Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  “Oh—” Helen, shaken, finds herself coming closer to the man who has risen from his seat—against whom she instinctively presses, in her anxiety and surprise. “Adaya,” says Thea, who is on her feet. And, look: it is Adaya, coming in view—to your left, to the first of the windows, among the jackdaws’ hurl and eddy. Her thick fair hair curls up at the collar and a gold cross sits on the cheap gray wool of her winter coat. She is smiling, in her hesitant way, and her young face is flushed with the cold. Then she passes from view and appears again, in that window where Arnel stood and pressed his palm against the glass; Adaya is tall now, and her smile is gleeful and merry and red, and her hair is dark and long and it lifts with the wind. Look: again she is gone, slipped out of sight; again she appears, in the third window, the last, which is beside the door: Adaya, but by no means Adaya, in black clothes of a fine thin fabric, many layers of it, that trail behind her like a shadow, that snare the panicked jackdaws, that drip like spilled ink in the gutters. She is monstrously tall, she must surely stoop to cross the threshold; her gaunt face flickers with passing shadows; she grins.

  Helen Franklin feels neither fear nor surprise. She recalls Adaya’s soft hesitant looks and her way of saying: “Have you been punished? Do you despair?”; thinks of her at the cold marble table overlooking the National Theatre and of how she held a seed pearl and said, “What a very wicked thing you did!”

  And here she is, on the threshold, between the parted curtains: Melmoth the Witness, the wanderer, she who is cursed, who is lonely beyond endurance; she who cunningly concealed herself; made herself useful, attended to Albína, to Thea, to Helen—to their small wounds, their confessions—with gestures of caution and care. She is smiling. Her feet are bare and bleeding.

  “I have come,” she says. “Helen, my friend: did you know it was me? I wanted you to know—I hoped you would know: I even told you my true name, which I have not heard spoken since the days of my transgression!”

  “Adaya,” says Helen, and all the lamps grow dim.

  “My own mother named me witness: did she see my curse at the hour of my birth? Oh Helen, my loved one, to whom I gave my name—you have waited for me long enough!”

  Helen turns, and finds that everything about her is arrested. The waiters are at the window, exclaiming at a jackdaw, which is breaking itself against the glass. Thea has fallen into her seat: she is aghast, amazed; her right hand is pressed to her mouth. Arnel stands, and has put out his hand, as if to fend off something he does not want to see. But all the while the jackdaw struggles, and the waiters exclaim; all the while Thea breathes heavily against her palm; all the while Arnel sways, and his raised hand trembles.

  “Oh, I have no need of them,” says Melmoth. Contemptuously she dismisses Thea, Arnel, the waiters at the window. She comes nearer. The bones of her feet are breaking. “It is only you that brings me!”

  “I knew.” Helen cannot take her eyes from those of the Witness: they hold hers with an unblinking implacable gaze. “It has been a long while. I felt you—at night, when I couldn’t sleep, in my bedroom, when I was young—”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Was it you, in Rosa’s room—beside the door—on the chair—”

  “The chair was left for me.”

  “Did you see me? Did you watch me when we lay on the bed—”

  “I saw you. I heard you sing.”

  “Then you know what I am! You know what I have done!”

  She is very close now, very attentive: her eyes in her gaunt dark face are like oil spilled on water. Lightly she puts out a hand, touches Helen on her shoulder; her palm is warm, and very soft, and Helen, who has denied herself so much, responds with something like desire. “My love”—the hand moves in a caress—“I know what you are. I have always known. How could you fool me, whose eyes have never left you?”

  “These past few days I have been mad—I have seen them all—they were in my bed, they were at my table—” Helen is faint. She sways where she stands—she covers her face: “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe you are here. I am sick—my head hurts: I don’t know what I’m seeing . . .” How is it possible? It is fantastic, bizarre. It is simply that she has read too much, slept too little, carried her shame for too long; it is all just a shadow moving on the wall. The scent of lilies is all around her; it is strong, sickly, and there is something else there which is like the sweetness of things left to decay.

