by Sarah Perry
Nameless vomited. “See?” said the woman; and vomiting again, he fell on to the wet sand. Light bloomed behind the monastery on the cliff. Nameless saw that all the sacks scattered on the shore had come undone, and that in each sack was a child, or an infant; or several, or merely two. Then Hassan fell to his knees beside his brother, and Nameless heard that he was counting: “Fifty-two—fifty-three—fifty-four—” he said, as if he might well be called on in the morning to make a report, like any diligent government official.
Then the woman was kneeling there on the sand with them and her feet were bloody and bare. Lightly she touched Nameless on the cheek. Her hand was very hot. She said, “These are the children that were safe, until you signed your name. Here is Taniel, who only learned to write his mother’s name three days before he died. Here is Siran, who wears her sister’s scarf. See? It will never be clean again now. Here is Petros, who broke his leg playing and wanted to be an engineer. Do you see what you have done?”
“I did nothing,” said Hassan. “I did nothing.”
The woman came very close, and whispered. In the folds of her fabric was the scent of lilies dying in a hot room. “It was your hand that held the pen, and yours that sealed the letter. It was you that led them to the boats in the bay, and you that held the knife, and you that put the living and the dead together in the sacks piled on the deck. Did you think I wouldn’t see? Did you think there was no witness?”
Hassan was bewildered and afraid. “I did nothing!” he said. “Nothing!”
“All this, and more,” said the woman. Then she opened her arms and drew the brothers towards her: Nameless on her left shoulder, Hassan on her right. It was softly done, but neither could release themselves from the hands that held them. “Let me show you,” she said. Her breath on their cheeks was warm. “Let me show you—” and suddenly weary, Nameless and Hassan leaned against her, half-dreaming. They saw a desert, and wild dogs hopelessly rooting in the dust, and some distance away, the torso of a fallen woman. Nothing remained of her below the hollow of her ribs, within which some animal had made its nest. Above the empty cone of bones a skull smiled and smiled up at the blue sky. Then they saw a town square and heard the murmur of a crowd which was excited but polite, and in the square were six tripods of new wood, made very fine and sturdy for the occasion. And hanging from the tripods on short ropes six men hung, their robes white and clean, and their feet not a yard from the ground. Sometimes they moved and kicked like sporting boys. Then again they saw a child on a stool, and this child wore a white shirt, and a hat of white Astrakhan fur, and a pair of good dark trousers mended at the knee. He held up his hands and stretched out his bare feet, and on each hand and each foot was the mark of crucifixion. On his face was a look of bewilderment, as if all the world spoke a language he did not know, and could never learn.
Then the brothers were roused from their dreaming by the sound of laughter. Holding them tightly, the woman laughed and laughed. Then she grinned at them with a wicked good humor and said, “Did you see what you have done, with your letters and documents? What great things you can accomplish from behind a wooden desk with three drawers, and a filing cabinet kept in good order!”
“It’s not fair!” said Hassan. “I’ve done nothing! I’ve done nothing!” He put his thumbs to his eyes and pressed them very hard, as if he thought he might put them out of their sockets and with them everything he had seen. Then he stood and the sacks were all around him and the rising sun shone on the upturned hands of the children that spilled out. He walked steadily and without stumbling into the sea. The water was at his waist and something floating there pitched up against him and caused him to cry out. “I have done nothing!” he said, and went on walking, and the slow black water closed over him.
Nameless watched with an acceptance of his own guilt which was almost placid. He knew himself beyond redemption’s reach: no hand of grace could come so far, no light could penetrate. Well, then: he’d seek neither light nor grace. The woman breathed beside him. He knew her name. “Melmat,” he said. He heard in his own voice longing and fear in equal measure. What else was left to him now, but she who’d seen what he had done? Who else might accompany him now, but she for whom life was an eternal punishment? “Melmat,” he said. “I know you, as you know me.”
She petted the sack beside her on the sand. She sang to it, and her soft voice thrilled and appalled him. “What do you know of me?” she said.
“That you are damned, as I am damned.”
“It’s true: I am damned.” The shadows that shifted across her face stilled for a while, and Nameless saw clearly the broad gaunt bones of her cheeks; the smoky eyes, and behind them the old light burning. “What else do you know of me?”
“When I was a child they told me you wander the earth watching all that’s most base and most wicked in mankind—that wherever sin is greatest you are there, and you are the witness. They said you come to those in the blackest despair, and hold out your hand and offer friendship, because your loneliness is so terrible.”
