Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  At ten minutes past eight in the evening, three days later and the rains not yet come, Arnel Suarez was arrested in his mother’s home. It was the promised party, with Benjie at the head of the dining table, flushed with the pleasure of being spoiled. Cousins and second cousins ate long-life noodles and bowls of beef braised in vinegar and anise; they drank beer from the bottle and teased Benjie without once causing him to scowl; Helen laughed as the others laughed at how ineptly she sucked at the noodles in her dish.

  The men when they came did so politely, with the politeness conferred by a weapon at the belt. What need was there of harsh words, when there were metal alloys and jacketed lead so readily to hand? They were implacable. Their uniforms and their badged caps were blue. At the sight of them Mrs Suarez began stormily to cry in a curious passive fashion as if she could think, off-hand, of any number of felonies for which her sons might be indicted. Benjie meanwhile began to rail and rant: it was not necessary for Helen to understand the words to discern his rage at being no longer the sole focus of the day. Arnel, meanwhile, stood. He removed his glasses and folded them and put them on the table. He looked at Helen, and inclined his head. He patted the pocket of his shirt as if something stolen was kept there. “I told you,” he said. “Didn’t I say I was a very bad thief?”

  But it was not, the policemen said, merely a matter of stealing from a pharmacy. They were concerned, more properly, with the murder of a woman known as Rosa, done away with one afternoon by an overdose of opioids while she lay sleeping in her hospital room. Of all this, Helen understood only Rosa, Rosa, Rosa: saw, as she heard the name, the dark head cradled on her shoulder, heard the frantic rub of a thin hand on the sheet. There was a sensation as if all that she contained—her blood, her viscera, her bones—lurched and settled and lurched again. She gripped the table. She looked at Arnel. The skin drew white and taut across his cheekbones; she saw in him the old man biding his time. Quietly, shaking his head, he spoke. Helen heard his deference, his placating disbelief; watched the movement of his hands; understood him to say: certainly not, certainly not—what use would I have for killing a woman I’ve never seen? Then (very politely, very placidly) he was cuffed, his arms drawn behind his back, and Helen called out, “Be careful! Be careful!” and felt in the joints of her own shoulders a matching tug and pull.

  All around her there was noise: Mrs Suarez, on the floor, on her knees, pleading; Benjie blubbering, incoherent in bewildered fury, still unable to stand. In other rooms oblivious children were singing. Arnel shook until the cuffs rattled on his wrists. The men drew him politely and placidly towards the door. Helen opened her mouth. There were words on her tongue that had the weight and taste of copper coins. Her mouth was open, and she said nothing. Arnel turned and looked at her again. In that look she saw query and comprehension: saw his image of her alter, break, and be remade. She waited for the raised hand, the accusing finger; stood, with the notion that she ought to meet justice on her feet. But Arnel Suarez shook his head. “Sit down, little sister,” he said. “Sit down.”

  Was there someone watching then—was it the gaze of the Witness that passed coldly across the nape of Helen Franklin’s neck? Standing, she felt it—felt many eyes upon her: not merely of Arnel, his mother, his cousins’ cousins; not merely of the police officers registering with very mild surprise the Western woman at the table. There was something else: the demands of justice made incarnate, peering at her as if from behind a magnifying lens. “Little sister,” said Arnel, and his voice was not steady. “Little sister, sit down.” Obediently, and with a shameful elated relief, Helen sat down, and the coins on her tongue went unspent. Then there was a hard indifferent jerk on the cuffs at Arnel’s wrists, and with an infuriated cry of pain, he had gone.

  They are very quiet, very close, Helen Franklin’s listeners. The table has been cleared, wiped, filled again: there are sweet yellow squares of the cake they call “little coffins,” interred within mounds of cream; there are pieces of sachertorte so thickly glazed the chandeliers sparkle on the plate. (Freddie Bayer eyes the cake.) Helen clings to the table and her fingers are sore.

  “I went home after that,” she says. “My mother said: we knew you’d be back before long.”

  Is it disgust that silences the women? Is it contempt? She cannot lift her head. “They took him to prison,” she said. “I suppose there was a trial. I couldn’t bear to ask.” The marble on the table is cold. Then a hand—white, capable, its nails pared short—reaches hesitantly towards her. “What a very wicked thing you did,” says Adaya, but the inflection is gentle, kind. Helen looks up at the thick glasses, the short fair hair, and is astonished to encounter the same shy smile that attended her in the chapel of mirrors. “I know,” she says. She is conscious of a feeling of lightness.

