by Sarah Perry
Adaya dips the corner of a napkin in a glass of water and wipes at the soup on Thea’s shirt. She allows it. Adaya says, in her perfect and faintly accented English, “I once heard a mother in a playground tell her child, ‘Watch out for Melmotka, she knows you took my purse, she has her eye on you.’ Very cruel, I thought. I don’t think Melmotka comes to take children from their mothers. She is not a monster.”
“Then you know little about her,” says Thea. “Leave my shirt alone! I am not an infant! You know nothing about her—she is a drowning woman who wants only to pull you under . . .”
Adaya puts the napkin down. “Don’t you pity her?” she says. “Wouldn’t you long for company if you were so lonely? Wouldn’t you, Helen?” Her look of shy appeal reaches Helen irresistibly.
“Oh, perhaps,” she says.
“I think,” says Thea, through mouthfuls of bread, “we may safely say it’s not a damned soul on bleeding feet that chases you through the town. Who, then?”
Albína Horáková, removing her coat, sheds seed pearls on the table. They scatter among the silver forks and rattle on the plate. “Look at my empty glass!” she says. “No manners in the young.” Then she nudges Helen and says, “She’s got a past, this one. Thinks I don’t notice, little English myš with her hair like water in a ditch! Thinks I don’t see how she sleeps without sheets and won’t eat sweet things and scratches her wrists when she thinks I’m not looking. Made them bleed once. I noticed, yes! You hiding, Helen Franklin? You got something to hide?”
Josef Hoffman is not alone. Here is Alice Benet, turning the pages of her bible; here is Franz Bayer beckoning to someone just outside the window. One by one they turn to Helen, who closes her eyes.
“I suppose,” says Adaya—gently, softly, passing Thea a glass of water—“nobody has ever lived who didn’t keep something in their pocket out of sight.”
“Not me,” says Albína, and without warning delivers a gleeful belch. It is greeted with applause from men in suits eating pork at a window table. “This Melmoth, she’d have no interest in old Albína Horáková who never hurt a fly—yes, milá ku, yes: clear the plates.” A waiter with white sleeves rolled to the elbow bends over the table.
“What about Thea then, eh? What about you? You think Melmotka is waiting at home, on your bed, with your name on a piece of paper?”
Helen—eyes open, Josef Hoffman mercifully gone—is grateful to feel Albína’s blue gaze move on. She says, “Yes, Thea: what about you? What sins do you have to confess?”
Frowning, Thea says, “I sometimes wish that she were real—that she had come for me before all this”—she shows them the splints on her wrists—“before Karel went, while I was still myself; I might have preferred to wander alone with the damned than find I am no longer loved.”
The man at the piano has worn himself out, or got suddenly weary with beer; he’s leaning on the music rest, forehead on forearm, not hearing the calls from his friends. It is quiet now. Helen says, “You are not changed; not really,” and she believes it because she must. She watches the table filled again with food: veal schnitzel, very fragrant and gold, with almonds broken in the crust; pieces of dark beef garnished with cranberries and cream; potato salad and milk-white dumpling fatly sliced on the plate. There are gherkins. There is more bread, hot from the oven, with yeast rising on furls of steam. The butter in the dish has melted. Helen, who has not eaten herself to satisfaction in twenty years, feels faint at the sight of it. “You don’t fool me,” says Thea, smiling. “And I don’t think you are fooled. Illness like this—” she shrugs. “You think I’m not changed? You think it’s like I used to drive a decent car, and this one has a flat tyre? It is the passenger that changed, not just the vehicle! Still”—another shrug, and this a careless valiant one. “I suppose the trick is to acquaint myself with myself.”
“Do you despair?” says Adaya. It is a curious question, very direct, and asked with a blush, as if she thinks she might be violently rebuffed. Beef parts softly under her knife. She puts a piece on Thea’s plate and says, apologetically, “So often, people do.”
Thea accepts the plate, the question, a glass of wine. She says, as if with surprise, “No, I don’t think I do. I wonder if I should.”
