Machines in the Head

by Anna Kavan

  The nurse stood looking over his shoulder at the writing, most of which was her own.

  ‘Excellent. Excellent,’ Dr Pope said after a while. He glanced up at the waiting nurse and smiled at her. She was his best nurse; he had trained her himself in his own methods, and the result was entirely satisfactory. She was an invaluable and trustworthy assistant who understood what he was trying to do, approved of his technique and cooperated intelligently. ‘Really excellent work,’ he repeated, smiling.

  She smiled back, and for a moment the identical look of gratification on the two faces gave them a curious resemblance to one another, almost as if they were near relatives, although they were not really alike at all.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re certainly getting results now. The general morale in the wards has improved enormously.’ Then her face became serious again, and she said, ‘If only we could get Ward Six into line’.

  The smile simultaneously disappeared from the doctor’s face, and a look that was more characteristic appeared there, a look of impatience and irritation. He turned the pages in front of him and reread one of them, and the irritated expression became fixed.

  ‘Yes, I see. Ward Six again. I suppose it’s that fellow Williams making a nuisance of himself as usual?’

  ‘It’s impossible to do anything with him.’ The nurse’s cool voice contained annoyance behind its coolness. ‘He’s a bad type, I’m afraid. Obstructive and stubborn. Unfortunately some of the youngsters and the less stable men are apt to be influenced by his talk. He’s always stirring up discontent in the ward.’

  ‘These confounded trouble-makers are a menace to our whole work,’ Dr Pope said. ‘Rebellious undesirables. I think friend Williams will have to be got rid of.’ He pulled a scribbling pad across the desk and wrote the name Williams on it, pressing more heavily on the pen than he usually did so that the strokes of the letters came very black. He underlined the name with deliberation and drew a circle around it and pushed the pad back to its place and asked in a brisker tone, ‘Anyone else in Six giving trouble?’

  ‘I’ve been rather worried about Kling the last day or two.’

  ‘Kling? What’s he been up to?’

  ‘He seems very depressed, Doctor.’

  ‘You think his condition’s deteriorating?’

  ‘Well, he seems to be getting more depersonalized and generally inaccessible. There’s no knowing what’s in his head. It’s not the language difficulty either; his English is perfectly good. But he’s hardly spoken a word since that day he was put in the gardening squad and got so upset.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the gardening incident. Odd, getting such a violent reaction there. It should give one a lead if there were time to go into it. But there isn’t, of course. That’s the worst of dealing with large numbers of patients as we are.’ A shade of regret on the doctor’s face faded out as he said to the nurse still standing beside him, ‘You see far more of Kling than I do. What’s your own opinion of him?’

  ‘I think, personally, that he’s got something on his mind. Something he won’t talk about.’

  ‘Make him talk, then. That’s your job.’

  ‘I’ve tried, of course, but it’s no good. Perhaps he’s afraid to talk. He’s shut himself up like an oyster.’

  ‘Oysters can be opened,’ the doctor said. He twisted his chair around and smiled directly up at the good nurse he had trained. He was very pleased with her and with himself. In spite of troublesome individuals like Williams and Kling the work of the hospital was going extremely well. ‘Provided, naturally, that one has the right implement with which to open them.’

  He got up and stood with his back to the window, which, to be in keeping with the room’s decoration, should have had satin curtains but instead was framed in dusty blackout material. He had his hands in his trouser pockets, and he was still smiling as he went on, ‘We might try a little forcible opening on oyster Kling’.

  The nurse nodded and made a sound of agreement and prepared to go, holding the signed pass in her hand.

  ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ she remarked on her way, in order not to end the interview too abruptly.

  Dr Pope glanced into the sunshine and turned his back on it again.

  ‘I’ll be glad when the summer’s over,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s efficiency level drops in this sort of weather. Give me the cold days when we’re all really keen and on our toes.’

  The nurse went out and shut the door quietly.

