Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  A woman had taken a military jacket from a soldier and wore it over a white cotton blouse. She said: “Look at him. Collaborator! Pig!” She leaned forward, and spat in the face of the man.

  “Show me,” said the official.

  “Show him,” said the woman. The crowd loosed its grip on the captive who dropped to his knees. His head had been partially shaved. There were cuts on his arm in the shape of the swastika. He was not young. He raised his head, and helplessly I moved towards him, because it was Polizist Novák. His uniform was gone and so was his ruddy, benevolent look: he was bewildered and gaunt. I could not have said then, and cannot say now, why this policeman roused in me more pity and terror than the death of my father and the mutilation of my mother, but there was a sensation in my heart like the breaking of a twig underfoot. I said: “Novák!” but my voice was very quiet because my throat was dry, and he didn’t hear me. The Czech official said, “Do you know this man? Who is he?”

  Novák looked at me. He was empty as a burned building. Slowly I understood that I had his life in my pocket—that it was in my possession, like the stone I carried with me. If I called him Polizist Novák as my mother used to do, he would be damned for a German, as I was damned, and boys would come and tie cloths soaked in petrol around his neck and they would set him alight. If I called him Rotný Novák, he would be taken for a Czech, and he would be saved.

  “Novák!” I said—and at that moment the morning sun was extinguished as if a great black cloth had been thrown over it. There were no stars. Jackdaws descended from every quarter, disgorged from window ledges and chimney pots and other roosting places, all asking over and over why? why? how? why?, all looking brightly at me with blue eyes—and Melmoth was coming implacably down the street. She came not enclosed in a pillar of smoke but rimmed with light, with a bright, bluish light like that from a gas flame. Her robes lifted around her as she walked—thousands of yards, it seemed to me, of fine black cloth, so fine it ran like liquid into the gutters as she walked. Shadows shifted across her face and her eyes were wide and they were fixed on me. Her feet were bare and bleeding and the Prague streets were marked with footprints in blood. As she walked she left stillness in her wake: every woman and man she passed was arrested in the moment of her passing. I do not mean they were seized, like insects caught in amber—I might have preferred that. What I mean is that each went on doing precisely what they had been doing as she passed—that and only that—like damned souls hopelessly carrying out the same tasks over and over. So I saw a child in a doorway go on being struck with a woman’s shoe; saw a girl go on being tormented by men that busied themselves under her skirt; saw a soldier go on being stripped of his clothes.

  She came near and I smelt her then—sweet as lilies in summer, rotten as spoiled meat. I was not afraid. Had I not been waiting for her all my life—ever since I’d seen the farmer by the Eger leaving out his chair? She came slowly to me and she said nothing and then she fell to her knees at my feet. Her eyes hung in the bones of her face like spheres of smoky glass and they contained every wickedness imagined or acted on. Then she spoke and her voice was soft and appealing. “Josef!” she said, “what are you doing here—what do you think you will do?” She pointed at Novák, who groveled, and grunted, as if he might well go on groveling and grunting until the sun was extinguished for the final time. “Little Hoffman, have I watched you so long, only to leave you here in the street? Have I waited this long, only to see you burned before my eyes?”

  I said, “How can I let him die? He is my friend.”

  “Your friend?” She stood, and she began to laugh, and I cannot say whether she towered above me or whether in my guilt and confusion I’d dwindled down until I was only an ant awaiting her heel. “Your friend?” she said. “And how do you treat your friends, little Hoffman—of what does your friendship consist?” All the inky robes trailing about her began to reach for me, as if they had a spiteful intelligence—they wrapped around me and I found I was in her embrace. Her arms were bolted iron gates. My cheek was against her breast and she was soft there and the scent of lilies was strong. She said, “Shall I show you where your friends are now? Shall I show you what your friendship does?” I began to faint against her until I was almost dreaming and in my dream I saw a railway track that ended at the gate of Theresienstadt and all around it no grass grew. I saw barracks emptied of their military men, and filled with children who had the faces of old women. I saw a boy with his head shaved for lice stoop to pick a horse chestnut from the gutter and saw him struck five times with a club for this breach of the law, and I saw a starved girl brought before the authorities because someone had heard her sing, and I knew this boy and this girl were Franz and Freddie Bayer. I saw many filthy bunks in a filthy room and in one of them the starved girl shook so that her iron bed rattled against the wall and someone brought her a dish of potato peelings to eat. Then I saw a train pulling carts like those for cattle along that railway track and I saw a hand coming out between wooden slats and the hand was bruised and I knew it, and I knew that I had rejected it and I knew hell waited where the track ended, and I knew that I’d helped build that hell as surely as if I’d put stone on stone. “Do you see, little Hoffman,” the woman said, and her arms were a jail cell I have never left. “Do you see what you did to your friends?” Then I saw the girl in her iron bed and something like filthy water ran out of her mouth, slowly like rain running from a gutter pipe, and she had once worn pink satin under her school skirt and read books her mother had forbidden her and she had once danced with me as the radio played and she had liked her coffee with sugar and cream and she was sixteen years old and on the 19th of August 1942 she had been murdered not with passion or anger in the ordinary decent human way but by a great engine turning and I had been a cog in the machine.