“Enough of this talk!” says Albína. “You think you know suffering? You wait and see what time does to your bones and come speak with me about suffering then. Sometimes I hear mine grind like stones! I watched my mother dry out like a landed fish in the sun. Now her hands are my hands. Helen, eat, for pity’s sake. You think you’ll choke if you do?” And indeed the veal is irresistible: Helen takes a bite. (Jackdaws are convening on the National Theatre roof; musicians are convening in the pit.) “Come now, Thea,” she says. “If Melmoth were watching what sin would she know—what would she have seen?” On her white clothes there is now gravy, flecks of parsley, a cranberry gleaming like a jewel on a scrap of Guipure lace.
“The very worst?”
“I expect,” Adaya says, “it was when you were very young. So often it is.”
“Helen, make them stop,” says Thea. But she brightens and straightens with a clumsy flourish the napkin in her lap. “I didn’t always have money. My mother brought me up on her own in a two-room flat on a miserable North London road. You have never seen a more dispiriting place, all pebble-dashed houses black with pollution, and I thought I should have dwelt in marble halls, as the old song goes (Helen, you’re pale—have more wine, I would). She worked long shifts cleaning council offices and there was never enough to go round. By the time I was ten she looked sixty. I hated it. The woodchip wallpaper. The two-ring stove. I hated the fire with the three electric bars and the brown tiles all around it. I wanted a pair of leather boots that laced up to my knees and I wanted a white dressing gown I could wear straight out of the bath, and my initials stitched on the pocket. I wanted records and something to play them on. I wanted the right kind of clothes, not always very slightly the wrong ones.” There are chandeliers overhead, and beneath them Thea is queenly, serene: her cropped hair is threaded with copper wires, the silver bee gleams on her hand. It is impossible to place her in dingy rooms with windows blackened by passing cars. “I knew that I would be all right, in the end: I had a good mind and I knew I would see to it that if I didn’t dwell in marble halls it would at any rate not be a house with a stain on the ceiling of every room. But I’m not patient now and I wasn’t then. I wanted money almost more than anything. Sometimes girls at school had five-pound notes and I didn’t see the queen’s head on blue paper: I saw lipstick in gold cases and velvet jackets with velvet buttons and hand cream that smelt of roses in a pot with a silver lid. So I began to steal. My mother kept a notebook where she wrote down everything she spent and everything she earned. She kept her money in a biscuit tin: the purple kind with flowers printed on—you remember, Helen? You got them at Christmas every year and they lasted months until they all went stale. Every day, almost, I took coins out. Just ten pence, sometimes. Once I took a pound coin. Do you know, I wasn’t the least bit guilty? I acquired a conscience much later on. I simply thought: well, if you didn’t want me to steal, you shouldn’t be so poor. I remember always having money in my pocket. It’s heavy, isn’t it? The weight of metal.”
Helen does not like this admission of a small, mean transgression. It would be somehow more likeable, and certainly more glamorous, if her friend had, say, killed a dog in a fit of temper.
“I wanted a suede jacket for my birthday, with fringes at the back. I’d seen how much they cost and I knew it would always be beyond my mother but I wanted to punish her for making me poor. On the morning of my birthday she made eggs on toast, and she gave me a gift—a book, I don’t know what. She’d wrapped it very carefully, I know that. She had bought red ribbons. She had never done that before. I opened it and said, ‘I don’t want this. You know what I wanted. Didn’t you listen? Don’t you care?’ She cried, but then she cried so easily in those days it didn’t bother me. She told me she
had been saving for something special, but that she never seemed to have quite enough—that she tried to make a note of everything she earned, but had made a mistake somewhere. All the time, of course, I could feel the money I had stolen in my pocket, getting heavier and heavier, because I never spent it.”
“Horrible!” Albína is delighted. “Horrible child!” She eats a mouthful of beef and mops up gravy with bread.
Adaya, hands folded in her lap, says, “Do you think you have been punished?”
Thea gestures with a rare hard flash of anger to her legs, which are wasted these days beneath the fine wool cloth of her trousers—to the well-shod feet which never rest quite as they should on the floor. “What do you think? And do you think the punishment is fitting?”
“Still,” says Helen. She feels a perverse enlarging of affection for her friend. She had never thought, when first meeting Thea—first seeing her competence, her expansiveness, the apparently fathomless depths of her generosity—that she, too, was a sinner. “Still: if Melmoth sought out every scheming little thief in North London she would hardly be lonely.”