  “Don’t you believe that I am here? Oh Helen, my friend, my dear! You are tired—won’t you rest your head on my shoulder?” And Helen is drawn down in arms that wrap her like a winding sheet. She cannot move—she does not want to move; she hears the beating of Melmoth’s old heart, rapid and strong; she hears her murmur: “Let me show you what you did.” Helen, half-dreaming, sees a jail cell. It is scarcely larger than the room where she sleeps and it contains twenty men. They lie on a concrete floor which is wet with monsoon rains that pour from gutters overhead. The men are listless and thin; all have lesions and rashes that make their skin tender and raw. There is a yellow slop-bucket full to the brim. There is Arnel, young, squatting, his face buried in his hands. Beside him a boy of sixteen is clutching his stomach and asking for his mother, and Arnel pats his hand, his hair, and says he would help him if only he could. Then again here is Arnel, older, in a frenzy of despair, punching a wall until the skin splits across each knuckle, and not feeling it, and Helen knows beyond doubt he is thinking of her. And again: Arnel, on a high bunk, eating a kind of broth, reserving the few noodles, the few pieces of meat, for later, because he is afraid there’ll be no more. And there is nothing left of him now—no fury, no kindness, no despair—there is nothing: he has been emptied of himself, left hollow.

  “You see?” Melmoth is murmuring now—her voice is very soft, very sweet: it is the voice of a lover. “You see what you did? It would have been better for him, for his mother, for everyone who loved him, if you had never been born. Who would want you now? Who could bear to look at you? If they knew what I knew—if they’d seen what I have seen!”

  “I know. I know.” Helen is humble. The jackdaw is breaking its beak on the glass.

  “Then come away with me! What remains for you here but shame and disgrace? Come away with me, little Helen: be my friend, be my companion! Won’t you take pity on me? Won’t you take my hand? I’ve been so lonely!”

  The old heart is beating beneath Helen’s cheek and the scent of flowers is heady and rich. She is tired. It would be so easy and so sweet to submit.

  Helen says: “Is there no hope?”

  “None—how could there be?—but a loving companion in your despair.”

  No hope, then, thinks Helen—but she cannot believe it. There is something there—something in her, fluttering, weak, making itself felt. She thinks of the box beneath her bed, and its remnants of the time when she had lived. Then she thinks also of another box, another girl—a lid lifted, and all the world’s wickedness let loose. But something had remained then—hope, very small, very frail, like a white moth looking for a flame. She puts a hand to her stomach and imagines that she feels it—nothing urgent, nothing grand: only a faint lifting that draws her up towards the light. She thinks then of Karel Pražan, and of the choice he made—of how it was Melmoth, in the end, who roused in him the belief that justice demanded he stand witness; who made him not cowed and despairing, but something more large and more free.

  She looks down, and there on the table is Arnel’s notebook. It has fallen open at a place where he has drawn a garden. This garden is in a valley and above it there is a mountain and the peak is obscured by cloud. Flowers in the foreground bloom on the page—there is honeysuckle and bougainvillea, and there are leaves of mint. Deep in the valley, scarcely more than a scribble of a worn-out pencil, are two figures standing close. Lightly she touches the page. It offers, in its little sketch, something she thought beyond her grasp—the prospect of redemption by meeting hope with hope.

  She says: “No.”

 
; “No?” The jackdaw’s beak is breaking.

  “I won’t go with you.”

  Helen is thrust from Melmoth’s arms and the eyes that hang in that gaunt face are burning blue. “You reject me? You—a murderer, a coward? You would leave me here to my sorrow, to my solitude?”

  “I am sorry for it”—and it is true, because what Helen feels now is pity, as she looks down at the bare feet bleeding on the carpet—“but I do have hope, I feel it in here like a pain! I must try, I must!”

