belt, which has a habit of working itself loose—why not. She has something which is not hers, and she will be passing the owner’s door: it is merely good manners that compels her. It is a white evening, with snow drifted up against bicycles and litter bins. None presently falls, but all the same the air contains, you might almost think, the dust of opals ground against a stone. Music both sacred and profane meets above the awnings where valiant men sit on sheepskin-covered chairs and shiver delightedly. “This is it!” say the English: “Real winter, like when we were young, and on the doorstep birds pecked right through the foil milk-bottle tops.” They pay over the odds for bad beer, and think it cheap.
Karel and Thea live just beyond the Old Town Square, where Helen slips through unseen and largely unseeing. She is more or less immune to the effect of the façades, which have a quality of impermanence, as though they might at any moment be drawn back like a curtain. She reaches her friends’ apartment out of breath, discovering that she has walked a little faster than she generally does, as though she heard against the cobblestones the rapping of a follower’s feet. Down an alley, beneath an arch—stooping, though the curved stones clear her head by inches—and there is the yard onto which four apartment buildings look out, and there the familiar door, much snow banked against it. She pauses, and puts her thumb beneath the satchel strap, which has begun to press against the bones of her shoulder. She makes a swift calculation. Either they have remained indoors for—let’s say, twelve hours? More?—or have left, and not returned. She steps forward, and at that moment the single light set beneath the arch goes out, and the yard and all around it is dark. Each of the thirty identical windows set above their identical sills is merely a pane of black in the blackness, and the effect is of a total emptiness, as though no lamps were ever lit there. The sole light is that which comes weakly in under the arch from the distant Old Town Square—weakly, as if very distant indeed; as if Helen has gone twenty miles from there, and not twenty paces. She stands very still. She listens, and it is her whole body that strains within the silence. What does she listen for—the drag of long skirts against the snow, the tread of boots—or of bare feet, perhaps: feet which have walked over continents and are indifferent to pain? She listens, and of course there is nothing, save for the distant skirl of Bohemian bock piping away in the dark. Then the arch light returns, some loose wire finding its fitting perhaps; and Helen blinks against it, and sees now what she did not see before: that the familiar door is open by barely the width of a forefinger. She surveys that long black ribbon between the door and its frame. Manners forbid the crossing of a threshold uninvited, but it seems to her that something is awry. “Karel?” she calls. “Thea? It’s me. May I come in?” There is silence. My mother, she thinks, would have said: “Cooee! Karel? Thea?” But again, nothing; she puts her hand against the door, and goes in. She stands in the little hall with its umbrella stand, its coat hooks, and listens. The silence is something more than the absence of noise. If it is possible to hear silence, Helen hears it: a thick, soft sensation against the drums of her ears. She reaches for the light switch, and the hall and everything in it is precisely as she remembered, save that the air is altered: it contains nothing, nothing at all—not a speck of dust sifting through the light, not a thread of scent from the lily in the vase. It is as if Karel and Thea had been removed not hours before, but at their conception: as if they are not here, nor were they ever. She moves forward, noting as she does the remnants of the familiar—the stripped pine floor, against which the ramp with its gritty gray surface sits so poorly; the cabinet with its burden of glass; the prints, each mounted in white, taken from volumes addressed to the student of botany—and pauses where the ramp descends to a door. This, too, is not quite closed, and Helen puts out her hand, observing with interest that she is trembling. Then she is arrested by a sound which comes from the room beyond, and which seems only to approximate the human. It wakes Helen from what has been, until then, a kind of detached courage: she feels instead a rising up of fear which has the effect of valor. She shoves at the door and with a sharp hard action turns on the light. The long room is instantly illuminated as brightly as an operating theatre. White light pours down from fittings concealed within the white ceiling, and presents to Helen a familiar picture, of a long table on which spring bulbs have been cajoled into bloom, and of books heaped in an inviting fashion. There is beneath her feet a rug brought north from Turkey, and in front of her a range with the six hobs which Thea had declared essential to any dinner worth the name; there is the evidence of Thea’s recent history: the painted box where her barrister’s wig is kept, the scarlet-bound copies of Archbold Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice. But here too the air is empty: there is no scent of food or wine, or of candles burning in blue glass bowls. Even the hyacinth on the table gives off no smell, as if all its white flowers were pieces of plastic; and propped up on the windowsill the convex silvered surface of Karel’s telescopic mirror distorts the room. At the head of the table there is a wheelchair. It is not large, or fitted with devices to aid movement: it is merely an aluminium-framed chair on wheels. Seated there is Thea, with both hands curled in her lap, and her feet on the footplates turned in like those of a child sick since birth. Her head is thrown against the black leather back of the chair. Her lipsticked mouth is open, and her chin hangs as if a bolt somewhere has been loosened. Her hair is neglected, long: red-gold hanks of it drape across the rubber-clad handles which extend behind her. Her gaze is fixed upon the ceiling, and it is possible to make out beneath their lids the wet gleam of the whites of her eyes, and the green paint on their lids. On either side of her, drawn back from the table by precisely the distan
ce required to allow the seated to rise, are two wooden chairs. There are three wine glasses on the table and they have all been drunk dry. Then there is again that noise—call it a grunt, for certainly there are no words contained within the sound, no sense worth reaching after. For a moment it is not possible to discern the source, then it comes again: a wet sighing sound which acquires the feeling of something more human than animal. Helen moves closer, and as she does so Thea’s jaw is snapped upward, moves swiftly in a circular motion, then falls again to the accompaniment of what is unmistakably a snore. It is loud enough to wake her, this one: her curled hands clench, and her head slowly rises. She opens her eyes—closes them—reaches up to knuckle fiercely at them, so that the sleeve of her dressing gown falls back and reveals a soft wrist-splint fastened with straps.
