Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  “Well then”—the woman offers her arm. She is no longer shy-seeming, but has instead a kind of practiced kindliness. It occurs to Helen that she is not, of course, a nun, but a nurse, if perhaps one called to the vocation by the Almighty. “Well then—take my arm: I’d be glad of your company. Only you must tell me if your knee is sore. The patella is a tricky bone.”

  Certainly a nurse, then! Helen thinks of Thea—of her weak uncertain gait, her saucers of tablets, her clumsy hands. She briefly takes the woman’s arm, stands (she is, after all, a little dizzy), and releases it. “I’ll be all right, I think; but if you are going that way anyway—” At the door, the woman holds back the heavy curtain, with a small gleaming smile, as if to say: I will keep you from peril. Helen believes it. What danger can come to a woman in such very sensible shoes? She looks back at the dark church—at the silvered mirrors, and the angels with their empty scrolls—and sees a jackdaw on the windowsill outside. It inclines its head in the gentlemanly fashion of its kind; Helen inclines hers in return.

  The snowfall has been thick and swift. Prague seems sleepy now beneath its freshly laundered eiderdown. The bustle of tourists is thinned to clusters of bright coats on the thresholds of cafés, and all the beggars have packed up the tools of their trade. Adaya—in a long coat of navy blue which conveys more than ever the effect of a nurse on duty—says, hesitantly, as if unwilling to trespass: “You live here?”

  “I have lived here almost twenty years.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It seemed the most suitable place at the time.” Helen pats her knee, but the bleeding has stopped as if her blood has frosted over.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Is anybody happy?”

  “Ah, well. It is not a happy city.” This startles Helen, who is accustomed to feeling that she alone is not swept up in Prague’s merriment, its beauty. “Look over there,” says Adaya. Her gloved hand gestures down towards the river. “Did anyone ever tell you about the priest who took the queen’s confession, and would not tell the king her secrets, and was tortured for it over many days? They drowned him, in the end.”

  “Still,” says Helen. “It got him a sainthood, at any rate.”

  “Yes: and a crown of gold stars, as they say. And then over by Wenceslaus Square, you know, Jan Palach burned himself alive in political protest. Do you think he meant to die?”

  This melancholy company is curiously consoling. It is restful to be exempted from the obligation to find, in every spire and pinnacle of the mother of cities, reason to wonder and delight. “Oh—look—” Adaya pauses for a moment. She gestures with the toe of a well-worn shoe to a place on the pavement which has been cleared of snow. “A stumbling stone.” These are familiar to Helen, who has seen them shining among the cobbles many times before: brass plates that mark places where men and women and children were taken from their homes to be murdered in the camps. She looks. The inscription is very small, and somewhat rubbed, and she is not particularly minded to stoop and read. Adaya removes her glasses. She says: “Murdered in Theresienstadt, 19th of August 1942. And only just sixteen. I wonder, when God permitted us to fall, if He knew we’d fall so far.”

  “Sixteen,” says Helen. It is so melancholy, so beyond her comprehension, that she is chastened out of indifference. She bends (her knee aches) to read the name, and when she has done so she takes in a breath which is so sharp and so cold it seems to deposit a coating of hoar frost on her tongue.

  “Is it your knee?” says Adaya. She holds out a steadying hand.

  “No,” says Helen. “No, it’s only that I’ve seen that name before.” She steps back, and looks at the windows behind the stumbling stone. It is a shop, rather handsome, and the blinds are down. It is all as she thought it would be.

  “Ah.” Her companion hesitates. “Well, you have looked, which is all that could be asked of you now. Let’s go on.” She holds out her arm. “Let’s go.”

  Thea answers the door on her feet. She is drunk, in the perfectly calibrated fashion of the expert drinker: voluble without indiscretion, witty without cruelty. She wears a dressing gown in scarlet brocade with collars and pockets of grass green, and a green cravat is loosely wrapped around her throat. On her head: a large and shapeless velvet cap, such as a Tudor page might wear; in her hand, which very slightly shakes: wine in a gilded Moser glass; around her neck: a green moldavite on a silver chain. Her small feet are white and weak against the pine floor; the left turns in somewhat, the toes curled back towards the sole. Everything about her is both grand and disordered—it is evident it has taken time and effort to dress, and that in many respects she has failed. The cord of her dressing gown is coming loose, and there is nothing under it.