  Then Melmoth said, “Who else will know your wickedness, as I know it? Who else has seen what it is in your heart, as I have seen it? What if they knew, little Hoffman? What if they saw?”

  I said, “I am damned, then.”

  “Damned! Oh yes: you are damned!” She released me, and began to laugh. “Don’t you see what punishment awaits you?” I looked and everywhere I looked the punishments went on all around me, still burning, still tormenting, and I knew somewhere knives were being sharpened and they were knives meant for me.

  “If I am punished, it would only be just,” I said, but I did not feel courageous.

  “Do flames burn less, because they are just? Are knives blunted because the cut is righteous? Do you think you will suffer less because of your sin?” She touched me and I felt a pain in my wrist. She had done nothing but put her forefinger on me, but it was as if my arm were pinned to the ground and someone had quietly and calmly crushed it with rocks. I discovered then that pain could obliterate everything that made me human and reduce me to something lower than an animal. I would have done anything to escape it—I would have bitten out my tongue—then she took away her hand, and the pain was gone. As I stood gasping in the street Melmoth did not tower over me any more. She was only as tall as I was tall and her eyes were cool and calm, and when she spoke to me it was shyly and quietly as if she were afraid I might turn and run. She said, “Josef, little one, little Hoffman”—she touched me again and her hand was small and soft on my arm—“Josef, don’t you pity me? Have you never known what it is to be lonely? I am the one survivor of a wrecked ship adrift on a tideless sea! I am the sole star shining among all the burned-out galaxies! Who is there to bring me water when I’m thirsty? Who is there to answer when I speak?” I had never heard until then, and have never heard since, a voice more seductive, more appealing: I believe I would have hanged myself from the Bayer sign if she had asked me to. “Josef, my dear one, my heart,” she said. “Come away with me now. Come away and be my companion. What is left for you but suffering? What is left but the just outcome of all your iniquity?”

  I looked at Novák then. All the while Melmoth had been speaking he had simply gone on grov
eling there in the street—gone on bleeding, gone on sobbing, while all around him women and men went on looking at him with hard avaricious faces. I said, “But what then will become of Polizist Novák? How can I leave him here alone to be beaten in the street!”

  Her voice was still more soft, still more appealing: she whispered against my cheek: “But what can you do? You are only a schoolboy—let it be! Ah, Josef, my dear, my longed for: take my hand—I’ve been so lonely!” She held out her hand and the temptation was like every hunger pang I’d ever felt tormenting me at once. If I took the hand she offered I could not say what lay in store, but it would not be this: the cruelty, the struck match, the child tormented in the doorway. I reached towards her and her face altered and I saw triumph in it, and a blue light shining in her smoky eyes. Then I put my hand in my pocket and felt the stone there. It had worn smooth from my touch and was heavy. I looked at Novák—I looked at the fires burning in the streets, and the child being struck with a woman’s shoe—I looked at the officials with their sharpened pencils and their sheets of paper and I looked at the truck with its engine idling at the end of the road. I said, “No.” It was the sole act of courage of my life. “No,” I said. “I won’t go with you. I will stay and help my friend.”

  Instantly she changed. All the softness and all the appeal left her and I was afraid. She was gaunt and tall and terrible to look at: her mouth was red and wide and her unblinking eyes flickered and blood pooled at her feet, and I saw how they bled from places where bone broke skin. “Stupid boy!” she said, and she was shrieking now, and jackdaws were all around her like flies around a dead dog: “Stupid boy! Do you think you can atone for all you’ve done? Do you think there’s enough blood in you to settle the debt? I have seen your punishment—I have already been the witness!” I could not bear to hear more, or look at her—I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to my ears and when I took them away I heard a man’s voice and the Czech official was impatient and he was saying, “Do you know this man? Do you know him? Who is he?” I looked. Melmoth had gone and it was morning again. It was morning, and the beaten child was toppled on the step and didn’t move. It was morning, and my mother looked dully down at the wound in her heel. It was morning, and Novák was on his knees, and he was looking at me.

