by Sarah Perry
Thea waits in the appointed café and has been there since the appointed hour. The place is dimly lit from behind green glass shades; the light is like that of a forest at dusk. Green velvet curtains hang from the windows and against the door; there are green glass ashtrays on the tables. Dimly, Helen recalls—as if from a distance of many years—having once sat here, at this table, under these green lights, as Karel Pražan said, “Do you see her? Has she come?” Thea gestures in comic admonition to the clock ticking on the panelled wall. As if nourished by loss, by shock, by her encounters with Melmoth the Witness, she looks very well indeed. Her hair springs from her forehead; her cheeks glow with good health, and with the application of a powder that glistens with gold. She wears black, in deference to the occasion, but her trousers, her blouse, the patent shoes on her feet, have nothing melancholy about them, nothing remotely sombre. Her lipstick is scarlet and neatly applied. There is something almost malignant in her vitality when set against Helen’s depletion. She has come not in her chair at the hands of a helper, but on two crutches that lean on the table. If this has proved arduous there is little sign of it. The café is otherwise empty, and the staff lean bored on the counters. Thea has prepared two chairs beside her.
“You are late! Never did I think I’d see the day. But Helen, darling, have you been ill—did you catch a cold? God knows it’s easily done in this weather. Sit down, won’t you? What is it—what’s happened—what have you seen?”
Helen turns her back on Arnel Suarez and Alice Benet, who wait patiently outside. Obediently she sits. She places a hand on the empty chair. Might it be possible to confess to Thea that the veil which hangs between what is real and what is not has been torn—that she wanders about in a daze, and cannot tell which side she walks?
“Is it Melmoth?” says Thea, teasingly, with none of the concealed malice with which she used to say the name, and Helen realizes that Thea is done with it now: that having passed on the Melmoth manuscripts she has washed her hands of the affair. Her yoke is easy; her burden is light.
Helen says: “It is all of them.” A girl in a white shirt brings three glasses and a bottle wet from the ice. “Melmoth,” she says. “Nameless, Hassan, Josef Hoffman. They have been with me for days.” Her hands in the warm air throb with the sudden rushing of her blood.
“Won’t you pour?” says Thea. It is evident she has concluded that Helen is indulging in the absurd. “I’ll only make a mess of it. Adaya said she would come. Odd how a stranger becomes an acquaintance, isn’t it? Very quickly, and as if they hardly mean to.”
“Last night,” says Helen, “I had Rosa in my bed.”
“All right then: I’ll do it, but it’s your fault if it gets spilled. Then you’ve had a temperature, to be seeing things like that? Poor lamb, poor thing. Perhaps they’ll make you a toddy, if I ask, like in an English pub—”
“And there’s this place on the wall where the shadow looks dark and deep and I thought: if I touch it my hand will go all the way in—”
“What I think we need is plenty of lemon, for the vitamins, and at least two fingers of whisky.”
“—I think she has been watching me all along. I think, even, that I might not have done it, if I hadn’t felt her watching me—”
“And take off your coat. You won’t feel the benefit, as my mother would say.”
“In all those stories nobody said that. Nobody said: I know she was watching, I knew it marked me out, and that’s why I did what I did.” Helen pauses. She says, with a mouthful of spite which tastes delicious: “I’m surprised you either remember or care what your poor mother would have said.”
“Look, Helen, they’ve made you a whisky and lemon. Sit quietly for a bit and drink it. You’re not being very nice.”
“Nobody said, it was her fault—it was her fault—I would never even have done it without her—”
“How odd. There is somebody on the pavement, just standing there in the cold.” Thea has spilled the wine.
“Oh yes!” Helen smiles. “I told you. Hoffman, Alice, Arnel—Sir David Ellerby, not dressed for the weather.” She does not say: Melmoth, because it is both too much to hope for and too much to dread (and do you wonder what she might say, were Melmoth the Witness to come now, and offer Helen her hand? Oh, so do I—so do I!)
“Drink up, before it gets cold. It’s a man in a black coat with the hood up. He looks absolutely wretched. His glasses are broken. He looks sick.”
Helen’s blood surges in her like a tide dragged by the moon. She cannot speak.
“Poor man ought to come in out of the cold. He is shaking.”
“Do you see him, then?” It is a whisper, this: of hope, fear, disbelief.
“Of course I see him. I may be a wrecked ship, Helen, but my eyes are all they ever were. He is looking at you, actually.” Thea frowns. She has the look of a lawyer surveying dubious evidence. Is it possible it occurs to her that here is Arnel Suarez, having crossed the years and continents, and pitched up in a café in Prague, where the beer mats on the table show Charles Bridge at midnight? Perhaps: certainly she loses a little of her good cheer.
Helen says: “Is he alone?”
“Yes. Strange how quiet it is today.”
