Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  The young people with their signs came and spoke to me. I liked them. They were full of energy and a kind of anger which was somehow more excited than despairing, though God knows there is always cause to despair. They had something I lost a long time ago—the belief that they were doing what was right and that if they failed this time they would win out in the end. They asked me what the man had said. I told them he’d been a mechanic, and that in the town where he lived he’d often be beaten because they found out his lovers had all been men. He was never beaten badly or until he thought he might die, but so often and over so many years that his hips and his legs were weak and stiff and his hands couldn’t hold his tools, and he couldn’t work. He put up with it until a boy he loved had been killed by his own mother, who was a pastor, and thought him devil-possessed—so he came to England, but was kept for months in a kind of jail until they told him he had to go home. Once he had a fight with another man and because of this he was marked as dangerous (I thought about the man in the white shirt looking at the clipboard with its piece of white paper), and so they pulled him through the airport on a chain, even though he walked like an old man.

  The girl with the nose ring started crying again. The others comforted her, and so did I, and they didn’t seem to wonder who this old man was who patted her shoulder and gave her a handkerchief. They made me think of my students, who are so young and look at the road ahead of them happily, having no idea that the road narrows and turns back on itself, and goes through dark places, and is covered all over with things to trip you up and break your ankles. Then because they were young, and everything for them is possible and everything is easy, they took me with them to a fast-food place still open where the lights were very bright. They propped their signs against their chairs and ate fried chicken and began to plan what they’d do next. Oh, I see you laughing now as you picture me drinking Coke at a plastic table! But it all seemed natural and right. They’d mistaken me for someone good. They thought I cared, like they cared—they thought we were all of one mind. And because I have been mad, and lost—because you are gone—even, I think, because of Melmoth—I let myself be taken by the flood. It seems they are part of a student group protesting the detention of asylum seekers which (so they tell me) is neither legal nor just. Two have been handed suspended jail sentences for acts of civil disobedience; another broke his arm scaling a wall in Calais. Between them they speak Arabic and Farsi, a little German, a few phrases of French, a fair amount of Portuguese. That I myself speak four languages seems to them little short of miraculous. I asked them where they were going next, and they told me something was happening soon at a detention centre where women are kept. There would be hundreds of them, they told me, demanding it be closed and all the captive women set free. Many terrible things happened in there: girls who’d been raped as punishment in wars would wake in the night and find English men in their room watching while they sleep, smiling or something worse. Sometimes women try and hang themselves or jump from high places and are mocked by the guards when they do. Often they don’t understand how it can be that they have done nothing wrong, but are imprisoned, and this alone is enough to break their spirits and make them mad. I thought of that poem you sometimes recited when you were homesick for England—Stands the Church clock at ten to three, and is there honey still for tea?—and wondered if maybe the plane had taken a wrong turn and put me down in some other country. Then I felt that anger again, the flare of the match, and I welcomed it. It is much better than what had been there before—just loss, loss, loss. The girl with the nose ring wiped her eyes on the handkerchief I gave her and said, “Come with us, why don’t you?” And I said, “All right then.” There were no more trains for four hours. So we found a corner and put down bags and coats and slept, and someone’s head was against my leg, and I didn’t mind, and I didn’t for one moment think: what am I doing, Dr. Karel Pražan, on the floor of an English airport, with a stranger’s coat for a pillow?

  So here I am. I can hear them talking downstairs: the landlady asks us to keep the noise down, but we take no notice. I have made a sign that says SET HER FREE. A coach is coming and they say there’ll be cameras and film crews waiting. Will it be any use? I don’t know. But I do know this. There is no Melmoth, no wanderer, no cursed soul walking for two thousand years towards her own redemption—there is nothing to fear in the shadows on Charles Bridge, in the jackdaws on the windowsill, in the way the shadows on the wall seem sometimes blacker than they should be (you are nodding—I know it—you have felt these things too!). No, Thea, there is no Melmoth, there is nobody watching, there is only us. And if there is only us, we must do what Melmoth would do: see what must be seen—bear witness to what must not be forgotten.

  They are calling me down. Goodbye for now, my learned friend.

  KAREL

  Helen Franklin, forty-two, neither short nor tall, her hair neither dark nor fair; on her feet, shoes of patent leather with a wet cherry shine, and a garnet bracelet on her wrist. About her shoulders, a cashmere stole, very fine, very black, with camphor and lavender in its cobweb folds; falling from collarbone to foot, a dress which is too long and too large: a tissue of tulle and silk, with something of the Weimar in the ribbon about the hips, in the tarnished dazzle of sequin and jet. Garnet also in her ears, around her throat (draw a little closer and note, in the light of that one bare bulb, the oxblood gleam in the stones). In each corner of the room—crouched on the bed, say, or tucked behind her neatly hanging dressing gown—uninvited visitors. Josef Hoffman in his new school shoes, with a cobblestone worn smooth in his pocket; Alice Benet, from whose burned hand there comes, very faintly, the scent of branded skin. At the window, Sir David Ellerby in a plain cloth coat whispers to Freddie Bayer, who is pale, and thin, but all the same is singing. On the windowsill, a jackdaw paying court in the fashion of its kind; beyond the window, five floors down, a watchful figure. It stands very still, very quiet—there is about it an implacable patience which would frighten Helen, were she to look beyond the glass and see it.

