Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  Novák breathed on his watch and polished it on his sleeve. “What have you been up to?” he said.

  I saw three jackdaws on the bracket where the Bayer shop sign hung. Their eyes were chips of glass and they were turned on me. They opened their beaks and made their querying cry. Why? they said: how? how? why? I looked away. I said, “Can you hear music? These people have a radio and I think it should have been taken away a long time ago.”

  “What do you mean?” Novák peered through the glass. Frau Bayer stood and pressed her hands into the small of her back. I could hear violins. “This is a good German family from Hamburg. I’ve been in there: Herr Bayer found my wife a book she wanted for its cover.”

  “I don’t think they’re a good family,” I said. Now there were five jackdaws on the sign. “I don’t think they’re the sort of people that should have a radio.”

  Novák shook me by the shoulder. “Tell me what you mean,” he said. “Don’t you know you can break the law as much by doing nothing, as by doing something?”

  “I don’t mean anything except that I don’t think they should have a radio. Work it out for yourself.” I had frightened myself and it made me churlish. “Aren’t you a policeman? Go and do your job.” Frau Bayer was on her knees again and I could see the worn soles of her shoes. I felt sick. I turned and ran home and all the way the music followed me, and with it the sound of the jackdaws: why? how? why? My mother opened the door to me and I was sick on the step, and for a week was too ill to leave my bed.

  That night and for many nights after I dreamed of a woman. It always began with something burning in a corner of the room giving off smoke, but neither light nor heat. Then the plume of smoke would thicken, and take on the form of black silk moving in the wind, and I knew that what I saw was not an object but a feeling of despair and loneliness made incarnate, as if thoughts had substance. Then in time that dark and insubstantial thing formed itself into the figure of a woman. She was dreadfully tall. Sometimes she was thin as if worn down by time, sometimes large as if about to deliver new life into the world, and I knew that this life also, though naked and speechless, would hunt me down to the ends of the earth. Her face was veiled by gray-black hair that made me think of the jackdaws that watched me above the Bayer shop, and I knew this woman watched me too. Then I’d wake and find the sheets were wet because I’d urinated like a child in my terror, though it was not relief I felt, but loss. On the sixth day I was able to eat, and my father buttoned me into my new winter coat as if I were still very young (“The best wool, the finest, woven in the north: only good things now for the Hoffmans, eh?”) and took me out for fresh air. When we came to the Bayer shop my father cuffed my shoulder and said, “See this? Those people down from Hamburg with their fine clothes and their music? Turned out they were Jews all along. Heard it from Polizist Novák: forged papers, the works. Well, off they go to Theresienstadt with the rest of their kind. The stink of a pig gets smelt sooner or later, you mark my words.” Trembling, I looked into the windows of the shop. The glass case was cracked. A book with marbled endpapers lay upturned on the floor and its spine was broken. I saw an empty vinegar bottle and a bit of white cloth. I asked to be taken home.

  A month later, shortly before my mother’s birthday, I said to my father that she might like a radio. I said I’d heard they could be got cheaply if you knew where to look—that in fact Polizist Novák might know where one could be found. But when her birthday came her gift was a new cotton housecoat, to wear as she swept the shop floor.

  So the war went on. I spoke to no one, read no papers, crossed the street to avoid Novák, could not abide the company of boys my own age. One day Polizist Novák came to the shop. He had brought a piece of cake wrapped in paper, and ate it while I wiped crumbs from the counter. “What’s it like in Theresienstadt?” I said. “I sometimes wonder.” I did not add: after what I did; but I think he understood. “Don’t fret, young Hoffman,” he said. “Why, the Red Cross paid a visit2 and what did they find? A playground, no less! Schoolrooms and washrooms. A bank. The Jews complain of a boring diet—too many tinned sardines, which can’t be beaten, in my opinion, on a slice of hot toast of an evening. But you’re looking thin, young Hoffman. I won’t have it! Some fruitcake for you. We’ll look out for each other, you and me.”