Helen turns in her seat. Her body rebels against the command and it is a great effort to move. The café has three windows, long and deep, which face the cobbled street. Through them she sees the black pole of a street light with a bike tethered to it, the façade of a shop selling Moser glass, a board on which are papered flyers for concerts in deconsecrated chapels. There are no passersby, no children in winter coats, no tourists holding paper cups of honey wine. In the middle window—precisely in the centre of it, placed as if by an artist on a canvas—stands the man in the hooded coat. His face is up against the glass. His breath blurs it. Light strikes the cracked lens of his glasses and gives him a blind bewildered look. His mouth is moving: he might be speaking or singing but the glass is thick and Helen cannot hear. He raises his hand and presses his palm to the window.
Helen Franklin stands. She shudders; her hip knocks the table and Thea’s glass breaks on the floor.
Thea says: “Do you know him? Helen, what is it: you’re frightening me.” She fumbles with the crutches propped against the table.
“He’s here,” says Helen. “He really is here.” The words are a whisper because there is a cold hand at her throat. Frantically she looks for her old companions—for Hoffman, for Alice, for Nameless and his brother: if they are there, Arnel is not. But—no: it is only that solitary figure, patiently waiting.
“Who is it? You look so afraid.”
“I am afraid! I am afraid!” Helen is hot now, with the old wet heat of a summer in Manila before the rains have come. Sweat has broken out on her face, on her body: her eyes sting with it. She looks down and sees the hard green tiles of a hospital floor and the print of a bleeding heel. Twenty years slip from her like the sloughed skin of a snake: she is twenty-one, ardent, believing herself marked out, believing herself merciful and just; she is twenty-two, appalled, shaking in the bed where she slept as a child, knowing herself condemned.
“So it was him.” Thea is trying to stand, grasping the table’s edge: “Who has followed you, all this time?”
“What does he want?” Helen’s voice—she hears it; she despises it—is high, querulous, plaintive. “Has he come to punish me? How he must hate me—what can I do? What can I say?” With a very great effort she lifts her head. The window is empty and he’s gone. There is a single moment of elation and reprieve before she sees him at the door. His hood has fallen back, and she can almost make out, behind the gaunt loose skin gone sallow from confinement, behind the high forehead which has lost its thick dark fringe, Arnel Suarez, who once held her aching arm very gently and turned it this way and that, who stood with her at the mouth of a volcano, who danced towards her in the street and kissed her, who had sat with his brother and been very tender and worried all night that he wouldn’t bear the pai
n. “I did that,” she says. “I did it.” Because it is not merely time that has decayed Arnel, that has sucked the flesh from his bones, that has knocked the teeth from his head. He is on the threshold now and he is carrying a plastic bag. The handles are torn and it slips from his fingers and is clumsily pulled up. The atmosphere in the room is thick, oppressive, its particles charged—two waiters leaning on the counter seem indolent, weighed down by the heavy air. Thea, leaning on the table, shaking with the effort of standing on wasted legs, says, “You will have to face him, Helen—there is no way out, I’m afraid.” She has lost her vital, happy look. She says: “I think Melmoth would be better than this.”
“How has he done this? How did he find me? How did he come all this way—”
“Anyone can find anyone, these days—there are no hiding places, not any more!” The door closes. The velvet curtains hanging over it stir and are still. Helen hears herself breathing rapidly and each breath is a whimper. The curtains part and here he is, the man who has pursued her from the Pasig to the Vltava, who sang to her in the streets, whom she sentenced to a kind of death with her pride and cowardice. He puts down the bag he carries and takes off his glasses. The lenses are white with steam. He lifts the hem of his shirt, and wipes them carefully, and carefully puts them back on. Then he stoops to pick up the bag and clutches it to his chest. All his movements are slow, considered, and his hands are shaking. The greenish light gives his face a still more sickly look. He comes forward. Helen finds her mind and body are wholly immobile: she cannot move—she can scarcely think—she is suspended between dread and anticipation, between pity and fear, and it leaves her stupid, insensible. He is hardly ten feet away. He stops. He says: “Helen? Little sister?” and his voice has a break in it. “Little sister?” he says; and then there is a violent bang. The women are startled out of their stupor and the man flinches and drops what he carries on the table. They all turn. High up on the centre window there is now the imprint, very plain to see in the thin cold light, of a bird. The uplifted wings, the smooth full breast, glint on the glass. The shock of it rouses Helen from her disbelief. She studies the man who stands closer now, wringing his hands. There is nothing there to frighten her, nothing to justify those days, just passed, of lying shivering on her bed. He has the humble, shy look of someone who expects nothing but contempt and refusal and accepts it as his due. He is shorter than she remembered—much shorter, as if something has dwindled down his bones. He says, “I have come a very long way and I’m very tired. Can I sit down?” What color remains on his cheek fades. He sways where he stands. Thea—regaining her customary control by degrees—says, “Of course you must sit. Here. You ought to eat. You ought to have something hot to drink.” There is a pause, in which you might, if you looked closely, see Thea’s anxiety do battle with good manners, which in the end win out. She holds out her hand. “I am Thea,” she says. “I am a friend of Helen’s.” The man looks at the outstretched hand (there again is the diligent bee in the eye of the silver skull), bewildered, then grasps it with both his. He clings to her. “Ma’am, thank you,” he says. “Thank you. My name is Arnel Suarez.”