Adaya smiles, blushes, touches Thea lightly on the wrist. “I think so,” she says. “I think we might rule you out: unless, of course, you have secrets too dark for the dinner table.”
Albína, scoffing, says: “You think that’s a bad thing? Listen to this. I killed a man with a hatpin. There, that put the dog among the pigeons!” There is no need, now, for the rouge that sits on the tablecloth in its tarnished case; her cheeks are flushed with wine, with meat, with delight. “You think Melmotka would trouble herself with this English mouse, this cripple? This girl with a face like a saucer of milk? When she comes, she’ll come for the murderer!”
Ten yards distant someone drops a silver tray: it spins and rattles on the floor and wakes the man who slumbers at the piano. He starts, snorts, wipes his mouth on his sleeve: begins idly to play a waltz. The many chandeliers overhead shine on the windows, so that everything beyond the glass is obscured save the National Theatre sailing adrift in the darkness. (If I were to turn out the lights, just for a moment, you might well see—there on the steps of the National Theatre, leaning on a white stone pillar—a watchful figure, seeming weary, with eyes fixed on the dining women.)
“I don’t believe you,” says Helen, lightly and coolly, because she has begun to feel nauseated. Murderer, said Albína Horáková, and the food on her plate is viscous, thick, with something of the scent of the slaughterhouse in the fibers of the meat; murderer, she said, and the wine glass in her hand is fragile, and would break if she pressed it; murderer, she said, and here is Josef Hoffman, here is Alice Benet, here is Freddie Bayer, and they are beside her on the leather seat, very attentive and very close.
“I believe you,” says Adaya. Hesitantly, she brushes a fragment of meat from Albína Horáková’s sleeve.
“Tell us,” says Thea. “In comparison my own soul will be white as snow, I’m sure.”
“Not much to tell.” Albína shrugs. “You girls, what do you know? I’ve seen tanks coming over the Bridge of the Legions so often I forget what year, whose tanks. I heard about the Old Town Square burning while I worked a shift in the Škoda factory and hadn’t had good food in months. What do you know—anything you want, you get.” She snaps her fingers; a waiter comes, and is despatched with a squeeze of his arm to bring more and better wine. “You know the happiest days of my life? The day each month they let three books from the West come into Czechoslovakia. Just three! Imagine! It was always a Thursday. Up we got at dawn to queue in the cold and not a complaint between us. You think you suffer? Hah!” She chuckles without malice, and eats a piece of dumpling.
“But the hatpin?” says Adaya, in her hesitant way. She has eaten very little; there is nothing on the crisp striped breast of her blouse.
“Ah, that. My friend and I, we took a cab home one night. It was raining, hard, our shoes were new. The driver went a different way, and a different way, and a different way. ‘Where are you going?’ we said. He didn’t say anything, went a different way again. Well, we’d heard of these things. I had a hat with a hatpin and I took it out and I stabbed him! Like this!” She prods Thea on the shoulder. “Hard, very hard! Well, it was raining: he couldn’t see, could he? Came off the road, straight into a shop. It was a shop selling, you know, mops, vacuum cleaners. Funny what you remember. We were fine, though my friend’s nose never looked right after, but she was ugly anyway and it didn’t matter. But he broke both his legs. Got an infection, died in hospital two months later. Serves him right, eh! Now what do you make of that?”
“To be perfectly frank,” says Thea, “I am disappointed. I’d hoped for a charge of wounding with intent, at the very least.”
“Then”—Adaya picks one by one the scattered seed pearls from the table—“we can safely rule you out, I think? We can say: you are acquitted from the court of Melmotka.”
There is another of Albína Horáková’s shrugs. It dislodges a feather from a swan pinned on her shoulder. “Ah well, what life have I left to give her? A year, a month. Perhaps a day. Thea, give me your glass: we shall toast our innocence, ano?”
Obediently Thea raises her glass. “Now,” she says. “Melmoth the Witness versus Helen Franklin, in the court of King Wenceslaus in the lands of the Bohemian Crown. Dear Helen—dear good little Helen, so calm, so considered: who never says a word out of place! What can her sin be?”