  “I know him,” I said. I ran forward and hit Novák hard and when my hand came away there was blood between my fingers. “Traitor!” I said. I spat at him. “You betrayed your fatherland! You should hang!”

  The official tapped his pen on his sheet of paper. “What do you mean? What do you mean, traitor?”

  “He knew,” I said. “Who lived there, in that shop. He knew they were Jews and he did nothing. Who knows what else he did?” I spat at him again. “Pig!” I said. “Traitor! Nothing but a dirty Slav!”

  “Is this true?” said the Czech official. He said it mildly. Did I think Novák would look at me with gratitude? Did I think he would understand what it was I had done? The woman in her military jacket shook Novák and said, “Cat got your tongue, man? Is it true?”

  Dumbly as a dazed animal Novák nodded and nodded. In Czech he said: “I am Rotný Novák. I did what I could. I did what I thought was right.” The woman made a sound which was part boredom and part disgust, and released his collar. He pitched forward onto the street.

  The official looked at his paperwork. He looked at Novák. He looked at the woman, and at the hard vengeful faces of the crowd. He might have been my father totting up the day’s takings in the ledger. Then he shrugged and said, “His name is not here. Leave him, leave him.” Then he looked at me with such contempt I’ve worn it like a brand ever since. “On you go,” he said. So on we went, the little group of us, on to our punishment—my mother, limping, snuffling into the sleeve of her blouse, the man with the shaved head that bled from small cuts. Someone opened the doors of the truck at the end of the street. I looked back once. The crowd had begun to disperse. For the moment their anger was spent. Only one woman remained—young and very pretty, she wore a blue scarf in her hair. She stood beside Novák where he’d fallen and stirred at him with her foot as if he was just a pile of abandoned clothes. In the truck men and women and children sat quietly waiting. I was weak and someone had to help me in. There was no room for my mother. We drove away and left her there, waiting for somebody to come and tell her what to do. I never saw her again.

  So in time I too was taken to Theresienstadt, where the few Jews remaining had been freed from the typhus and the squalor within its walls, and there I lived in confinement for nineteen months and thirteen days, with all the men and women who had shared my crime. At all times I wondered if I walked where Franz and Freddie Bayer walked, and if I suffered as they suffered, and considered all my sorrows and my pains little but an afterthought. But I make no record of it. Let them be the song, and I the dying echo.

  Part 2

  Karel Pražan

  c/o John Bunyan House

  Bedford

  Dear Thea,

  As you see, I am in England. It’s cold, but not like the good clean Czech cold. It is simply wet, as if the whole place has been crying about something for weeks. For days I’ve been here in this room with pink wallpaper you can wipe clean, and pink curtains with a ruffle. Each morning the landlady makes toast like squares of white wool made slightly warm, which we eat with very thin sausages. I regret to tell you the English are not, to my mind at any rate, pleasing to the eye. The women have thick legs with bad circulation that makes the skin turn blue, and all the men at every age wear jeans and anoraks. Certainly I think you must be the best of your kind, as I have always known.

  My learned friend: I write to ask that you forgive me. I have been mad. I should like to blame Melmoth but we both know a man can’t be sent mad by a children’s story. Were you afraid I believed she was real, and was coming for me? Maybe I thought so sometimes. I was often drunk—I was always upset. My friend died, Thea! And worst of all, you have gone. They say love is not love, that alters when it alteration finds. Much as it pains me to tell you that your English poets are wrong, how can this be true? Love must change if its object changes. You don’t stand under a tree in winter when the branches are black and admire its green leaves and its shade. No, I don’t love you as I did because you’re not as you were. What I must know now is whether you will let me learn to love the Thea that remains. Don’t think I haven’t thought of you every day. Are you taking your tablets? Write down your medicine in the notebook I kept, and all the times you take it. You are stronger than you think. You could dress yourself if you believed you could do it. Is Helen caring for you? She is cold I know but good at heart, or knows her duties, which is perhaps even a better thing.