  Albína snorts. She is attending to a piece of sachertorte. There is very little about her ensemble now that is white, pristine. “Fool of a boy if you ask me,” she says. “Nobody asked him, did they? Nobody said: take the blame, take the punishment. Did you? No. Well, then. What was all this for?” She gestures with her fork—up, down, up: it is both contemptuous and triumphant. “Miserable little English myš. He gave you a life and what did you do but build your own prison. Idiot!”

  “I deserve it. I deserve it.” (Josef Hoffman, solemn boy, nods.)

  “You know,” says Adaya, cool hand on Helen’s, “it is not always necessary to suffer, even when it’s well deserved.” Her thumb moves, once, in a caress.

  Thea has not yet spoken. She frowns. It is a look Helen knows well: judicious, inquiring, examining the facts. Her eyes rove about—take in the piano, the waiters adroitly tending to their patrons, the National Theatre sailing by. She unfastens, refastens, unfastens the splint on her left wrist: experimentally opens and closes her fists. Her hands these days are puffy and weak. The bee on her finger goes about its business in the eye of the silver skull. Then she says, “It is hardly unprecedented. Remember the law of Leviticus: think of the goat who took the sins of the people on his back and went out into the desert to die. Well: if Arnel Suarez made himself the scapegoat, justice has been served. And served twice over, what with all this denial, this self-punishment.” Confidingly she leans forward. “We always tried to guess what it was, Karel and I. In the end we concluded you’d been brought up by Jesuits and whipped yourself on Tuesday afternoons.”

  It is preposterous, this lightness, this acceptance of her: Helen rebels against it. “You are not taking me seriously,” she says. “If you did, you would leave.”

  “Well.” Albína shrugs. “That woman. Rosa. You did what you were asked. I would have done it and without singing.” Helen believes this: imagines, for a moment, waking one morning to find Albína approaching with a pillow.

  Thea, pondering, says: “Were I his lawyer I should have a case, I suppose. But I am not. It is time to set a statute of limitation on your crime, little Helen.”

  Adaya pours seed pearls from hand to hand. She says, gently, apologetically: “It may be, of course, that she cannot; that her sentence is a full life term.”

  “It is!” Helen is grateful that Adaya, at least, is not fooled—does not attempt to bring mitigating circumstances before the court, to extend the hand of mercy.

  Thea says: “Adaya, put those down, and get my bag.” It is withdrawn from beneath the table: a satchel on which is painted a Renaissance army going elegantly into battle. Thea fumbles with the buckles—resists Adaya’s offered help—takes out a folded sheaf of paper. It is placed on the table, its edges straightened, a breadcrumb brushed from the title page (The Cairo Journals of Anna Marney); it is all done slowly, reverentially, as if it were a document retrieved from the ashes of Lindisfarne, and not fifteen sheets of A4 run through Karel Pražan’s printer. Meanwhile there is dancing now beside the piano: a woman of fifty in the arms of a boy who wears a velvet scarf. Thea says, “I’ll give you this. You’ll wish I hadn’t—but in the light of it you’ll think yourself a saint. Take it—go on, put i
t in your bag: it’s heavy, and I don’t want it.”

  “Melmotka again, I daresay,” says Albína. “You girls and your fairy tales. How do you know she’s not here already, huh? Might be me! I’ve had my eye on you for years now, did you think of that?”

  Helen, folding the document into the pocket of her coat, says lightly: “I shouldn’t put it past you,” but finds herself looking swiftly up at the shining window, the open door. There is a piece of cake on a plate in front of her. It is dense, moist, almost black; it is spiked with liqueur, and wet with apricot preserve. There is the scent of almonds, a silver fork on a brocade napkin, a strawberry cut and splayed into almost a flower. It no longer seems to Helen impossible that she might take a bite: that she could permit herself the taste of sugar. She looks up—looks for Franz Bayer, with the open sores beside his mouth; looks for Alice Benet tending to her burn—looks, with a yearning guilt, for Rosa shuffling over wrapped in her worn-out sheet. They are gone. Albína is looking at her over a raised wine glass: seems to say, Go on, go on, no need for all that now. She takes the fork, and presses it through the glossy chocolate, the apricot, the cyanide-scented crumb; Thea says, “We should probably go soon.”

  “I’m hungry,” says Helen. It is a surprise. She puts the fork in her mouth. The cake’s sweetness, its softness, is a delectable shock. She tastes apricot orchards in August, almonds cracked open in a silver dish. The fork is cold and smooth on her lip. She awaits the sensation of revulsion which is her just reward, but feels only the simple pleasure, the child’s joy, of sugar in the blood.

  “Eat up, eat up,” says Albína Horáková. She is putting on her velvet coat, tying its grosgrain ribbon.