  There is a change in Melmoth. She who was all softness, all coaxing warmth, who retained something of the hesitant appealing look of the young woman she had briefly been, hardens, grows rigid as a stone grotesque high on the castle wall. She stoops beneath the low dark ceiling and her hair is all around her in greasy coils that lift and fall. She is grinning now and her mouth is wide and red. She says, “Idiot!” and begins to laugh, a laugh which has in it as much misery as wickedness. “Idiot!” she says: “Then I will leave you here, to wallow in your shame. Do you think you can be redeemed? Do you think you have anything to set against all these years? There is no redemption—there is no hope—there is nothing you can do, to make the balance even!” (Do you think it’s only malice, that makes her speak like this to Helen? Do you think it only spite? It is not—it is her loneliness, her grief!) The shadows on the wall deepen, pulse, acquire substance: Helen sees in them Josef Hoffman, and he is kneeling, and Franz and Freddie Bayer stand over him, and torment him with blows and with kicks; she sees Nameless and Hassan among the sacks on the Black Sea shore; sees Rosa, hears the rub of hand on sheet, the grunt of pain and relief. All the lights in their green shades go out one by one, and there is movement now at the window: jackdaws, in their hundreds, in a frenzy, pouring down the lane, hurling themselves in stupid rage against the glass. Melmoth is shrieking, but Helen cannot make out the words above the sound of it, of small bodies striking the window, of beaks sheared off, of broken wings: then the window shatters, and they are all around her—on the carpet, struggling, beating helplessly against the carpet, opening their beaks—why? why? how? why?

  Then—it is light again, with that greenish forest light, as if the low sun comes in through a canopy of trees; it is light, and Thea is saying, “She is coming,” and is half-rising from her seat; and at the window the staff in their white shirts are exclaiming at the glass, and the glass in the window is cracked, and there is the imprint of a bird.

  “Oh.” Thea frowns. She returns to her seat. “I thought I saw Adaya—I thought I saw her coming down the road.” She shrugs; does not see how white Helen is, how she leans against Arnel.

  “Strange,” says Thea, “how quiet it is today.”

  “She was here,” says Helen. The green lamps are glowing on the walls. “She was here, and now she’s gone.”

  “Helen,” says Arnel. He is humble, quiet. “Little sister,” he says. “Won’t you sit? Won’t you sit with me for a time? I don’t want anything. Can’t you sit here with me?”

  “Do sit,” says Thea: “For goodness sake.” She has always had a certain impatience, a certain briskness, where the frailty of others is concerned. “Is it the birds? The glass was polished too well, that’s all: they thought they could fly clean through.” The staff shrug, lightly press the window where the pane is cracked, and draw the curtains. The soft green light is still more soft, more green; they bring candles, and set them on the table in green glass bowls.

  Helen’s legs are shaking. Her heart beats as hard as Melmoth’s heart was beating. Arnel puts his hand on the chair beside him and looks at her with a shy and frank appeal. She sits down. She says: “I’ve got so little to tell you.”

  “There.” Thea surveys them both with a placid contented air, as if their presence together—their improbable, their astonishing presence, in the same room, at the same table—has all been her doing. “There. Now, Arnel: will you forgive us if we make a toast? We came to raise a glass to a friend, who died. She was old and dreadful, but we miss her.”

  “I do!” Helen begins to laugh, and Arnel’s face, which has been so melancholy and so gaunt, lightens in a smile. “I hated her, you see,” says Helen, confidingly, watching Thea, clasping the bottle with both hands, pour glasses of Bohemia sekt. “I can’t really remember why.”

  “If I may, ma’am: what did she die of?”

  “She died of life, as I suppose we all do, in the end.” Thea is regal: her hair is a gilded crown. “A toast, then.” She lifts her glass. “To Albína Horáková,” she says, “who will never really die, so long as Rusalka goes on singing.”

  “To Albína Horáková,” says Helen Franklin. The glass in her hand is cold. Now there is music. Beside her Arnel is cleaning his glasses on his sleeve and she knows the movement well. He looks up at her, shyly; looks away. “To Albína Horáková,” she says. The lamps glow against the green curtains and on the green walls: it is all verdant, warm, a forest in summer at dusk, and Helen closes her eyes. She finds herself on a path with a dark wood enclosing her. It is dense and deep and there is no light. The road narrows and turns and then there is a house among the branches and something shining in the dark. It is a candle on a windowsill. It has burned so long the flame is small on its charred black wick—but it does burn, it does shine. It shines on David Ellerby holding Alice Benet’s hand and commending her to God; it shines on Josef Hoffman, melancholy boy, and his sole act of virtue. It shines also on Arnel Suarez on his narrow bunk, refusing despair; it shines on Hrant Hachikian as he bends over his letter and hopes only that his name is remembered; it shines on Rosa, with a pink fabric scrap in her hand, waiting for her friend.