  The doctor swung around again in his energetic fashion and opened the window as wide as it would go, looking out over grassy grounds dark with evergreens. On a hard tennis court to the right a circle of patients in shorts clumsily and apathetically threw a football about, and he watched them just long enough to observe the bored slackness of their instructor’s stance and to note automatically that the man was due for a reprimand. Then he went back to his desk under the smiling doves.

  As if he were somehow aware of the doctor’s censorious eye, the instructor outside just then straightened up and shouted with perfunctory disgust, ‘You there, Kling, or whatever your name is; wake up, for Christ’s sake, can’t you?’

  The man who had not been ready when the ball was thrown to him, who had, in fact, altogether forgotten why he was supposed to be standing there on the hot reddish plane marked with arbitrary white lines, looked first at the instructor before bending down to the ball which had bounced off his leg and was slowly spinning on the gritty surface in front of him. He picked up the big ball and held it in both hands as though he did not know what to do with it, as though he could conceive of no possible connection between himself and this hard spherical object. Then, after a moment, he tossed it towards the man standing next to him in the ring not more than two yards away, and at once forgot it again and nothing remained of the incident in his mind except the uneasy resentment that always came now when anyone called out to him.

  For many months he had been called Kling, that being the first syllable and not the whole of his name, which was too difficult for these tongues trained in a different pronunciation. To start with he had not minded the abbreviation, had even felt pleased because, like a nickname, it seemed to admit him to comradeship with the others. But now, for a long time, he had resented it. They’ve taken everything from me, even my name, he thought sometimes when the sullen misery settled on him. By ‘they’ he did not mean the men of another race with whom he shared sleeping room and food and daily routine, or any particular individuals, but just the impersonal machine that had caught and mauled him and dragged him away from the two small lakes and the mountains where his home was, far off to this flat country across the sea.

  And then there was that other reason why the sound of the short syllable was disturbing.

  The game, if it could be called that, came to an end, and the patients slowly dispersed. There was a little free time left before tea. Some of the men walked back to the hospital, others lighted cigarettes and stood talking in groups, several lay full length on the grass or dawdled where evergreens spread heavy mats of shade.

  Kling sat down by himself on the top of a little bank. He was young, very big and broad, very well built if you didn’t mind that depth of chest, dark, his hair wiry like a black dog’s, arms muscled for labour, his eyes only slightly decentred. He did not look ill at all, he looked enormously strong, only his movements were all rather stiff and slow, there was a marked unnatural rigidity about the upper part of his torso because of the lately healed wound and because of that heavy thing he carried inside him.

  The bank was in full sunshine. Kling sat there sweating, dark stains spreading on his singlet under the arms, sharp grasses pricking his powerful, bare, hairy legs, his breast stony feeling, waiting for time to pass. He was not consciously waiting. His apathy was so profound that it was not far removed from unconsciousness. A breeze blew and the tall grass rippled gently, but he did not know. He did not know that the sun shone. His head was bent, and the only movements about him were his slow br
eaths and the slowly widening stains on the singlet. His chest was hot and wet, and gloom ached in the rocky weight the black stone weighed under his breastbone, and his big blackish eyes, dilated with gloom, stared straight ahead, only blinking when the sun dazzle hurt, and sweat stood in the deep horizontal lines on his forehead.

  While he sat there, a row of patients with gardening tools – spades, rakes, hoes – on their shoulders came near. They walked in single file in charge of a man walking alongside, himself in hospital clothes but with stripes on his sleeve. Kling watched them coming. All of him that still lived, resentment, gloom, misery and all his clouded confusion, slowly tightened towards alarm. He could see the polished edges of spades shining, and he shuddered, all his consciousness gathering into fear because of the danger signals coming towards him across the grass. As he watched, his breathing quickened to heave his chest up and down, and, as the gardening squad reached the foot of the bank, he made a clumsy scramble and stood up.

  Standing, he heard the clink of metal and saw a shiny surface flash in the sun. The next moment he was running, stumbling stiffly, grappling the weight inside him, running from the men with the spades.