  “Eat up,” says Thea, and she is smiling, and putting her hand on Helen’s shoulder.

  “Mind you don’t feel sick,” says Adaya, blushing, tugging at the very white cuffs of her shirt: “It can happen, if you’re not used to it.”

  The dancers are waltzing by the piano, by the Danube. The National Theatre goes on sailing by; Helen Franklin goes on eating.

  Silly Rusalka, swooning water nymph, is straightening her wig. She is none too bright, and made still more foolish by lust: within the hour she’ll exchange her voice for the love of a portly tenor and be swindled by a witch. But first she’ll sing to the rising moon: it waits, pale paint peeling from its disk of wood, somewhere by a pulley in the wings. Here is Ježibaba, witch and swindler, provider of potions and knives: she is fretting over a worn-out shoe and eating cheese and cucumber on a piece of brown bread. The portly tenor is at the mirror and contemplating a drink—he is not (he thinks) all that he once was, but at any rate is more than he soon will be.

  It is twenty minutes past seven. Helen Franklin is in her seat. Albína Horáková has paid for a box: they are enclosed, these four women, in a velvet casket, flanked by plaster gods. Thea—breathless, triumphant, refusing aid or praise—came slowly up the stairs, her chair stowed among furs and travelers’ cases in a basement cloakroom. She says, “Helen, you really needn’t stay,” concerned that the sweetness of Dvořák will be worse for the penitent than even the sweetness of cake.

  But: “I’m fine,” says truthful Helen. She feels drunk. A woman in black is tuning her harp. “I’m fine,” she says, and looks for Josef Hoffman, for Alice Benet, but they are gone.

  There are three seats and a stool in here in box 7. Adaya, perching straight-backed and patient, sits on the stool beside the door. She has the look of a sentinel: nobody, thinks Helen, not even Melmoth, could pass without permission. Albína, leaning on the balcony edge, shedding a feather, shedding a tear: “This was always my best, my favorite. I could sing it all. I could go down on stage and sing it all for you now.” The feather lands on an old woman’s shoe: she looks down, looks up, smiles. She has garnets dripping from her ears.

  “Karel hated Rusalka,” says Thea. “Idiot of a girl, he said. Who’d give up eternal life, he said, for the sake, of all things, of love?” Her voice, when she remembers Karel, breaks: all the same, she is courageous. She says, “I suppose that was quite telling, in its way.”

  Albína is still eating. She has, wrapped in a napkin, a piece of bread and butter. “Ekni mu, ekni mu, kdo na eká!” she sings. She grins wickedly at Helen. “ ‘Tell him: who is waiting for him!’ ” Somewhere in a rehearsal room Ježibaba is sending a message to her son: Remind me, she says, to buy milk. Rusalka is at the mirror whitening her face with paint. Her hair is red and many yards long: scraps of green nylon are stitched across her breast with silver thread. How lovely I am! she thinks. A man in an apron is cleaning the moon. The minor gods sleep on the balconies; the chandelier has been put out. To Helen Franklin it is as rich as the cake which is still on her tongue, and even more forbidden. A baton is raised in the pit and it is the signal for silence above and music below: Helen sees, in each face turned towards the stage, the pure sweet pleasure of anticipation. She is not immune. There is a lightness in her which she cannot trust. Is it wine? Is it the striking of the opening timpani, felt as much as heard? Is it the sight of Thea, dimly lit, glowing, seeming her old self; as if the past year—sickness, frailty, loss, pernicious old Melmoth with her bleeding feet—has been erased? Is it (here are the timpani again; here, a flute, very serene!) merely that Helen has made her confession—that like Bunyan’s pilgrim sinner she has set her burden down? Albína, leaning forward, lets loose another feather; it rocks and drifts on the air. Helen finds she is smiling: that she can barely recall the faces of Hoffman, of Alice Benet; would be hard pressed, if you asked her, to recall the sound of footsteps behind her in the streets. It seems she is on parole. She permits herself to indulge in the thrill of the rising curtain, which stirs also Thea in her seat, causes Albína to lean still more towards the stage: here is Rusalka with her red-gold hair, her alabaster skin with its greenish cast; here is mist rising from the lake; here also is the moon, freshly polished: an opal on a bit of velvet.