  Helen opens her eyes. Thea is turned towards Arnel with solicitous care, because now she is not the most wounded at the table. Arnel is saying, “The snow is not as hard as I thought it would be,” and a candle is burning in its green glass dish. Helen raises her glass again and again, silently, with tears. Here’s to Alice Benet with the sacred wound on her hand and here’s to Freddie Bayer and her brother dancing in their white buckled shoes. Here’s to Rosa, burning in her bed. Here’s to Karel Pražan, gone for a time; to Sir David Ellerby and Josef Hoffman; even to Nameless, even to Hassan: because isn’t it always those who have been forgiven most, who find themselves most able to forgive?

  The bottle is empty. Helen puts down her glass. Somebody opens the door, and beyond it the afternoon has lost its cold severity: the wind coming off the river does not sharpen itself against the eaves, only billows in the awnings of the cafés and the market stalls. “Shall we go?” says Helen. She stands. Thea drains her glass, puts money on the table; Arnel closes his notebook and tucks it in his winter coat.

  The streets are busy, and nobody pays Helen any mind: the jackdaws on their ledges have other matters at hand, and Master Jan Hus, who feels a change of season, is shaking out his coat. Arnel stumbles on the cobblestones and Thea on her crutches is slow. “Come on,” says Helen. She offers each a hand. A pleasure boat is moving on the current of the river, down in the gleaming shadow of the bridge. There is music playing on the deck, and it comes blowing up the alley like a scent. She says, “Come on.”

  Look! It is midnight on the Vltava. The banks are white with sleeping swans and ice that creeps from east to west. St. John of Nepomuk on Charles Bridge has little to entertain him: the street lights blooming on their iron stems show no passersby, no lovers, no children let out late. But it is not empty, not quite: look at this solitary figure leaning on the high stone balcony, gazing down into the river, with an eternal, an absolute solitude! Think of a black ship adrift in a windless calm—think of the last star burning in an empty sky! Doesn’t pity light an ember in your heart—don’t you long to reach out your hand?

  My reader, my dear—you know her, you have been waiting for her: it is the witness, the wandering woman—the punished one, who is lonely beyond endurance, before whose eyes the world’s wickedness unfolds! Oh beloved one, my companion—it is I, Melmoth, whose voice you have heard all
these hours, these days—who first put Hoffman’s letter in your hands! It was I who told you to read, and to bear witness—it was I who showed you how degraded we are, how far we have fallen from all that we ought to have been! Didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess?

  Dear heart, I’ve watched you so long. I was there when you were a child and wondered how much you were loved; I was there when you lay awake in the dark and wondered who stood at the foot of your bed! There is no tear you’ve shed that didn’t wet my cheek, and no joy you’ve had that didn’t lift my heart!

  Oh, and I saw what you did when you shouldn’t have done it—I know what thoughts plague you most, when you cannot keep hold of your mind—I know what you cannot confess—not even alone, when all the doors are bolted against your family and friends! I know what a fraud you are, what an imposter—you never had me fooled: I know how vain you’ve been—how weak and capricious and cruel! What might they all say, if they knew?

  And don’t you know you were born to sadness, as surely as sparks fly up from the fire? I have already seen it! I’ve seen how sorrow will break your bones! But my love, I won’t leave you here to bear it on your own—I have walked to you on bleeding feet: who else could want you like this?

  Oh my friend, my darling—won’t you take my hand? I’ve been so lonely!

  About the Author

  SARAH PERRY was born in Essex in 1979. She has been the writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library and the writer-in-residence in Prague, UNESCO city of literature. Her first novel After Me Comes the Flood, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. Her second novel The Essex Serpent was a number one bestseller in hardback, was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2017, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Dylan Thomas Award, and longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Norwich.