  The war was coming to its end and something had altered in the air of Prague. I hardly noticed it, as one hardly notices the onset of winter until one finds oneself chilled in the morning. Once when going to buy packing paper I was jostled by three Czech boys. I heard one say to the other: “Soon we’ll take our clubs in hand and drive the Germans from the land!” Instinctively I reached for the stone in my pocket. What could they mean? Whose land was it, if not mine? One evening as I lay doing nothing I heard a bustle in the street below. I saw men huddled around a woman in uniform pulling her cap from her head. Her curls were pinned tightly underneath and they wanted these too and some of the men held lengths of her hair in their fists. They were saying: “Whore! German bitch!” Then they vanished as if on a signal and the woman was left in the cover of a doorway, shaking, trying to put on her hat. Two women crossed the road to avoid her. I closed the curtains. It was May 1945. I was nineteen.

  Then the lights went out for the Hoffman family. I was in my room. My father was doing the accounts and my mother was in the kitchen. I heard doors slamming and my father running up the stairs, and when I went to the window I saw darkness cover the city as one shop after another and all the yellow street lights went out one by one. But in the distance other lights shone: they were red and low like many small suns rising. I went downstairs. My mother was looking at her oven. “It’s gone off,” she said. “It’s cold. Tell your father. Tell your father it’s all gone off.”

  That night we sat at the table. We had no heat or light. Once my father went outside, but whatever he saw on the street sent him back inside. There was the sound of something being constructed a few yards away and I thought for some reason of a gallows. At dawn someone hammered on our door and when I opened it there was Herr Becker, with whom we sometimes did business. He was tearing at his hair, and told me the Czechs had turned against the Germans, who after all had sought only to protect them. “They have taken over the radio and are broadcasting terrible things, so that we fear for our lives! Stay where you are! Tell your parents—tell everyone you can—stay where you are, until we are safe!” Later from my window I saw a barricade built at the end of our road, and Herr Becker approaching with his hands held high. The men at the barricade spoke for a long while quite calmly and amicably and then they shot him. I closed the door and returned to my parents. The candle had burned down to the wick.

  I cannot tell in what order these things came: when we realized the city was burning; when we heard the German bombers over the Old Town Square; what night it was I saw a German woman lying in the street while men busied themselves with her in a way that made me think of ants worrying at the body of a spider. On the third day we ate cold mutton stew dotted with hard yellow fat, which had a rancid taste, but was all we had. On the fourth day my father began to shiver. Still nobody came. Our suffering and fear made no bond between us. My mother put all her shoes on the table and fretted over their worn laces, or praised the gloss of their polish. “What about the delivery on Tuesday?” she said. “Where will they take the order if the man can’t come to the door?” One night below my window someone cried over and over with the patient tireless regularity of a ringing bell: “God! God! God! God! God!” After an hour the voice broke—I heard it break—and then for another hour there was instead a kind of wordless questioning which may just have been the jackdaws on the windowsill. My father took all this as a personal slight against the Hoffman name. “Six years!” he said. “Six years I lived as a man of German blood on German soil. Was that all I was to be given? Is my son to have no more than this?” He kept the Hoffman sword by his side. He began drinking. He remained drunk until the very end.

  Often as I crept abo
ut the cold apartment in a daze of hunger and weariness I’d see a black column of smoke rising—distant, as if on a far horizon—then growing nearer, until it rose up from the floor of the room where I cowered away from the window. Each time the sight of it filled me with a kind of longing fear—as if what I desired most was also what appalled me most. Sometimes I made out a grinning mouth, a wrist, a hand—then I would reach for it and find myself saying: “Melmoth—Melmoth!”