  “Helen Franklin!” she says. It is necessary for her to lean against the wall if she is to give her customary embrace, her usual double kiss with its smell of green leaves, and as she does so Helen looks instinctively behind her, down the dim hall with its cabinet of glass, for the wheelchair. It is there, on the ramp. It is tipped on its side, and one wheel slowly spins. “You have brought a friend?” This is delivered with a formidable scowl intended to convey that there is nothing Thea likes better than an uninvited guest.

  “I am Adaya,” says the young woman. “How do you do?” Shyly she holds out her hand. Helen observes how she takes in the flesh-colored splints on Thea’s wrists, and how unevenly they are fastened. The eyes behind their thick lenses rove down the lamp-lit hall and take account of the toppled wheelchair, the gray ramp.

  “Absolutely delighted to meet you,” says Thea. “Thrilled you felt you could come by. Did you bring anything to drink?” She contemplates her glass, which is empty. “Pleased to have company, actually. I have had nightmares. I am a maiden in a nightgown: there is something squatting on my chest.”

  “I don’t think you should be standing,” says Adaya. “You ought not to be standing. Won’t you take my arm?”

  “I do not need your help!” Then she overbalances—reaches for support—encounters Adaya’s offered arm. “It is merely the drink, you understand,” she says, allowing herself to be guided down the hall. The velvet cap has fallen on the mat. Helen picks it up, and puts it on the cabinet of glass.

  “I quite understand.”

  “A very good Tokay, as it happens.”

  “I have never had it, myself.”

  “Have you not? What a terrific shame! I shall give you a bottle.” Then Thea takes in her visitor’s muddy tights, which gather and sag at the ankle; the shabby open coat, and beneath it the heavy skirt and plain cloth of her blouse. “What can you be wearing? Extraordinary ensemble! Helen, where did you find this young person?”

  Helen watches. Adaya—with that curious combination of hesitancy and professional skill which is so appealing—contrives to deposit Thea in an armchair, and having done so claps her hands together with the satisfaction of a job well done, and smiles. She looks briefly very young. It might have amused Helen, were she not still seeing, shining at the toe of Adaya’s shoe, the stumbling stone set in the pavement, and the name that was written there.

  “I fell over,” she says. “I fell over, and hurt my knee, and Adaya happened to see me. That’s all.”

  “Where? Where did you fall? I don’t believe it.”

  “A concert, in the mirror chapel,” says Adaya. “Do you know it? It was Dvořák—Song to the Moon.”

  “A concert—Helen? Dvořák? Now I know that you are playing tricks, and I in my dotage, and dependent on the kindness of friends. Be serious, now.”

  “I need to sit down,” says Helen. “Thea, may we at least turn on the light?”

  “Illuminate, by all means,” says Thea; and then the room is warm and bright, and almost as it has always been: the white walls obscured by a lifetime’s accrual of prints, etchings, paintings, and tapestries; the Ercol table on the scarlet rug; the pair of armchairs set side by side, one of which is empty. All the same, there is the air of a home dispirited—a peace lily in
a porcelain bowl has gone too long unwatered and there are plates of lonely half-eaten meals scattered about. Thea has taken her barrister’s wig from its box, and it is now huddled, as if frightened, beneath a chair. On the table, there is a pile of books and papers: a document entitled The Testimony of Nameless and Hassan; a lined notepad on which is written, in Thea’s shaky hand, Melmoth—Evidence for the Prosecution; a clothbound hardback with Melmoth the Wanderer written on the spine.

  “How are you coping?” says Helen, with that diffident manner which seems to her best suited to Thea’s pride.

  “Aren’t I dressed? Aren’t I fed?”

  “You look wonderful. But, all the same”—Helen gestures to a teacup which has acquired a skin of mold—“I wonder if you could use help, now and then. I was so grateful for Adaya today.” She makes a show of rubbing her knee.