“It is true. I am lonely.”
“Then take me!” said Nameless. “What’s left for me now? My brother and my only friend is dead—I cannot take my guilt to my father—I have been the cause of such suffering my eyes will see nothing else until the day of my death!”
“You would be my companion?” said the woman. She stood. The low sun slid behind her. The black silk of her robes lifted and fell as if immersed in clear water.
“Take me with you! If you and I are damned, can we not be damned together? How can I return to the life I had, which all along was the life of a devil? I am not worthy of my home, my land, my family, my name!”
“Your name!” The woman began quietly to laugh. Her merriment among the scattered sacks was more frightening than anything he had seen before. “Your name,” she said. “Tell me your name.”
Nameless opened his mouth and his tongue did not move. It lay there like old meat.
“Tell me your name!” she said; and he found he had forgotten it—that it had gone, like his brother had gone.
The woman went on laughing, and put a hand within her robes. She took it out, and Nameless saw that she held a letter. It was not the kind that passed through his hand hourly, or so it seemed, in the course of his working week: it was white, and very small, and the name on it was written in blue ink blotted long ago by water.
“I have something for you,” the woman said. She held it out. She grinned, and watched him, and the old light flared up and was blue. Nameless took out the sheet of paper folded inside. Morning had come now, drearily and weakly, with enough dreary light for Nameless to read. When he had read it, he began to shriek without words, without purpose, without any hope of comfort. He groveled in the sand. The grinning woman reached out with her bare foot and nudged him once or twice. The water lapped the shore. The eyes of the infant in her wet sack looked up at the sun. Nameless patted blindly about in the sand—looking for Melmoth, looking for mercy—and could not find her. An hour passed. When he raised his head there was nobody else on the shore.
Here Anna Marney’s journal ends.
Editor’s Notes
In 1940 Marney was recruited as an official war artist by the War Artists’ Advisory Commission at the Ministry of Information. She produced more than 300 charcoal sketches, some of which are held in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. They are distinguished by an impressionistic style, and by the inclusion of a figure in black located towards the edge of each work, suggestive of the artist herself as witness. She died in Cairo in 1974 after a short illness.
Marney’s journals present a puzzle to historians of the period. The change in style between the first diary entries and that of the “Testimony,” together with the abrupt abandonment of the journal, indicate that Marney may have suffered a psychiatric illness involving a dissociative episode. Others suggest the journal is merely a piece of fiction of no historical value.
Since much official documentation relating to de
portation orders and the creation of special militias during the period 1914–1918 has been destroyed, it is not possible to identify Nameless or Hassan. Nonetheless significant points of interest remain. Correspondence between an official at the American Consulate in Trebizond and the US Secretary of State in 1915 testifies to the treatment of Armenian children in the area at that time, as does an eyewitness account from a Turkish lieutenant circulated to the British War Cabinet in 1916. Red Cross reportage on the condition of Turkish prisoners of war interned in British camps in Egypt bears striking resemblance to details recounted in Marney’s journals. These documents, now published online, would not have been available to a British woman in Cairo in 1931. In addition there are notable inconsistencies: for example, there is no bell tower in the Sumela Monastery outside Trebizond.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Marney journals is a letter discovered within the pages, which is reproduced here:
Trebizond
1889
My brother, I kiss your hands. I will not see you again. Our papers are secured, and tomorrow we depart. In Constantinople we will live beneath the crescent and the star, and not the cross; we will be good Turks, and not despised Armenians. You will think me foolish. You say the Great Massacres, which we saw with our own eyes, are the past, and not the future. But I have learned to trust hope less than knowledge and I still hear drums in the night.
Yet I have hope, brother, and it is this which sustains me: that the suffering of our people does not go unwatched—that there are those not yet born who will know my name, and that of my wife and of my children, when all our bones are dust.
So it is that I, Hrant Hachikian, now called Altan Sakir, willingly forgo my name, home, faith, customs and inheritance, that I may preserve the lives of my wife Zabel Hachikian, now Aysel Sakir; my son Emmanuel Hachikian, now Hassan Sakir; and my child who is yet to be born, and is nameless.
Forgive me, and hold me always before the eyes of God.
