Machines in the Head

by Anna Kavan

  The world belongs to heartless people and to machines which can’t give. Only the others, the heroes, know how to give. Out of their great generosity they gave me the truth, paid me the compliment of not lying to me. Not one of them ever told me life was worth living. They are the only people I’ve ever loved. I think only of them and of how they are lost to me. How never again shall I sit beside someone who loves me while the world races past. Never again cross the tropic of Capricorn, or, under the Arctic stars, in the blackness of firs and spruce, see the black glitter of ice in starlight in the cold snow countries.

  The world in which I was really alive consisted of hotel bedrooms and one man in a car. But that world was enormous and splendid, containing cities and continents, forests and seas and mountains, plants and animals, the Pole Star and the Southern Cross. The heroes who showed me how to live also showed me everything, everywhere in the world.

  My present world is reduced to their remembered faces, which have gone for ever, which get further and further away. I don’t feel alive any more. I see nothing at all of the outside world. There are no more oceans or mountains for me.

  I don’t look up now. I always try not to look at the stars. I can’t bear to see them, because the stars remind me of loving and of being loved.

  JULIA AND THE BAZOOKA

  JULIA IS A LITTLE girl with long straight hair and big eyes. Julia loved flowers. In the cornfield she has picked an enormous untidy bunch of red poppies which she is holding up so that most of her face is hidden except the eyes. Her eyes look sad because she has just been told to throw the poppies away, not to bring them inside to make a mess dropping their petals all over the house. Some of them have shed their petals already; the front of her dress is quite red. Julia is also a quiet schoolgirl who does not make many friends. Then she is a tall student standing with other students who have passed their final examinations, whose faces are gay and excited, eager to start life in the world. Only Julia’s eyes are sad. Although she smiles with the others, she does not share their enthusiasm for living. She feels cut off from people. She is afraid of the world.

  Julia is also a young bride in a white dress, holding a sheaf of roses in one hand and in the other a very small flat white satin bag containing a lace-edged handkerchief scented with Arpège and a plastic syringe. Now Julia’s eyes are not at all sad. She has one foot on the step of a car, its door held open by a young man with kinky brown hair and a rose in his buttonhole. She is laughing because of something he’s said or because he has just squeezed her arm or because she no longer feels frightened or cut off now that she has the syringe. A group of indistinct people in the background look on approvingly as if they are glad to transfer responsibility for Julia to the young man. Julia who loves flowers waves to them with her roses as she drives off with him.

  Julia is also dead without any flowers. The doctor sighs when he looks at her lying there. No one else comes to look except the official people. The ashes of the tall girl Julia barely fill the silver cup she won in the tennis tournament. To improve her game the tennis professional gives her the syringe. He is a joking kind of man and calls the syringe a bazooka. Julia calls it that, too. The name sounds funny, it makes her laugh. Of course, she knows all the sensational stories about drug addiction, but the word bazooka makes nonsense of them, makes the whole drug business seem not serious. Without the bazooka she might not have won the cup, which as a container will at last serve a useful purpose. It is Julia’s serve that wins the decisive game. Holding two tennis balls in her left hand, she throws one high in the air while her right hand flies up over her head, brings the racket down, wham, and sends the ball skimming over the opposite court hardly bouncing at all, a service almost impossible to return. Holding two balls in her hand Julia also lies in bed beside the young man with kinky hair. Julia is also lying in wreckage under an army blanket, and eventually Julia’s ashes go into the silver cup.

  The undertaker or somebody closes the lid and locks the cup in a pigeon-hole among thousands of identical pigeon-holes in a wall at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea. The winter sea is the colour of pumice, the sky cold as grey ice, the icy wind charges straight at the wall making it tremble so that the silver cup in its pigeonhole shivers and tinkles faintly. The wind is trying to tear to pieces a few frost-bitten flowers which have not been left for Julia at the foot of the wall. Julia is also driving with her bridegroom in the high mountains through fields of flowers. They stop the car and pick armfuls of daffodils and narcissi. There are no flowers for Julia in the pigeon-hole and no bridegroom either.