  “You have muscular atrophy and peripheral neuropathy.” Adaya has removed her gloves and coat and is watching Thea. A steel watch is pinned above her narrow breast. She speaks mildly, but with authority: it is not quite possible to recall her old shy manner. “You have foot drop on the left, and your balance is compromised. Have you applied for state social support?”

  Helen watches Thea attempt to be affronted, but it has wearied her—the valiant absurd attire, the walk to the door, the Tokay in its gilded glass—and she leans against the armchair acquiring, it seems, a decade in a moment. “To be honest,” she says, “I don’t know what to do.” It is very unlike her, this moment of defeat. Helen recalls all at once the messages that brought her here: Helen come here now.

  “What has happened?” she says. “Is it Karel?” A look of such childlike sadness passes over her friend’s face that she attempts a little levity. “Did Melmoth get him in the end, huh? Has she taken him away?” She closes her eyes, and sees behind her lids a woman—tall, severe, unspeaking; guiding Karel Pražan by the hand; down on the banks of the Vltava perhaps, or some miles distant already: long gone north, until the Vltava ran into the Elba; to Wittenberg and Magdeburg and Hamburg, bleeding through his lambswool socks.

  Thea looks swiftly at her uninvited guest, who says, without the inflexion of surprise or query, “Melmoth.”

  “Just our little game of make-believe,” says Thea. “Nothing to worry about. Sit down, won’t you? You’re making me nervous. No, my dear Helen. Turns out it’s not Melmoth’s fault. Turns out I have only myself to blame.” She reaches into her pocket—it takes effort, this, and Helen and Adaya each for a moment look away—and withdraws a postcard. It is torn at the centre by only an inch, as if she has attempted to destroy it, but lacks the strength. She hands it to Helen. It is cheap, and evidently not chosen with the recipient in mind: an orange stein of beer, very badly drawn, perched among the castle spires. It was posted from Prague. “Read it,” says Thea, and Helen does:

  I am at the airport. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ve gone. I’m sorry. Everything is different now. I am not myself, you are not yourself. For a long time I thought SHE was coming for me but it was only ever shadows on the floor. I’m sorry. I loved you.

  “You will note, no doubt, being yourself a student of language, the tense.” Thea’s valiance in the face of defeat moves Helen almost to tears: these, she stems, as she has taught herself to do. “Loved, he says. Well, things fall apart, don’t they? All things tend towards entropy. I thought, when we met: I have fifteen years on him. It will not last. But Helen”—Thea’s courage fails her—“he may have gone, but I am still here, and now what am I supposed to do with all this love?”

  “I think perhaps you shouldn’t drink any more,” says Adaya, with a watchful eye on Thea’s hand, which moves towards the wine bottle.

  “All right, dear child. All right.” Helen is startled to see that Thea, by no means the most biddable of women, returns her questing hand to her lap.

  “I am sorry,” says Helen. What more is to be said? Karel has gone—Thea is left alone—she is sorry for it: these are the facts.

  “So am I! So am I!” Thea begins to cry. Adaya surveys her. It seems she has caught her tears by sitting close by: they shine behind her glasses. Then she stands, and begins to gather the moldy teacups, the plates on which crusts of bread have begun to curl.

  “Do you think,” says Thea, turning to Helen, “that if he really is gone—if he never comes back—I’ll stop loving him, too?”

  “Probably not,” says Helen.

  “No. Probably not. Well”—she wipes her nose on her brocade sleeve—“perhaps Melmoth will come for me, eh? Think she can manage a wheelchair?”

  “I expect so,” says Helen; and it may seem to the observer that she is a little distracted, a little cool. The fact is that her mind is elsewhere. Lovers’ tiffs are not of great interest to her, even when concerning her friends: she has so long left behind that part of her life that she might as well be asked to summon up enthusiasm for children playing games in well-tended gardens. She is fond of Thea, she is fond of Karel, she wishes them no ill—she is moved by Thea’s tears, her weariness, and hopes Karel will return. But what is all that to the follower whose footfall she thinks—even now, as Adaya pours a glass of water on the dying peace lily—she hears in the hall? What is that to what she saw on the stumbling stone in the street? What is that to her own guilt, which weighs her down, and will one day break her back?