“So I infer. Helen, sit down. Mr Suarez, give me back my hand.”
But Helen cannot sit. How can she take part in this pantomime of good manners, of introductions, of a glass of wine and something to eat? She rubs absently at the scar on her forearm—rubs harshly, as if that small wound was the cause; as if all of it—Rosa sharing her bed at night, Karel’s desertion, the shadows deepening on her bedroom wall, Melmoth herself with her implacable eyes—was caused by nothing more than a cockroach nymph getting hungry in the night.
“Is it you?” she says. Still, she doubts it, and well she might: what is there in this small, cringing, gaunt old man, with his broken glasses and torn plastic bag, to make her think of her lover? He cannot meet her eye: has not, yet, looked directly at her. “How did you find me?” Anxiety makes her imperious. “How dare you?” she says. “How dare you follow me here?”
He fumbles with the bag and takes out a child’s exercise book. It is stained; the corners roll and fold. “I didn’t know where you were,” he says. “I didn’t know where you went. I couldn’t write or call. So all that time, all those years: I made this. Look.” He opens it with care. “I made it for you,” he says. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it better. I wanted to show you what it was like. I wanted you to know what I did for you.”
“But what do you want?” says Helen. “What can I do? What can I say?”
“I went to the Q.A.F. the day I came out. My mother, she’d died by then; my brother is a lawyer, you remember. I am no good for him. So I went to the Q.A.F. and then I wrote to your family at the old address, asked where you were. I am sorry. I just wanted you to see.” Humbly, he pushes the book across the table. Helen will not touch it. But after all there is something familiar in the way his hair grows at the nape of the neck, in how he straightens his glasses: Helen hears, as if it is an echo delayed by many years, her own voice, half-laughing, half-tender, saying, “Older brother, I’m thirsty, get me something to drink.” Deep in her stomach, where the flames have so long been damped down: an ember. There are moles where his neck is bare above the worn collar of his coat. She knows them. They have thickened, coarsened by sun and age. They revolt her and she’d like to touch them.
“Let me look.” Thea cannot conceal her curiosity. She draws the book towards her, and with awkward movements flicks through the pages. It has the look of a sketchbook kept by a student: drawings in ink and black pencil, annotated, erased, drawn over. Or rather: it is like a book in which many students have sketched. Here, bushes of bougainvillea so finely drawn the petals curl from the page; here, a man, squatting against a wall, looking up, very haphazardly done. Across a double page, what seems at first to be many insects going about their business, but (Thea peers a little closer; Helen cannot help but look) is men, dozens of them, seen from above, lying beside and upon each other, confined within a cage.
“Nineteen years,” says Arnel Suarez. “I said I was innocent. But then, it was a long time before the trial. A year. I lost heart. I didn’t care.”
“Here,” says Thea. It is not that she doesn’t pity him: her attention is merely elsewhere. She points at a page—turns it, points at another: at a barely sketched figure in black outside a barred window, or standing watchful at the corner of a yard. “This woman, here, at the edge of the page—and here, at the foot of the bed . . .”
“Yes, ma’am.” Arnel removes his glasses and puts them in the pocket of his shirt. The movement causes Helen a new pain so sharp she presses a hand to her side. “We saw her sometimes. Not all the men, but some. When things were bad. There were too many of us, you see: not enough food, and what we had wasn’t good. Every day in the summer it smelt, worse and worse. Our skin went bad, we got sick. And then sometimes we saw her. Just watching. We said: won’t you help, won’t you tell someone how it is for us in here? But she just watched. Some of the men called her Saksi and thought she’d come back. Saksi,” he said, “means witness.”
“What do you want?” says Helen again. His hands are folded on the table. A black cross is tattooed on the left, beside the thumb; the right is scarred at the knuckles with thick padding as if he has repeatedly struck something hard. He says, humbly, “You don’t have to give me anything. I don’t want money. I want to know it was right, what I did. I want to know it counted. That was how I stood it, all that time, knowing you were free.” He looks at her then. His eyes are bloodshot, and the remains of an infection is reddening the lids. “Kuya,” says Helen. “Older brother—”
Listen! There is the sound of something striking the window—then another, and another. It is jackdaws—gentlemanly, blue-eyed, watchful jackdaws—coming down from the eaves and ledges of the buildings opposite, coming up from the Vltava and down from the shoulders of St. James and St. John; from the library bell tower and from deep in the folds of the coat of Master Jan Hus. They come so thickl
y down the street the light of the winter sun is obscured: the café darkens, the lights glow more ardently behind their green glass domes. There is another strike, and the indolent waiters, exclaiming, come forward, and stand beside Helen, beside Thea: the windows now are marked all over with the greasy imprints of broken wings. The glass cracks. Thea says: “There she is,” without surprise or horror. “She’s coming.”
