by Sarah Perry
Helen Franklin—sick, bewildered—looks. And what is there but a mezzo-soprano in dyed green rags that hang from waist and wrist, and green tights worn thin at the foot? What is there but a cardboard moon on a pulley, and painted birds on silver wires? There is a seed pearl on the balcony and it hasn’t fallen yet. She picks it up. The faces of the crowd below, of the musicians in the pit, are turned away—to the scores on the music stands, to portly Ježibaba under her papier-maché tree; they have no interest at all in Helen Franklin. “Melmoth,” says Helen, whispering, as if she might very well summon her up; but no, it is all stage sets, contrivances, illusions—all conjured out of tales for children, and the fertile ground of her guilt. Still, it is not so easy to shake the illusion off—there is again the slam of the prison gates; there, she is certain, is Josef Hoffman up in the gods, and Rosa is sleeping on his shoulder.
“I must go,” says Helen—but Adaya is cool and calm on her stool beside the door, hands folded in her lap, a blushing sentinel. She catches Helen’s eye. She smiles, and puts a finger to her lips. Helen, whom confusion and fear has made biddable, returns to her seat. The stage is busy with water nymphs imploring Rusalka to come to her senses, but she is thinking only of the portly tenor, pays no mind to his slipping wig, and cannot be dissuaded. Then—“Shh!” says Thea, laughing: Albína is snoring, still more loudly; surely there is a look of censure from the first violin? “Shh!” says Thea, but the old woman shudders, and the many layers of white in which she slumbers rise up around her, shed fragments of satin and pieces of net, and settle against the chair. She is a white bird on the riverbank shaking itself out, tucking its head beneath its wing. There is another choking, gasping snore, which is very long, and very loud—the first violin suppresses a smile and turns a page of his score. “Albína Horáková, really!” says Thea, in an admonishing whisper, turning in her seat: “So much for your favorite opera; so much for singing it by heart.”
But something is not right: the old woman’s head has tipped too far, her mouth hangs unevenly open. Helen takes Albína Horáková’s wrist. The skin slips over the bones as loosely as a length of silk. There is no flutter there, no blood beating at the pulse. Albína’s eyes are open and they are fixed on the stage, and they’re as wide as those of an enchanted child. Her lap is full of pearls.
“Oh,” says Thea. “Oh—” She puts out her hand, clumsily; rests it on Albína’s knee.
“It’s nearly finished,” says Adaya. She is standing. It is not possible to see her eyes behind their lenses.
“But we hated each other,” says Helen, and cradles the cool thin hand between hers. She feels a fissure open. She glides apart. She falls in the cavity, and all the griefs she has denied herself—for Rosa, for Arnel, for Thea, for Karel, for her own life, interred within a cardboard box—are waiting down there: in the unlit cul-de-sacs, the dark unentered places, she had no idea she contained.
The water nymphs have deserted the stage, and the witch is returned to the wings. Rusalka is drinking a glass of water and the audience drifts to the aisles. Slowly the chandelier blooms with light. Act Two has finished.
Part 3
From The Cairo Journals of Anna Marney, 1931
Tuesday 19th May
I saw the beggar again today. There’s a place under the awning of the Heliopolis where they let him sit. How can they leave him there? You’d think they’d sweep him into the gutter with the rest of the rubbish. I took his photo. I don’t think he saw me.
Sissy just came home. She thinks she’s bought saffron at the market, but it’s only sawdust and ink. I said nothing. Let her find out.
Wednesday 20th May
Mother and Pa have gone to Karnak. Sissy refused to go with them. She’ll do nothing but lie in her room eating dates and rubbing oil into her shoulders.
I’m sick most days and my head hurts. I want to be back home with Lou and David, with turpentine on my clothes, drinking at our old place on Floral Street. Lou wrote and told me she’s sold three gouache sketches and will spend the money on a canvas two yards long. She says she’s bored of representational art. I wish she were here!
Tonight I saw the beggar walking to his usual place. He sidles along like he’s ashamed. I took his photo again, then he sat down and rattled a tin spoon in a tin bowl. A man ran out from the Heliopolis and put bread and olives in the bowl and went back in without saying a word. I can see him there now, down in the shade, eating olives, spitting the stones into the street.
Thursday 21st May
I spoke to him today. I was standing at the window and he beckoned me down. He must have seen the sun on the camera lens. His arm looked as if it got broken long ago and nobody bothered to set it straight. He was looking directly at me and waving and I thought: why shouldn’t I go? There’s nothing else to do.