ALTAN SAKIR
Look, if you can, at Helen Franklin now. It is morning. She is curled on the bed with her face to the wall. She’s grown thinner in the days that have slowly passed since Rusalka sang to the painted moon: the bones of her back show plainly through her nightshirt like the ribs of a trilobite. Winter has turned unkind. She shivers. Albína Horáková is present in the spiders dawdling in the dried flowers, the doilies, the ugly useless objects on the mantelpiece—she is present in the scent of old incense, old drink, old food. At night Helen hears her shuffle and drag on the carpet, and wakes expecting to see the old woman at the door, but there is only her walking frame toppling like a drunk in the hall. The memory of Helen’s last sight of her—face turned up among her bridal finery; conveyed like a duchess on a palanquin through Prague’s opera-going classes, who twitched their good clothes in distaste—cannot dispel the notion that she might at any minute appear at the door with a plate. A phone is on the floor beside the bed. Sometimes it lights up, rings, falls silent; it is ignored.
The testimony of Nameless and his brother Hassan is scattered across the carpet. Helen has read it three times. She sees in her sleep the wet sacks scattered on the Black Sea shore. She cannot turn and face the room, because she is by no means alone. Here is Hassan shivering and wet. Here is Nameless, here is Josef Hoffman: they have much to say to each other. Here is Freddie Bayer: she is choking, and nobody pays her any mind, because nobody can help. Here is Rosa, behind Helen, actually on the bed: she is laughing, in her husky wordless way, at something Helen cannot hear. There is a shadow on the wall. Helen averts her eyes. It is dense, deep—it pulses, sometimes, so that she draws up her knees, her feet, makes herself small, insignificant.
She is broken, then, as I suppose you thought she would be. Is it the manuscripts, the stumbling stone, the reckless consumption of sweetness, of pleasures she does not deserve? Is it her watcher, who even now—this minute, while she shivers on the bed!—stands on the pavement, in the hard cold light of the morning, looking steadfastly up at her window? Is it poor Rosa: did she fight against the fatal dose—was it, in the end, not mercy but malice? Is it Melmoth? Has it always been Melmoth, in fact: were those glassy calculating eyes, that longing look, not mere tales told to children, but fixed on her all along? Is it (and perhaps you think this more likely) Arnel Suarez, older brother, unlocked from the chamber where she kept him hidden, let loose in her memory? Many hands have made light work of dismantling the barricades behind which Helen Franklin has made herself safe. She is exposed to pleasure and fear alike. Her constrained life, her genteel suffering, her penitence, have all amounted to nothing. She has fewer defenses than at the hour of her birth, because there is nobody now to give comfort.
There it is again, the insistent phone. Its blue light flickers on the wall. Hunger rouses Helen. She lifts her head from the pillow, and slowly—very slowly, like an animal which expects nothing but harm—turns on the bed (Rosa covers her face with her hands and slowly rolls aside). Standing, Helen reels, lightheaded and sick. She puts her hand to the wall to steady herself and the shadow there thickens, reaches out, recedes. The phone rings. Dumbly Helen looks down at the screen: it is Thea, who has called many times, who has left messages. It is today, she reads. Helen picks up the phone, crosses the carpet (Josef Hoffman offers her his arm), takes her dressing gown from the door. She does this slowly, flinching, expecting to find that there beneath the thick pink folds is Melmoth the Witness, patient as she always is—watching, as she has always been.
There is a little food in the fridge. There is a plate of small iced cakes in which Albína has left a clumsy thumbprint. There is meat which has gone over. The smell of it mingles with the smell of Albína’s greenhouse lilies dying in their vase. Helen eats, with small unwilling bites: stale bread, cheese which has acquired a bloom of mold, a tomato which has gone sour (Franz Bayer sits at the table and eats potato peelings). It is today, reads the message. She drinks water from the tap in a cup which has not been cleaned. Somebody is singing on the pavement outside. Helen looks at her phone. She recalls, with the effort of moving aching muscles, Thea in her wheelchair at a table in a café not far from Charles Bridge, in black cashmere and black linen, her russet hair neatly parted and combed. “I don’t mean a wake, exactly,” she had said, frowning, judicious: “That’s not it. But I hate to think of anyone passing out of the world without notice. Helen, you’re not sleeping.”
Adaya had been there, too: Helen recalls her serene presence, her clumsy shoes, her look of a postulant nun. She had said, gently: “I suppose it is guilt, still. It is a heavy thing. Does it make you tired, Helen?” Lightly, she had touched the gold cross resting on her blouse. “You look sick. I don’t think you should eat, but perhaps some tea.”