  There is a knock on the door. Here is Albína Horáková on her ninety-first birthday. She has abandoned her aluminium frame because it is not festive, and uses instead an ebony cane. It is insufficient: she grunts and shuffles on her worn-down hips and is breathless with the effort, but nonetheless her cheeks are flushed with a hectic good cheer and perhaps (let’s say) a thimbleful of liquor. “Aha!” she says. She surveys Helen—she tilts her head, as the jackdaw does, and winks one glittering eye. “See?” she says. “Not so ugly after all, huh? You will want to thank me I know, but it’s fine, it’s fine, this is thanks enough, the sight of you. You like it? You like my garnets?”

  They are not comfortable: they rasp at Helen’s wrist and throat. “I like them,” she says. And it is true: their beauty satisfies that part of her concealed beneath the bed; their discomfort satisfies her desire for punishment.

  “And what do you think of me, eh?” Her left hand shaking on the ebony cane, her right hand graciously extended, Albína Horáková bows to a depth of perhaps six inches. She is in white. It is an extraordinary, a pristine white: it is the white of garments dried on rocks under equatorial suns. Her dress is certainly silk. It is heavy, and has a paper rustle. It stands out above stiff underskirts and displays ankles gleaming in nylon above white buckled shoes. She wears, over her white silk dress, further white layers, within which Helen sees seed pearls, feathers, brooches of paste stones in silver settings. Above it all a velvet coat, snowy and thick, is fastened with buttons of ivory. What remains of her hair is clipped back with plastic pearls. Among all this her face is a walnut on a tablecloth. “Amazing,” says Helen, because she is indeed amazed—it has never occurred to her that Albína possesses a single garment which could not politely be worn to a wake. She examines herself and finds that her loathing of the old woman, which has always had in it the sourness of disgust, has become merely dislike.

  “Never much wanted to be a bride,” said Albína. “Di
dn’t have the stomach for it. Men, you know? Just big children pawing at you for this and for that and turning bad when they don’t get it. Still”—she makes a small adjustment to this brooch, that ribbon—“it was the clothes I liked the look of; and if not now then never, eh?”

  “I have a gift for you,” says Helen, and takes something from the desk (in order to do so she must move aside Franz Bayer, who shakes his bare shaved head three times). “Here,” she says, and passes over a bottle of scent in green paper.

  “Is it that you think I smell, hm?” says Albína, having fumbled it free of its wrapping. The bottle is small. It looks cheap against the velvet, the ropes of seed pearls.

  “You do, a little.”

  “Ha! You learning to tell the truth after all this time? All right, Helen Franklin, a spray for me and a spray for you, eh?” Helen is doused in jasmine water. The pleasure it gives her is troubling, and she is recalled to her need for penitence. What is she doing, dressed in cashmere and tulle, smelling of gardens at dusk, while rich sweet food and music is promised within the hour? She is revolted by her transgression, by how willingly she submits to small pleasures, and in contrition scratches her wrist and raises a welt on the skin. This does not pass Albína Horáková by. “What’s the matter with you, eh, myš? Face like a bowl of whey. You don’t want dinner? You don’t want music? Well, no choice. Do as you’re told.” With the end of her cane she straightens the cashmere stole. “I know what it is. You think Melmotka’s watching, huh? Why worry? What’s to be done, if she’s got her eye on you?”

  The jackdaw on the windowsill is speaking. Helen cannot hear it, of course: these are well-made apartments, with no expense spared on the double glazing. But she can see its beak move and knows what it is saying: why? why? how? why?

  Then: who?

  * * *

  Look—here is Prague’s golden chapel, its fairy palace, sporting a gilded crown. The National Theatre, twenty feet east of the Bridge of the Legions; its pit, stage, flies and curtain paid for out of the pockets of peasants, beggars, governments and princes. High up on the gable a winged victory not dressed for winter weather bestows a laurel wreath on every passerby, while her three bronze horses hurl themselves in panic from the roof. Meanwhile in the auditorium whole pantheons of minor gods are employed to carry lamps and plaster wreaths, and in well-heated rehearsal rooms sopranos drink hot water with honey and wash their tights in the sink.