  ‘This is her syringe, her bazooka she always called it,’ the doctor says with a small sad smile. ‘It must be twenty years old at least. Look how the measures have been worn away by continuous use.’ The battered old plastic syringe is unbreakable, unlike the glass syringes which used to be kept in boiled water in metal boxes and reasonably sterile. This discoloured old syringe has always been left lying about somewhere, accumulating germs and the assorted dirt of wars and cities. All the same, it has not done Julia any great harm. An occasional infection easily cured with penicillin, nothing serious. ‘Such dangers are grossly exaggerated.’

  Julia and her bazooka travel all over the world. She wants to see everything, every country. The young man with kinky hair is not there, but she is in a car and somebody sits beside her. Julia is a good driver. She drives anything, racing cars, heavy lorries. Her long hair streams out from under the crash helmet as she drives for the racing teams. Today she is lapping only a fraction of a second behind the number-one driver when a red-hot bit of his clutch flies off and punctures her nearside tyre, and the car somersaults twice and tears through a wall. Julia steps out of the wreck uninjured and walks away holding her handbag with the syringe inside it. She is laughing. Julia always laughs at danger. Nothing can frighten her while she has the syringe. She has almost forgotten the time when she was afraid. Sometimes she thinks of the kinky-haired man and wonders what he is doing. Then she laughs. There are always plenty of people to bring her flowers and make her feel gay. She hardly remembers how sad and lonely she used to feel before she had the syringe.

  Julia likes the doctor as soon as she meets him. He is understanding and kind like the father she has imagined but never known. He does not want to take her syringe away. He says, ‘You’ve used it for years already, and you’re none the worse. In fact, you’d be far worse off without it.’ He trusts Julia, he knows she is not irresponsible; she does not increase the dosage too much or experiment with new drugs. It is ridiculous to say all drug addicts are alike, all liars, all vicious, all psychopaths or delinquents just out for kicks. He is sympathetic towards Julia whose personality has been damaged by no love in childhood so that she can’t make contact with people or feel at home in the world. In his opinion she is quite right to use the syringe; it is as essential to her as insulin to a diabetic. Without it she could not lead a normal existence, her life would be a shambles, but with its support she is conscientious and energetic, intelligent, friendly. She is most unlike the popular notion of a drug addict. Nobody could call her vicious.

  Julia who loves flowers has made a garden on a flat roof in the city; all around her are pots of scarlet geraniums. Throughout the summer she has watered them every day because the pots dry out so fast up here in the sun and wind. Now summer is over, there is frost in the air. The leaves of the plants have turned yellow. Although the flowers have survived up to now the next frost will finish them off. It is wartime, the time of the flying bombs. They come over all the time; there seems to be nothing to stop them. Julia is used to them, she ignores them, she does not look. To save the flowers from the frost she picks them all quickly and takes them indoors. Then it is winter, and Julia is on the roof planting bulbs to flower in the spring. The flying bombs are still coming over, quite low, just above roofs and chimneys; their chugging noise fills the sky. One after another, they keep coming over, making their monotonous mechanical noise. When the engine cuts out there
is a sudden startling silence, suspense, everything suddenly goes unnaturally still. Julia does not look up when the silence comes, but all at once it seems very cold on the roof, and she plants the last bulb in a hurry.

  The doctor has gone to consult a top psychiatrist about one of his patients. The psychiatrist is immensely dignified, extremely well dressed; his voice matches his outer aspect. When the bomb silence starts, his clear grave voice says solemnly, ‘I advise you to take cover under that table beside you’, as he himself glides with the utmost dignity under his impressive desk. Julia leaves the roof and steps on to the staircase, which is not there. The stairs have crumbled, the whole house is crumbling, collapsing, the world bursts and burns, while she falls through the dark. The ARP men dig Julia out of the rubble. Red geraniums are spilling down the front of her dress; she has forgotten the time between and is forgetting more and more every moment. Someone spreads a grey blanket over her; she lies underneath it in her red-stained dress, her bag, with the bazooka inside, safely hooked over one arm. How cold it is in the exploding world. The Northern Lights burst out in frigid brilliance across the sky. The ice roars and thunders like gunfire. The cold is glacial, a glass dome of cold covers the globe. Icebergs tower high as mountains, furious blizzards swoop at each other like white wild beasts. All things are turning to ice in the mortal cold, and the cold has a face which sparkles with frost. It seems to be a face Julia knows, although she has forgotten whose face it is.

