Machines in the Head

by Anna Kavan

  As soon as I got home I started to search through the papers which, in my preoccupied state of mind, I had allowed to accumulate in an untidy pile. It was not long before I found what I was looking for. The face of the young assassin, gazing darkly at me from the page, was, in all essentials, the same black-browed face that had confronted me a short time previously in the curtained seclusion of his handsome room.

  Why did this accidental likeness make such an impression on me, I wonder? It is possible for a man to resemble a certain murderer in his outward appearance without possessing himself any violent tendencies; or if, as is more likely, he does possess them, without lacking sufficient restraint to hold them in check. One has only to think of D’s responsible position, to look at his controlled, serene, intelligent face, to realize the fantastic nature of the comparison. The whole sequence of ideas is utterly grotesque, utterly illogical. And yet there it is; I can’t banish it from my mind.

  One must remember, too, that the man in the photograph was no common assassin but a fanatic, a man of extraordinarily strong convictions, who killed not for personal gain but for a principle, for what he considered to be the right. Is this an argument against D or in his favour? Sometimes I think one way, sometimes the other: I am quite unable to decide.

  As a result of these prejudices – and, of course, there were others which would take too long to write down here – I decided to put my case in the hands of a different adviser. This was a serious step, not to be taken lightly, and I expended a great deal of time considering the subject before I finally sent off my application. Even after I had posted the letter I could not feel at all sure that I had done the right thing. Certainly, I had heard of people who changed their advisers, not once but several times, and of some who seemed to spend their whole time running from one to another, but I had always rather despised them for their instability, and the general feeling in the public mind was that the cases of these individuals would terminate badly. Still, on the whole, I felt that the exceptional circumstances warranted the change where I was concerned. In wording my letter of application I was particularly careful to avoid any statement that could possibly be taken as detrimental to D, merely stressing the point of how expensive and awkward it was for me to be continually undertaking the long journey to his house and asking for my case to be transferred to someone in the university town near my home.

  For several days I waited anxiously for an answer, only to receive at the end of that time a bundle of complicated forms to be filled up in duplicate. These I completed, sent off and then waited again. How much of my life lately has consisted of this helpless, soul-destroying suspense! The waiting goes on and on, day after day, week after week, and yet one never gets used to it. Well, at last the reply came back on the usual stiff pale-blue paper, the very sight of which I have learned to dread. My request was refused. No explanation was given as to why a favour which had been granted to hundreds of people should be denied to me. But, of course, one can’t expect explanations from these officials; their conduct is always completely autocratic and incalculable. All they condescended to add to the categorical negative was the statement that I was at liberty to dispense altogether with the services of an adviser should I prefer to do so.

  I was so cast down after the receipt of this arbitrary communication that for two whole weeks I remained at home, absolutely inactive. I had not even the heart to go out of doors but stayed in my room, saying that I was ill and seeing no one except the servant who brought my meals. Indeed, the plea of illness was no untruth, for I felt utterly wretched in body as well as in mind, exhausted, listless and depressed as if after a severe fever.

  Alone in my room, I pondered endlessly over the situation. Why, in heaven’s name, had the authorities refused my application when I knew for a fact that other people were allowed to change their advisers at will? Did the refusal mean that there was some special aspect of my case which differentiated it from the others? If this were so, it must surely indicate that a more serious view was taken of mine than of the rest, as I was to be denied ordinary privileges. If only I knew – if only I could find out something definite! With extreme care I drafted another letter and sent it off to the official address, politely, I’m afraid even servilely, beseeching an answer to my questions. What a fool I was to humiliate myself so uselessly, most likely for the benefit of a roomful of junior clerks who doubtless had a good laugh over my laboriously thought-out composition before tossing it into the wastepaper basket! Naturally, no reply was forthcoming.

  I waited a few days longer in a state of alternate agitation and despair that became hourly more unbearable. At last – yesterday – I reached a point where I could no longer endure so much tension. There was only one person in the whole world to whom I could unburden my mind, only one person who might conceivably be able to relieve my suspense, and that was D, who was still, when all was said, my official adviser.

  On the spur of the moment I decided to go and see him again. I was in a condition in which to take action of some sort had become an urgent necessity. I put on my things and went out to catch the train.

  The sun was shining, and I was astonished to see that during the period I had remained indoors, too preoccupied with my troubles even to look out of the window, the season seemed to have passed from winter to spring. When last I had looked objectively at the hills I had seen a Bruegel-like landscape of snow and sepia trees, but now the snow had vanished except for a narrow whiteness bordering the northern edge of the highest point of the wood. From the windows of the train I saw hares playing among the fine emerald-green lines of the winter wheat; the newly ploughed earth in the valleys looked rich as velvet. I opened the carriage window and felt the soft rush of air which, not far away, carried the plover in their strange, reeling love dance. When the train slowed down between high banks I saw the glossy yellow cups of celandines in the grass.

