by Sarah Perry
“Last night, after you left, I fell asleep reading the story of Nameless and Hassan. When I woke it was three in the morning and there were no lights outside, not even the courtyard light, and my own room was as black with my eyes open as it was with them closed. But all the same I could have sworn there was a movement in the corner of the room—somehow very far back, too far, as if it wasn’t against the wall but behind it, actually behind it—moving like a swarm of flies, or like the shadow under a tree.” In the kitchen, Adaya begins to sing. “The strange thing is that I wasn’t only scared. I wanted something to be there—I wanted to see something waiting for me—do you think you can long for something that scares you half to death?”
Helen considers this, carefully, as she considers all things. “I sometimes think that one great emotion is never very far from all the other ones. Best to avoid them entirely, if possible.”
Adaya returns with a plate. There is the scent of honey and melted butter; there is fragrant tea in a pot. There is also, in a plastic box designed for the purpose, a handful of tablets of various kinds. She sets these on the table, beside the pile of books and documents: they nudge a sheet of paper, which drifts to the floor. She stoops to pick it up. “Melmoth the Witness: Primary Sources?”
Both Helen and Thea feel embarrassed at the quiet, querying look that comes from behind the young woman’s glasses. “We are . . . researching, that’s all.” Thea has the faint hauteur of the mildly ashamed.
“Oh yes. Melmotte. Doesn’t everybody know?” Adaya is unperturbed.
“Not us,” says Thea. “Not until recently.”
“We know, of course,” says Helen, “that it’s only a legend.”
“Ah!” Adaya’s shy smile grows teasing. “You don’t imagine she is watching you? Perhaps your consciences are clear. Now, Thea. Please: eat.”
Helen stands. She is tired. There is a dull ache in her knee. “I must go,” she says. “But I will see you tomorrow, I think—Thea, have you had a call from Albína Horáková?”
Thea laughs. “A veritable royal summons. Dinner, and then—heaven help you, Helen, heathen that you are—the opera.” She cradles a teacup, which trembles in its saucer.
Adaya surveys Helen. “You don’t like music?”
“I did once.” It is useless to explain, and equally useless to protest. Albína Horáková is, she has learned, as immovable as Prague Castle. She buttons up her coat. “Thea, shall I come tomorrow—will you be all right?”
Adaya and Thea answer together: “Oh yes,” they say. “Oh yes: everything will be all right now.” The young woman stands beside Thea’s chair. Steam rises from the teapot in her hand; the lamplight shines on her thick fair hair, and on Thea’s ruddy mane. She looks, in her brocade gown, not frail and compromised by sickness, but like a queen who has acquired a courtier.
* * *
Walking home, Helen listens for the echo of her follower’s footstep, but there is none. Is it merely the muffling of the snow, which has not yet been cleared from all the paths and alleys? Perhaps. But Helen is almost minded to think the arrival of that shy, competent young woman in her thick brown tights marks the end of the matter—the end of unsettling dreams in the night, of blue-eyed jackdaws and their knowing winks, of watchful schoolboys in the street. Josef Hoffman has merely died, as all men must; Karel Pražan has merely turned tail, as many men do. But climbing the stairs to her apartment, submitting humbly to the additional pain (the well-deserved pain) that comes from her throbbing knee, Helen thinks of the name on the stumbling stone. Certainly Melmoth the Witness may be discarded as a tale told to keep children in line, but not all things can be so readily set aside. Two hours remain of the day, and she resolves to devote them to what is left of Josef Hoffman’s manuscript.
Her apartment is silent. There is no fitful television light, no muttering from Albína Horáková’s room; there is not even the musky scent of incense cones burned in dishes to ward off the evidence of cigarettes. But Albína has been at work, all the same, for there on Helen’s bed (you recall the bare mattress under the bare bulb) is a pile of dark and flimsy fabric. It is a dress, very old, very fine, almost disintegrating at a touch: it is embroidered with fronds of fern, and beaded with small birds. There is also a woolen wrap, cashmere, reeking of camphor; a pair of buckled shoes; and a handful, carelessly tossed down, of garnet jewelry glinting bloody in the light. There is no note. None is required. Helen pictures herself in an opera box, a brass eyeglass raised to the stage, trailing scraps of beaded net, and laughs. She hears, very distantly, a corresponding laugh, and this one is delighted—comes, it almost seems, from the cardboard box beneath the bed. Then she tosses the glittering pile to the floor, takes the Hoffman document from her desk, and lies on the hard thin mattress to read.