The relief that comes to Helen is of the kind that sweeps away all past fear and apprehension: it is not merely that her anxious creeping along the halls seems now absurd, it is gone from her memory. “Gosh,” says Thea, her voice as it always was: cultured, in a fashion that makes its origin (which in fact is nothing so grand as her self-command, her style suggest) impossible to guess at. “Helen? What are you doing here?”
“Thea!” says Helen. “Thea!”—and delivers, to their equal astonishment, a slap across her cheek. The other woman slowly shakes her head, and regards her from beneath heavy, slumberous lids. They gleam green in the lamplight. “Have they gone? That is”—Thea looks from left to right, waking sufficiently now to acquire a puzzled, querying look—“has he gone? I think he’s gone, you know. I thought he might. I said: in the end, you’ll go.” She is silent a moment, then frowning says: “Tell me—is there a woman here?”
“I am here,” says Helen. “I am here; but Karel isn’t. Thea, have you been ill—ought we to phone for help?” She waits, for Thea dislikes silence, and is generally minded to fill it. But she does not—merely goes on turning her head from side to side, with a vague, dazed expression, as though still in the borderlands of sleep. Helen, Englishwoman that she is, briskly pats the table. “Well, then: let me put the kettle on, and we’ll have tea.” There is then the performance of the sacred ritual: two pinches of the leaves brought from home; the warmed pot; the teacups reverently set down. All this Thea observes passively. “Thank you,” she says, cradling a cup between two hands, which is how she takes her tea, these days. “Thank you.” And then, restored within two sips: “Turn off those damn lights, would you? Find a candle, anything, my head hurts.” Obediently Helen turns off the lights, and strikes a match for a candle melting in a blue glass dish. Sighing, Thea says, “Better. God, my head. What has happened—I don’t remember any of it—”
Helen watches. She listens, and finds no new slurring in her speech, though certainly the scarlet lipstick is inexpertly applied. Not another stroke then: nothing so readily explained. “Then drink up, and wake up, and tell me what you can—but first, let me call Karel. Let me do that.” And she does, three times; and is three times unanswered.
“I thought so,” says Thea. “Yes: I thought so.” What is this calm, thinks Helen? It is eerie. Where is the lover’s anxiety, the partner’s irritation? There must have been some bitter and final row. The prospect of Karel-and-Thea being snipped at the join is too unpleasant to be countenanced, and she pours more tea.
“Tell me what you remember—look, here: three glasses, and all the wine gone. Was there a guest?”
“A guest?” Thea fumbles at her cup—sets it down—ignores the spill. “Oh, we have had a guest for weeks, let me tell you! It has been three of us since that damn document entered the house: he and I, and this—specter!” With a sudden show of spite she swipes at the cup with a splinted wrist. It breaks against the floor. “Has he told you about it—about her?”
“About Melmoth?” says Helen. The name, said aloud, astonishes her. One might as well say Peter Pan, she thinks, and expect a green boy to come flying in. (But doesn’t she look up, all the same—at the closed door, the fastened windows?)
“Melmoth,” says Thea. “My God! He comes home with this stinking folder some mad old fool left him—I could smell it, the moment he walked in, an animal smell, like the leather was rotten—and everything changed. Oh, it was changed already, everything between us, you know it—you have seen it: the light went out when I did.” Helen does not do what is polite: remonstrate, and soothe, and say that Karel’s love, his admiration, did not falter the moment his lover pitched forward into her dinner and became a cripple. For it did, it demonstrably did: it became strained, attentive, very careful—it was performed diligently, and the performance had its limits. Instead, Helen does what her mother taught her—clears up the broken porcelain, the spilled tea, and pours more. “Go on,” she says.