He’s even worse close up, squatting against the wall, smelling: if he were a dog, you’d shoot him. His right arm is wasted and his left has got some kind of disease—it’s covered with black lesions like fungus. Something is wrong with his eyes: they’ve gone pale, but he doesn’t seem blind. I thought he’d ask me for money. I said, “What do you want? Why did you call me down?”
His English is good. He said, “I’ve got something to tell you,” and then he started to cry. He blubbered and sobbed and nuzzled into his arm and it made one of the lesions lift off, and underneath it was raw and red. He said, “I’ve got something to tell you, please don’t go.”
I thought he had mistaken me for someone else. Sometimes here they think I’m a boy, because my hair is short and I won’t wear frocks. “You don’t know me,” I said. “I’m only Anna Marney from London. I’m not important. We’ve never met.” Then he told me his name was Isimsiz and he’d waited fifteen years for me to come. He said, “Allah is merciful, and has sent you to me!”
There is no god of course, and if there were, why would he send me? I said, “Is this because I took your photo? It doesn’t mean anything. I take photos of everything here. I’ve got nothing else to do.”
He started to say something but then he stopped and his awful eyes went very wide and he started to scream. I realized I’d never heard anyone scream before. Sissy loses her temper when she doesn’t get what she wants, but this was different. Then he scrabbled against the wall as if he wanted it to open up and swallow him down and said, “Look, look, look, look, look!” So I did look and realized he was pointing straight at the window of my room. He said, “Do you see her?” First there was nothing, but then I suppose the sun got in my eyes because I saw the strangest thing. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t a shadow. It was like a swarm of flies—like one thing made of many other things and all of them black and moving very fast. Then I blinked and it was gone, and the beggar was at my feet in a pile of dirty white cloth. He patted about trying to find me but I backed away because for some reason I felt sick and afraid. There was nothing there, I knew that—it was my head and the heat and the man screaming—but I kept thinking of Sissy alone in her room and I wanted to see her and be sure she was all right, so I ran across the road.
Of course as soon as I got inside our apartment block I heard Sissy singing along to the gramophone and Salma in the kitchen taking bread out of the oven, and I knew what an idiot I’d been. Salma saw me and called me in and told me off. She said, “Don’t go talking to that old fool. And don’t touch him. God knows what disease he carries.”
I said, “Where is he from? Is he Egyptian? He says his name is Isimsiz.”
“It’s not a name,” she said. “It’s Turkish. It means ‘nameless.’ Maybe one time he had a name but he doesn’t know it now.” I sat on the wicker chair in the corner and watched her kneading dough and I said, “Tell me more about him.”
She said, “He was a prisoner of war—of the English, you know. Kept here in camps with men from the Turkish army. I remember them. Bored and unhappy, wearing the fez, asking for something to read. The English know nothing about food and gave them this bad diet. They all got pella
gra—you’ve seen it on his arm?”
I said it was like fungus and she said, “Yes, like tree bark, like he’s not human. The only doctor in the camp was Armenian and Isimsiz wouldn’t let him touch him, so.” She shrugged. She took her apron off and put her hands on my face and said, “Don’t go giving your pity there, Anna. Other people deserve it. See his eyes, all burned out? Maybe it was just too long in the desert. Maybe it was something else.” She shrugged again. Nobody shrugs like her.
I could hear Sissy upstairs singing. I said, “Did anyone come to the house today? Was anyone in my room?” She looked at me as if I were mad and said, “Nobody came, only Fatima to bring the flour, and she had nothing to say for herself, because does she ever?”
Saturday 23rd May
I am sitting at my desk. It’s dark outside as if all Cairo has turned out its lights. I want to turn round but I can’t because if I do I’ll see someone sitting on the end of my bed waiting patiently for me. I can hear something moving and I think maybe it’s only my pen as I write or maybe it’s long black clothes dragging on the floor . . .
Yesterday I woke up feeling guilty. This Isimsiz was just a mad old man, not even wanting money, and I had run away. All those years I thought I was different—not a simpering English girl good for nothing but men and babies, but willing to look the world dead in the eye, then the world came to me and I ran. So when I had my coffee I asked Salma to give me a dish of ful medames and some of the bread she made and I went over the road to give it to the beggar. He was in the same place as always. When he saw me he held out his tin bowl, and ate it all without speaking to me.
“What do you want to tell me?” I said. He said, “I knew you’d come, for is Allah not most merciful to those who most need mercy?” Then he took my hand and kissed it and his mouth was wet with tears and the juice of black olives but I didn’t flinch. He stood up, and it was like watching an animal stand that had only just been born, and I wondered if underneath his robes his legs were as scarred and broken as his arms. “Come with me,” he said. I thought for a moment of Sissy and Mother and Pa. I thought of their faces, which are like my face, and of the way they live, which is not how I want to live. Then I said, “I’ll go with you.”
