by Sarah Perry
All that evening she watched her hosts. Thea, who had ten years on her partner, mothered and petted him—cuffed him, sometimes, if she felt he overstepped the mark (“Don’t be nosy, Karel—let her keep her secrets!”). To Helen she was attentive and warm, though always with faint amusement, as if she found her guest odd, but not unpleasantly so. Karel, meanwhile, had an air of cultivated irony, of indifference, which slipped most when he was watching Thea, which he did with a kind of loving gratitude; or when treating Helen as if she were a pupil. Later Helen understood that his partner and his subject were really all that ever occupied his thoughts—that he was like a man who dines so well on the dishes he likes best that he has no appetite for anything else.
Helen—refusing wine; accepting only a very small portion of meat—said to Thea, “Do you teach at the university too?”
“I am retired,” said Thea, with a smile anticipating Helen’s protests that surely not—surely she was nowhere near retirement age.
“She was a barrister, back in England,” said Karel. He gestured to shelves that bowed beneath the weight of legal textbooks. “She still keeps her horsehair wig, over there in a black tin box.” Then he said, with as much pride as if it had all been his own doing, “She chaired a government inquiry, you know. Could have taken a title, if she’d wanted it.” He took her hand, and kissed it. “My learned friend,” he said.
Thea offered Helen buttered potatoes in a porcelain dish. Seeing her guest decline—seeing the half-eaten food on her plate, and the few sips taken from her glass of water—she said nothing. “It had been all work, and no pleasure,” she said. “So I took a holiday in Prague, and that became a sabbatical, and that became a retirement. And then, of course, there was Karel.”
Karel accepted a kiss, then looked with disfavor at Helen’s plate. It seemed he lacked his partner’s tact: “You’re not hungry?” he said; and then, “You’re very quiet, I must say.”
Helen said, “So they tell me.”
“Well, then.” Thea put down her fork. “How long have you lived in Prague?”
“Twenty years.”
“And what do you do?”
“I work as a translator, though my German is better than my Czech.”
“How wonderful! What are you working on at the moment—Schiller? Peter Stamm? A new edition of Sebald?”
“An instruction manual for operating Bosch power tools.” (Helen smiled then; and she smiles now, remembering.)
“I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed! And tell me: was I right—are you from London, or from Essex?”
“Essex, I’m afraid.”
“Ah. Well, that can’t be helped. And you came to Prague because—?”
Helen flushed. How could she explain her exile, her self-punishment, to these smiling strangers? Thea saw it: “Forgive me! I never quite lost the habit of cross-examination.”
“If our guest were in the dock,” said Karel, “I wonder what the indictment could be?” He peered at Helen over a glass of wine, then drank it. There was a flash of dislike in Helen then—for the pair of them, with their good clothes, their warm apartment, their ease; for their unlooked-for hospitality, their charm, their way of wheedling out confidences. But it was swiftly extinguished, because Thea said, with a repressing pat on Karel’s hand, and a mollifying smile, “Did either of you see that old man in the library the day we met, crying over a manuscript? What do you think he was writing—love letters, perhaps, to some man or woman long dead?” And later, helping Helen into her coat, “I have so loved having you here—won’t you come back, and we can talk about England, and all the things we hate about it, and how much we would like to go home?”
All this Helen recalls with a kind of disbelieving fondness, because they are gone now, those easy evenings; have seemed, in the few months since Thea’s stroke, to have actually been erased. And now she is at this small table, with this glass of water—with this new Karel: stooping, uneasy, a little frantic. If whatever was concealed in that file, wrapped three times in leather cords, has had such malignant power, might it also disrupt her peace of mind? But—no!—it is impossible. That peace of mind, so hard won, is buttressed with stone. She draws the sheet of paper towards her, and reads: My dear Dr. Pražan—How deeply I regret that I must put this document in your hands, and so make you the witness to what I have done . . .
Helen Franklin, having read the letter, feels no chill—no lifting of the fine fair hairs at the nape of her neck. She greets it with interest, no more. An old man, confessing some long-forgotten sin (my fault, she murmurs: my fault, my most grievous fault), which doubtless could not, these days, tweak the eyebrow of the most ascetic priest. Nonetheless (she draws the paper towards her; reads: my pen is dry, the door is open), there is something curious in its fear and longing that is something very like the half-shamed anxious glances of her friend (she is coming!).