  “She’s right, you know.” She gestures to Adaya, who has gone now into the kitchen, with the bustling, contented air of a woman for whom strangers’ kitchens are familiar ground. “You ought to contact social services; or perhaps hire a private nurse. I wonder if we might perhaps ask Adaya—”

  “I don’t want charity, and I don’t need staff!” Thea is affronted.

  “All the same,” says Helen. “You do need a little help. For example: I wish you’d tie your dressing gown tighter.” She smiles to show she means no ill, bends beside Thea’s chair to tie the cord. There is a smell about her that she recognizes—a body unwashed, growing stale from disuse; it summons a memory which is instantly suppressed.

  “So then: what about asking her?” says Thea. She watches Adaya return with a cloth, with which she wipes the table, the sideboard. “She seems to be some sort of nurse—she may know someone.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” Helen touches her knee through the tear in her trousers. Her flesh has sealed over in a scab. “I thought she might be a nun. I wonder why we don’t ask?”

  And why don’t they ask? It is curious, this placid acceptance of the woman’s presence, as if she’d been expected all along. She disappears with the cloth—returns without it—sits beside Thea with her hands folded in her lap. “What time do you take your medication?” she says. The lenses of her glasses are occluded with mist: she has been washing something with hot water. Thea gives Helen a quick, baffled look—what business is it of hers?—but says, “With an evening meal, generally, or I feel sick.”

  “And have you eaten?”

  “I don’t want to eat.”

  “I really think, you know, that you should.” Again, that baffled look from Thea to Helen—again, the acquiescent response.

  “I wouldn’t mind some toast.”

  The woman hesitates then, and looks down at her folded hands. It is as if her apparently professional interest in them both—in muscular atrophy, in knees requiring stitches, in the necessity of taking distalgesics with food—has faltered, and she has realized that she has imposed herself on strangers. Helen pities her. She is young, and uncertain of herself: she has merely tried to be kind. She says, “I think that would be a good idea.” She raises her eyebrows at Thea—Why not? Why not let her help?

  But it is not Thea’s habit to accept help without seeing to it that the balances weigh even. She looks, with kindly disdain, at Adaya’s muddy tights, her scuffed shoes, the cheap gold cross on the silver chain. “It seems to me,” she says, “that you could do with a job.”

  Adaya looks up, and Helen watches a flush of pleasure cross her cheek, and it
occurs to her for the first time that perhaps she, too, is lonely. “You would like me to stay? I already have work,” she says. “But I have time for more. Yes: I would like it very much.”

  “Well then!” Thea is triumphant (but the postcard is clutched in her right hand). “Well then! We shall see to it. Your yoke will be easy, and your burden light. Two rounds of toast with honey, please, and all the Naproxen my constitution will allow.” Adaya stands without speaking—still more briskly, still more at home—and returns to the kitchen. There are the consoling noises of a kettle filled, and of a knife against a board.

  “Well then,” says Helen. She is relieved. Now that help has been acquired, and far more competently than she might have been able to provide, she is able to see Thea once again as she always was: merely her friend. “I am so sorry,” she says. “About Karel—about all this.” She gestures around the room. For all the neatness instigated by Adaya, it has a dreary, half-empty look, like the windows of a shop gone bankrupt.

  “Ah, well.” Thea’s courage fails her: she unfolds the postcard, and clumsily wipes at it with her thumb. “There are worse things.” In Adaya’s absence, it seems possible to return to the matter at hand. She nods at the documents on the table. Her face alters: there is again that mischievous, not quite pleasant look which Karel had worn as he first showed her the scuffed leather folder with its gilded monogram. “What have you read? Have you read the Hoffman document? Horrid little boy, wasn’t he?”

  “Only the first part.” (Again, she sees the stumbling stone.) “This morning I read Sir David Ellerby’s letter.”

  “My God! That one!” Thea shudders. “I will never have lilies in the house again.”

  “Even though it can only be legend—even though it is only something made up of fear and rumor and guilt—you almost think, don’t you, that one day you might look up and see her there?” (Again, Helen hears the footsteps of her follower.)