  The undertaker hurriedly shuts himself inside his car, out of the cruel wind. The parson hurries towards his house, hatless, thin grey hair blowing about wildly. The wind snatches a tattered wreath of frost-blackened flowers and rolls it over the grass, past the undertaker and the parson, who both pretend not to see. They are not going to stay out in the cold any longer; it is not their job to look after the flowers. They do not know that Julia loves flowers, and they do not care. The wreath was not put there for her anyhow.

  Julia is rushing after the nameless face, running as fast as if she was playing tennis. But when she comes near she does not, after all, recognize that glittering death-mask. It has gone now; there’s nothing but Arctic glitter; she is a bride again beside the young man with brown hair. The lights are blazing, but she shivers a little in her thin dress because the church is so cold. The dazzling brilliance of the aurora borealis has burned right through the roof with its frigid fire. Snow slants down between the rafters, there is ice on the altar, snowdrifts in the aisles, the holy water and the communion wine have been frozen solid. Snow is Julia’s bridal white, icicles are her jewels. The diamond-sparkling coronet on her head confuses her thoughts. Where has everyone gone? The bridegroom is dead or in bed with some girl or other, and she herself lies under a dirty blanket with red on her dress.

  ‘Won’t somebody help me?’ she calls. ‘I can’t move.’ But no one takes any notice. She is not cold any longer. Suddenly now she is burning, a fever is burning her up. Her face is on fire, her dry mouth seems to be full of ashes. She sees the kind doctor coming and tries to call him but can only whisper, ‘Please help me . . .’ so faintly that he does not hear. Sighing, he takes off his hat, gazing down at his name printed inside in small gold letters under the leather band. The kinky-haired young man is not in bed with anyone. He is wounded in a sea battle. He falls on the warship’s deck. An officer tries to grab him, but it’s too late; over and over he rolls down the steeply sloping deck to the black bottomless water. The officer looks over the side, holding a lifebelt, but does not throw it down to the injured man; instead, he puts it on himself and runs to a boat which is being lowered. The doctor comes home from the house of the famous psychiatrist. His head is bent, his eyes lowered. He walks slowly because he feels tired and sad. He does not look up, so he never sees Julia waving to him with a bunch of geraniums from the window.

  The pigeon-hole wall stands deserted in the cold dusk. The undertaker has driven home. His feet are so cold he can’t feel them; these winter funerals are the very devil. He slams the car door, goes inside stamping his feet and shouts to his wife to bring, double quick, a good strong hot rum with plenty of lemon and sugar in case he has caught a chill. The wife, who was just going out to a bingo session, grumbles at being delayed and bangs about in the kitchen. At the vicarage the parson is eating a crumpet for tea, his chair pulled so close to the fire that he is practically in the grate.

  It has got quite dark outside; the wall has turned black. As the wind shakes it, the faintest of tinkles comes from the pigeon-hole where all that is left of Julia has been left. Surely there were some red flowers somewhere, Julia would be thinking, if she could still think. Then she would think something amusing, she would remember the bazooka and start to laugh. But nothing is left of Julia really; she is not there. The only occupant of the pigeon-hole is the silver cup, which can’t think or laugh or remember. There is no more Julia anywhere. Where she was there is only nothing.

  FIVE MORE DAYS TO COUNTDOWN

  THE SITUATION IS RATHER dodgy. We may get away with it. But I wish I could persuade Esmerelda to leave now, in case things get worse. Does she, or does she not, really mean to come away with me finally to some lost Antipodean island? It’s hard to tell.