  Even in the city there was a feeling of gladness, of renewed life. People walked briskly towards appointments or dawdled before the shop windows with contented faces. Some whistled or sang quietly to themselves under cover of the traffic’s noise, some swung their arms, some thrust their hands deep in their pockets, others had already discarded their overcoats. Flowers were being sold at the street corners. Although the sunlight could not reach to the bottom of the deep streets the house-tops were brightly gilded, and many eyes were raised automatically to the burnished roofs and the soft, promising sky.

  I, too, was influenced by the beneficent atmosphere of the day. As I walked along I determined to put the whole matter of the letter and its answer frankly before D, to conceal nothing from him but to ask him what he thought lay behind this new official move. After all, I had not done anything that should offend him; my request for a change of adviser was perfectly justifiable on practical grounds. Nor had I any real reason for distrusting him. On the contrary, it was now more than ever essential that I should have implicit faith in him, since he alone was empowered to advance my cause. Surely, if only for the sake of his own high reputation, he would do everything possible to help me.

  I reached his house and stood waiting for the door to be opened. A beggar was standing close to the area railings holding a tray of matches in front of him; a thin, youngish man of middle-class appearance, carefully shaved and wearing a very old, neat dark-blue suit. Of course, the whole town is full of destitute people, one sees them everywhere, but I couldn’t help wishing that I had not caught sight, just at this moment, of this particular man who looked as though he might be a schoolmaster fallen on evil days. We were so close together that I expected him to beg from me; but instead of that he stood without even glancing in my direction, without even troubling to display his matches to the passers-by, an expression of complete apathy on his face that in an instant began to dissipate for me all the optimistic influence of the day.

  As I went inside the door, some part of my attention remained fixed on the respectable-looking beggar with whom I seemed in some way to connect m
yself. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps one day I, no longer able to work, my small fortune absorbed in adviser’s fees, my friends irreparably alienated, might be placed in the same situation as he.

  The manservant informed me that D had been called out on urgent business but that he would be back before long. I was shown into a room and asked to wait. Alone here, all my depression, briefly banished by the sun, began to return. After the spring-like air outside, the room felt close and oppressive, but a sort of gloomy inertia prevented me from opening one of the thickly draped windows. An enormous grandfather clock in the corner didactically ticked the minutes away. Listening to that insistent ticking, a sense of abysmal futility gradually overwhelmed me. The fact of D’s absence, that he should choose today of all days to keep me waiting in this dismal room, created the worst possible impression on my overwrought nerves. A feeling of despair, as if every effort I might make would inevitably be in vain, took possession of me. I sat lethargically on a straight-backed, uncomfortable chair with a leather seat, gazing indifferently at the clock, the hands of which had now completed a half-circle since my arrival. I thought of going away but lacked even the energy to move. An apathy, similar to that displayed by the beggar outside, had come over me. I felt convinced that already, before I had even spoken to D, the visit had been a failure.

  Suddenly the servant returned to say that D was at my disposal. But now I no longer wanted to see him, it was only with the greatest difficulty that I forced myself to stand up and follow the man into the room where my adviser sat at his desk. I don’t know why the sight of him sitting in his accustomed pose should have suggested to me the idea that he had not really been called out at all but had been sitting there the whole time, keeping me waiting for some ulterior motive of his own; perhaps to produce in me just such a sensation of despair as I now experienced.

  We shook hands. I sat down and began to speak, driving my sluggish tongue to frame words that seemed useless even before they were uttered. Was it my fancy that D listened less attentively than on previous occasions, fidgeting with his fountain pen or with the papers in front of him? It was not long before something in his attitude convinced me that he was thoroughly acquainted with the whole story of my letter of application and its sequel. No doubt the authorities had referred the matter to him – with what bias, with what implication? And now my indifferent mood changed to one of suspicion and alarm as I tried to guess what this intercommunication portended.

  I heard myself advancing the old argument of inconvenience, explaining in hesitant tones that in order to spend less than an hour with him I must be nearly six hours on the double journey. And then I heard him answer that I should no longer have cause to complain of this tedious travelling, as he was just about to start on a holiday of indefinite length and would undertake no further work until his return.

  If I felt despairing before you can imagine how this information affected me. Somehow I took leave of him, somehow found my way through the streets, somehow reached the train which carried me across the now sunless landscape.

  How hard it is to sit at home with nothing to do but wait. To wait – the most difficult thing in the whole world. To wait – with no living soul in whom to confide one’s doubts, one’s fears, one’s relentless hopes. To wait – not knowing whether D’s words are to be construed into an official edict depriving me of all assistance or whether he intends to take up my case again in the distant future, or whether the case is already concluded. To wait – only to wait – without even the final merciful deprivation of hope.

  Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.

  THE SUMMONS

  R IS ONE OF my oldest friends. Once, long ago, we used to live in flats in the same building, and then, of course, I saw a great deal of him. Afterwards the circumstances of our lives altered, wider and wider distances divided us, we could meet only rarely and with difficulty – perhaps only once or twice in a whole year – and then only for a few hours or at most for a weekend. In spite of this our friendship – which was purely platonic – continued unbroken, although it was naturally not possible to maintain quite the original degree of intimacy. I still felt that a close and indestructible understanding existed between R and myself: an understanding which had its roots in some fundamental character similarity and was therefore exempt from the accidents of change.

  A particularly long interval had elapsed since our last encounter, so I was delighted when we were at length able to arrange a new meeting. It was settled that we should meet in town, have dinner together and travel by train later in the evening to the suburb where R was living.

  Our appointment was for seven o’clock. I was the first to arrive at the restaurant, and, as soon as I had put my bag in the cloakroom, I went upstairs to the little bar which I often visited and where I felt quite at home. I noticed that a waiter was helping the usual barman, and, in the idle way in which one’s thoughts run when one is waiting for somebody, I wondered why an assistant had been brought in that evening, for there were not many customers in the bar.

  R appeared almost immediately. We greeted each other with happiness and at once fell into a conversation which might have been broken off only the previous day.

  We sat down and ordered our drinks. It was the waiter and not the barman who attended to us. As the man put down the two glasses on the table, I was struck by his ugliness. I know that one should not allow oneself to be too much influenced by appearances, but there was something in this fellow’s aspect by which I couldn’t help feeling repelled. The word ‘troglodyte’ came into my head as I looked at him. I don’t know what the cave dwellers really looked like, but I feel that they ought to have been very much like this small, thick-set, colourless individual. Without being actually deformed in any way, he seemed curiously misshapen; perhaps it was just that he was badly proportioned and rather stooping. He was not an old man, but his face conveyed a queer impression of antiquity, of something hoary and almost obscene, like a survival of the primitive world. I remember particularly his wide, grey, unshaped lips which looked incapable of anything so civilized as a smile.

  Extraordinary as it seems, I must have been paying more attention to the waiter than to my friend, for it was not until after we had lifted our glasses that I noticed a certain slight alteration in R’s appearance. He had put on a little weight since our previous meeting and looked altogether more prosperous. He was wearing a new suit, too, and when I complimented him upon it he told me that he had bought it that day out of a considerable sum of money which he had received as an advance on his latest book.

  I was very glad to hear that things were going so well with him. Yet at the same time a small arrow of jealously pierced my heart. My own affairs were in such a very bad way that it was impossible for me not to contrast my failure with his success, which seemed in some indefinable manner to render him less accessible to me, although his attitude was as friendly and charming as it had ever been.

  When we had finished our drinks we went down to the restaurant for dinner. Here I was surprised and, I must admit, rather unreasonably annoyed to see the same waiter approaching us with the menu. ‘What, are you working down here as well as upstairs?’ I asked him, irritably enough. R must have been astonished by my disagreeable tone, for he looked sharply at me. The man answered quite politely that his work in the bar was finished for the evening and that he was now transferred to the restaurant. I would have suggested moving to a table served by a different waiter, but I felt too ashamed to do so. I was very mortified at having made such an irrational and unamiable display of feeling in front of R, who, I felt sure, must be criticizing me adversely.

  It was a bad start to the meal. All on account of this confounded waiter, the evening had acquired an unfortunate tendency, like a run of bad luck at cards which one cannot break. Although we talked without any constraint, some essential spark, which on other occasions had always been struck from our mutual c
ontact, now with held from us its warmth. It even seemed to me that the food was not as good as usual.

  I was glad when the waiter brushed away the crumbs with his napkin and set the coffee before us. Now at last we should be relieved of the burden of his inauspicious proximity. But in a few minutes he came back and, putting his repulsive face close to mine, informed me that I was wanted outside in the hall.

  ‘But that’s impossible – it must be a mistake. Nobody knows I’m here,’ I protested, while he unemphatically and obstinately insisted that someone was asking for me.

  R suggested that I had better go and investigate. So out I went to the hall where several people were sitting or standing about, waiting to meet their friends. I could see at a glance that they were all strangers to me. The waiter led me up to a man of late middle age, neatly and inconspicuously dressed, with a nondescript, roundish face and a small grey moustache. He might have been a bank manager or some such respectable citizen. I think he was bald-headed. He bowed and greeted me by my name.