The Hoffman Document
And so Prague changed, but no more (it seemed to me) than a door is altered by a coat of paint. Red banners with the black swastika appeared on municipal buildings and the German boys filled out their uniforms. One night a synagogue caught fire, and the fire wardens let the whole temple burn down; but I knew nothing of this until long after the war was ended.
Often when I passed the Bayer shop I heard the radio. Each time I thought of Freddie spinning in the warm room as flowers died in the grate and saw Franz extend his hand towards me through the closing door; each time I felt again the weight of desire and dislike.
One January night, when I was fourteen—it was a Friday: I know this beyond doubt—I walked home late from school. All along Viktoriastrasse lighted windows showed citizens of Prague and soldiers of the Reich sitting amiably over coffee and cake. Jackdaws had come away from the river and were seeking out ledges for the night, and the tram bells sounded like sleighs at Christmas. Everything was as it had always been and would always be, but when I turned into our road I saw Polizist Novák on the doorstep of an empty shop. He held his hat in his hands and he was weeping. It wasn’t done for show but seemed as private as thinking. I said, “What is it, Polizist Novák? Have you lost something?” I recalled, as I often did, my lost moldavite, and put my hand in my pocket as if I might feel it there. He said: “Josef, isn’t it? How tall you are. I hardly knew you.”
I sat beside him on the step. There was beer on his breath. “I only ever tried to do what is right,” he said. “What can we trust, if we cannot trust the law?” I had no answer and hoped none was expected. He plucked the fabric of his uniform coat. “I wake up naked, and I’m a man. But then I put this on, and I’m the law, and there is only the law, and the law is right. All my life I put my faith in it like my wife puts faith in her rosary. Who will I serve if it turns out my gods are false—what will my life have been then?” He went on in the rambling way of a man who relies on drink to loosen the tongue. There were laws, he told me, whose wisdom he doubted. “Now there’s a list of things Jews can’t have. Skis, for instance. What harm did skiing ever do? Bicycles, radios, gramophones, and so on.” What was more, they were no longer allowed in the public baths. He supposed it was wise (he knew the Jew to be sly as a fox, and one must protect the chickens in the coop), but all the same . . . he jerked his thumb towards the windows of the empty shop. One pane was cracked. “An optician, this one,” he said. “And a decent enough fellow. But three times now I’ve caught him coming home past curfew from his fifty lengths, with his towel rolled under his arm! I said: you’d better sharpen up or there’ll be trouble for the whole family. I might as well have said: ‘Karl, you’ve got something on your coat.’ He just went on sorting index cards into boxes. Then I came by this evening and found the whole lot gone.”
I asked where they had gone, and he said, “Away from harm, I suppose.” I understood then that his intellect was like mine: slow-turning and deliberate, reaching its conclusions with great pains and by small degrees. He said, frowning: “All I’ve ever known is that I am the law, and the law is right. But now I wonder if there is what is right, and there is what is good, and these are not the same.”
It was late and I was restless but something in me changed. It was as if, having only ever looked down at the shuffle of my shoes on the cobblestones, I began to lift my head. Memories I hardly knew I’d acquired appeared clearly to me then: I saw a man lying in the doorway of the place where my father smoked with friends, and this man’s arm was raised, and his hand dangled backwards against his wrist, and swayed loose as a tree branch broken by wind. I overheard, on a street corner as I was sent to fetch tobacco, a man crying because his son had been arrested and had never come home. I saw boys missing from my class, because they’d gone away on holiday, and not come back; I heard young soldiers in their winter coats pointing at our neighbor Anna, saying very quietly: “Pig. Pig.”