  They came for us on the fifth day. There was the sound of breaking glass and I thought: I polished those cases as well as I could. I remember how soft the light was, and how precise—how it picked out the drab curtains at the window, and the drab blankets on the bed, and my hands reaching for the door. I recall this very particularly because it was not in darkness that Melmoth came at last to me but in the light of a May morning. One moment I was alone, and the next I was not. It was as swift and absolute as that. As I reached for the door my hand did not meet the wood, the brass handle, but HER. Fear and wonder fixed me where I stood and I could do nothing but look. Her hair was coarse and long and moved slowly as hair does under water. Her face was lovely and dreadful: her eyes were like the slick of oil on water—gray-blue, steel-blue, their colors moving—and set deep in the sockets of her skull. Her skin moved. It seemed to me like shadows on a wall: now black, now very pale. She was gazing at me with so imploring a look that I could not speak. Then she raised one finger to her mouth—Be silent!—and her eyes filled with tears and these ran very slowly down her gaunt cheek. Beyond the door I heard my mother shrieking, and heard her damned as a German whore. I heard my father blubbering, and heard him damned as a collaborator and a coward. I heard my mother cry, “No! I won’t go! I won’t!” So I moved again towards the door but Melmoth through her weeping made a sound which was like the growl of an animal you would not want to rouse. “I won’t go!” said my mother, and I knew she was being taken. Then I heard laughter, and someone said: “What a brave German soldier we have here, hey, old man? Did you ever see anything like it? Heil, soldier! Show us how it’s done!” I closed my eyes and imagined my father holding the Hoffman sword. I saw him feinting and thrusting, fumbling with the useless fingers on his right hand—saw how absurd he was and had always been—how absurd it all was: the blood, the soil, the pride, the name. Then I heard an explosion that was small, but very close by. “Leave him there,” they said: “he’ll get what’s coming to him.” There was the sound of blows landing, the clatter of boots on stairs, and they were gone. I opened my eyes and Melmoth was gone too. Her absence was so absolute I felt the loss like grief. She’d seen what I had done—seen my desire, my resentment, my envy, my cowardice—and still she had come for me. Tears poured out of me as though I were a broken bottle of water. What did I mourn—my mother? My father, whom I’d always despised? Freddie Bayer, and the light picking out the fine fair down above her knees—Franz, and his offered hand, which I had ignored? I didn’t know. Somewhere in the adjoining room my father was tidying up. There was the sound of objects stacked against each other, methodical and neat. I wondered why he never called for me. Then I heard a noise like that of a starving man who has at last found food, and is incapable of eating without choking. The old bastard, I thought. How could a father keep food from his son? Angrily I pulled open the door. He was not seated at the table: he leaned against it, or seemed to—leaned in a dragging, weary way, like a man come home after a day of laboring. Then he slumped further in his weariness and gurgled as he did it—then further still until his forehead rested on the place where my mother would put dishes of meat. In the lucid morning light I saw then that some long, wet object reached from him to me. It was the blade of the Hoffman sword. It was bloodied and there on the steel were other fragments—of cloth and flesh, I suppose. He had contrived somehow to lodge the hilt of the sword in a place where the floorboards were broken, and brace it firm with heavy things—the cashbox which had been his nightly companion, my mother’s mangle—and fallen on it, thinking himself, I suppose, a tragic figure undone by cruel fates. He was not dead yet. Blood and fluid poured from his open mouth. His eyes were very wide. Then the weight of his body dragged him still further down the sword, and I suppose that was the end of it, for all that evening I sat with him at the table and never heard another sound.

  The following night my mother came home. She had been stripped of her coat, of her shoes and her stockings; she dragged one foot behind her. Her hands were swollen and rough and she pulled splinters of wood from her palm with her teeth. She sat with me at the table. If she saw my father there with his blood dried like lacquer on the wood she gave no sign of it. I said, “Where did they take you? What did you do?”

  She had in her pocket a piece of bread, which she put on the table. I took it and ate it. “All the women are at the barricades,” she said. “Taking them down. Early start tomorrow. Better rest.” Then she lifted up her dragging foot, and inspected it. “Why did they do that?” she said. “Why would they do that?” I looked, and saw that someone had cut a portion of flesh from her heel, very precisely, measuring half an inch square. Within that neat wound was a mass of yellowish fat and fibrous tissue. I went on eating my bread.