Karel returns with food: slabs of beef, thick gravy seeping into porous dumplings. “Well?” he says, with a not quite pleasant grin. Helen takes the offered plate; eats deliberately, in small bites, and without pleasure.
“Poor chap,” she says. “Old, I suppose? Only a very old man or a very affected one would use a typewriter.”
“Ninety-four. He looked as if he’d been pickled in vinegar, put in a jar. ‘You will outlive me,’ I said. ‘Bring vodka to my funeral.’ He laughed at that.”
Helen notes the tense. “He has died, then? No beer for me, thank you.” She sets down her fork, and gives him a quick kind look. “You know, it would be simpler if you just told me about it. If you told me all about it—the old man, and the woman you think you see. I don’t like mysteries or surprises. How many times have I told you? I don’t like them at all.”
He laughs then—shrugs—clears his plate. The boys in their workman’s boots have gone; in the corner a student sits smoking over her books. Karel returns the sheaf of papers to its file, and the tremor has gone from his hands. “All right,” he says. “I’ll tell you everything. That is: everything I have seen myself. The rest, we leave to Josef.” He glances at the file. “And yes, he is dead.” There is a long, silent moment: each bows their head, a little foolishly, out of mere good manners. Then Karel lights a cigarette from the candle on the table, leans back against the painted wall beside the velvet curtain, and says: “I met him first where I met you: in the library, in the morning, very early, six months ago at least . . .”
Morning, very early, at least six months ago: the National Library of the Czech Republic at the Klementinum, and a kind light shining on the pale bell tower of the Jesuit college it once had been. Karel, on compassionate leave from Charles University, Thea having suffered her stroke, went daily to his library desk to escape his guilt and shame. The woman in the chair for which ugly ramps had been fitted in his home was not—he could not pretend otherwise—the woman with whom he’d passed a decade. Thea, who could hardly cross the road without acquiring a dinner companion, or someone with whom to attend the Black Light shows for which she had a child’s love; Thea, with her look of someone you could not trust with a secret, but to whom you’d tell it anyway—this Thea had, he feared, been effaced. On the steel footplates of her wheelchair her well-shod feet turned weakly in; her capable hands lay listless in her lap, or fumbled at the pages of a book. Karel found himself unsuited to the task of carer, which had been always Thea’s role: who was there now to pet Karel in his childish moods, when he must clean, and carry, and press analgesics and distalgesics and antiplatelets from their foil packets, and carry them to Thea on a saucer? He wept onto burnt toast, and wished the tears were more sorrowful than angry. Thea said, “Oh get out, be off with you: do you think I need you under my wheels all day? Off to the library with you, and bring me something good to eat.” Released from his duties—relieved, and guilty at his relief—Karel went to the Klementinum from Monday to Saturday, sat himself at desk 220 as he always had, photographing, mumbling, taking notes; in the afternoons (these being her allotted hours for work
) meeting Helen in the café for cakes filled with poppy-seed paste.
On perhaps the second week—spring indecently in bloom—his gaze was drawn by an elderly man seated across the cork-tiled aisle at desk 209. He could not later say what it was that had made him look—a sudden movement, perhaps? The sound of a pencil’s frantic scratching?—only that for several minutes he could not look away. The man wore a heavy coat, despite fine weather, and sat very still save for the motion of his right hand, which crossed and crossed a sheet of paper in a fine copperplate. All around him students typed rapidly before their glowing screens, or sat with eyes turned upward listening secretly to music; but this man had brought a pot of ink into which he dipped his pen with mechanical regularity. Beside that pot, Karel saw, was one of the small square stones that pave the streets of Prague, and which often erupt at the footfall of too many passersby, or at the upward press of a tree root; this he occasionally touched, without looking up from the page. Altogether the effect was of a breach in time through which Karel peered into some morning decades past: “I’ll hear horses’ hooves on the streets outside!” he thought. The document on which the man worked looked very like an academic treatise, with lengthy footnotes appended here and there; sometimes he would read over what he’d written, and shaking his head with a sound of disgust tear the paper into strips, earning censorious looks from nearby scholars. The desk beside him was empty, but the lamp was lit; the old man seemed to have drawn the chair towards him, and if someone approached—hopefully clutching their books to their chest: “May I?”—he raised his head, sternly shook it, and drew the chair a little nearer.