  So let me tell you what I did, and what I have been doing, and what I mean to do. When I left you I was confused and sick. What did we drink, Thea—how many bottles? Sometimes it seems to me someone was there—someone in black at the table pouring the wine and whispering terrible things to me while you slept in your chair—but of course it was only my thirst and all the Melmoth stories. I put things in my bag and got in a cab, and said to the driver: “I want to go to England.” I had England all muddled up with how you once were, as if you might be waiting for me at arrivals with your collar turned up, and that smile which I’m certain is different from all your other smiles when it’s only meant for me. I was sick in the cab and I had to pay him more for that. I had coffee at the airport and wrote you a card, and then I was on the plane and sick again, and the sickness cleared my head, so that when we landed I was almost myself again. It was past midnight. In England the airport was busy but also quiet and everywhere people were sleeping, so I put down my bag and thought I would sleep too, and in the morning decide what I should do. I put myself in a corner where I could smell coffee and the toilets being cleaned, and put my head on my bag and thought again of you, but then I heard a man shouting. All around me people were sitting up and looking around. Everybody is nervous these days, aren’t they? The shouting
wasn’t angry. It was sad and hopeless and his voice was rough as though he’d been shouting for a long time, and knew nobody was listening, but all the same couldn’t stop. I stood up and saw a black man with white hair walking in the way old Albína walks: swaying, like his hips didn’t work. He had a chain around his waist. There was nothing around his wrists or his ankles, only his waist, and the chain went out in front of him and a white man, an Englishman I suppose, pulled him along like a dog. This man was not a policeman or a soldier: didn’t have a uniform, or a hat, or a number on his shoulder. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and black trousers and a blue tie, and an identity card around his neck on a blue strap. Another man walked next to him and he had an identity card too on the same blue strap, but he had put it in his pocket. He had a clipboard and on this clipboard one sheet of white paper, which he looked at as if there were instructions written down and he wasn’t sure what it was he was supposed to do. They walked quickly as if they were busy and ashamed, and they tugged and pulled at the chained man because he could only walk slowly, and because of this he shouted, “Regardez-moi! Regardez-moi!” The two men said nothing. It was as if they heard nothing at all, and I think what made me angry was that if they were not wearing the uniform of the police they must have been doing this terrible thing not for the law, but for money.

  Thea, you know I’ve never been brave. I like to be comfortable and quiet—I like good shoes and excellent wine. But anger went up in me very fast and very hot, like lighting a match. How could these two men, who looked as if they had no more authority than someone come to read the gas meter, have such power? Then I saw coming close behind a group of young people holding signs. There was a girl with a nose ring and a pink scarf and two boys in checked shirts, and another in a dirty coat. The signs said NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL and the young people and their signs looked helpless and useless. I asked if they’d spoken to the man, but of course they had little French, and knew only his name, which was Michel, and that he was being flown to Kinshasa and didn’t want to go. Suddenly—even there, even in the very bright concourse of a London airport—I thought of Melmoth the Witness. I imagined her standing beside me with all her black robes winding around her legs. I imagined I heard her breathing hard as if she’d walked a long way to reach that place at that moment—I imagined looking down and seeing her bare feet, and blood under them, on the hard gray floor. All this seemed so real to me that I was amazed when I looked up and there was nobody there, just an English girl with a nose ring and a scarf and a painted sign trying not to cry. So I ran forward and I walked beside the chained man for a minute or two, spoke to him in French and told him my name, and asked him who these people were and what they were doing. He spoke to me quickly as if he had it all stored up and now everything could come pouring out. The men ignored me for a minute or two, but then lost their patience and said, “Sir, I must ask you to step back.” I told them they were welcome to ask, but they had no authority over me, and could not tell me who I could speak to, and who I could not. They rattled the chain. They punished him to punish me. He looked at me and his eyes were wide. He lifted up his hands and I knew he was telling me that nobody could help him now: that there was nothing anybody could do. They pulled the chain again, sharply, like you pull the lead of a dog that won’t sit when it’s told. Then I heard the English girl shout that the police were here, and I saw two men and a woman with weapons coming slowly down the concourse. They didn’t hurry. They looked bored. But their guns were huge and black. So the flame of my anger went out shamefully quick. I watched the police surround the man and he was shouting. Then all of them were gone through a door that had no sign on it, and I noticed there was a phone beside the door, the old-fashioned kind with a coiled wire, and the receiver had been taken off and was hanging right down to the dirty floor.