  So: she goes about her business, the swooning water nymph. She stands under the opal moon and lets down her hair and sings clear as a blackbird in the morning. Poor Helen lacks the necessary armor to withstand the beauty of it, which is no less intoxicating for being false. She experiences it as if she’d been kept in a dark room and let loose without warning on a fine spring day—it is too sweet, too sad, too much: the sound of the harp, the thousand lights, the white smoke pouring from stage to pit. Rusalka is singing the end of her song. She kneels. Her small hands cannot reach the moon. Her red hair hangs to her heels. Black birds descend from high in the wings and all their eyes are blue. They come down to the water nymph, who is singing now one single note which rings up to the gods. It is impossibly high, impossibly sustained: in wonder Helen looks and sees Thea motionless, sees Albína Horáková leaning forward while a seed pearl falls from a string of beads. On come the birds, very black, very real: Helen cannot see the wires that hold them. Still Rusalka sings that one high note and does not breathe or pause—not when the birds are by her side, not when there comes onstage a witch.

  “Ježibaba!” whispers Helen, delighted as a child, for she has read the program: and indeed here is all she’d hoped from that wicked enchantress. Beside kneeling Rusalka the old witch is tall and wears a coarse black wig. It is long, this wig, and by some trickery moves of its own accord, so that coils of it lift and fall about her, languidly, as if she were underwater. Her robes also move, stirred by onstage breezes—they are of the finest silk worn very thin; they pool at her feet like spilled ink. “Ježibaba!” says Helen, turning to Thea, who remains motionless, fixed with wonder perhaps; turning to Albína, whose seed pearls are still falling. But—how can that single note go on—how can Rusalka still be singing? What soprano’s trick is this, that defies the need for breath? And Albína is pouring pearls out over the balcony, and Thea does not move—Helen begins slowly to rise from her seat and there is the sensation in her throat of something very sharp lodged there. Down on the stage the witch hangs her head as if in weariness and
shame—her black hair falls forward—her hands are by her side. And Albína is pouring pearls out over the balcony, and Thea does not move, and Rusalka goes on singing. Then—Helen cannot move; cannot draw a breath—the witch raises her hand. It comes slowly up as if movement causes pain in every muscle and bone, and there is a gaunt white hand among the deep folds of her sleeve and it is pointing, and (Helen reaches for Thea and Thea cannot move) pointing at her—unmistakably, it is pointing at her, at Helen Franklin, who was taught to pass without notice—at the frail black net of her dress, the skin on her breast, the ribs beneath it, the heart beating there—pointing at what is kept concealed, what can never be set down. That weary head, hanging forward, begins to lift, and Helen dreads and longs for what’s beneath the moving coils of hair—there is a sensation in her which is part terror and part desire. Her courage fails—she looks away, down to the auditorium below where the patient audience waits out Rusalka’s song. Are they patient? Do they wait? The elderly woman twenty feet down with garnet dripping from her ears turns in her seat and looks up at Helen and does not blink. The man beside her, holding her hand, slowly moves his head: he looks up also and his eyes are black behind their glasses and they are fixed on her. One by one, then in their dozens, and in their several hundreds, every face is turned to Helen—children in buckled shoes and dresses of tulle, lovers pressed together, diligent students taking notes; from the cheap seats, the gods, the circle, the stalls; from the velvet boxes and from down in the pit each musician, each visitor, each usher waiting in the aisle, is looking placidly and with bright unblinking eyes at Helen Franklin where she stands. Then in an instant, as if each were whispered a secret all at once, those impassive faces change: register contempt, disgust, surprise. The air is full of the smell of lilies, of jasmine, as if flowers have been hurled in tribute on the stage. And here at last—out of the pages of the Hoffman document, out of the pen of Sir David Ellerby alone in his room, out of a farmer’s field in a cold village by the Eger—is the face of Melmoth the Witness. Her skin is dappled as though many shadows cross it and her unblinking eyes are spheres of smoky glass. It is as strange as a nightmare and as familiar as home. There is a look on it of the most profound unswerving devotion: it is possible to believe that she has waited out millennia for this one moment of witnessing Helen Franklin in box 7 of the National Theatre. On her knees Rusalka goes on singing and a pearl falls from Albína Horáková’s neck. Helen reaches out her hand—over the balcony, towards the stage—imagines the touch of Melmoth’s palm, very hot perhaps, very soft against hers, coaxing her up, drawing her down. So after all her parole has been revoked: she hears the slamming of the iron gates. But she hears, also, very close by, a grunt and choke. It is Albína Horáková, in a deep sleep brought on by wine, by good rich food, by the warm air rising from the velvet walls, the deep plush seats. She snores once more, and it is loud. Her head tilts back; there are feathers in her lap. The sound silences Rusalka, down there on her knees—at last that single ringing note stops. Thea picks her program up and fans her face, which glows with pleasure: she whispers, “Poor little Rusalka! Would you trust that witch? Would you trust her an inch? Look at her!”