The following morning, coming early to the café for coffee and a pastry, Karel found the old man seated at an empty table. Curiosity put her palm between his shoulder blades and pushed him over; he set his own plate down, and said: “May I join you?”
Startled, the old man had cast his eyes about the room; then putting his palm on the chair beside him as if to indicate that he was shortly to be joined by another, said vaguely: “Oh—ah: well, that chair, I think, is free.” His Czech was careful and decorous; his German accent that of a man for whom Prague’s river would always, really, be the Moldau.
“You work hard,” said Karel, gesturing to a leather file on the table. “You put us all to shame. What an ethic!” Then he said, “Karel Pražan, of Charles University; though not very often, if I can help it.” He put out his hand.
“Josef Hoffman,” said the man. “A pleasure.” They shook, and the touch of palm on palm actually rustled, as though Hoffman were made of paper.
Not a great deal was exchanged that day—statutory pleasantries regarding the fine weather, and the difficulty of locating anything at all on the shelves these days, what with the staff being so young, and always putting some new system in place. But in the days that followed, if one saw the other a silent greeting passed between them, as if they were colleagues pursuing some common purpose. It was a pleasure to encounter Hoffman in the café, eating potato salad with a spoon; it was a pleasure to note that, yes, again, he carried that leather file, sometimes rubbing with his thumb the gilded monogram J.A.H.; that he kept the little paving stone in his pocket at all times. Karel never discovered what his occupation had been, but was delighted to find him knowledgeable in all kinds of subjects, and that he had never lived long in one country. He possessed a formidable memory for fact and figure, and took so great a pleasure in treating his new friend like a pupil that Karel concluded he must once have been the master of some country school: did he know, for example, that Saddam Hussein was once given the keys to the city of Detroit? That even the dead can get gooseflesh? The two often spoke in German, Hoffman moved to quiet laughter by Karel’s inelegant phrasing, his impoverished vocabulary. In return for help with grammar and usage, Karel showed Hoffman how to operate a computer, which the old man treated with intelligent awe. All technology interested him, and he often spoke—with some sentiment—of an old radio he’d once used when he was young. He was in all things intelligent, courteous, quiet, and rather shy; if asked what it was that he was writing he would say, “Only an old man’s recollections that will never be read,” and without rancor change the subject. He was given to sudden fits of melancholy, and on those mornings did nothing but incline his head towards his friend, barely raising his eyes from the manuscript which seemed to be the sole preoccupation of his life. At these times Karel would see him cross out page after page, the nib of his pen scoring the paper; weeping in the arid way of the old, who have already wept themselves dry; then he would fretfully move the empty chair beside him this way and that; or lean first towards it, and then away . . .