Do you see—there beyond the shining window, coming down from the steps of the National Theatre; coming over the road, the tram tracks, the gleaming cobblestones; coming closer, with a steady implacable tread, with a head withdrawn inside a soft black hood, a watchful figure at the door? Well, perhaps: the chandeliers are dazzling on the glass, the streets seethe and bustle, there are lovers on the Bridge of the Legions. Certainly Helen sees nothing, because she has closed her eyes and is looking down a corridor. It is lined with cheap green tiles. At the end, in the wall, there is a place where a door has been taken from its hinges. On the threshold there is an empty chair with a shadow on the seat; beyond the shadow, a room which is very hot, and very dark. She opens her eyes, and sees there all her companions: Albína Horáková, from whose shoulders snowy feathers fall; Thea with her pageboy’s hair, the memento mori on her hand; Adaya, who goes on removing from the table the seed pearls that are tossed among the plates. There also is Josef Hoffman, and he is young, and he is watching Franz and Freddie Bayer as they dance beside the piano.
“Do you think you can?” says Adaya. She has a handful of pearls. “Do you think you can tell us?”
Can she? It is not fair to say that she is being asked merely to tell a secret. It is as if she is required now to excise a piece of her flesh and place it on the table, where it may be scrutinized, anatomized, taxonomized, before being returned to her body: packed in, closed up, stitch by stitch. It has so long demanded the constant mortification of body and spirit—the constant denial of pleasure, of richness, of emotion: of everything that might be said to have conspired with her to do what she did—that to tell the tale seems as impossible as a disruption in a planetary orbit.
But: “I should like to know,” says Adaya, and says it with that hesitant, appealing look from behind her glasses, so that Helen—palms pressed against the cold marble table; eyes averted from Josef Hoffman’s dour young face—overhears herself saying, as if from a great distance: “When I was twenty-one I left home and traveled to Manila. I’d never really been abroad before—”
The Sin of Helen Franklin
She was woken at dawn by a cock crowing on a tin roof ten feet down. This was not some country yokel strutting for the hens, but a prize fighter fitted with steel claws upon whose bad temper small fortunes were gambled and lost. On waking she dislodged from her forearm the busy cockroach nymph which had been dining on the salt on her sweat-doused skin; it bolted for the corner where it hid among the corpses of siblings dispatched with a slipper at midnight. The ceiling fan stirred the air as a sp
oon stirs soup. She had been in Manila a month, but felt each morning as if she’d been deposited there only five minutes previously owing to an inaccuracy in some celestial paperwork. The whole undertaking, she reflected, had been to show that she could butt up against the constrictions of her parents: to demonstrate that for all the smallness of their lives, and the smallness with which they’d assumed she would be content, she could live more widely, more intemperately. As it turned out, it had done little but create in her a longing to be back behind the pebble-dashed walls of her Essex home, with nothing more strange beyond the double glazing than a jay among the bedding plants.
Pressing idly at the cockroach bite, she stood. It was a June day before the rains, and so humid that her satchel hanging against the wet walls bloomed with mold which could never be quite cleaned off. Between the greasy slats of the lowered blind she saw the hazy sky, and against it the thicket of power lines descending from a pole to the sprawl of shacks in the shanty town below. Litter blown up from littered pavements hung from the wires like filthy laundry: black bin bags in flapping rags, colored scraps of cloth. The crowing cock met the cries of vendors in the street below, and the ten-lane roar of Aurora Boulevard in the middle distance, elevated high above the city on its concrete stanchions. Beneath it all there was the very faint sound of singing, which might have come from any quarter. She felt as unguarded then as she had on her arrival: her eyes contracting against the sun, which had a vehemence no English heatwave could conjure even at noon; her throat a little sore from the polluted pall that gave Manila Bay its famous sunsets. Eleven months remained of this—of standing beneath a shower that did not work, and had never worked, to wash with water sluiced from a plastic dustbin with a plastic ladle; of using a toilet that did not work, and had never worked, and flushing it with an inexpert toss of that same plastic ladle from that same bin. Was it a disaster? (She spied the cockroach nymph, and having no slipper to hand crushed it with her bare heel.) She could not bring herself to think so, since that would be to admit that after all she was her mother’s daughter: that unfamiliar constellations above unfamiliar lands were not for the likes of her.