“Let her be!” Helen recalls Thea’s scowl. “Leave her alone. Her friend has died. She is mourning.”
Helen said: “I hated her.” She missed that hatred, the warmth of it, more than she missed Karel’s teasing or her father’s anxious affection.
“All the same.” Clumsily, Thea had passed her coffee. “Not a wake, but we should meet after she is cremated: next week, say, and toast her in sekt . . . oh, she was dreadful, I know, but wasn’t it a good way to go? All that wine, the pearls on the floor. In her sleep, at the opera, on her birthday—”
Hesitantly, Helen had said, “Did it all seem ordinary to you—the birds on the stage, the witch?”
“Were they puppets, do you think, those birds?” The café door opened: Helen averted her eyes. “And that fat old witch with ladders in her tights! What I always love about the theatre,” said Thea, “is looking for the artifice—for who it is that pulls the strings.”
Helen takes a bite of stale bread. The kitchen floor stiffens her feet with cold. Helen supposes she agreed to it—to raising a glass to Albína Horáková, who alone is missing from the zealous faces that cluster about her now. And why not? She does not fear the city streets, the lanes and alleys—what is there to trouble her in the sound of fo
otsteps following hers, when she already knows herself haunted? She sets down the dirty cup, the bread. It is very quiet on the street outside: the air is sharp, the snowfall slick and frozen over. No children play. Somebody outside is singing (. . . marble halls, with vassals and serfs at my side . . .) but Helen does not flinch, or seek to distinguish between what is present, and what is remembered. She is acquiescent now. She accepts her punishment. The phone on the table rings. Thea is growing impatient. Helen replies: I am coming.
The city has wearied of winter. The place where the Christmas tree in the Old Town Square played Strauss just four weeks back is empty and slick with ice: last night someone slipped there and broke two bones in their foot. Master Jan Hus huddles deeper in his overcoat, and might well prefer the flames of the martyr’s fire to the cut of the winter wind. In the Jewish cemetery folded notes of pity and contrition left on the jostling graves freeze hard to the headstones and will never be read. Nobody sits outside the cafés, the restaurants: chairs are stacked against the wall. The air is spiteful. The soft lips of children split with the cold and old men are in bed with pneumonia. The Vltava is freezing at the edges and each morning a swan must be broken free. It is one minute to noon. Helen is down by the river. The sky is pale with a frozen haze and behind it the white sun is a paper disk. She wears no gloves: her hands are scarlet and they ache. A minute passes and an eerie sound rises from the east of the river, then from the west; from behind the National Theatre with its golden crown, from the ticket booths and pizza stalls, from the Black Light theatres and the library at the Klementinum, where a student at desk 209 turns the pages of a textbook. It is a low note, melancholy, ringing up from the pavements and down from the eaves of apartment blocks—startled jackdaws are tossed from their ledges and bicker in the stripped black branches of the linden trees. The low note rises and nobody pays it any mind. One or two tourists, braving the wind’s bite, pause, lift a finger, exclaim: but it is generally ignored. Helen reaches the Bridge of the Legions. It is empty. The siren tires of its own voice and slowly dwindles to a low note, which is cut off by a man indistinctly speaking Czech from a speaker ten feet above Helen on an iron pole. The silence it leaves is uneasy—you might imagine the city to pause a moment to recall the rattle of tanks coming over the bridge before going about its day (though listen carefully and you’ll hear, quiet in that uneasy silence, somebody is singing). Helen stops on the kerb and awaits the passing of a tram, empty save for an elderly woman too doughty to be dissuaded from her tasks by mere weather. It passes, and reveals a man standing on the pavement opposite. He wears black trousers and a padded coat within which he is shivering. The black hood has fallen back. There is little hair left on his head: what remains has receded from above the cheap glasses cracked across one lens, and grows sparse and black above his ears. His skin has a sickly pallor and hangs loose at the jowl. When he opens his mouth to speak there are black places where teeth have come out. He raises his right hand; he is carrying something in his left. “Arnel,” says Helen. It is no surprise to see him there, because he is not alone: Josef Hoffman, boy of fifteen, is just behind his shoulder; Sir David Ellerby, wringing his hands, stands poised on the kerb. “Older brother,” says Helen, but does not respond to the raised arm, the sound of her name. She walks in a daze past Legion Bridge, down Smetana Embankment, along the freezing banks of the Vltava. The man with the broken glasses follows her. So do his companions.