  He heard the Kling! of his name being shouted, and again a second clattering kling! and running heard the spade kling-clink on the stone, he seemed to be holding it now, grasping the handle that slipped painfully in his wet hands, levering the blade under the huge ugly stone and straining finally as another frantic kling! came from the spade, and the toppling, heavy, leaden bulk of the stone fell and the old, mutilated face was hidden beneath, and Kling, stopping at the door of Ward Six where he had run, choking with strangled breath, while two men passing gazed at him in surprise, felt the dead mass of stone crushing his own breast.

  He went into the ward and lay down on his bed and closed his eyes against the drops of sweat which trickled into the ends of his eyes. Then for a time there was nothing but the soreness of breath struggling against the stone.

  This was what he had known a long while, ever since the truck had been blown thirty feet down into the ravine, and he had seen the falling stone and felt it strike, felt it smash bone, tearing through muscle, sinew and vein to lodge itself immovably in his breast. Ever since then the stone had been there inside him, and at first it had seemed a small stone, just a dead spot, a sort of numbness under the breastbone. He had told the MO about it, and the MO had laughed, saying there was no stone or possibility of a stone, and after that he had not spoken of it again, never once. But from the start he had been very uneasy, oppressed by the stone and by the heaviness that could come from it suddenly to drive away laughter and talk. He had tried not to think of the stone, but it had grown heavier and heavier until he could not think of anything else, until it crushed out everything else, and he could only carry it by making a very great effort. That was not so bad really, because with the weight of the stone crushing him he was nothing and that was not painful or frightening – it was just a waiting, and that was nothing as well. But sometimes, perhaps at the moment of going to sleep, the dead weight lifted a little, and then there were all the uncovered faces, the stone and the digging, and the old man would come back.

  And so he lay very still on the bed, waiting for the deadness to overlay him, lying there in the knowledge that if the dead weight of the stone lifted to let him breathe the old man would come.

  Strange how it was always this one who came and never one of the others.

  The stone weight was lifting now, and Kling, who had dozed a little while after his breath had stopped struggling, woke suddenly, frightened by the return of the bloody-faced man lying in brown leaves with hairs growing out of his nostrils and a torn shirt fluttering.

  That was his father who had lain dead in the room beside the Blue Lake. No, not that man. When he thought of his home he couldn’t see any faces, only the jagged line of the mountains like broken eggshell against the sky, and the two lakes, the Blue Lake and the lake shaped like a harp. That, and sometimes the inn with the acid wine of the district, greenish in thick glasses, the swarming trout in the small tank on the wall, crowded sleek fish bodies slithering past the glass. But no faces ever. The stone blocked out all the home faces.

  When he thought of the war it was always the digging he thought of because, seeing him so strong and used to working with a spade, they had put him on that job from the beginning; and then there were faces, wrecked or fearful or quiet or obscene faces, far too many of them, how he had laboured and toiled till his saliva ran sour, desperate to hide the faces away from the brutal light.

  How many faces had he covered with earth and stones? There surely were thousands, and always thousands more waiting, and he all the time digging demented, always the compulsive urge in him like a frenzy to hide the ruined faces away. And sometimes he remembered that officer in charge of the burying party, the one who joked and sang all the time; he must have been a bit cracked really, boozed or something, but they had dug and shovelled till their hands were raw-blistered and hardly noticed the pain because of his Hey! Hi! Ho! and the jolly loud voice that he had.

  There had been no singing that afternoon in the gully where the corpses, boys and old men among them, sprawled in the withered oak leaves between the rocks. Only haste then and the bitter taste in the mouth and the aching lungs, hacking the stony ground that was hard like iron to the weak bite of the spade, and the sky grey and muggy and flat and quiet. In the end someone had shouted, and the others all started running back to the truck, and he had run, too, and just then he had seen the old man lying flat on his back with blood congealing all down one side of his shattered face and the dry leaves gummed and blackening in the blood.

  Kling was looking now at this object that the stone had rolled aside to reveal. There was no stone weighting him any more as he watched the object, feeling the bed shake under him as he shook and the muscles twitching in his forearms and thighs.