  When they came the next evening it was quietly in uniform and with sheets of paper to consult. “Josef Hoffman, father. Josef Hoffman, son. Adela Hoffman, mother.” They looked at my father, and made a note. “Downstairs. Bring your papers, bring a coat.” There were jackdaws on the windowsill. Nobody touched us; nobody spoke. It was all done with decency and order.

  Outside the streets were busy and the atmosphere seethed: it was as if the air was composed of combustible gas and a single spark would detonate the city.

  “Over there,” they said: “over there.” We were taken to stand with a handful of other Germans, who looked as I suppose we did: made gaunt by hunger and sleeplessness. Some were empty-handed; others clutched briefcases as though on their way to an ordinary working day. “Do as you’re told,” said a woman to my mother. Her head had been shaved. “Just do as you’re told.”

  A man said: “What are you doing with us?” It was grown dark by then, and somewhere fires were burning. This man was very anxious. The back of his hand had been branded with a swastika.

  “It’s all official,” said a Czech. “It’s all decided: nothing to do with you, nothing to do with me. Only official business.” Across the street a group of women gathered. I’d queued with them at the bank to pay in cloth bags of coins; I’d watched them walk home with their children. They spat at us. A white-haired woman said: “You’ll get what’s coming to you! An eye for an eye, that’s it—I’d cut them out if they’d let me, I’d have your eyes on my knife!”

  “All right,” said the Czech official. He held a stick and with it he lightly switched the anxious man without malice, as a farmer might a cow. “On we go,” he said; and we few Germans shuffled along the street, watched from above and below by many baleful, gleeful eyes. Beyond our street the sky was lit with an orange glow; nearer fires also burned, in braziers or in the windows of apartments which I suppose had belonged to Germans like us. Beside me my mother dragged her mutilated foot. The branded man had begun to mutter to himself with a bitter furious stream of complaint—it wasn’t fair, he was only an administrator, what harm had he ever done filing paperwork, he had never harmed a soul—and I hated him for it. What good was complaint—what good had it ever been? The ant does not complain when its nest is destroyed, and we were no more than that. I had always thought so. I’d never seen evidence of grace, nobility, or courage in my fellow men. What did it matter that, as I supposed, my mother and I were not to live? We were no great loss. We’d come by then to the Bayer shop. A man in police uniform lay unconscious or dead on the threshold. Two boys had tied around his neck a thick white cloth that smelt of paraffin and they were trying to strike a match, but the matches were damp and wouldn’t light. They swore, and kicked him, and tried again.

  On we walked, acquiring more companions as we
went: three young women so silent it seemed to me their suffering had exceeded anything I had seen so far; an elderly couple, smartly dressed, talking amiably about what a warm evening it was, just as if over the road they could not quite clearly see men stamping on the stomach of an SS officer so that in time there seemed nothing left of him there, only the fabric of his uniform on the wet cobblestones. Once we passed a broken window and paused there as the inventory was consulted, and more names were read aloud in a brisk dispassionate voice: “Reinhard Weber, Marlene Weber, Rudy Weber—good, good. Next house. Falke Möller, Franz Möller.” I saw a long table carved with leaves and flowers. Here sat a family dressed for church: three girls in cotton aprons over floral dresses, their mother in a silk blouse, a man in a fine double-breasted suit and a baby in his arms. There were five wine glasses on the table—elegant and thin like Moser glass—and all but one had been knocked over. They’d drunk poison. Their mouths were open and those fine clothes were stained with blood and vomit. Only the baby looked peaceful because someone had broken its neck. I thought I saw, beyond the table, deep in the shadows behind an open door, a woman, watching—I strained to see her, and to make out the blue eyes burning. I thought: she must be there—how could there be no witness? The Czech official switched me with his stick and moved us on like cattle.

  Then I saw a small crowd coming down the road, shouting, dragging a man on his knees. The official sighed and put his pen in his pocket: he looked, I thought, rather bored. He turned to face the crowd. “What have we here?”