We looked at each other. I think each saw in the other’s eye a kind of fearful reluctant wakening. The snow went on falling, but it began to change. It was no longer fine, and white, but began to drift down in huge and filthy blots. Then there was a deep thrilling sound from above the clouds, and I saw that it was pieces of paper, thousands and tens of thousands, tossed out from planes that flew above the city. Novák picked up a sheet and held it under the light of a lamp. Then he came and stood beside me in the shelter of the optician’s shop, and showed it to me, and I read: VELKÁ BRITANIE ESKÉMU NÁRODU—GREAT BRITAIN TO THE CZECH PEOPLE!
“What does it mean?” I said. “What else does it say?” What did Britain have to do with us—a boy and a man in a doorway in Prague? Novák shook his head in anger and disbelief: “Czechs! The world Democracies are watching in admiration and sympathy your wonderful struggle against oppression!” A child was sitting laughing in a snowdrift, gathering bits of paper. Were we oppressed? Did we struggle? “A few little rules and regulations,” said Novák. “To keep the people safe—and they talk of oppression! Josef: look at these lies. TRUTH WILL CONQUER!” I looked at him. All the unease we’d briefly shared was gone. He stood as straight and proud as a young soldier on parade. I understood then that he was very like my father: a spinning weathervane, which turns easily at the movement of the wind. He shook me roughly by the collar, and I understood that in seeing his weakness I had committed an offense. “Go home to your mother,” he said.
So I went on my way. A few yards on I had the sensation that he was standing under the street light and watching me go—but when I turned to see, he was on his hands and knees in the snow, picking up sheets of yellow paper, shaking his head. At that moment the street lights dimmed and I saw the figure of a woman at the window of the apartment above the optician’s shop. She was tall, and draped in fine black cloth that stirred as if somehow the wind blew indoors. I could not see her eyes but knew, with a kind of longing terror, that they were fixed on me. I thought of the farmer in his field by the Eger leaving out a chair; I thought of Herr Schröder and how he’d touched his shrapnel scar when he told me the cursed woman’s name. “Melmoth!” I said: “Melmoth!” and helplessly stepped forward. Then the street lights came on and I saw plainly what had been in the window: just a coat stand, on which the optician, leaving in a hurry, had left a good black winter coat.
My walk home was arduous because of the snow, and because all around me people were gathering to exclaim over the leaflets scattered about. When I came to the Bayer shop it was closed, and the shutters were drawn down; but someone had left on the windowsill one of the stones that sometimes come free from the pavements, and it prevented the shutter from closing as it should. I put my face to the window. In the dark shop I saw that the map of Bohemia I’d seen Frau Bayer hang had been sold, and in its place was a picture of some dark landscape bounded by water. A little light came from lamps in the room where I’d once danced and drunk sweet coffee. I saw the corner of the dining table and the oak sideboard where the radio stood on its green cloth. I saw candles burning, and bread plaited like a schoolgirl’s hair. I saw a back turned to me, and I knew it was Herr Bayer because of the way his fair hair grew at the nape of his neck. I saw Frau Bayer standing with her arms raised over the candle, and saw how their flames stirred as she moved. I saw her cover her face and stand for a time with her mouth moving. Then I saw Freddie stand beside her mother. She was not the child I remembered at night: she’d exchanged her white socks for stockings. She kissed her mother as if she were the older woman and Frau Bayer a frightened child. Then I saw Franz. I saw his white-fair head and saw how broad he had grown in the year since he had offered me his hand, and I rejected it. Then he closed the door.
I leaned a while against the wall beside the shutter. I understood what I had seen: my mind, always so sluggish and so dull, grew clear as water. These were the Jews against whom I’d been so often warned: who were by some alchemy both bankers and Communists, both powerful and wretched, who for two thousand years had wandered from place to place because no nation could bear their presence? This family? This girl who pouted as she read—this mother, who stood on a ladder to dust the tops of gilded picture frames, and poured cream in my coffee from a blue and white jug? This boy, who had only wanted me to praise his radio? I shook my head until it ached.
In the years that passed between then and now—as I walked the streets of Berlin and London and Istanbul with feet that ached and bled—I’ve allowed my past self one minute only, of an anger which is righteous and pure. I give that dull boy leaning on the wall a moment to reject what he’d been taught—to cast off the filthy coat thrown about his shoulders the day he was born. Then the minute passes, and his vanity and prejudice wins out, as it won out that day. How they must have mocked me! I thought. In bewildered anger I thumped my head with my fist. How they must have laughed, to have taken me in—to have made me complicit in their crime! What crime it might have been, I could not have said—I simply understood I had been made to feel poor, and drab, and foolish. It ought to have been they who flinched from me—they were the despised! They the outcasts! I was a German, and the son of a German, and it was my blood that made the soil rich, not theirs!