  Over the road—over the icy cobbles, the tram tracks, the discarded tickets for the Torture Museum down on Celetná Street—Helen Franklin sits at a marble table and surveys her dining companions. Here is Albína Horáková, whose white garments have somewhat lost their lustre in the arduous journey on the Metro; she is pressing rouge from a tarnished compact into her gaunt old cheeks and has drunk two glasses of Bohemia sekt. Here is Thea, whose chair has been folded against the wall. She is sombre in a pleated dress shirt and someone has cut her curls. She looks rather young, very serious: a pageboy intent on his work; nonetheless it seems to Helen that her recent grief has lost some of its sharpness. Seated beside her, chair drawn solicitously close, is the young woman Adaya, who has made no concession at all to the festivity of the occasion, save that her blouse this evening has a faint blue stripe. (Her uninvited arrival—pushing Thea’s chair, a little shyly, across the threshold; smiling, more shyly still, at Helen in her trailing dress—delighted Albína Horáková, who can sniff out a fresh victim at fifty paces or fewer. “What’ve you got here then, eh, Thea? Replaced Karel quick as you like, I see! She looks like a nun, eh, but one who might change her mind. Ano, ano, sit then, I like your face, better than the little mouse here. I’ve seen enough of that, haven’t I? Ha!”)

  The habitual surliness of the attending waiter is tempered by the sight of these four women. Albína in her white velvet coat is coquettish and voluble, making girlish requests for another candle, another bottle in a silver bucket, the dishes of food she has ordered in advance. There is brawn set in aspic and garnished with thyme, and bowls of beef broth and liver dumplings in which leaves of parsley float. Baskets of rye bread have the scent of caraway; little dishes of butter soften in the heat. It is early, but a man in a white dinner jacket is merry enough to sit at the grand piano and play, with charming ineptitude, an Austrian waltz that slides soon into familiar songs: delighted, all his nearby companions lift bottles of beer and sing. Over the road the National Theatre is lit entirely gold, as if Midas brushed it as he bustled past on his way to kingly business elsewhere.

  “Well: I have news,” says Thea. She looks commandingly at her companions. “It is Karel,” she says.

  Helen looks at her glittering eye, at her smooth brushed cap of golden hair, and concludes that Karel Pražan has not, for example, been found on the banks of some distant river, walked to his death by the Witness.

  “I have had a letter,” says Thea. “Karel is in England. In—and Helen alone will understand my amusement—in Bedford.” Helen adjusts the garnets pricking at her neck, and cannot help but laugh.

  “What’s more,” says Thea, “he has fallen in with a group of students, and has decided that his lot in life, for the moment at least, is to protest the unlawful detention of migrants—Helen, are you choking? You should have a glass of water.” Helen drinks the glass of water that Adaya hands her. It is so absurd—Karel Pražan, with his fondness for fine tailoring, his distaste for unease, discovering a social conscience in some previously unopened compartment of his mind—that she cannot suppress her delight.

  Thea tears a piece of bread and the scent of caraway rises from the table. “He says: there is no Melmoth—there is no one to witness what’s done these days—and so he will simply have to do it himself.”

  “But why?” Adaya frowns. She flushes, very faintly, and butters Thea’s bread. “What use is it? What good does it do, to watch?”

  Thea loses for a moment her newly acquired merriment. “I don’t know,” she says. She is frowning. “But perhaps he feels he must do his duty, even if no good will come of it.” Then she turns towards Helen. “You haven’t slept,” she says. Her breath is sweet with brandy. “Melmoth, was it?”

  Helen looks up, and there is Josef Hoffman at an adjoining table, very old, making marks on his manuscript. “Something like that.” She presses her hands on the marble table, which is very cool. Then she says: “Someone is following me.”

  “Helen,” says Thea. She looks both reproving and secretly, maliciously thrilled. “I didn’t think you’d fall for it like Karel did—you, of all people! Oh, it’s distressing, I know, those stories, but hardly worse than the morning papers, and Melmoth herself—” she pauses.

  “You see!” Helen, laughing, taps her hand (on it, Thea wears a silver ring in the form of a grinning skull on which an industrious bee is perched). “You see! You can hardly bear to say the name yourself!” She allows herself a spoonful of beef broth, and Josef Hoffman goes on writing in the margins of his document.

  “No, it’s not Melmoth,” says Helen (though I wonder if you saw how swiftly, how secretly, she looked up at the open door?). “But Thea: someone is following me.”

  “Dip in your bread, like this!” says Albína, thickly buttering a slice; then raises her glass to the piano player and begins to sing.

  “Come now, Helen!” Thea is amused: and really, who can blame her? Helen Franklin, buttressed on all sides against disruption, against emotion, against intrusions of any kind into her ordered days, hearing Melmoth at her heels!

  “You have soup on your shirt. No, not Melmoth—of course not: do you think I can’t tell what’s myth and what’s real?—but somebody, all the same. I hear them behind me, when I walk out of the library, when I come to see you—they wait round corners, they wear black, sometimes they sing; I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman or even a child, but it frightens me. I wake frightened in the night and read about Josef Hoffman or Alice Benet and in the morning they are there with me in the room.” It is as much as she has ever confes
sed, even to Thea, whose genius for eking out confidence has been refined over two decades on her feet by the witness box. “Of course in the night I think: perhaps it’s her, perhaps she has come for me, but, well.” Another spoonful of broth. “We all have nightmares.”