  She’s a strange woman. People are perplexed by her stark Nordic strangeness and Lorelei hair and by her eyes which have the remote blue glitter of the Skagerrak. It’s not how they expect the founder and principal of an important college to look. I point out to them, whenever a suitable opening occurs, that a brilliant, unorthodox superwoman, the inventor of a revolutionary system of education, isn’t likely to conform to ordinary standards in her appearance or anything else.

  Meanwhile, the students have got out of hand. Impossible to keep them inside our walls. They’re all over the town, the streets are full of them. Shoulder to shoulder, they march about, singing their rude fraternity songs and carrying banners with subversive slogans. No one’s quite sure what they want or why they are demonstrating. Yesterday they closed ranks and barricaded the marketplace and the main street for hours. The townspeople are indignant. They can’t do their shopping, and Christmas is only five days ahead. A deputation of shopkeepers has just been to the college demanding immediate action. Esmerelda was experimenting with a new snow-wheat hair-piece, so I got rid of them, with considerable difficulty. They didn’t want to go without seeing her and left reluctantly, muttering, shaking their fists at me, threatening to ask for government protection unless we get the students under control at once. If they do that, we’re sunk.

  ‘It will be fatal if they ask for protection,’ I told Esmerelda. ‘The authorities will take over, and we’ll be kicked out.’

  ‘They’d never dare get rid of me.’ Her eyes flashed, she stuck out her chin, asserting herself as a superwoman. Asserting herself some more, she went on, ‘Don’t forget I invented this revolutionary educational system.’

  ‘Which they now see breaking down. You’d much better come away with me while the going’s good.’

  A dedicated idealist if ever there was one, she insisted that it was her duty to stay. ‘And yours, too. Especially as things are.’ She looked at me coldly out of her northern eyes, which are sometimes so blue they are almost purple.

  She certainly is a strange woman. In a century which has exalted war to unprecedented heights, regarding it as the finest flower of human endeavour and scientific progress, subordinating every thing else in life to it as a matter of course, she sees the all-powerful giant mush room shape menacing us as a mere bogey to be eliminated simply by depriving children of war-like toys.

  ‘Teach the kids of all nations together,’ she says. ‘Instead of telling them they’re Aryans, Asians, Africans or whatever, call them all humans, and bring them all up the same way. Then they’ll take their different-coloured skins for granted. There’ll be no more colour problem and no more war.’ The superb simplicity of the concept is staggering. At first, I was absolutely carried away by her extraordinary vision, by her enthusiasm and by the eno
rmous grants and awards she extracted from pacifist organizations. Now I sometimes wonder if she’s not incredibly naïve; except that such naïvety passes belief. The success of her theory depends on segregating the students; but it’s proved impossible to isolate them completely from the world outside. Outsiders, of course, are responsible for the present trouble: war is their god and their religion, and they’ve infected our lot with their pernicious beliefs.

  The position is becoming more dangerous. The students are now out in force, and we can do nothing with them. Only the children in the junior section still keep to their usual routine. ‘Those blessed innocents remain uncontaminated,’ said Esmerelda. ‘They won’t let me down.’ I hoped she was right, thought it wiser to say no more. She’s crazy about the juniors, teaches them herself. In one lesson she teaches them about the galaxies, Kublai Khan and dimensional limitations. Those kids’ heads must be whizzing round. Who can guess what’s going on inside them?

  Student riots have reduced the town to a state of chaos. ‘Public indignation is rising,’ I told her. ‘Things look pretty grim.’ ‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’ she snapped back at me. ‘Don’t just stand there . . .’ It wasn’t like her; she doesn’t snap as a rule. I saw that she was wearing a new pair of Chapal tiger-patterned, kid knee-high boots and guessed they were hurting her – she will buy them a size too small. I organized the staff into patrols, issued arm bands and sent them out to do what they could to restore order. Regrettably, some of them failed to return and were said to have joined the rebels.