So they’d gone on, the old man and the ageing one. If Thea’s stroke and its consequences had knocked Karel off course, and presented him with daily evidence of his own selfishness, Josef Hoffman was a fixed point—and one which, what’s more, required a redemptive degree of kindness. When Karel came to the library that last morning—a full year turned, the winter air clean and bright as polished glass, the courtyard rimed with frost—and found himself first to arrive (the custodians of the library cloakroom still drinking from their Thermos flasks; no security guards at their post) he laughed to think he’d at last beaten Hoffman to the door. Hoffman, who’d chide him so often for arriving at his desk an hour later than any good student should! It occurred to Karel to play a little trick: perhaps he might even transgress so far as to sit at desk 209, or in that always empty chair, and risk the old man’s wrath. He slipped past the cloakroom unnoticed, a light coat thrown over his arm—laughing quietly at such an innocent deceit, the library empty, and his heels rapping out against the floor; the corridors, the oak drawers with their obsolete hoard of library catalogue cards, the view of the courtyard, all in their emptiness seeming entirely strange, as if he had never been there before. Then the great ironclad door, with its noisy latch; he lifted it, and slipped through. No librarians yet at their post, the ranks of desks miserably empty, like sockets from which teeth had been pulled; from the vaulted plaster ceiling plaster babies descended, screaming, as if behind the vault their soft fat feet were being scorched with branding irons. All this Karel saw, uneasy; what had been a place of comfort and industry now repelled him, so that he turned on the threshold to go back. How dark it was, with no lamps shining at their desks!—but, no: a single light was switched on, there, far at the back—left on overnight, perhaps, by some janitor heedless of the cost. It shone down and illuminated a sleeping scholar. Karel, coming slowly down the aisle between the desks, saw the outstretched arms that made an aching pillow for the stooping head; the curved back, the spill of white hair over the dark sleeve. “Josef!” said Karel to himself; hardly surprising, really, that the old man had taken a nap. “Josef?” he said, tiptoeing nearer, and speaking tenderly, as if to a sleeping child. Later he thought: why did it not occur to him, then, that Hoffman was taking his last long sleep? Ninety-four, and weary, and the library so comfortable and quiet—he reached the desk, and lightly put his hand on Hoffman’s shoulder. “Josef!” he said, “Shouldn’t you be at your work by now?” But Hoffman didn’t wake, only fell aside, slumped against the green surface of the desk. The old head lolled against the shoulder—the hair was long and rough; it was the hair of a man who no longer cared what others might make of him, and Karel thought: was he always this man, with his shoes broken down and those great raw wrist bones erupting from the fraying cuffs of his greasy sleeves? “Josef,” he said again, and this time shook the shoulder beneath his hand—again the head lolled, rotating on the thin corded neck, so that it turned a blind face up to its tormentor. The eyes were open—they were green—they gazed at Karel, imploring, in an expression of fear and dread; the mouth (Karel shudders, remembering) wide open, the lower jaw fixed awry, as if some unkind hand had tugged it aside as he lay screaming. The hands outstretched upon the desk were not at rest, but rigid, palms down, the fingers hooked, the nails scoring at the surface; there were pale marks visible, as
if Hoffman had scrabbled frantically at the leather for minutes at a stretch; and scattered across the desk, in pieces as if crushed by a great weight, were fragments of stone. Beside him another chair had been prepared: it was tilted, as if he’d been deep in conversation with a companion who’d long since left; beneath the chair something unmoving, ill-defined, a scrap of dark fine fabric perhaps; oh, very dark, very fine, like the hem of a woman’s dress; as Karel watched, it slipped, as fabric sometimes does—moved, again, as if a breeze passed over it. Karel, in a daze, put out his hand; then a window slipped its latch and blew back against the wall. He cried out, and turned: a jackdaw lighted on the sill, blinked its blue eye once, and left. That look, he later thought, was what recalled him to his senses: nothing on the floor after all but Hoffman’s feet, twisted back against the joints of his ankles, and the deep unmoving shadows of the desk and chair. He ran out then, indecently fast (as if the old man might rear up! As if those hands might reach blindly out!), and encountering the security guards at last at their posts said, “An old man—a heart attack, I think?—you’d better call an ambulance.” Then there’d been all the banalities: students turned away at the door half complaining, half relieved; bitter coffee shared from a flask, curious questioning from the staff; and if he shuddered to think of Hoffman’s face, and the horrid gaping of his open mouth, it was only death, the old debt paid on all those years spent living. As he waited by the entrance, uncertain of death’s etiquette (should he remain with his old friend—would there be suspicions, perhaps?) a solemn woman approached. “Dr. Pražan, yes? I found this,” she said, “while cleaning.” She paused, and narrowed her eyes. “There was a note saying we should give it to you. Not how we usually do things: most irregular. Not part of my job. Still,” she said, “under the circumstances. It’s his, isn’t it? The dead one. Didn’t think I knew him, but as soon as I saw this I could picture him clear as you standing there now. Those initials, there—always wondered what they stood for. Well, I know now, don’t I? German, I suppose.” Here, a very faint note of distaste. “Still, it’s a shame.” Reluctantly she handed it over; Karel took it, and left it unopened on his lap.