  Then, watching the object, while his heart pounded, he saw the hairs sprouting in his father’s nostrils as he lay dead on the wooden bed that was like a wagon without wheels, he saw a movement detach itself from this man in the gully, or perhaps it was the torn shirt which flapped in the wind, only there was no wind, and he did not stop to investigate but, knowing only the obsessional urge to hide at all costs that which ought not to be exposed to the level light, hoisted his spade and shoved and battered and fought the top-heavy rock until he heard a grinding crash and knew the torn face bashed out of sight, shapeless-smashed and hidden under the stone: and was it the same stone that burst his own chest and sank its black, dead heaviness in his heart?

  The weight fell again now so that there was no more pain or fright and the bed did not shake; there was only the waiting that was nothingness really, and the men in blue talking and moving about the ward.

  That was all that he knew, sweat slowly drying as he lay on the bed, and the old man buried mercifully by the stone. The others took no notice of Kling nor he of them, and he heard their talk and did not know that he heard until a woman’s voice cut through sharp. ‘Williams, and the rest of you, why are you hanging about in the ward?’ He turned his head then to the nurse who had just come in; she was speaking to him, too. ‘Kling, you’re to go to Dr Pope after tea. You’d better get up and make yourself decent’, and he saw her pale, cold eyes linger on him as she went out of the door.

  ‘Get up and make yourself decent,’ the man called Williams said. ‘That’s a way to talk to a fellow who’s sick.’

  Kling said nothing but looked up at him, waiting.

  ‘To hell with them,’ Williams said. ‘To hell with the whole set-up. Bloody racket to get sick men back into the army. Cannon fodder, that’s all they care about. Taking advantage of poor mugs like us. Pep talks. Pills to pep you up. Dope to make you talk. Putting chaps to sleep and giving them electric shocks and Christ knows what. Lot of bloody guinea pigs, that’s what we are. Bloody, isn’t it?’

  Kling was staring at him with blank eyes.

 
‘Look at Kling here,’ Williams said. ‘Any fool can see he’s as sick as hell. Why can’t they leave him in peace? Why should he go back into their bloody army? This isn’t his country anyway. Why should he fight for it?’

  From the far reaches of his non-being Kling looked at the faces around him. They were all looking at him, but they had no meaning. Williams had no meaning any more than the others. But he heard Williams go on.

  ‘Damned Gestapo methods. Spying and snooping round listening to talk. Bitches of nurses. Why the hell do we stand for it?’

  A bell was ringing, and the patients started to move out of the ward. Kling, staring up, saw the shapes of their meaningless faces receding from him. He looked at Williams, who was still there, and Williams looked back at him, smiling, and said, ‘Coming to tea, chum?’ And in the words Kling half recognized something forgotten and long-lost, and some corresponding thing in him which had died long ago almost revived itself; but the stone was too heavy for that resurrection, and he could not know that what he wanted to do was to smile.

  ‘So long, then, if you’re stopping here,’ Williams said. He pulled a packet of Weights out of his pocket and put a cigarette on the bed beside Kling’s hand which did not move. ‘Don’t let that bastard of a doctor put anything over on you,’ Kling heard Williams, walking towards the door, call back to him as he went.

  Kling did not smoke the cigarette or pick it up even; but after a time rose, and with those stiff motions which seemed to be rehearsing some exercise not well remembered, washed, dressed himself in shirt and blue trousers, combed his thick hair and went along corridors to the door upon which was fastened the doctor’s name.

  There was a bench outside the door, and he sat down on it, waiting. The passage was dark because the windows had been coated with black paint for the blackout. Nothing moved in the long, dark, silent passage at the end of which Kling sat alone on the bench. He sat there bending forward, his hands clasped between his knees, his red tie dangling, his eyes fixed on the ground. He did not wonder what would happen behind the door. He waited, without speculation or awareness of waiting. It was all the same to him, outside or here or in the ward; he did not notice, it made no difference to his waiting.