“I don’t see him. He does what he can’t avoid—reaches cupboards I can’t, lifts me when my hands won’t hold the rails by the bath. Kisses me, even. Sometimes puts his hands here, where he used to.” Comically, Thea gestures to where the velvet collar of her dressing gown crosses her breast. “Not even a stroke could diminish me in that respect, you understand. Then he puts me to bed, but I remember I’ve forgotten this drug or that one, and I call him, to save myself the effort and pain of fetching it myself—oh, Helen, the humiliation of it, it will kill me long before my body does; he puts me to bed, and it is as if he can live then, with me out of the way, with the old woman out of sight. Then all night he sits up reading over his manuscripts, making notes, bringing home books and letters. Sometimes he’d say: ‘Melmoth the Witness is watching me!’—making a joke of it, for my sake. ‘I’ve been a bad boy!’ he’d say, and laugh. But it’s hardly unknown, is it, to laugh most when you’re most afraid?”
Watch Helen: something alters. Until this moment Melmoth has had less currency than fairy tales, for she is newly acquired. Cinderella, Bluebeard, Peter Pan: these are bred in the bones, and accepted without hesitation. Melmoth has not had this luxury, but must instead announce herself to the imagination; must rap three times upon the door. And it is now—as Thea rests her head against her chair, as somewhere beyond the window a man calls for his dog—that Helen at last hears the rapping on the door, and opens it, and Melmoth walks into the room.
“I saw him at the library,” says Helen, reaching for her scarf (she has grown cold). “Photographing books, like he always did. Wasn’t it research, for some paper he had in mind?”
“Some paper!” Thea laughs, and attempts to reach for notebooks and sheaves of paper half-concealed beneath a pile of novels (Helen tilts her head, and reads: The Rider on the White Horse; and on another book, in rubbed gilt type, -ERT MATURIN), but her arm falters midway. There is a small frustrated cry cut off before it could meet sympathy. “Get those, would you? The notebooks, the papers—take a look, go on.” She gives her friend a look which is very like the shifty, not quite pleasant smile with which Karel handed her the Hoffman document. Does Helen pause, then? Oh, a little, perhaps—there is a certain slowness, a certain reluctance you might say, in the extended hand. “I will,” she says. “But you haven’t told me yet what happened tonight: who was here, and where Karel has gone.”
Thea frowns. “It’s hard for me to say. My tablets make me so drowsy . . . and we had been cross with each other: I wanted to go out—I said I could walk a little, if he’d push me as far as the square. I could hear the bock piping and I wanted to say hello to old Master Hus. And Karel wouldn’t take me! He’d found something, he said. Something about a watching woman: in Essex, of all places. So then I had wine, which I shouldn’t, and I said: ‘If I am losing you to some other woman you ought to tell me about her, at least.’ And he did.”
She stops then, and raises her head, which is for a moment as it always was, in the old days when she stood naked on the banks of Mácha’s Lake in winter and jumped in. “I can tell you,” she said. “If you like.”
“Yes, tell me,” said Helen, for what she wants above all else is to restore, even if briefly, the Thea who could command a room
for thirty minutes as if she’d never left the courtroom.
“Another cup, then, and light a candle—and you’re certain, are you, that nobody else is here—not out in the hallway perhaps?” Another cup, and a candle obediently lit; and Thea’s voice grows faintly louder, as though to address jurors sleeping at the back.
“You know the legend by now, I should think: that a group of women went to Christ’s tomb to anoint his body—but as any good Sunday School child will tell you, the stone was rolled back, and he was gone. Women being what we are, they ran at once to tell the menfolk, who thought it all idle gossip, as well they might. And among those women was the one they now call Melmoth, or Melmotte, or Melmat, and I suppose any one of a dozen names; and she flatly denied what she’d seen, and said her friends had cooked it all up between them. So she was cursed not with death, but with deathlessness: to wander the earth until Christ returns—one hopes, for her sake, in a forgiving frame of mind—condemned always to appear where all’s most cheerless, dark and deadly.”
“Cruel, if true,” says Helen lightly.
“Well: that’s the Almighty all over, isn’t it?” Thea contemplates her empty cup; then looks beyond Helen down the lamp-lit hall. Then she says, “Karel told me all this the day that Hoffman died, and he brought that document home. We laughed and said: isn’t it strange, that we never heard the story as children? But after that, he left earlier for the library every day, and came home later every night, collecting books and papers that had nothing to do with his usual line of work—look, see for yourself! A letter dated 1637, a novel nobody’s read, a journal by some artist neither you nor I ever heard of! Then he stopped going out at all, only sat here poring over his books. Once I caught him stroking the pages, murmuring at them, as if he thought they might answer him back! He wouldn’t eat. He smoked until he was sick and he drank in the mornings. Then—would you know what I meant if I said: it was as if he longed for what frightened him most?” Helen thinks of Karel seated with her in the café, shivering in his blue silk shirt—of how he’d flinched at each opening of the door, but had also worn a yearning look. “I would,” she said. “Yes, I’d know what you meant.”