I pulled out the stone that held up the shutter. It fell noisily into place, so that I imagined them looking up from their rituals of bread and wine and sharing a look of alarm. Well: let them. I put the stone in the pocket of my coat. It was a poor substitute for my moldavite, but I stroked it and petted it as if I’d found my lost treasure. Then I went home, and slept—as my mother said when she woke me in the morning—the sleep of the righteous.
Reader, shall I lie? Shall I redeem myself with a story that goes like this: that I, Josef Adelmar Hoffman, woke from my sleep of ignorance and shame? Shall I say that I lived out the war in fear and indignation, alert to sorrow and despair—that I saw two women carried out of an apartment three doors down, having attempted suicide with bottles of poison meant for greenfly on the roses they grew on their terrace—that I pitied them, and knew what they dreaded? Shall I say that I went into the Bayer shop and coolly said that security was a concern, these days, and they ought to fasten their doors and windows securely?
I wish I could! But if I were to lie there is one who would see, there is one who bears witness now, as she bore witness then—I feel her eyes on me now—implacable, as they have always been—what use is it to deceive, when from the first I was found out?
So I go on with my confession, which is this: that I went on as before, my eyes cast down, in my pocket that piece of stone which I caressed and turned over and over as though it were a sacred object. Yet Prague did not go on as it had before because some great crime1 had been committed which altered the city. Jews now wore the yellow Star of David. Sometimes it conferred a strange defiant pride (two Jewish boys with whom I’d studied arithmetic passed me on the street with a swagger and looked me hard in the eye), but mostly I saw a staring, shadowed look. Once I saw Polizist Novák remonstrating with a man, gesticulating towards his lapel, indicating that he did not wear the mark of shame prominently enough. Then Novák met my eye, and nodded, and I felt warmed: we’d shared a moment’s weakness, he and I, and had not been broken by it.
The y
ear I turned sixteen the Jews began to leave Prague. Sometimes I heard the trucks going from house to house and instructions in German issued and accepted and thought how ordered and polite it was. One morning I met Polizist Novák on his beat, and asked him what became of them. “Off to Theresienstadt,” he said, cheerfully. He looked stouter and more benevolent than ever, well-fed on the meat of a job done well. “Pleasant little town, and you don’t hear them complaining: off they go, with their papers and suitcases. Grateful to be all together I shouldn’t wonder. Birds of a feather, eh?” Then he showed me his wrist. “Look at this watch. Swiss! Gold! Never short of a penny you notice, these Jews. You can pick up all sorts for a song. Sergeant Svoboda got his hands on a gramophone: they say his wife’s never been happier.”
We had come to the corner of our street. It was spring. The trees were not in leaf but had a kind of green mist on them. Overhead the scarlet Bayer sign hung on its bracket. In my pocket the hard cold stone called for my hand. I touched it. I could hear music. I said, “They take things from the Jews, and give them away?”
“Nothing’s free in this life, little Hoffman. But ask the right questions in the right places and have the right sum in mind, and you’d be surprised what might come your way.”
The music went on playing. I saw the curved oak case of Franz and Freddie Bayer’s radio: saw the green cloth under it, and the three glass valves inside. How beautiful it was—how far beyond anything I ever hoped of having for myself! And how it had shamed me—how it made me diminished and small! Where was the glory my father had promised, which was in the blood and the soil, in the steel blade of the Hoffman sword, which had come over the River Moldau in iron tanks, in the hearts of boys in their winter coats? Frau Bayer crouched beside the case where the costly books were kept. She was polishing the glass with a bottle of vinegar and a white cloth, just as I did when I cleaned our shop. She was thinner than I remembered. The orchestra grew louder. I imagined Franz standing by the radio, one hand in his pocket, turning up the dial—imagined Freddie seated swooning on the floor. The stone in my pocket was cold. I said: “Polizist Novák, what should I do if I know a crime has been committed?”