He led me down Emad El-Din Street and I could hear trams and I thought of London. I could see buildings with white balconies and Arabic slogans painted on the plaster and posters pasted up full of bright colors, and men selling newspapers in kiosks. There was a cart with its donkey gone and its load empty, and yards away a Ford with its motor running and a woman putting on lipstick in the back. There were basket-sellers and awnings and at the end of the road a gold-and-white minaret. I looked into a café with a green tiled floor and men in gray suits were reading pieces of paper with the government insignia on them, and two girls walked past smoking cigarettes that smelled like the cigarettes Lou smokes sometimes. I felt happy—I thought I’d forgotten how—here was everything I thought I had left behind: just ordinary life, badly lived and well lived, going on all around me! Then Isimsiz turned into an alley where there was only one shop. It was a café that was empty except for a young man standing by a silver urn. He didn’t look surprised to see a beggar and an English girl come in, but brought us coffee on a copper tray. I drank mine right down to the grounds at the end then Isimsiz said, “Everything I tell you now you will write down, and you will call it ‘The Testimony of Nameless and Hassan,’ and since Allah is most merciful to those who most need mercy, it may be that I who am nameless will then be lifeless also, for what other hope do I have?”
Then he began to speak. But it’s as if I was drugged because I can’t remember anything that passed between then and now. I don’t remember his words, or whether I spoke or whether anybody else came in. I remember nothing until I woke in my bed an hour ago and when I woke I was full. I knew that I had been an empty vessel that would ring hollow if you struck it and that now I was full and that the fullness would be heavy and painful in me for the rest of my life. I lay there in the dark until I saw on my desk a pile of empty paper and my father’s pen and knew that I could do nothing now but write down everything Isimsiz had put in me—
The Testimony of Nameless and Hassan
He was born in 1890 to a modest family in Constantinople. Altan Sakir his father was a tailor, and made suits of broadcloth and linen in a room of their home on a sewing machine which he pedalled all day without rest. His brother Hassan was a government official. The brothers were friends. Each enjoyed the company of the other, and would have sought it out even if they had not been born in the same house eighteen months apart. They were alike in appearance, in diligence, in a fondness for any activity that was governed by rules, and their inability to appreciate, or even tolerate, music in any form. All three men were dark-haired and dark-eyed, with mouths that would have been girlish and pink if they had not grown beards very young. Aysel Sakir, their mother, had died too early to inhabit his memories; they admired and respected their father, who taught them to play chess, and told them the stories that all children are told: of the wolf who bore ten sons, of Timur’s iron sword, and of Melmat, the woman who watches. Neither Nameless nor Hassan were married, out of shyness, and a feeling that their lives, for the moment at least, required nothing more than what was already their lot.
When he was eighteen Nameless joined a minor bureau in a minor department not far from the bureau where Hassan was employed. Here he developed a skill with drafting letters and documents which passed from one desk to another, and kept the infinitely small wheels of government infinitely turning. The brothers traveled together in the morning by tram, and home again the same way, and met sometimes during the course of the working day. Hassan taught his younger brother all the skills of the petty bureaucrat: the correct etiquette relating to the titles of government officials, the best method for laying out a set of minutes, the nearest café serving good strong coffee.
Nameless and Hassan had been born under a dying star. They knew, as all good Turkish boys knew, what was their due as heirs of the Ottoman empire. Theirs was the race that had calculated precisely the motion of the earth around the sun, built the watch which could measure time to the ticking minute, depicted for the amazement of unborn historians the skills of surgeons who were also women. But the last of the Sultans, fearfully watching his borders, thought it wise to put in place means to indicate the inferiority of other races. So it was that Armenians were forbidden to annoy their neighbors with the ringing of church bells on a Sunday morning, or build houses so much as an inch higher than those of their Turkish neighbors, who after all had truer claim to the land. These same Armenians wore red shoes and hats. Greeks meanwhile wore black; Jews, turquoise. None were permitted to wear collared kaftans, or silk, or cuffs made from the pelt of the Astrakhan lamb. (Meanwhile, in villages hidden behind hills, Sultan Abdul Hamid II earned the nickname Abdul the Damned, for more direct and efficacious enterprises; but of these, Hassan and Nameless knew nothing.)
Late one evening, as Nameless and Hassan and their father ate a dinner of lamb, they heard the howling of an animal. “Do you hear that?” said Nameless.
